[wccrawford]

I liked RSS. And then most of the things I followed in RSS destroyed their RSS feed in one way or another. For a while, I used scrapers to turn the real pages into RSS, but as most killed their feeds, I gave up on it.

It's all well and good to say how awesome it can be, but there's so much friction to getting there that I don't care enough any more.

[fwn]

What you describe as friction was largely caused by misaligned incentives between readers and content creators who felt the need to kneecap their RSS feeds.

The difficulties of monetization and the (at least perceived) lack of control over repurposing, etc. are significant (and persistent) problems with RSS.

[le-mark]

This is an interesting and relevant point. What is repurposing in this context? In what way does RSS allow someone’s content to be repurposed more easily? How does this make monetization more difficult?

[giantrobot]

When the "creator" runs ads on their webpage they get paid per impression. With RSS they can't lock content behind a wall of JavaScript (and the associated AdTech). So they want to drive clicks to their ads.

This all means content creators are incentivized to make feeds that only link to their ad-laden web content. At best they'll put a tiny snippet of content in the post's description but the common case is just an empty description. End users of RSS want to have the actual content inside their reader. Reader apps often have features to detect link-only feeds and then go fetch the web content and display it in a Reader Mode fashion. This is at odds with the co tent creator wanting to show their ads.

This feeds (pun intended) into the question of repurposing. If a site has an easy way to find all the latest posts it becomes relatively easy for a third party grab that content and repost it. This was an explicit function of the old Planet software. It would aggregate a bunch of feeds together into a "river of news" format.

[kjkjadksj]

You efficiently move through content on multiple sites in one place without ads. No dark patterns to rope you on there longer to view some ads like on the major site. No trackers.

[ranger207]

What I've found is that many sites are offering an RSS feed even if they don't necessarily know about it. If I had to guess Wordpress has it built in and so many sites are built on heavily customized Wordpress instances that it still works. You usually have to search the page source to get the link though