[gkoberger]

Okay bear with me here.

We blame the RSS aggregators for the death, which is very fair. But I don't know if blog writers ever supported RSS, either.

With RSS, your words are read, which is great. But you lose the ability to control the feel of the post... the best blogs have a vibe where the medium is at least large portion of the message. A pg essay would feel wrong in a chunk serif font, and I've read blogs that have used interactivity to great effect. RSS also kills monetization, since you can't have ads or push users to sign up.

I would love to see a platform (mobile would be great for this) that let the creator control the design and maybe even levels of monetization. (Some could argue I'm somewhat describing Medium or Substack, although I don't think they quite hit it for me.)

I could never get into RSS. I theoretically loved it as a concept, but I missed "feeling" the vibe the author was going for.

[adolph]

> lose the ability to control the feel of the post.

Agreed, rss was popular with people who wanted to decrease noise.

> RSS also kills monetization, since you can't have ads

This was the killer and the dumb part, because it could, but monetization sofar means integration with all the bad parts of the Internet that desire to track people.

[gkoberger]

For what it's worth, and there's lots of reasons this hasn't and won't happen, I think micropayments are the solution here.

But until that happens, ads fill a middle ground: users don't want to pay and creators want to be paid.

[colesantiago]

So what is the solution here other than ads?

Most people who use RSS, use it because they don't want to go to a website (filled with ads) and they want content 100% for free.

[throwawsy7273]

I have a feeling that it used to be much more valuable to send users to your site in the past, than today where a lot of traffic comes from search/ads/social media.

Perhaps it is time to revisit a distribution model, where the full content of the article is available for paid users inside the reader itself. The RSS reader would require a subscription and pay RSS feed providers a share of the subscription price. A sort of distributed spotify model.