[eli]

Honestly, I think people just never really liked using feed readers. I saw in my own data that RSS usage seemed to top out in the late 2000s.

I'm not really sure why it never expanded beyond the "early adopter" crowd. Maybe the readers were too hard to use or the benefits weren't explained clearly. Part of me kinda hopes it's because publishers started caring a lot more about the design of their sites and people actually preferred the experience of reading on the original site instead of a "stripped down" version in an RSS reader.

[stevesearer]

This is the reason I prefer that my readers subscribe to my opt-in weekly email newsletter rather than using Google Reader/RSS. They get a quick little digest of the top content from the previous week and click through if it looks interesting.

RSS is still available though, but the email channel is clearly the winner in terms of people using and interacting with it.

[eli]

Yup, it's hard to beat email for engagement. Maybe really well executed push notifications.

[marbletiles]

People love stripped-down versions: Instapaper, Pocket, Flipboard et al are all testament to that (as is AdBlock, to an extent)

I think it was almost entirely because the "follow/unfollow" experience was so clunky, especially compared to Twitter and FB. Even today, adding and removing feeds from my readers is unnecessary pain.

The hurdle is far too high for the casual audience.