Do these people live in some sort of alternative reality where:
- The guardian
- BBC
- Reuters
- Ars Technica
- LWN
- Hacker News
and a fuck ton others don't have an RSS feed?
Or some sort or reality where Flym (or the myriads of RSS apps) don't exist?
Because I sure as hell don't.
Apart from the migration to walled gardens, I also think it's a problem that 99% of web users haven't heard of RSS.
This doesn't remove the ability to promote and share your content elsewhere. Content creators really can have it both ways. Publish on your own site and link to, share or duplicate that content on Facebook, Instagram, Medium, Twitter, RSS, Soundcloud and any other service that may be relevant to your audience.
Ease of use. Plenty of folks don't have the skills to set things up and keep them humming along, nor do they have the funds to play someone else to do it for them. So they hand over a bit of control in exchange for a platform that's set up and kept up to date.
You may argue that they're giving up too much control, and I'd agree with you, but that's not how most (non-technical) users see things.
I know one of them personally, and I think in her case, she may have had a few hundred people following her art blog, while on Instagram, she quickly amassed over 100,000 followers, so when she stopped updating the blog, she lost less than 1% of her fans.
It comes down to people knowing how to follow Instagram/Facebook accounts, while they haven't even heard of RSS.
Again, I'm not recommending giving up those channels, but betting your content on a platform that will be gone/unpopular at some point (they all come and go) while abandoning the constant, central presence of your very own website, regardless of how small the following may be, seems short sighted. This has nothing to do with RSS.
Edit:
Every single of those webpages have an RSS feed.
Ars Technica: http://feeds.arstechnica.com/arstechnica/index/
The Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/uk/rss
LWN: https://lwn.net/headlines/newrss
BBC: http://feeds.bbci.co.uk/news/video_and_audio/news_front_page...
I agree with him, I consume most of my news using RSS and even in pages that do not have RSS (like soundcloud) there is a RSS server somewhere serving the feed.
... however, they do 'touch' a lot of the articles during the week so the order they appear in the feed keeps changing.
Before you point out how RSS powers all kinds of other invisible stuff that most people aren't aware of, that's not what this article is talking about, nor is it what people mean when they say RSS is dead.
If you truly believe that RSS has as much influence over consumers in 2018 as a decade or so ago, you probably do live in an alternate reality.
Super annoying.
Have you tried an RSS Reader with an embedded web view for those types of sites?
(I use Newsblur and it has a really neat view where it shows the original blog/page and uses a bit of logic to track your cursor to mark as read articles you read directly on the originating site in a frame inside of Newsblur. It doesn't work for all sites but the ones it does work for can be pretty magic. That said, I'm an old school "river" user and simply have a habit workflow that heavily makes use of keyboard shortcuts to open new tabs and close them quickly.)
I've created my own RSS aggregator, and a large percentage of smaller sites have misconfigured or broken RSS feeds. Most site owners don't seem to care much about RSS anymore.
So does Myspace.
Beyond that, a full-featured client can implement either of those features. I use Newsblur.com which allows you to control whether you see the feed's description or the readability-filtered page, and you have a training system to up/down flag authors, tags, and arbitrary text.