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Comment by forgotAgain | Hacker News Reader

RSS did not decline due to technical differences. By the time Google Reader was killed, RSS readers had advanced to the point where wide public usage was possible because the readers dealt with the incompatibility problems outlined in the article.

RSS declined because major tech companies convinced large media companies that they had a better future publishing to their walled gardens and not directly to the public.

The walled gardens only benefited the garden owners, not independent publishers. Now that that is recognized there is again a chance for independent publishers both big and small.

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RSS declined because nobody wanted to put up content on 3rd party systems that didn't pay them.

Large media companies had to actively do work to shut down their RSS feeds, when they could've just done both. They took them down because they weren't making money on keeping them up.

If the incentives would've been right there's no reason this should've been the case. Large media companies don't make money form being in the Facebook newsfeed, but rather from the traffic redirected from there.

> RSS declined because nobody wanted to put up content on 3rd party systems that didn't pay them.

Probably 2/3 of the RSS feeds I use come directly from the content producers, not from third party systems.

I meant people's RSS readers as the 3rd party, vs the 1st party website hosted by the producer. Not the clearest way to say it, I admit.

Ah, I understand. RSS is often used for things that aren't connected to a website at all, so I don't automatically make that connection.

> RSS declined because nobody wanted to put up content on 3rd party systems that didn't pay them.

The feeds I use come directly from the provider in almost every case, and some of them had ads so it put the system ahead of Twitter/Facebook/Google+ in that regard.

The theory was that they’d get more revenue from more users but we know that wasn’t true even when the numbers weren’t totally faked like Facebook’s video push. What we know is the case is that the companies who pushed those rosy predictions profited considerably and were able to freeze out many competitors.

I think it had much to do with the fact that it was much more difficult to monetize content delivered through RSS. I recall some sites playing around with delivering ads through it, but it was nowhere near as "robust" a platform for ad delivery as via their own full-fledged sites. And less face it, most content sites really are just operating as ad delivery platforms, so anything that interferes with that will fall by the wayside.

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