1) Google Reader and friends disappeared, and 2) Browsers stopped supporting RSS feeds natively, including discovery of a feed.
Put the functionality back in browsers where it belongs, it could at least be used to find feeds and then you can use newsbeuter or something similar to subscribe with.
Guess who makes the most widely used browser today.
I would argue that's only a part of the story. After all RSS quickly morphed into Link with a short blurb and image just like any modern link aggregation site rather than a full page of content.
The big issue was RSS was it prevents site lock-in like Facebook ect. Even Reddit pushes people to the comments to try keep you on the site as much as possible in order to have you see the link aggregator's Advertisements and more recently, to provide more robust data collection for later sale.
It also has the benefit of the site owners now being able to see somebody is subscribed to the feed. I'm visiting their website and they might see my traffic in their visitor statistics. To make this even more clear to the site owner, I add an URL parameter called /?rss_ref=heyhomepage.com
There’s no point in serving only excerpts. By serving full content the people like you who like to consume on the original site can still do that.
Serving blurbs forces everyone to do that and that’s wrong imo.
What I also do is filter out all the markup and even links, I only show some sentences of text basically. It sits wrong with me to make my reader a sort of browser window and display all the markup.
Beautifully simple site you have, by the way. And I found I'm already subscribed to your feed.
"RSS is not a notification system. It's a distribution system." you say on your site. Was that the purpose of the inventors? I guess I take the freedom to use it slightly different then, we're on Hacker News after all. ;) We can agree to disagree.
This is why I took over the maintaince of the Feediron plugin for the TT-RSS feedreader, I really like having the flexibility to define what content I feel is relevant on a feed by feed basis
But I can see why not all situations allow for sending full content via rss.
I still believe that IF you can send the full content you should do so.
Shit gets removed, people get upset, and they're told to deal with it. They didn't consider that the people who used the features that were removed also didn't send telemetry data, so they made a dumb decision based on incomplete and inaccurate data instead of something sane like appeal to the community and invite people to maintain or test it.
To discover a feed, just check the html source. The problem is when the feed exists but it is not mentioned at all in the website.
In the media optimized for engagement/addiction, RSS provides a step off the platform, so of course they don't use it. Even many personal blogs the article mostly talks about might want to keep the reader on the site for clicks.
It's a conflict of interest between content providers and consumers (mostly advertisement). It's not an implementation issue.