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Comment by ncallaway | Hacker News Reader

I think the only thing I’d add is some kind of open and standard syndication system like RSS

You then have to figure out where the RSS button is for every website.. it's a nightmare for the average person

Browsers used to have a little RSS button either next to the address bar, or somewhere in the bottom status bar. But a propaganda corporation has been leading the charge in browser "development" for past few decades, and those do not like it when people exchange information without a centralized middleman, so use of RSS got deliberately pushed as far away from mainstream use as possible.

So of course now it's "a nightmare for the average person".

Its still not actually a nightmare because for pretty much every RSS reader you can just past the website URL into the subscribe function and it'll present you with all the feeds provided by that site sourced from <link rel="alternative"> tags. The browser feature was good for reminding people about the existence of RSS feeds but it is not required to solve the purported problem of feeds being hard to find.

Could it be intuitive on mobile? The problem is, how do we make it as simple as scrolling and tapping on the follow button so the user never even has to change apps?

I agree, but apparently that's still too difficult for the mainstream user.

It is. Like why do they have to take several steps and remember instead of being reminded

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