Do you have any evidence to invalidate Googles claim of declining usage? I trust Google on this one. It served its purpose in 2005 but much better services have replaced it. Move on and get over it.
Much better services? Name one! (much less "many"....)
Reddit, HN, Facebook, Twitter and G+ are all user-sponsored aggregators. If I see content there, it must have come from somewhere. Where did I find the articles i share on Facebook? On my RSS feed.
One alternative is to follow your websites you like on a social service like Facebook. That's not as helpful as RSS.
- No read/unread tracking
- Depends on news feed algorithms
- Lots of noise
[1. Follow instead of subscribe. 2. Feed instead of RSS, because (a) there's also Atom, and (b) neither "RSS" nor "Atom" are quite as friendly as "feed".]
These services give me a good chance of discovering things, RSS lets me follow them. As a case in point, there are a lot of things in my RSS feed that I have discovered from HN because one single post from them made it to the front page, but no subsequent one has. But I get to see the updates because I subscribed to their feeds. That subsequent ones haven;t made it to the HN front page is absolutely not a value judgement on their worthiness - unless, as I say, you think 5 same-but-different articles on who said what and to whom at a conference is more important than the infrequent technical article by a researcher.
In short, I want to follow the stuff on the right of the bell curve, not in the middle. The stuff that mostly floats to the top of what you're advocating (HN, fb, twitter) is firmly in the middle. A lot of the people posting the content I find interesting don't have twitter feeds announcing their posts - that kind of thing is often the preserve of this week's preferred javascript framework project. My RSS feeds allowed me a much higher SNR than any of these things. So please don't compare them, as if they can serve the same purpose. That's nonsense.
Careful, you're bias is showing.
For curators, there are (yet) no good alternatives.