>The author paints it as some kind of conspiracy, but the simple truth is that RSS waned in popularity once push notifications became popular and widespread. Ev

>The author paints it as some kind of conspiracy, but the simple truth is that RSS waned in popularity once push notifications became popular and widespread. Every user's RSS reader polling every website for changes every few minutes for all eternity is horribly inefficient and unfeasible to do on most platforms and devices today. Pub/sub is the clear way forward, but it's just sad that there is no accepted standard for it. Polling isn't a requirement. If your reader is polling it's strictly because the author wanted to implement such a feature; that's it. There's also ETag and last-modified which are used when checking and have very little overhead (most especially in the case when the content has not changed).