I think an ongoing, robust RSS ecosystem is a major thorn in the side of any substack-like business model. Their target consumer (affluent/intellectual enough

I think an ongoing, robust RSS ecosystem is a major thorn in the side of any substack-like business model. Their target consumer (affluent/intellectual enough to pay for access to ideas) has access to a far wider variety of arguably better content if they're willing to build up a set of RSS feeds. Maybe there's room to build a company on top of the RSS ecosystem, but it's difficult when free, feature-rich, and high quality alternatives exist. FWIW, it does seem like Substack is trying to attack this space: https://on.substack.com/p/new-reader-homepage https://on.substack.com/p/new-reader-homepage. However, as a publisher/bundler of paid RSS feeds, they have a big conflict of interest in offering an RSS reader. Like Spotify and their "exclusive" podcasts, they have an incentive to push bland content and obscure the rich niches that make the RSS ecosystem actually-valuable.