RSS is not dead because it covers an use case for which there is no replacement. The attempt to kill RSS didn't consist in creating a better RSS, it consisted i

RSS is not dead because it covers an use case for which there is no replacement. The attempt to kill RSS didn't consist in creating a better RSS, it consisted in walled gardens. The use case of providing structured updates for a web site has no better replacement than RSS right now. Some walled gardens like twitter feeds are the closest replacement and they are not nearly the same. But the article gets it wrong IMO (except for the last point). The main people to blame about this situation is not the incentives, nor the companies who tried to created the walled gardens. Even if there were incentives, RSS would not improve. As long as web makers don't treat it as a first class citizen, RSS will keep being an "optional" thing that requires separate extensions, programs, etc, it is just not going to be massively used if using it isn't super obvious. It's the browser makers' fault (Mozilla, I'm looking at you). RSS was treated almost like an annoyance. Firefox only provided an icon and "live bookmarks" thing with a really poor UX and then removed it because not many people used it (meanwhile we have Pocket shipped by default...). Google, they never had interest in competing with their own walled garden. And that's how we ended with the current horrible state of the web, where every website asks you to subscribe via email to their wonderful newsletter. If we only had a technology that would allow websites to provide content that users can read asynchronously and doesn't involve filling their mailboxes...something like a newsletter RSS...maybe then we would not need to place a stupid JS popup in every fucking website in the world and we would let people easily subscribe to a newsletter RSS. Unfortunately, browser makers are too busy with things like webassembly, because making the JS popups faster is way more important than fixing the basic interaction with the web.