Isn't this kind of an argument for dropping it? Yeah it would be great if it was in use but even the people who are clicking and providing RSS feeds don't seem to care that much.
You are probably right, but it is depressing how techies don't see the big picture & don't want to provide an on-ramp to the RSS/Atom world for newcomers.
Google is widely faulted with effectively killing RSS by pulling the plug on Reader (I, for example, haven’t used RSS since), so I don’t think they’re missing the big picture, I think they just prefer a different picture
It's probably worth considering that if the technology could be killed by one company pulling its chips off the board, perhaps the technology wasn't standing on its own.
We still use RSS and Atom feeds for podcasts. It's a pretty widely-adopted use case. Perhaps there is a lot more to the contraction of RSS as a way for discovering publishing of "blog"-style media than "Reader got killed" (it seems like Reader offered more features than just RSS consolidation that someone could, hypothetically, build... But nobody has yet?).
Native apps are always better, but having a web page syncing your feeds made it easier to access them, eg from the library or work computer. Not to mention nothing to install (or update) reduces friction. I didn’t have to stop using RSS, but the newly exposed hurdles were enough discouragement that I did stop
1. Everyone who uses a static site generator can add XSLT
2. Everyone who doesn't use a static site generate only has to add the XSLT file and add a single line to the XML. No need to write any code: new code is not a big deal for many HN readers, but not every blog author is a coder.
Isn't this kind of an argument for dropping it? Yeah it would be great if it was in use but even the people who are clicking and providing RSS feeds don't seem to care that much.