So is getting updates from people and projects you care about really such a niche thing? Have I missed some other huge channel that supersedes RSS? Or are we about to actually lose something profound here?
Kudos to Newsblur, which I never heard of before today. I'd like to sign up for a paying membership, but it seems like this is exactly what everyone else is doing, so servers are dead...
As an aside: I implore you not to say things like "protip" here. It comes off as immature and condescending if not outright hostile. I realize it's a quick and snappy way to get upvotes from like-minded users but it's really that kind of phrase which prompts people to complain about redditization or 4chanization when they refer to the declining post quality of HN.
My guess is that it is. Anecdotally, I would guess that only my programmer or tech industry friends and me seriously care about getting updates from projects, or from people they don't know socially IRL. I would guess that my non-programmer friends want social updates from people, which social networks do provide, and they are somewhat interested in what the rest of the world is talking about, but just as a form of entertainment, so there's no need to group all the updates together because it's just as fun to check each individual site every now and then.
I guess there is a crowd of political news buffs too, people who would want comprehensive coverage of various takes on various recent events, but I don't know any personally (who aren't also programmers). If you don't care about multiple points of view then reading one or two newspapers or magazines is sufficient and there's no need for a feed reader.
There's also journalists and PR people whose job involves keeping up with zillions of updates.
And podcasting.
So, my guess is, yes, it's just a niche: programmers, a small subset of news buffs, media professionals, and podcasting.
Looking at the bright side, it doesn't matter to me if most websites drop RSS as long as the ones most relevant to my niche continue to use it; so if RSS becomes forgotten about by most people but is still used by websites that target programmers and by news websites, that's enough for me.
I used it throughout the day and run all my CPD and almost all my non social media based marketing through it.
Currently looking at Feedly and I have 6 posts in my Saved in 1 screen shot instead of 17 with Reader. Working my way through the alternatives and on hour 8 so far. Grrrr.
It isn't niche in the same way as GMail isn't, or Apps.
Why not RSS? Formatting was often not quite right - if I wanted to read something, I often ended up clicking through to the original site anyway. And I didn't like the e-mail style expectation that I would read everything, or at least mark it as read (which felt like admitting defeat). It just began to feel like a chore. When I log in to twitter, it doesn't tell me that I have 1439 unread tweets.
The second I completely agree with you on. Even these cool readers that prioritize stuff you're most likely to read, by necessity, keep track of what's read and unread, and I get exactly that same itch that I need to stay on top of everything. It's completely artificial and almost ridiculous, but there it is. And I can't imagine how a reader could solve that problem without creating the even worse worry of missing things. (Which ironically evaporates when you don't use a reader and therefore no longer expect not to miss anything.)
Perhaps there is a novel solution there though, waiting to be discovered.
Technically, there's no reason it couldn't be done with RSS feeds. But the language of 'subscribing' encouraged thinking about RSS feeds in a different way.
