According to Google Trends, during the past few years, there has been nothing but a few minor bumps that faded away as quickly as they came. I love RSS because i do not have to scroll through dozens of different news sites all day and i would love it to return.
EDIT: Typical case of people only reading the headline. I was asking why people are hyped over something that did NOT happen.
I used to rely on news feeds through Firefox until they suddenly removed this feature. I switched to an RSS reader but around the same time, a lot of websites started dropping their RSS feeds. I'm out of the loop of why this happened and it's probably one reason I feel so bored being online nowadays
It's because RSS doesn't allow you to serve ads and every tech company right now is either feeling the squeeze or feeling the greed.
Feeds can be set up to just show part of the article so you'd still have to visit the site to read it all, which seems a better solution than losing the traffic completely. I've deleted many sites that just stopped their RSS at some point and I just kind of forgot about them.
Also, why can't sponsored texts be added to RSS? It seems to me this would be hard to block by adblockers (and I'll probably unsubscribe, but still).
Modern ads aren't simply bits of text or animated gifs anymore. They're full tracking platforms that rely on analyzing a person's usage in order to deliver them targeted ads. It's much harder to do that over RSS.
I used to have a bunch of science and technology articles in Google Reader and tried to do a blog where I would look for possible synergies and connections. When Google shuttered it I tried to keep going on other readers but my ADHD struggled with the change and it turned into another hobby that fell to the wayside. Makes me sad because I was so much more informed then than I am now about a wide array of stuff.
I keep hearing about Google being part of the downfall but I honestly never heard of Google Reader until long after it got closed down. How was this different than other RSS readers?
Since it was completely server-hosted it was incredibly fast. You'd open it up and boom, everything all up to date. The search was fantastic. (Say what you will about Google but they've always been great at search. Very fast and very good results.) The site layout was clean and minimal. It was just a really good implementation. Of course they murdered it.
If you used Gmail in the early days, and ever used something before it, you probably had a moment where you said "wow, this is what email should have been all along". Reader was the same.
When I ran a site, I dropped it because of the server load and lack of ad revenue from it. (My site was getting taken down by the host server, but probably mostly for another issue). That said, most sites seem to have a feed (though often hidden) and there are third parties that can make a feed for virtually any site.