Comment by Aurornis
2 days ago
These products were phased out because most people weren't using them.
RSS is and always was very niche. There are always claims that companies killed RSS for nefarious reasons, but I think the truth is much simpler: Companies stopped putting resources into RSS tools because very few people use them.
The people who use RSS are very vocal about their support, but they're a small minority of internet users. Even I started with an RSS reader but found myself preferring a set of bookmarked favorites to the sites I wanted to read, even though they're not equivalent in functionality. For my use case, a random sampling of websites that I could visit during times I had 15 free minutes to read something was better than collecting everything into one big feed, even though I would have guessed the opposite before trying both ways.
Was RSS was not niche, and it's not niche today unless you consider podcasts niche. Also most new social media platforms have RSS built in.
It was nefariously killed by companies, especially news sites, who saw no good way to monetize RSS feeds, and would much rather you keep clicking bookmarks to be served new ads.