The NYTimes is actually an example that undermines the ideals of RSS for the average web surfer who is not a tech geek.

The NYTimes RSS feeds are not full texts of the article such that a one can read the entire story within the comfort of the RSS reader. NYTimes only provides snippets and excerpts to bait people to click on to the real web page. For many normal people, this crippled functionality of article summaries in RSS is worthless to them.

Yes, many low-traffic WordPress sites still give RSS feeds of full text but that's not going to reverse the decline of RSS.

Again, I emphasize and concede that many hardcore web surfers (e.g. HN users in this thread) still find the limited RSS summaries useful because they don't have to "visit 100 websites" but that's not a problem the mass population has[0]. This "go-to-our-real-website-to-see-the-entire-article" amplifies the trend of RSS declining in popularity. If RSS is just "teasers", the typical web surfers would rather get their "aggregation" from Facebook or just use the NYTimes smartphone app which has enhanced rich content such as video, etc.

The publishers of popular mainstream websites simply don't have any economic incentive (i.e. ads) to give readers the full text in their RSS feeds.

I still contend that a bunch of RSS enthusiasts in this thread talking about how they use RSS doesn't answer actual the question the HN poster asked. The actual question is about mainstream trends and not about the habits of HN hardcore users. Take another look at the words used in the Ask HN question. HN users don't need to "hope" for a new web or smartphone RSS client. They're already using RSS right now!

[0] similar example previous comment from 9 years ago that makes a distinction between "normal mainstream" web surfers and hardcore RSS enthusiasts: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2060707

It is admittedly more of an issue in airplanes. But I'm disinclined to throw out the baby over a few hours per year's worth of bathwater.

Well yes, of course you wouldn't! A techie HN discussion participant like you is not the demographic I was talking about when I qualified my sentence with "For many normal people, ..."

In the most complimentary way I can convey it, you are example of "not normal" in the context of dealing with a higher threshold of pain regarding any RSS inconveniences.

Again to emphasize for productive discussion, a bunch of us HN geeks sharing anecdotes of how we're still using RSS in sophisticated and clever ways does not actually answer the OP's question.

I'd argue that it's quite the opposite. Facebook always gives you a blurb. Twitter gives you no more than 280 characters minus the length of a link. Pinterest gives you a picture. RSS/Atom remains the only option where it's at all common to get the whole article without clicking a link and taking a shotgun blast of JavaScript to the face.

Sorry for not being clear. The "pain" of RSS or "pain" of Facebook/Twitter is multi-dimensional and so it's not just comparing 1-for-1 annoyances such as "extra click to get to the real publisher website" being equivalent with RSS vs Facebook.

>RSS/Atom remains the only option where it's at all common to get the whole article without clicking a link and taking a shotgun blast of JavaScript to the face.

Yes that's true but the other "pain" that normal mainstream users don't want to deal with is setting up a separate RSS reader/app. They already have Facebook loaded because that's where there friends are. They also don't want the pain of finding relevant RSS feeds and curating them. Facebook already gives them suggested articles passively. And it's irrelevant if Facebook's newsfeed algorithm is bad; the selling point is that it's passive and automatic and the typical non-HN user doesn't have to bother configuring anything. So for normal typical websurfers, RSS theoretically is a solution for news aggregation, but it also creates new problems they don't want to deal with. Yes, HN techies are happy to fine-tune RSS feeds; but regular users have no interest in that.

And if you want to mention how RSS is the option that sometimes provides full text, you also have to be fair and mention that the real websites are the option that sometimes provides video. A lot of normal mainstream web surfers love rich content like video for consuming news.

Again, I keep trying to focus the discussion on the mass psychology and habits of non-HN mainstream users but people keep talking about the benefits that HN techies enjoy. We are already in this HN forum and already know what the benefits of RSS are. Thus, it doesn't actually add productive discussion to the OP's actual question.

Mercury works better than Readability usually, but the downside is that Mercury uses a third party to process it, whereas Readability is all local. So some sites will block Mercury from accessing it, because it's seen as a bot (Forbes does this, as do a few other sites).

This combo works great for reading entirely in your RSS reader. I use my phone to download my feeds for offline before flights, so I can read the actual content as well without an Internet connection (assuming it doesn't have formatting errors).

might be useful for people trying to start a collection of feeds

I had a few emails recently asking if my site had an RSS feed. I have never used RSS and had no idea. Went into Squarespace settings, messed around for 2 mins, it gave me a button and set it all up for me. Honestly I thought it was already dead until I had those emails come in...

When sending such emails I always include a tiny example of a minimum item rss feed. "If you take whatever code you have that spits out text files that are html documents it shouldn't take long to have it spit out text files that are rss feeds."

  <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
  <rss version="2.0">
  <channel>
  <title>hacker news</title>
  <link>https://news.ycombinator.com</link>
  <description>Description of website</description>
 
  <item>
  <title>newest article title</title>
  <link>https:// link to article</link>
  <description>first few lines of article</description>
  <pubDate>Publication timestamp according to RFC 822 like: Thu, 1 Apr 2060</pubDate>
  </item>

  <item>
  <title>slightly older article title</title>
  <link>https:// link to article</link>
  <description>first few lines of article</description>
  <pubDate>Date</pubDate>
  </item>

  <!-- and any number of extra <item>'s here. -->

  </channel>

  </rss> 

  <link rel="alternate" href="https://news.ycombinator.com/rss" title="RSS" type="application/rss+xml">

There is lots more to know about feeds but the above is really all they need to use it. Things like, pubDate is not required but a feed without it isn't worth much. RSS aggregators should accept RFC 822 dates with 2 year digits. They don't have to know that. Such details only make implementation less likely.

https://sputniknews.com/export/rss2/archive/index.xml for example had it up and running 20 min after the mail. They've dressed it up a bit since.

I’ve recently needed to get RSS feeds and a good number of times I can find it via /rss or view the source of the site and search for xml.