RSS has more of a commercial problem. You can’t put ads in it so sites are incentivized to force a site visit. Which in turn forces them to withhold the bulk of the value from the feed itself. Ie just include first sentence or two. Which kills the usefulness of the feed as anything more thank headlines and link. Headlines in turn are all clickbait these days so those don’t have much info density either.

> You can’t put ads in it

That's a silly thing to say. Of course you can put ads in it since it allows linking to things. What you mean probably, is that it's not as easy as embedding some google ads markup in your sidebar.

Everywhere that ads are the only way to create revenue streams, that should be considered a commercial problem in itself. It should be way easier to pay (and charge) securely for services like this by now.

John Gruber (Daring Fireball) has made his entire living for 20 years by putting a once a week sponsored post in RSS along with the full content of his posts from his site in RSS.

There are also some efficiency-related shortcomings. I'd wager that most feed readers either implement conditional requests incorrectly, or they don't implement conditional requests at all. Polling rates also tend to be stupid, on the order of 1-30 minutes with no regard for how often any given feed actually has new posts. This creates server-side pressure to make your feed as small as possible, which always means excluding content.

Why can't you put ads on RSS? Either in the story itself (by the site or aggregator) or as a "promoted item" in the feed (by the aggregator). If anything, the Google Discover (or whatever it's called) is not too different, just that you don't control which exact news sources you're subscribed to.

I can imagine an alternate timeline where Google Reader turned into a sort of Twitter (or FB or IG) feed.

Ads are a recent innovation on top of existing web standards. A new generation of changeable scripted ads had emerged and this was not compatible with XML. The old generation of ads was still compatible but not scalable, similar to how podcast sponsor ads work (immutable after publishing), and so did not get much traction.

Sounds about right.

Podcasts inject ads into the content: from RSS you get the link and description of the episode, and inside the episode are ads.

I guess that's why RSS is still a thing for podcasts? :-)

I only put a summary of each item in my RSS feeds because I do not want to be redundantly sending the same body data over and over but I do want a complete history available easily in at least some versions of the feeds. And some of the primary content is audio (or video) so cannot be dumped into the RSS usably.

why not? you can format ads as an entry in the rss feed. in fact it would not even bother me. i could train my rss reader to detect the ad based on keywords and mark it, and even if not, i'd just skip over it manually, mark it as read, and it's gone. as long as the frequency of ads is not to much that is better than an ad on a website that is permanently visible.

It's more like a one-way problem. Authors don't know how far the RSS reached nor who reads the articles.

Readers don't know how to reply to the author in a standard way (like an email)

FreshRSS on android will fetch the full article. Such a good feature I wished more applications used.

I host freshRSS and it's been amazing for me.

Man, RSS still brings me so much nostalgia. Anyone still feel the pain when Google discontinued its RSS reader?

I hate that the self hosting newsletter does this.