> If they weren't greeted with a load of what seems like nonsense for nerds there could have been broader adoption of RSS.

Why? Wouldn't just see a different view of the same website that had that intriguing icon and go "ok, so what?"

If they don't know what an RSS feed is, seeing a stylized version isn't really going to help them understand, imho.

You can add text to the document via XSL which can be used to explain what you're looking at and how to use it.

See: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/XML/XSLT/Refere...