> Publishers don't care about your use case. They WANT you go to back to the site and click their ads.
Isn't that actually an _incentive_ for them to offer RSS feeds? After all, I'm probably not going to go to their site if my RSS reader never notifies me that they posted a new article.
Unless you have tons of blogs you want to follow or a really slow internet connection, it seems simpler to just take a minute and check each blog site routinely. When I first tried out RSS in the PSP days, I was hoping that could serve as a consistent interface for news.
It was pretty disappointing to find out that no one wanted their full article on RSS. It was always just a snippet and a link to the full article on their website. This is what I believe burtonator is referring to in the part you quoted.
Checking even a few sites routinely for new content is a huge waste of life. You have to figure out if there is new content, then you have to remember where you left off and, assuming a site even makes that easy (most don't), while figuring it out, you have to avoid falling into a bottomless pit of click bait. I have 12 feeds in my reader; HN, a handful of YouTube channels and a handful of personal blogs. Some have posts every minute, some have posts every day, some have posts months apart. Of all these feeds, only 1 contains the actual content (Planet GNU), everything else is a link and maybe a small summary, and I'm perfectly fine with that, I just want the uniform process of notifications that RSS provides because the alternatives are all horrible.
> Unless you have tons of blogs you want to follow or a really slow internet connection, it seems simpler to just take a minute and check each blog site routinely
Obviously I can only speak for myself but there's no way I'm going to do that. My feed aggregator (Feedbin) serves as my daily inbox of web content. From there and since many feeds are truncated I'll open specific articles that seem interesting to me. Truncation is fine, I understand that commercial sites need a way to get visitors.
However not providing an RSS feed at all is a good way to miss out on my page view.
> Unless you have tons of blogs you want to follow
You mean you don't? I've got maybe about a hundred at this point. Even if it were only a half-dozen, that'd still be _way_ more than I'd want to check manually every day.
Isn't that actually an _incentive_ for them to offer RSS feeds? After all, I'm probably not going to go to their site if my RSS reader never notifies me that they posted a new article.