The fundamental question for the users here is "should I read an article on a website, which is designed exactly as the users should read and explore it and has 100% support for all typographical element, or on a third party reader which displays a processed copy of the article and requires effort to set up?"
RSS hasn't died, but it is definitely not growing, as those who prefer to use it are already using it.
> The fundamental question for the users here is "should I read an article on a website, which is designed exactly as the users should read and explore it and has 100% support for all typographical element, or on a third party reader which displays a processed copy of the article and requires effort to set up?"
I'd take the plain text of an article over a JavaScript-laden monstrosity of a single-page app any day of the week, and twice on Sundays.
I really miss being able to quickly & easily read articles, without distraction. But then, I miss lynx — and I still harbour a deep-seated hatred for those who have destroyed the Internet I once loved.
That's one question, sure, but there's nothing fundamental about it. Here's a second question: should I have to go to the frontpage of a website to find out what's new on it, or get notifications automatically when there's something new?
Here's a completely unprocessed feedreader that I built as a Firefox extension until #$%# Mozilla killed it: https://github.com/akkartik/spew. It answered your question with, "why yes, read each article precisely as it was intended to be read on its own website," but still used RSS feeds for push notifications. Best of both worlds.
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Here's a third question: should I prioritize articles based on how their website shows them to me, based on when they're posted, or by some other prioritization? This may be what stunted RSS: people chose with their feet to prioritize socially (reading what their friends shared: Facebook, Twitter, etc.) or by collaborative filtering (reading what people like them read: Reddit, HN, Lobsters, etc.)
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Here's a fourth question: do I want to be notified of every single post from a source? And this may be RSS's remaining niche. I no longer use it for high-volume sites like CNN or Buzzfeed. Those need prioritization. I do use it for ~250 extremely low-volume sources (that cumulatively yield a dozen or so stories a week) from whom I want to see everything: http://akkartik.name/feeds.xml.
With Firefox, you can turn an RSS feed into a virtual bookmark folder that always contains the newest items. I am not sure if Chrome can do this, With Internet Explorer I could not figure out how to get it to work.
But it is such a cool feature. Effectively, it allows me to embed a tiny RSS reader into the bookmark toolbar.
