Yeah, I don't get what people mean when they say "bring back RSS"—-it's still around. The thing that disappeared was Google Reader, which I guess was a signal of super mainstream popularity of RSS.

Feedly is a great app that I use regularly to keep up with RSS, and there are other RSS readers too. It's not like we're talking about a dead protocol like Gopher, here.

IMHO Feedly is barely adequate.

Give NewsBlur a try.

RSS feeds are still widely generated, but they are not encouraged and overt links to them have been removed. I know that many proprietors of monetized blogs keep RSS feed generation turned on because they think it is important for SEO, but they don't want readers using it because it clashes with their monetization strategy -- users are supposed to be drawn straight to the main website where they can then be upsold through popup modals and shit. I recall one blog where even mentioning in the comments feed that you subscribe to the site through RSS would lead to a permaban.

Thanks for the explanation. Sounds pretty awful. I mostly read smaller unmonetized blogs, so I have not bumped into this.

I'd even say it's working much better than in the golden days as pretty much everyone is using an off-the-shelf blog engine which does RSS just fine, whereas in the old times a good half of the blogs were something homegrown/obscure/opt-in rss.

Yes but most people broadcast their views or interesting findings on twitter because that’s where the audience is.