That will be protest. Have some more, I've got plenty left:
Back in the good old days before the Internet was segregated into several factions behind membership walls operated by Facebook and Google we had public feeds that:
1. Didn't require signing up for anything.
2. Didn't redirect to some shitty feed aggregator that throws out partial pages so you have to click through to a page stuffed with ads and tracking to get the full content.
3. Actually respected established standards for subscriptions.
4. Actually worked properly.
Going a few years before that, we even had this thing called usenet which allowed you to subscribe to topics as well and communicate with other people posting on the feeds!!! Think of that!!!
Then Deja came along, got bought by Google, everyone got marketed to death and made to choose ecosystems, a subscriber became a dollar value or a social information provider rather than an appreciated reader, content became small and insignificant and people got lazy resulting in blindly ambling into ecosystems and getting stuck there.
And now we're creating throwaway accounts to subscribe to things because that's the only measure of value for content.
But that's not based on Federated OAuth REST Web-APIs with JSON-output and backed by a webscale cluster of eventually consistent NoSQL DBs, so obviously it's not trendy and can't have been any good.
</sarcasm>
At this point, pretty much everything about the internet is moving in the wrong direction.
That's amusing because I'm actually just fighting a "unicorn poop" proposal that puts a shit ton of sensitive financial data into the system you just described on a stack built by the lowest bidding hipsters the new TA could get in. This is to replace the 10 years investment in the existing 100% working and 5% capacity Oracle/J2EE/SOAP solution. "But but with Ruby we can rewrite this all in a couple of months" (all 2.8 million lines of quite efficient Java - of course!)
Maybe it is time for an updated version of USENET, not tied to Google a la Google groups. I am aware that it still exists but the clients are outdated and they could use additional features.
