You are focusing on the consumption side and your proposed steps seem like a good way to bring back easy consumption of RSS feeds.
But the problem lies elsewhere: the blogs I regularly visit still have RSS feeds, but most content now isn’t in blogs anymore. For-profit sites have crippled or completely dropped their feeds to make users see ads. Many people that would have been bloggers a decade ago just publish threads on twitter now. And discoverability is a whole topic for itself…
So even if rss was in-your-face in every browser, how would you get content creators to support it?
My hope is that the one would follow from the other. If consumption is easy and awareness better, creators would want their content available via a feed. Think Youtube: With ads integrated into the videos every feed subscriber is a money source, both for the platform and for the creator.
I know a podcast I like but never listen to it, because it's behind a strange podcast platform without a feed. If they had that they had at least one listener more, and more listeners would mean more potential for advertising. Simple awareness could help here.
Also, I think it's somewhat of a misconception that ads are impossible to add to feeds. The article itself can contain them, the feed can even have special ads, there are no rules against that. Sure: We are talking static ads like banner ads, not Javascript-tracker-driven dynamic adspaces, but that's a direction the web should go to anyway. There has been technology and industry in that direction in the past, why shouldn't it exist again?
Wholeheartedly agree. And even if a feed ships a lot of text, the reader software can always trim it down and/or present it as it wants. For the website builder I develop and sell, I use the reader side of RSS as a 'social timeline', so there's no room for long articles in the feed anyway. Want to read more, just visit the website. The website is the best place for ads as well, dirtying up your timeline with ads is a no-no for me.
I also want to use the opportunity to propose a new name for RSS, which is 'Really Social Sites' or 'Real Social Sites'. RSS had name changes in the past, so it's only natural it gets a new name when it will revive in the coming years. And since all this web3 sh1t (names without meaning) I really felt the need to put energy in RSS and also it's name. To make it more accessible to everybody, not only devs and nerds, it needs a better name. Nothing else has to change, RSS is rock solid as a technology. Can't wait to use my own software to read the personal blogs/websites of all you guys and gals. Social Media without Big Tech.
But the problem lies elsewhere: the blogs I regularly visit still have RSS feeds, but most content now isn’t in blogs anymore. For-profit sites have crippled or completely dropped their feeds to make users see ads. Many people that would have been bloggers a decade ago just publish threads on twitter now. And discoverability is a whole topic for itself…
So even if rss was in-your-face in every browser, how would you get content creators to support it?