> you just stop by Reddit and HN. And assume anything you don't find on Reddit/HN is probably dead or dying, you're not going to look
So you saying that browsing reddit had replaced the “old ways”. That is exactly the problem, this was not an option. If those blogs or sites never appear in search engines, blogrolls are gone, archives have been deleted (eg Tumblr), delicious/stumbleupon/etc are gone, how do you find them? The internet and how content is distributed has changed a lot, it’s disingenuous to just dismiss it as nostalgia.
On RSS, maybe you forgot that google mangled it in 2013? They shut down the most popular RSS reader without warning, and around the same time most large platforms stopped providing full content via feeds, to drive traffic to their site == ad revenue. RSS went from being a major source of traffic for blogs, to 1-2% of visitors. Of course people will stop using it if stops giving you content and your software is gone.
So you saying that browsing reddit had replaced the “old ways”. That is exactly the problem, this was not an option. If those blogs or sites never appear in search engines, blogrolls are gone, archives have been deleted (eg Tumblr), delicious/stumbleupon/etc are gone, how do you find them? The internet and how content is distributed has changed a lot, it’s disingenuous to just dismiss it as nostalgia.
On RSS, maybe you forgot that google mangled it in 2013? They shut down the most popular RSS reader without warning, and around the same time most large platforms stopped providing full content via feeds, to drive traffic to their site == ad revenue. RSS went from being a major source of traffic for blogs, to 1-2% of visitors. Of course people will stop using it if stops giving you content and your software is gone.