RSS usability sucks
At the Blog Business Summit yesterday we discovered just how bad RSS usability sucks. Molly Holzschalg was on stage with me and visited a blog and was trying to find its RSS feed. She couldn't find it. Why? Cause there's no consistency in this industry on how to subscribe.
Context & Ripple Effects
This post captures a live usability crisis at the heart of the mid-2000s blog boom: even an expert like Molly Holzschlag couldn't find a feed on stage at the Blog Business Summit, because publishers offered no consistent way to subscribe. It lands the same day as a companion complaint that even Wordpress.com's own RSS feeds were broken, showing the problem ran through platforms, not just hobbyist blogs. The stakes were high because feed readers and blog news services were fighting it out for users at exactly this moment — every failed subscription was a lost reader in that war.
First-order effects
- Bloggers and publishers lose potential subscribers at the point of discovery: without standardized feed buttons, autodiscovery, or clear labeling, even motivated expert users fail to subscribe, directly suppressing readership numbers that feed-reading services compete on.
- Feed-reader vendors feel the friction immediately — subscription flows depend on publishers exposing feeds consistently, so poor usability caps adoption of the very tools (readers, aggregators) whose growth depends on easy subscribing.
Second-order effects
- Pressure builds toward standardization: platform vendors and browser makers are pushed to implement feed autodiscovery and one-click subscribe so that individual sites' inconsistency stops mattering — shifting the fix from publisher behavior to tooling.
- Centralized alternatives gain an opening: services that hide syndication complexity behind a single account (portal-style news services) can market themselves as the effortless option, siphoning mainstream users away from raw feeds.
Third-order effects
- If open formats demand user effort while corporate silos offer convenience, the pattern points toward the outcome later retrospectives describe: RSS losing mainstream adoption to centralized information silos controlled by corporations despite remaining an open standard (as a 2019 look back at RSS's decline concluded).
- The episode becomes a case study in how open standards fail operationally rather than technically — a format can win on architecture yet lose on implementation consistency, a lesson that recurs whenever adoption depends on millions of independent publishers doing the right thing.
The trend: Open web standards are losing ground to centralized corporate platforms not because they are technically inferior but because their fragmented implementations impose usability costs that silos eliminate.