RSS was and still is great for following a few blogs that were relatively infrequently updated. If I follow Rands, DF or Marco, it works quite well. I receive timely, relevant content at a pace I can cope with and digest.<p>The problem with RSS is that it scales incredibly badly for large, content heavy sites. I don&#x27;t really want to see everything that Gizmodo publishes. I certainly don&#x27;t want to see everything that HuffPo, Buzzfeed or any of the other content mills publish. Sure, you can choose granularity - a &#x27;US Politics&#x27; RSS feed for example, but that puts too much of the onus on me and I&#x27;ll end up missing some stuff I&#x27;d like to see.<p>For those large content mills, Facebook actually does a quite good job of bubbling stuff up through my network that I care about. Twitter served that function for a while before it became more about noise and snark.<p>The death of Google Reader probably had a role in the decline of the small independent publisher (how many new sites have appeared on that scene recently?), but it&#x27;s probably not to blame for the rise of BuzzFeed et al, which RSS was never really suited to handle anyway.