For mainstream users, the function of blogs and feeds were subsumed by Facebook. For techies, self-curated feeds were dropped in favor of canned feeds from Reddit and Hacker News, sadly.<p>The result is that as content consumers, we mostly abdicated our discovery of content and people to follow to big content sites and their algorithms. You get just enough "good enough" content that way that people don't bother to be their own algorithm, discovering and curating their feed themselves.<p>I also blame Google because they essentially killed Google Reader (their excellent RSS feed app) because they had Zuckerberg envy and built Google Plus to be the serious person's Facebook. If instead of trying to create their own walled garden of content and social network, they should have cultivated the wild garden of RSS and made it friendlier for the masses. Now both Google Plus and Reader are dead. What a shame.<p>Still, RSS as a protocol for publishing and pulling information is not dead but its promise as the Operating System of All Connected Things didn't become as widespread and mainstream as its hype in the early days where every coffee pot and your apartment's laundry room were expected to have RSS feeds you could subscribe to.<p>I personally think something like RSS is ripe for a comeback (based on JSON instead of clunky XML). Tim Berners Lee is advocating for that very thing, bringing back a decentralized, self-owned web of content curated by curious minds and not by commercially-driven ad robots.