I don't see any difference with how HN and Reddit attract people. They all seek the added social aspect to reading news; and Facebook is just what people know.
>Apologies for being cynical, but I'm not surprised.
Luckily cynicism doesn't equal realism. FF devs often make data-driven decisions, and none of the devs showed interest fixing all the accumulated bugs. So they left this to matter to add-ons, the big button was eventually stored away and the one in the address bar abandoned for Pocket. No sneaky marketing strategies involved.
That based on telemetry data the RSS feature was barely used in general. I haven't seen any commentary that suggests any relation with their support for Pocket.
I would very much like to see a banner at the bottom of the new tab page introducing RSS and how it can be used, similarly to how Mozilla did for Firefox Sync.
Yes, but even this feature would be more like a traditional browser: A service-neutral, "dumb" feature where the user is directly in control. Not in an abstract marketing sense but literally: A user subscribes to a page and will get all events from tha page in predicatable order.
The "news feed" as implemented by Facebook and envisaged by Pocket is something completely different. You "subscribe" to pages alright. But this is simply a hint that gets fed into a curation algorithm. What you then see is a selected subset of events from your subscribed pages, in addition to "related" content and content the algorithm things you might find interesting. The algorithm used is of course constantly being changed and optimized towards a metric you probably don't even know. In short, with that kind of system, the user is very much not in control.
> I came home and investigated – the option to "subscribe to page" when the page has an RSS feed is gone from Firefox, or at least I couldn't find it.
Apologies for being cynical, but I'm not surprised. I'll be bold and assume that you can make money with curated feeds (or letting other people try out their curation algorithms on your userbase) but you can't make money with RSS.