Luckily some readers also include a "always fetch full content" feature that pulls the linked page and runs it through a "reader mode" to remove the garbage. These kind of feeds really annoy me.

> I really enjoy reading content on my terms on not having to go everywhere to get it.

Unfortunately, I like to write my content knowing how it's going to have a certain appearance and layout, and because this doesn't scale to the narrow set of HTML allowed in the <description> tag, I don't have anything in there and just have a link to my site.

There are definitely RSS feeds without content so you have to go to their site and have adverts thrown at you, yeah, but it's not as simple as flipping a switch and having readable content in your RSS feeds.

...and then I feed it into Reader mode on my phone, or something similar, because fuck stylesheets in general.

I work on a project that can transform many of those feeds into full-text versions: https://fivefilters.org/content-only/

Another solution for sites that don't offer their own feeds: http://createfeed.fivefilters.org/

Previews in RSS isn't perfect, but I'll take it.

One of my favorite webcomics updated very sporadically and didn't provide a RSS feed for the longest time; it was difficult to keep up with updates. The current feed is just a link to the comic and is a significant improvement.

The author was resistant to RSS for the longest time because they thought they _had_ to include the comic in the feed and was worried about losing ad revenue.

A bit of that is that RSS simply doesn't have great character support. You have to escape a whole bunch of stuff that is useful to have in the final product - because for most users the RSS is a notification feed, not the endpoint they go to.

If the site is ad supported I can see why they're doing it. Can't serve ads in the RSS feed (some RSS readers reserve that right for themselves).

You can use basic HTML and embed images, there's nothing stopping you putting adverts in a feed.