The troubling assumption here is that every site has or depends on ads and cares about rankings.

>> "Why would anyone implement it?"

Because your assumption is wrong.

They wouldn't, but who cares about them? RSS is for people who blog to share their interests freely, and to help their readers get the content more easily.

Not everyone is trying to monetize everything.

Absolute heresy to say that on here lol.

Actually not really. Depends on the post of course, but for a VC ad channel, HN has plenty of users that are very much not aligned with that mindset and more let's say idealistic comments will regularly get upvoted here.

I would say that providing a first paragraph of text by RSS feed might actually attract more users/readers to a site to read the full article (paid or not).

Wasn't it Basecamp/37Signals who said to emulate drugs dealers and give the first try away for free? ;)

I've never met a single drug dealer who actually gave any drugs away for free.

I recall as a kid teachers giving us these lectures about not accepting drug-containing removable tattoos from strangers.

I wonder where this meme came from.

Drug education has always been all kinds of divorced from reality. But once you step away from literal drugs then the concept of a freebie to hook you is not at all uncommon.

Why did people create podcasts for free and distribute them via RSS? Because there once was a time when advances in computing had use cases that weren't driven entirely by commercial interests.

If only we still lived in that reality.

We still do! But the percentage of such publishers is smaller than back then, maybe against the desires if would-be publishers. Do you think it was easy to offer paid online content and get paid in 1998?

You can always choose to. Not everyone will join you of course and you might be discouraged because of that but there are plenty of us putting websites and content online without commercial interests.

On my blog I get about 800 hits per month. It’s not enough to generate meaningful revenue with ads. So my blog is more about branding and SEO for my name, and slapping an ad or even a donate button feels cheap to me.

If I had 10x the visitors I might see things differently but I think a lot of small blogs are in my boat.

I have been maintaining a personal website since 2001 and the core interest of my website is to share things I find interesting. RSS does not go against that. On the other hand, RSS makes it easy for subscribers to my RSS feeds to find out when I have shared something new.

Different people have different goals.