It’s a blessing in disguise that the protocol didn’t go more “mainstream” and get exploited to death by opportunistic assholes.

RSS isn't vulnerable to such attacks though.

Put an advert in the feed, make the post nothing but a link to the web url etc

There are plenty of anti-patterns to follow in RSS. We just didn't see them because only techies were using feeds.

DF has been putting ads in feed forever.

So? You just unsubscribe from any that are shit. Unlike on google where you can't delete a site from the search results (which you can on kagi btw, which is great).

So if RSS took off with the general public and this was your plan you'd very quickly be left with an empty feed reader.

The point is that RSS was/less overrun by advertising than the web because of cultural reasons, not thanks to something inherent to the technology.

News sites would start dropping ads into your feed, and currently, there would be no way to filter it out.

Right now, there’s no iOS RSS readers that will filter duplicate stories. I can’t imagine how adblocking would get implemented.

This was a solved problem in 2012. Ads are stories and can easily filtered skipped. Duplicate story checkers filter based on title/content similarity. Software available for iOS can be limited compared to windows or linux.

There was already ads in feeds or feeds that were nothing more than links.

But IIRC there were also sites that let you pay for a full feed and I think something good could have come out of it.

And there are websites that let you pay for add free.

The original point is simply that RSS would have gone the way of the web, in terms of the presence of advertising, had it become mainstream.

There being workarounds or other models possible doesn't change that and it also applies to the web today. As another commentor pointed out, RSS would have unique difficulties for adblockers as well.

I don't think RSS being widely used will make people insert ads into their hobby blogs.

It can only be empty if every website joined your plot. You might be shocked to find out how many respectable publishers are still out there.

But lets stick to the technology, first things first, how are you going to get me to subscribe to your feed? I just don't see it happening. Finding subscribers is incredibly hard.

You might be able to get one feed into my aggregator but I just press delete?

If it has as many postings as this one...

https://news.ycombinator.com/rss

...they all vanish when I press delete.

It isn't like you only have to obtain my email address. But if it was it would be easy for google to copy paste the gmail filter.

RSS is just as exploitable as anything else.

No, it isn't. RSS is not a search system. It has no such exploit, because it just doesn't work like that at all.