Hacker News Reader

In fairness NPR does in fact have RSS 2.0 feeds; they're separated by section [1] -- for example, one for US News [2]. There's an 'assorted' feed [3] that doesn't exactly mirror the homepage but shares a similar purpose.

The feeds only embed a line or two from the article, and link to the regular (i.e. non-lite) site. Nonetheless, they exist; artifacts of a patchwork of optimistic thinking about the future of the web that have largely fallen out of the collective popular consciousness.

[1] https://help.npr.org/customer/portal/articles/2094175-where-...

[2] http://www.npr.org/rss/rss.php?id=1003

[3] http://www.npr.org/rss/rss.php

Yeah, they could publish syndicated content but it would have to be really simple for non-technical users.

I mean the real barriers to entry are that browsers don't display feeds nicely, you need an additional client or service.

Or if there was some way to push those updates. [1]

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebSub