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RSS/Atom is still used by most syndications. The average user may be unaware of its existence but that same audience is similarly unaware of most technologies that drive the web.

Other than the death of Google Reader, there hasn't been much of a change.

The only alternative to RSS right now (afaik) seems to be bespoke APIs and <meta> which is a pain for publishers to maintain and for software to syndicate.

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Yeah I was myself surprised when recently I needed RSS feeds of a few parameters and was pleasantly surprised to see them still inplemented even with API’s on most of the sites.

We created an API at edX that is much more robust than our RSS feed. People still use the RSS feed because it is much easier than (a) registering for API credentials, (b) figuring out how OAuth works, and (c) learning what JSON is and how to parse it. The simpler solution was good enough for many clients.

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