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Viewers/listeners are not valuable by themselves. They are only valuable if the publisher gets paid for them, and they get paid via advertising (or a subscription fee). RSS does not provide advertising revenue for publishers. It could work with a subscription model, I suppose, but I am not sure there is the demand to sustain it.

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you're looking at the situation too narrowly. publishers & content creators also want esteem and influence, which they can bank to get paid later (perhaps through a related but separate effort, like product 'reviews').

the short-termist, transactional view of society (you are only a good as your last payment, no long-term relation) is not natural, not required and undermines many other adjacent social contracts

publishers should support a lively rss ecosystem (actually evolve next-gen tech based on its principles) and draw revenue on the basis of visibility (and as you say, esteem and influence) this provides

people have always been paying for content. we have normalized the exception and abberation that is the "pay-with-your-private-data" business model

yes, it’s a lowest common denominator view of society that collapses all the complexity into simple transactions. it’s a lifeless way of perceiving the world.

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