See also: IRC, which I also like, but whose demise is fully complete. RSS isn't quite as dead as IRC, but it's on the way out.
It's dying because it's not profitable for the big players (heck, you could say it's directly against their interest).
And it also isn't good at providing statistics, so small players see it as miniscule (thus dropping too).
The problem isn't that RSS isn't good or useful, it's that it doesn't fit into the incentive structures that we've bought into. An Internet in which RSS thrives is not one in which John Q. Programmer makes 250k a year at Facebook or Google.
I disagree. RSS is still the standard for following podcasts
RSS might be providing the syndication under the hood to these services, but it's firmly an implementation detail at this point and not a thriving protocol/community in its own right. Which isn't to say that I want it to fail or be replaced with something else, either!
Doesnt Feedly, for one, aggregate RSS subscriptions for all of its users? If I were subscribed to your blog through Feedly, would you see me as an individual subscriber, or all of your Feedly subscribers as one subscriber? If so, I imagine this would deflate your numbers.
For example, here's the UA that Feedly sent me a few hours ago:
Feedly/1.0 (+http://www.feedly.com/fetcher.html; 81 subscribers; like FeedFetcher-Google)Pockets of activity don't mean that IRC as a whole isn't dead, the same way that the Pope doesn't make Latin a living language.
I pronounce the end of the discussion!
I'd argue that accessible sites are realising its benefits.
New webpages rarely bother implementing a feed; old ones, when getting new iterations, often drop support too.
I've seen too many blogs without a feed...
It's a miracle YT still has them!