I never got into RSS readers, but I use Hacker News and Reddit for the purposes Marco is describing. I have Pulse on my phone set up to follow a handful of RSS feeds (Hacker News, The Verge, Daring Fireball, Ars Technica, etc.) so I have an easy way to see what's happening if I have a couple minutes to kill throughout my day.
I think you're missing what he says. Hacker News and Reddit are completely perpendicular use cases to RSS.
From the article: The true power of the RSS inbox is keeping you informed of new posts that you probably won’t see linked elsewhere.
I feel like I've been shouting this into the void over the last few days of RSS-related submissions, but RSS is not best suited as a news-discovery paradigm. Aggregators like HN or Reddit serve that purpose. RSS's sweet spot is tracking deeper content on niche sites or topics that don't get swept up in hype mills, and if you're interested in more than two or three blogs or sites like that, RSS is essentially the way to track that content. Being able to share that and discuss with a select group of people was icing on the cake that Google Reader added.
Without seeming overly defensive about it, I feel like everyone who dismisses RSS lately with "that's what HN is for" has never used RSS in the way that many of us find indispensable.
But if there's an interesting article on marco.org, someone who reads that will post it to /r/programming, and I'll get to read it without having to find and follow the author.
Ok, so imagine the site in question is a little-known blog. I follow a link on reddit, enjoy the article, then click around to see what else the author writes. I find it really interesting and want to follow this author more closely. Do I then cross my fingers and hope reddit shares my taste in his other content and also hope I happen to catch it on reddit if that blog's content comes up again? No, I track the RSS and can peruse updates at my leisure without missing anything.
I think it's a different model of consumption. HN/Reddit is browsing, "let's see what the chatter by the watercooler is today". RSS is "I am more than casually interested in particular content and want to be notified of updates".
I didn't know marco.org had anything to do with programming. I added it to Feedly when someone linked a good article on it. I don't care for programming, so I wouldn't have /r/programming/ in my subscriptions.
All of the sites you mentioned don't play to the strength of RSS. RSS is great for YOUR interests, not a crowd's interest. It's the difference between following an author or artist versus following a publication or radio station.
