Yup. The shift to the web as a service and advertisement platform over the years is completely at odds with RSS. The tidal wave is only going to get worse as ISPs increase the throttling of content of their choosing (speeding up yours or your partner's pipeline is throttling everybody else's even if you do not reduce their bandwidth) to support their business models. Applications and platforms that do nothing else well save letting users consume content with a large degree of control over the noise will always be fighting against the tide. They can totally exist, but they will always have trouble scaling as standalone services.

A feature that mimics what almost universally mis-used RSS readers do best seems like a great feature to roll into another platform, like Hubski. But if it is a feature that reflects the value a platform is providing, I think it would be worth it to act like a big brother and control the implementation such that you can't misuse it like everybody does with RSS readers. If you like tech, subscribing to a bunch (or even one!) of RSS feeds from popular sites can be fairly useless. I'm not even talking about advertisements, -the content itself becomes noise. Social aggregators actually are one of the solutions to this, but even they run into problems. The feature seems like kind of a natural fit for a social aggregator though.