I probably would have agreed with you in the past, but not anymore. Here's why:

I was having coffee with a friend today and he mentioned he was thinking about opening a facebook account – here's the kicker: the reason he wanted to get a FB account was the news feed; he wanted to be able to subscribe to people's pages and get updates when they post something new.

I mentioned RSS; he was flabbergasted. He didn't know such a thing exists. I came home and investigated – the option to "subscribe to page" when the page has an RSS feed is gone from Firefox, or at least I couldn't find it.

> he wanted to be able to subscribe to people's pages and get updates when they post something new.

Yes, but even this feature would be more like a traditional browser: A service-neutral, "dumb" feature where the user is directly in control. Not in an abstract marketing sense but literally: A user subscribes to a page and will get all events from tha page in predicatable order.

The "news feed" as implemented by Facebook and envisaged by Pocket is something completely different. You "subscribe" to pages alright. But this is simply a hint that gets fed into a curation algorithm. What you then see is a selected subset of events from your subscribed pages, in addition to "related" content and content the algorithm things you might find interesting. The algorithm used is of course constantly being changed and optimized towards a metric you probably don't even know. In short, with that kind of system, the user is very much not in control.

> I came home and investigated – the option to "subscribe to page" when the page has an RSS feed is gone from Firefox, or at least I couldn't find it.

Apologies for being cynical, but I'm not surprised. I'll be bold and assume that you can make money with curated feeds (or letting other people try out their curation algorithms on your userbase) but you can't make money with RSS.

You've explained where Facebook's likely interest lies, but not why that feature is actually popular.

I don't see any difference with how HN and Reddit attract people. They all seek the added social aspect to reading news; and Facebook is just what people know.

>Apologies for being cynical, but I'm not surprised.

Luckily cynicism doesn't equal realism. FF devs often make data-driven decisions, and none of the devs showed interest fixing all the accumulated bugs. So they left this to matter to add-ons, the big button was eventually stored away and the one in the address bar abandoned for Pocket. No sneaky marketing strategies involved.

Reddit and hn are quite different in the sense that HN actively (allegedly) attempts to fight against clickbait / mislabeled titles where resdit (in general) leaves that up to the subreddits to manage which (in general) do nothing.

Indeed, but it's the same concept, just different target groups.

What was the data-driven decision in that case? You mean they looked at plugin usage stats and realized Pocket had more usage than the built-in RSS feature?

>What was the data-driven decision in that case?

That based on telemetry data the RSS feature was barely used in general. I haven't seen any commentary that suggests any relation with their support for Pocket.

Is it surprising people don't use a feature they don't know exists? This is a catch-22 problem.

I would very much like to see a banner at the bottom of the new tab page introducing RSS and how it can be used, similarly to how Mozilla did for Firefox Sync.

On my version (60.0.2), I can click the hamburger menu on the right side of the address bar, click customize... and there's a "subscribe" button with the RSS logo that can be dropped onto the address bar or the overflow bar.

It's hidden away now, you have to open the "Page Info" window, available most-readily from the page's context menu, then go to the Feeds tab, select a feed and hit the subscribe button that appears, and it'll take you to the feed itself, where Fx shows its subscription interface (which you can get to directly if the page is helpful enough to provide its own link to the feed, as I think WordPress used to do by default in its meta links section back in the day).

However there's a distinct possibility said subscription interface will go away in future. (Whether or not the list of feeds in Page Info would go away at the same time is less clear)

> I came home and investigated – the option to "subscribe to page" when the page has an RSS feed is gone from Firefox, or at least I couldn't find it.

Actually it's a lot easy than others have said. It's just Bookmarks > Subscribe to This Page. If you don't have the menu bar enabled (I do), you can just press alt to see it.

I thought RSS feeds weren't available for Facebook entities (users/friends, pages, groups, etc)?

He reads people's blogs and he's interested to know when they post new stuff. The whole new FB account thing was his solution to the problem because those people also have FB accounts/pages and post there when they have a new blog post.