Nah it's much simpler. The reason RSS failed is because Google killed Reader so they could push content creators to Google+.
That in turn led to other companies with the ability to set things at the time gradually deprecating and removing their build-in feed readers (thanks Mozilla, thanks Apple) and the result is that RSS "failed".
It didn't fail, it was murdered so Google could promote their failed social media network.
I wonder if Google+ could've succeeded if Google had evolved it from Reader somehow. Start with the product people are actually using, develop it until it's the product you want people to use?
At the time, several of us were telling our friends working at Google to start from Reader comments. It was already a functional and somewhat popular social network.
Instead of that, they removed the comments and replaced them with something worse that no one ended up using.
Google should have built out Reader as its Twitter competitors, and Google+ as a separate Facebook competitor.
The former would be a more impersonal source of information and discussion, whereas the latter would have been where you put your personal connections.
Unfortunately Google wanted to do both in the same product, and thought that Circles would be sufficient to create the distinction, but the kind of stuff someone might want to expose to an impersonal connection is drastically different from the kind of stuff they want to expose to personal connections, to the point that they should arguably have completely different UIs.
Circles seems like the sort of feature that would appeal to power users (and indeed I remember a bunch of academic type people using Google+?) But most users are not power users and don't want to do a bunch of thinking about what circle each contact belongs to.
Nevertheless it seems to me like the network effect was the main thing, and Reader could've been a huge step there.
If RSS really were popular, you would expect Google closing Reader to spur Mozilla and Apple to put even more work in maintaining their RSS readers, to attract people to them.
However, RSS was never very popular outside some small tech circles, and Mozilla and Apple saw that the same way that Google did.
That assumes that Mozilla and Apple were capable of doing those things in that time period.
Mozilla is nothing more than controlled opposition that Google can prop up and say "See, we're not a totally monopoly" while Apple at the time could see nothing beyond the piles of money that the iPhone was making them, to the point where even their desktop/laptop lines suffered.
That in turn led to other companies with the ability to set things at the time gradually deprecating and removing their build-in feed readers (thanks Mozilla, thanks Apple) and the result is that RSS "failed".
It didn't fail, it was murdered so Google could promote their failed social media network.