Also people share articles. If you have a feed there is roughly 0% chance of me sharing one of your articles. If I subscribe to your feed and like the article then I may share it with friends or post to Reddit or Hacker News.

Of course while you may reach some users that you wouldn't have otherwise, you may also lose some ad views from people who would still check your site if there was no feed. So it is a balance.

OP here - I have a desktop RSS reader and I do not subscribe to feeds that only have abstracts.

I much rather just go to the site personally.

If every feed had just abstracts then I probably wouldn’t even bother with an RSS readers.

I’m technical already and I can’t imagine any regular person bothering with RSS if it was just abstracts.

Not everyone is you and you're ignoring the fact that some people do subscribe to those feeds and will drive traffic to your site for a completely negligible effort even if you personally wouldn't.

Your original post was about why you, as a website owner, would provide an RSS feed. Not why you personally would use an RSS feed

My original post is about why RSS didn’t take off. My second post is also about why RSS didn’t take off. Together they present an angle from both the provider and consumer sides with the greater point that Google didn’t kill RSS — rather, the relative unpopularity of RSS caused Google to pull out.

And guess what, RSS didn’t take off.

You just manually go through a long list of sites daily/monthly/yearly?

Yep. Sitting down and reading is an enjoyable thing for me. I’m not trying to hoover up every headline.

RSS made a lot of sense in a world where many sites published interesting but infrequent material.