You may have just heard it from me first: I know a guy that knows a guy that says that the next upcoming self-inflicted injury on the Reddit site is an imminent removal of the "old." prefix that has been used to un-fuck the interface and make it more bearably usable. They're already bleeding out users, especially active content-creating users, so this will only accelerate evacuations of the carnival tents as the circus fire spreads.
Yeah it's a really solid and robust system with far-reaching bonuses because of all the different ways you can use rss. I honestly credit it for a lot of reddit's early success.
It's most likely due to Swartz.
Yes absolutely, he developed web feed RSS itself.
creddit it