Comment by bsnnkv

RSS came of age in a very different time, when the world of computing was more, for lack of a better term, workstation-centric. People wanted RSS clients that were similar to email clients, or maybe even integrated directly into the email client, and they had this idea that they should 'catch up' on everything that was published since their last session, almost like it was a job.

Nowadays people have an implicit understanding that the net is vast and infinite, it's beyond the ability of one man to fully catch up, and you're just tuning into a slice of the data stream.

RSS clients never really departed from their roots of showing reverse chronological lists of all the posts, but this UI loses usefulness when the data stream gets too big. Commercial social media saw an opportunity and decided to make the algorithm that arranges the feed totally opaque - with that achieved, they proceeded to auction off each spot in it and get rich. Even worse than the reverse chronological firehose.

What we lack is a presentation that is actually good! I don't have the answer. One thing I want to experiment with, though, is digests. I use a straight reverse chronological UI that aggregates all my items in all my feeds. One thing I noticed is that this ends up wildly biased toward feeds that have lots of posts, like news aggregator websites, or Reddit. Anyone who's foolish enough to work hard and produce wonderful long form content with less frequency, gets lost in the firehose, which may tell us a lot about how the collapse-in-progress of our civilization got started. I have no idea how to solve this and do better than the UIs and algorithms that rule the world today. I do have it on my todo list to try a digest style UI - like perhaps each website gets one entry per day in my feed, and if they made multiple posts on that day, those are represented as multiple small title links in a compact format. Whereas a less frequent poster might even get an excerpt along with their title or something.

One of the big issue I had (and have) with RSS is that is discouraged me from following multiple similar sources, as I’ll see similar stories in each feed and it becomes very noisy.

Some apps I saw in the past, like Fever that attempted to quell this issue, but I ended to taking the approach of just being ruthless about what I subscribe to.

The ultimate result of this was just a few feeds, but one of them is ars technica, which on its own can become too much if I don’t keep up on it daily, and if they miss covering something, I miss reading about it. It doesn’t leave room for special interest blogs in tech, without inevitably creating more duplication than I’d like.

I don’t think the modern algorithmic approach is much better, as things can just as easily fall through the cracks.

I need to seriously consider adopting your “read it now or read it never” approach. This is effectively how my read-it-later accounts work in practice, but with the good intentions of reading something later, comes the shame of never actually doing it. Compound that with the regret I feel when I occasionally open it up and find dead links. I don’t think any of this shame or regret actually makes my life better.

There are a couple readers that avoid that by providing a calmer experience without a firehose and without background fetching.

https://blogcat.org (I made this one)

https://fraidyc.at (this is the inspiration for many calm readers)

https://cblgh.itch.io/rad-reader (multiplatform and super calm)

It depends what you use it for. I’m a researcher and use it to follow scientific literature (relevant arXiv sections and scientific journals, as well as funding agency announcements), and keeping an eye on what’s up is then arguably part of the job.

If you use it for general news and blogs, that’s of course different. I completely agree with letting the FOMO go.