I know many people feel nostalgic about the days when RSS was everywhere (and a more open web) — and I do too.
But my experience must be different than most. I had hundreds of feeds in Google Reader, which quickly became overwhelming. It was hard to tell what was worth reading, and I often just marked everything as “read,” the same way people get email fatigue.
While I support a more open web, I think the real missing piece in the conversation is curation.
Take HN, for example. It’s essentially community-driven curation, and I get far more enjoyment browsing HN today than I ever did sifting endlessly through my RSS feeds trying to find something interesting.
>> I had hundreds of feeds in Google Reader, which quickly became overwhelming
I never used Google Reader, did it not have any ability to put feeds in directories or any other way of prioritizing?
I have hundreds of feeds in my RSS reader, a dozen of them are in the directory titled "Good", and for those I read pretty much every entry in every feed every day. There are a hundred or so of them in the directory titled "Bored". I get to those every once in a while. There's a limit on how many entries it keeps, so most of the entries in the Bored directory will expire unread. But it's good sometimes to have a self-curated source of reading material even if you don't get to it all.
>> I get far more enjoyment browsing HN today than I ever did sifting endlessly through my RSS feeds
HN, of course, has an RSS feed. (It's in "Bored").
HN has RSS feeds, I solely access it from there. I can skim titles much faster in the consistent UI of my feed reader then I could visiting the bespoke home pages of HN and many other sites.
When I used Google Reader, I didn't read everything together under one heading for that reason. I clicked on a feed, read the latest, and moved on to the next. So on a slower feed I might always read everything, while on a very busy one I might just occasionally check in or read a little while and then mark the rest read.
Now I use TT-RSS, which looks a lot like Google Reader did, but you run it on a local system. And I still read some feeds completely every day and let others pile up for weeks.
Hundreds sounds overwhelming! Did Google Reader let you look at a single feed at a time? I've never found readers that present a single "inbox" combining all my feeds to be usable.
Some of the feeds I subscribe to are effectively curated news from around the web, and I use filters to hide certain topics - e.g. from a newspaper I might filter the entire sport section.
What was needed is your own personal "algorithm" to provide you a feed of the things you'd subscribed to so you didn't have to read and check off every published thing. Imagine if you actually had control of this feed and could have the social aspect but tweaked to your preferences instead of somebody else's
In fact it's not such a bad idea to write this software now
But my experience must be different than most. I had hundreds of feeds in Google Reader, which quickly became overwhelming. It was hard to tell what was worth reading, and I often just marked everything as “read,” the same way people get email fatigue.
While I support a more open web, I think the real missing piece in the conversation is curation.
Take HN, for example. It’s essentially community-driven curation, and I get far more enjoyment browsing HN today than I ever did sifting endlessly through my RSS feeds trying to find something interesting.