by Isofarro 12 hours ago
The idea that you have to read everything is a reader UI design flaw. By presenting feeds as an inbox, it gives the impression of RSS feeds being email. And that's not right, it can be, but it doesn't have to be.
The TikTok model is about scrolling, skipping, being selective.
RSS readers should be treated the same way. "River of news" is an RSS thing. You dive in when stuff interests you, and you let what doesn't interest you flow by.
Twitter is basically an RSS-like reader with 120 character limits on posts. You subscribe to interesting people, and their little posts drop on your homepage in reverse chronological order. There's no inbox or unread items. You just scroll past to the next item that interests you.
Yeah, turning off unread-items counters, definitely. The value of RSS is in what you chose to read. It's not an anti-library. And if something is really great, a good subscription list means someone you're reading will likely mention it and link to it.
This is an insight I realized several years ago: I want RSS, but I don't want to track what I've read and haven't. I solved my problem by writing a bot for each RSS feed - it would mirror posts in Diaspora. I would then subscribe to those bots.
These days it's Mastodon, but same idea. I just scroll and browse a bit, with nothing in the system telling me I have 573 unread posts.
I went through this thought process of creating a mechanical system to find interesting content all across the web for me based on my preferences that it learned.
And I started thinking about the supreme importance of high quality data sources... realizing there's a power law there, where I could just subscribe to a few high quality people... and ended up reinventing RSS from first principles.
And then instead of embeddings we have tags...
Honestly I think we nailed it in 2005 :)