Troubleshooting RSS addiction: a blogger finds freedom in a world without feeds

by Danny Mendez Apr 23rd 2008

It's part of our culture to want to get more done in less time, so it's unsurprising RSS readers are so popular nowadays. But what happens when efficiency and productivity start to replace general happiness? Well, that's what happened to a long time web publisher/surfer known as Halsted (AKA Cygnoir), who recently became fed up with her RSS addiction.

"I dread opening my RSS reader these days," she posted the day before giving up on RSS. "Right now there are 876 unread items glaring at me, from a total of 269 feeds." As of this writing, the brave soul has managed to get through about a week without relying on a reader -- you laugh, but some of us are truly addicted!

RSS and other technologies are often praised for their ability to save time, effort, etc, but it seems many forget their limits when they get into the habit of turning free time into work time -- all the time. This gets us wondering: How many feeds is one too many, and -- for all the RSS addicts out there -- how often do you check your feeds?

[via Valleywag]

Tags: blog, blogging, feed, reader, rss

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Mark said 9:35AM on 4-23-2008

I think it's all dependent on the person. It's not uncommon for me to see ~800 items.. especially if I'm too caught up in my classes all day to check feeds during class and/or I have too much crap to do when I get home. Here's my Google Reader summary:

From your 128 subscriptions, over the last 30 days you read 30,939 items.

That's not too much for a college student with 2 jobs who isn't affiliated with the web industry at all, is it?

Also, I check my feeds almost constantly... I at least pop into Google Reader once an hour to pare stuff down. However, it's not uncommon for me to be sitting in class hitting "Refresh" every two seconds so I can have something new to digest.

abaker said 1:14AM on 6-01-2008

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Todd said 9:41AM on 4-23-2008

Didn't we go through this before?

"Three TV networks are enough"
"No one will ever need more than 640k of RAM."
"No one reads books anymore."

...I'd throw in some quotes about Rock 'n Roll is the devil's music, or something from Reefer Madness, but I am in a hurry. But I will leave you with this:

"Evolve or Die"

Sensai said 9:54AM on 4-23-2008

Am I the only person on the entire Internet who still doesn't use RSS? I'd just prefer to actually visit the site...not only does it come to me in prettier packaging, it also gives me something to do.

But then again, I guess this kinda thing is for people who are in a hurry or need news and data streamlined to them. Not me.

Duffin said 2:24PM on 4-23-2008

I'm with you! The people go through the trouble of designing the site, I feel weird about not visiting it to read what they they post there. Granted, I don't have hundreds of sites that I visit every day. I'd say there are maybe 15 sites that update throughout the day that i keep up with.

keeves said 2:41PM on 4-23-2008

I think your probably with about 99% of the typical internet users. There is no website updates that i can't miss, and very while i just check to see if there is anything of any interest that catches my attention. i bet if i mentioned RSS to my mates, only a couple of the geakiest would have any idea what i am on about...

Peter said 7:15PM on 4-23-2008

Sensai - You might be :) I'm amazed that you and Duffin somehow feel obligated to visit the site just because someone spent some effort designing it.

I love RSS and I couldn't care less what the site looks like. I only care about the information. I don't think I've ever been to a site that made me think "Wow this site is fun, exciting and really well designed. Props to the code monkeys and graphic designers who worked on it." Unless your design is atrociously bad, I'm not even going to notice it.

RSS is also great for sites that don't update very often. Why should I go to your site every day or every week for 6 weeks just to find nothing new. It's a better use of my time to have you tell me when there's something new. I subscribe to 100+ feeds, but on any given day only 50-70 of them have updates. Why would I waste my time looking at the other 40 when I can have my reader tell me there's nothing new there?

Dagur said 11:10AM on 4-23-2008

Speaking of RSS feeds. The polls that appear in the downloadsquad/engadget/joystiq/etc feeds never work. You have to visit the page and vote from there. Otherwise you get a "poll not found" error.

Whitster said 11:17AM on 4-23-2008

I check Google Reader several times a day, more if i'm bored or not busy.

I'd say I get between 300 and 400 items per day.

James said 11:27AM on 4-23-2008

Heh, I hear that -- actually, DLS, your parent co is responsible for most of my troubles. I actually made a separate feed category in my GReader for the various Weblogs Inc blogs I follow. I can keep up on pretty much everything else, but Joystiq and Engadget are each ~500 posts behind for me right now.

Danny Mendez said 7:03PM on 4-23-2008

:-)

Master Devwi said 1:45PM on 4-23-2008

I have 297 RSS feeds that I check every day. (More like every hour! :P ) You can never have too many feeds!

Peter said 2:23PM on 4-23-2008

Or you could, you know, not read them all. You're not required to read everything that comes in. Just delete the stuff you're not going to read, no need to be such a drama queen about it.

Josh said 2:43PM on 4-23-2008

Honestly... RSS is just a technology that I see little to no point to. I'd much rather just read each site individually. I've cut down on the amount of blogs I read (the amount of duplicated info was getting ridiculous) so I am down to like 15 now and I have no problem clicking a bookmark in my bookmarks bar in Firefox. Even when I was at around 40 blogs, it didn't really save me any time to do RSS feeds for them all. =\

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