Comment by sebtron
4 hours ago
> I get the impression this person is using RSS reader wrong. Or is there really a culture of people you are using RSS like a youtube-channel, consuming everything from beginning to end? For me the purpose of RSS is to get the newest headlines, choose the interesting articles and skip the rest. This means there is a limited list of items to check each day, and a finishing line.
Why would the author's use be the wrong one? And why should YouTube be different, in principle? (Maybe you are using YouTube wrong...)
I think at some point there was a shift in the way we consume online content, from "I'll read whatever is up now" to "I have my list of things to catch up with". RSS is older, so it is natural to connect it with the older way of consuming content. But there is no reason we can't do the same with YouTube channels, for example.
RSS has been traditionally used like an email client rather than a streaming service. You don't read every email, some go straight to spam or the trash bin. RSS is a time saver, not a time waster.
I can see that some feeds, like serializartions or low-volume/high quality content, is desirable to be consumed in its entirety, but the 80/20 principle seems to also apply to RSS feeds too in general. Specially if your RSS list reaches double digits.
A bit weird to make blanket statements about a tool like that. Some people read all emails, some don’t. Just like some people only subscribe to people’s personal blogs and want to read all of them.
Some might want to use it as a news aggregator and quickly browse through headlines. There no right or wrong usage of an RSS reader or “traditional usage”.
As RSS was being widespread around 2010, this is what most people said they were using it like, at least in my experience. It was the time when we still didn't have great spam filters, and people were used to receive and discard many emails without reading them.
RSS was also frequently compared to discussion forums, where you also want to efficiently ignore non-relevant content. RSS gave us the power to ignore the budding information overload.
IIRC, Gmail at one time offered mailbox as RSS feed many years ago