Comment by ASalazarMX
4 hours ago
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.
I just scroll over it. Only the newest 5000 items are preserved, by default I allow maximum 4 items per feed (some feeds more some less), titles must be at least 3 words long and I delete items if the title contains any of the badwords.
Now that I think of it, the mistake most people make is not having enough subscriptions. Some spot around 1000 feeds the experience changes dramatically. You can afford to be less interested in things as there is plenty more.
I think I find about one decent article per day for each 10 000 subs.
Disposing of crappy feeds isn't a lot of work and a word filter works really well because people want to stuff descriptive words into titles.
Business insider amused me. They are so good at writing good titles that practically non of their countless worthless publications make it though my word filter. What remains would have one think it is a reasonable website.
IIRC, Gmail at one time offered mailbox as RSS feed many years ago