It's funny that he says he doesn't need the productivity loss of keeping up with RSS because anything important will show up in his Twitter feed.
Why keeping up with RSS is poisonous to productivity, sanity
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Re: Why keeping up with RSS is poisonous to productivity, sanity
#12Way back in the olden days, I built a lovely reader (inventively called Reader) at Earthlink. The key feature to Reader was that it did not have unread counts at all. You could flip through the articles and it would keep keep track of where you were. If you left for more than half an hour, the rest of the articles were marked as read. It was very liberating to not feel like you were ever trying to keep up with your f…
Fever looks great: rerank high volume feeds by correlation to other feeds I like, mark some feeds like bug reports/commits as read all
... but I cringed so hard when the demo said to set all the files to 777. It's a php app you run on your own webserver and according to the documentation updates itself automatically.
Re: Why keeping up with RSS is poisonous to productivity, sanity
#13My RSS reader only refreshes every hour (and there's no easily accessible refresh button or way to force that), and I stick to feeds that get max 1 or 2 updates a day. Problem solved.
Don't blame the technology, blame the way you use it. Of course, subscribing to a high-traffic feed isn't much more effective than just keeping a tab open and refreshing every few seconds. You still have to cut throught the noise. But that's not the point, imo. Rss is great for tracking these obscure blogs that get one or two very well-though updates a week, or even less.
Re: Why keeping up with RSS is poisonous to productivity, sanity
#14The issue with RSS is that you can't put advertisements in it else it'd lose all value. So RSS is not a good thing for sites such as Ars.
In the end you're going to have 3-10 RSS feeds to read max and they're exactly the same ones as the 3-10 sites you were going o read, except you can easily see headlines. Instead of putting 200 RSS feeds, which is clearly just as dumb as reading 200 sites (in fact its still easier to read 200 RSS than 200 sites)
And that's that.
Re: Why keeping up with RSS is poisonous to productivity, sanity
#15Let's step back a little and consider whether it makes sense to blame a document format for our problems.
Re: Why keeping up with RSS is poisonous to productivity, sanity
#16[deleted]
Re: Why keeping up with RSS is poisonous to productivity, sanity
#17Ars Technica criticizing RSS while advertising Twitter? With respect to the point of the article, that's a false dichotomy.
Other than that, RSS is universal and decentralized whereas Twitter is a vain, contained and centralized environment.
Re: Why keeping up with RSS is poisonous to productivity, sanity
#18I don't think RSS as a mechanism is the problem here. If anything, it's a problem of oversubscribing to too many blogs and news sites. What's really needed is a better mechanism for providing an overview of these items in a way that allows one to quickly skim over unread items and decide what's worth reading and what's not. Something along the lines of Flipboard or Pulse with ReadItLater support, which already exists for your tablet/phone, but seems to be lacking for desktops (as far as I know. I could be wrong here though).
Re: Why keeping up with RSS is poisonous to productivity, sanity
#19A tip: use a service like www.blogtrottr.com to keep up on infrequently-updated RSS feeds. It emails you with an excerpt and link to the full article when one gets published. That way you're not cluttering up your RSS reader with feeds that 95% of the time will show old content or no content.
Re: Why keeping up with RSS is poisonous to productivity, sanity
#20I don't think RSS as a mechanism is the problem here. If anything, it's a problem of oversubscribing to too many blogs and news sites. What's really needed is a better mechanism for providing an overview of these items in a way that allows one to quickly skim over unread items and decide what's worth reading and what's not. Something along the lines of Flipboard or Pulse with ReadItLater support, which already exists…
I use proxies to filter my news. Proxies are people like you and every other user of Reddit and HN. These people help me by voting on what stories they think are important. For example, I never go to TechCrunch on my own. Occasionally there will be an interesting article there, and it will show up on HN. It's using the wisdom of the crowd to filter the thousands of articles that are written every day.
Instead of saving stuff to read later, when I want to read something I go to HN and check what's currently on top. I'll almost always find something interesting, and if I check about ounce a day I don't miss much.