The current model of RSS consumption is still broken. For the vast majority of news sources, you really care about headlines and recency rather than read/unread counts. I had a rambling blog post about it a few years ago: http://bit.ly/rklROK My first startup was trying to address some of these issues but we never quite got there. Unfortunately, innovation in the RSS space pretty much stopped (partially because of th…
From the guy responsible for the first RSS reader and RSS producers. One of those cases where the pioneer got it right and a lot of the following horde missed one of the key points. I've been using RSS since, well, not quite day one but month one, and River of News is the only way to go.
It's OK to just skim past a lot of articles. If you pop open your reader and don't feel like it, just hit "everything's read" and close it again. You must understand it as a transient view. It's not email, it's a stream, and if you drop some of it on the floor it's not a problem. Nobody will bite you. None of this is an obligation.
Google reader is acceptable as a river of news. I've stopped using local readers, partially because despite only having about 60 feeds, RSS-reader-authors seem nearly incapable of producing halfway performant software and even my modest feed set tends to crash or cause 100% CPU for extended periods of time. (There are some, but cutting down the reader space by the criterion of "what was written competently" means that the apparent space of hundreds is actually only a handful of choices, and most of those aren't very good at the river approach.)