

Why keeping up with RSS is poisonous to productivity, sanity - carusen
http://arstechnica.com/web/news/2011/09/why-keeping-up-with-rss-is-poisonous-to-productivity-sanity.ars

======
glimcat
"Making a conscious (or unconscious, as the case may be) decision to scan
through 20-something RSS items a few times per hour means that you're
constantly interrupting what you were doing in order to perform another task."

Okay, I call shens on this whole article.

Using RSS means that I speed-read over a few hundred article headers during
half an hour over coffee and pop open around a dozen articles to read in full.

The problem they're talking about is checking your RSS feed obsessively -
which has exactly the same issues as checking your email obsessively, or your
texts, or your Facebook wall, or whatever the heck else that you should stop
interrupting yourself with constantly.

"Keeping up" does not have to mean being OCD at the expense of getting work
done.

~~~
bmurphy
Agreed.

I personally go through my RSS feed every few months and re-evaluate my feeds.
If I have feeds that have low signal to noise ratios, or simply publishes
articles that I never read, I remove them.

Also, I segregated high volume feeds (such as Flickr picture feeds and
Gizmodo/NYTimes/BBC etc.) into a separate account. I have two accounts, one
(low volume) where I try to take a closer more thorough look at everything,
and another (high volume) where I simply do a quick scan then mark all as
read.

Don't blame RSS for your inability to manage it.

~~~
icebraining
The 'trends' tab in Google Reader is useful to check on that: it gives you
both how many items a feed published and how many you clicked on for the last
30 days. This can be useful to confirm the ratios.

Most of my feeds publish only two or three times a week, some even less, but
with high signal to noise ratio; that's where RSS really shines, since
checking them manually would kill a huge amount of time.

------
gasull
Enter PostRank:

<http://www.postrank.com/feed/>

For every RSS feed you will get 4 RSS sub-feeds:

1\. Best posts.

2\. Great posts.

3\. Good posts.

4\. All posts.

The ranking (to decide if a post is good/great/best) is done through its
popularity online (reddit, digg, delicious, etc.).

When I'm interested in a website I usually subscribe to the best posts sub-
feed, sometimes to the great posts sub-feed. This way I'm never overloaded
with RSS items to read and I don't miss anything important.

Here are ultra-filtered HN sub-feeds using a feed of HN posts of 150 votes or
above:

[http://www.postrank.com/feed/20ad1f84cfa8acedf528c616cd441f6...](http://www.postrank.com/feed/20ad1f84cfa8acedf528c616cd441f65)

Also, here is a JavaScript bookmarklet I created to find the PostRank sub-
feeds for the current website you're on:

    
    
      javascript:location.href='http://page2rss.com/page?url=+encodeURIComponent(location.href);
    

EDIT: ReFilter is also very useful if you want to only read posts about a
particular topic:

<http://re.rephrase.net/filter/>

~~~
solnyshok
OMG, thanks a lot. I was struggling with too many reposts and self-promotions
by obscure bloggers on HN. This helps a lot. Looks like digg for rss.
Subscribed to the best HN posts. Unsubscribed from the original feed.

~~~
gasull
You're welcome. Beware that is a best posts filter from an already filtered
feed that contained only posts with at least 150 votes. Here's where the
"original" already filtered feed came from:

[http://talkfast.org/2010/07/23/a-cure-for-hacker-news-
overlo...](http://talkfast.org/2010/07/23/a-cure-for-hacker-news-overload)

------
mikepk
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 the adequate, and free, google reader). I keep waiting
for someone to pick up the news source / skimming / river of news / feed
magazine torch but I haven't seen it yet.

~~~
jerf
River of News: <http://www.reallysimplesyndication.com/riverOfNews>

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.)

------
codeup
Ars 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.

------
ryanklee
I'm personally torn on RSS readers. Admittedly, I'm an almost entirely
unproductive person lately, so I can't claim that it's because RSS is getting
in the way of other things. My chief suspicion is that as the number of
subscriptions goes up, the propensity to fly through headlines rises as well,
and so too does the efficiency of applying whatever criteria normally applies
in choosing whether or not to read past a headline. What normally would be
signal gets converted to noise because of the quantity needed to be consumed.
Of course, one can always lower the number of subscriptions, but on the other
hand, as one approaches lower bounds, the less sense RSS makes: one can simply
and probably with more aesthetic pleasure, just make rounds to the website.
Another point: there's more information and more of interest in a website than
what gets printed as words in an article or in the images or whatever media
that accompanies that article. And this is another suspicious element of RSS
readers: they divorce content from the context in which it "originally"
appears (scare quotes because of complexity). One can learn a good lot of
important stuff about a content provider by looking at that provider's
website, layout, design, ad priorities, etc. And not only about that provider,
but about just what the hell the web looks like these days. If all I did was
read via RSS, I'd probably have no clue. And more over, if all anybody ever
did was read via RSS, websites themselves would be something else entirely and
that something else probably wouldn't be much to look at.

So really that's two chief suspicions: one, it's hard to find an optimal
number of subscriptions (or even if there is such a thing); and two, RSS
annihilates the experience of everything it can't contain.

(I said I was torn, but I think I've started to convince myself that maybe I
need to ditch Google Reader...)

~~~
fragsworth
It seems there's a problem that needs to be solved, doesn't it? How's this for
a startup idea: "Pandora for RSS"

Users subscribe to a few feeds and provide feedback as to which articles they
liked and disliked; the system correlates each individual with other similar
users and starts providing suggestions, ratings, and sorts the articles in
terms of "quality" that you defined by your votes. Then, as a user, you don't
have to read everything - just the best recent posts.

It can be treated more like a tailored/customized version of Reddit or Hacker
News. You don't have to "catch up", you just go browse it when you feel like
it.

~~~
ryanklee
This really sounds to me exactly what sub-reddits already accomplish... am I
missing something?

In fact, I do use sub-reddits as a kind of rss alternative and for my less
frequented ones will sort by Top for last week/month/etc. It works pretty
well, but sub-reddits can only get specific to a certain extent, which is
where a feed excels in. Say I want to keep up not just philosophy, and not
just epistemology but phenomenological epistemology (doesn't matter what it
actually is, just that it's highly specialized). No sub-reddit exists for such
a thing (or anything like it that is so specialized). And I can rely on
/r/philosophy or even /r/epistemology to feed me that content.

What I really need is to get it all straight from the horses' mouths. Since
posts are apt to be spread out, it doesn't make sense for me to continually
check whatever blog or website for updated content: I want to be alerted when
it's updated.

Say I have 50 to 100 such websites of similarly specialized content. The
situation will be the same for each, so it seems like it would make sense to
get the alerts all in the same place, hence RSS. But the problem is that now
there's just too much being pushed, even though each content provider is only
pushing a little bit every week, it adds up fast (and this isn't even taking
into account more general, entertainment-like content that invariably works
its way into the feed).

On the other hand, this is starting to sound less like a problem with
technology and more of a problem with my personal information-junkie habits
(that are unfortunately self-defeating).

------
pgroves
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.

~~~
mambodog
Who's this _he_ you're referring to?

------
CMartucci
I simply separate my RSS feeds into two folders - A list and B list. A list is
for independent writers who only post a couple times a day. B list is for
news-centric websites. I do not hesitate to simply mark the entire B list as
read.

~~~
voidfiles
I second this. Triageing feeds is the way to go. Also don't think you can read
it all.

~~~
akkartik
I think you're missing his point: he separates his feeds into high- and low-
volume, and is willing to triage the high-volume subset without missing out on
the rest.

I've been doing something similar for a couple of years now. I built
<http://readwarp.com> to manage my high-volume sites, and now my google
reader's dropped from 1500 feeds to 100 low-volume must-see feeds that
generate 10 stories a day.

~~~
voidfiles
Yea, I don't think I did mis-understand the comment, but I glad you found a
place to plug your site.

~~~
akkartik
Wow, that is some nasty sarcasm you've got there.

Readwarp's an ancient hobby that I don't work on anymore. Did it seem like I
was trying to convert traffic? We all know how to build landing pages with
big, bright call-to-action buttons, you know.

I've long since pruned most features on the site. There's no way to import
feeds, etc. It only really works for me anymore. I linked to it because it's
hard to make sense of custom reading solutions without pointers to try them
out.

------
jimworm
Let's step back a little and consider whether it makes sense to blame a
document format for our problems.

------
gwern
> I combined that with my usual e-mail communications (tips from readers,
> conversations with PR folks from different companies, interviews already in
> progress, etc.) and my regular scans of Twitter in order to figure out what
> was going on during the day. It was stress-free, and I never felt like I was
> missing anything—I knew that if something truly important or controversial
> blew up, I'd hear about it instantly via Twitter and our loyal readers.

> Sam Stephenson, a programmer at 37signals, agreed. "I gave up on RSS a
> couple of years ago when I realized it was just another unread indicator in
> my dock, another number to zero out," Stephenson told Ars. "If an article or
> link is important it almost always shows up in my Twitter stream, or on one
> of the handful of websites I check throughout the day."

I think I see the problem here.

~~~
AndrewDucker
Why on earth would you actually check a handful of sites throughout the day if
you have RSS? That's what it's supposed to help with. You just have one site
(or app), and check that whenever your code is compiling (or whatever), and
_it_ checks all the other sites for you.

Actually opening up websites to see if they have something new feels horribly
inefficient.

------
Wilya
My 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.

------
matusz13
If anything I would say that my reader saves me time and distraction. I don't
have to search for the information I'm looking for, wasting needless time on
links in search that wind up being non-relavent spam. I get to skim through
articles that have a higher probability of being relevant to something that I
need to know and I get to do this at my leisure.

------
ttunguz
Swapping out RSS for twitter is illogical. They are both RSS but Twitter
doesn't have an unread count.

The article instead should have pointed to content browsing solutions that
replicate the experience of a newspaper for quick exploration leading to
deeper reading.

------
j05h
Way 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 feeds.

These days, Fever App seems the way to go... <http://feedafever.com/>

~~~
Maxious
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.

------
neuromage
I 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).

~~~
Periodic
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.

~~~
neuromage
This is a great idea. But I find that the churn rate for HN is quite high in
comparison to reddit, and I need to check HN quite a few times a day to not
miss interesting stuff. Also, though this case is probably rare given the
shared interests of HN and subreddits, it's still possible that you could miss
out on something that you would have potentially found interesting, but the
majority did not.

------
mcclanahoochie
I just use FeedSpeak (<http://feedspeak.tk>) - an app that reads your RSS
feeds to you, so you can listen to articles while doing other things.

~~~
ryanklee
Unless they've got Morgan Freeman or Tom Waits or Garrison Keillor doing the
reading, I'm not sure how you can stand this.

I'm not just being cheeky, either; is listening to voice fonts for extended
periods and for complex material just something you have to warm up to?

~~~
mcclanahoochie
heh, the robotic lady voice was annoying at first, but i got used to it. there
is experimental support for custom tts engines built into the app if you want
to use different ones.

------
zobzu
The 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.

~~~
icebraining
_> The 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._

Yes and no. While you'll be less exposed to ads than while visiting the site,
RSS also lets the site push content to the user, which can lead to more
pageviews than if he had to remember to visit it.

------
adrianwaj
Google Reader Notifiers

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/apflmjolhbonpkbkoo...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/apflmjolhbonpkbkooiamcnenbmbjcbf)
[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/kfimchjilnmjmjpdge...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/kfimchjilnmjmjpdgedcamjninpdkkpk)

Make checking efficient.

~~~
gnosis
Could you elaborate on this? How does it "make checking efficient"? And what
is an "efficient check" anyway?

~~~
adrianwaj
Try clicking on the links, you'll see some pictures.

------
FiddlerClamp
A 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.

------
drudru11
How does sam get what he needs from his twitter stream?

