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.
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”.
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 said blog instead of feed because social networks had a focus on the single scrolling feed as a list of content aggregated from different authors. Some RSS clients embraced this to a degree, but it didn't start out that way. Twitter was the first social network I really used in 2007 to follow bloggers I subscribed to, and it took a while to adjust to this firehose of interspersed content. That wasn't an uncommon sentiment from devs.
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.
To me, this is the best quote of the year, thanks.
>RSS has been traditionally used like an email client rather than a streaming service
This is very similar to batch vs streaming argument where we have lambda, kappa and the latest "batch" is the special case of streaming data architecture. I have a very strong feeling that batch and streaming are the two sides of the same coin. Only by this realization that we can transform Kafka [1].
Perhaps better RSS client can be the killer application of this new unified data oriented batch and streaming architecture or I coined it coin architecture (pardon the pun).
[1] What If We Could Rebuild Kafka from Scratch? (220 comments):