I do feel a little urgency to keep up since some me my feeds cover stuff happening in the world, and lose value if not read promptly.
I've seen takes similar to the author's before and they don't resonate with me. Maybe we just have different relationships with technology. The same way a watch telling me to complete my rings has no power over me because that's not a goal I chose for myself. The watch serves me, not the other way around.
It feels like some of our human-ness is being taken away. Writing is such a beautiful technology that carries ideas from one persons head into another. But now we put AI in the middle and I worry how much of the message is being corrupted.
What if most of these cases of AI usage is a matter of accessibility, not malice or bot spam, and the reason we suddenly see so much AI usage is because all these people never had a voice in english before?
That said, I'm sure that what I read now has more noise and less signal than it did a couple of years ago, which I find very sad. More and more of the writing I read daily is clearly AI generated, and it seems that a large proportion of it comes from people with a clear "quantity over quality" mindset. Even reading messages from people I know (who speak English well), I find it's frequently AI generated - I assume because they don't want to summon the effort to write it themselves, and find AI generated text "good enough".
This is not "I need to communicate with a doctor" or another necessity, if you put content out there, presumably it's because you want to communicate. You want to write in another language? That's great, learn the language and help yourself with a vocabulary, even a translator, but write yourself (which is also a way to learn).
I am saying this as a non-English speaker, as it might be obvious.
Actually I also think that email mailbox interfaces are shitty in general, including for emails.
For me, IM apps solved the problem correctly : one thread per contact. The thread goes up when something new happens. You can easily block contacts.
My mailbox sorted by date is a total mess. Having everything grouped by sender email would automatically make it tidy.
Funnily enough in old school mail client you could trivally make directory per contact via sieve filter but mainstream mail clients don't really want to give users much power.
But that's what sorted by date means, right? When you get a new mail, it goes at the top of the mailbox, and after new ones arrive, it goes down.
My mailbox sorted by date is a total mess. Having everything grouped by sender email would automatically make it tidy.
That works for single-sender mails, but most of my work mails have almost a different sent of contacts per topic. Grouping mails by subject (topic) makes this more manageable.
In all mail clients I've used, you're 1 or 2 clicks away from seeing your unread messages only, which greatly helps with filtering what's important to read soon.
Are there email clients that don't allow you to sort by sender (or any number of other things)?
IM threads have a place of course, but regular email works for me and is actually an important structural element of my work flow.
My reader (newsboat) is good at showing items at-most-once, and (at least the way I use it) punts to a browser to display content on the rare occasions I have further interest. Does this count as sufficiently-non-email-clienty for TFA's purposes?
But I want to see the headlines/first couple of lines for all of them, so I can decide which ones I want to read in detail.
Then it lets me filter with different criteria, the default is a ratio of points+comments that keeps the chaff out.
I am one of the hoarders who has saved Inoreader items, a "Later" bookmark folder with (once thought as) interesting stuff in it, obsidian we clips for the ones what are so precious I for sure didn't just want to reference to but actually make a copy of. But it's under control. It doesn't give me anxiety knowing that I "should" go through them, because... I often do.
I'm surprised that the "first" of these layouts only appeared in 2002. I would have sworn I used Akregator since 1999
I thought we stopped making up new ways to feel like a victim. This is so dramatic about something nobody sane feels about their RSS feeds or even work emails.
If it's really that important, I have inbox rules and can be reached directly.
I like knowing what I've already read in my RSS feed and find it way more useful than the read status on emails. Emails may need to be referenced later, archived, or forwarded. Whether I read it isn't that relevant. I am a heavy user of "mark all as read" like it's a trip odometer reset button. I don't care that way about my RSS feeds because I'm reading them for leisure. The read status there is like a bookmark and I ignore counts.
I don't feel like I'm missing out for the same reason as email. If it's important I will eventually read it more than once by some other means.
> Every interface is an argument about how you should feel
If it is, it's not very effective on me. To me every interface is roughly equivalent in not having enough information these days. The design details are very quickly ignored once I learn how to get what I want. All the alternative layout examples shown are less informative so I hate them even more than the "email" layout.
I used RSS for exactly one thing: to follow releases of content that I didn't want to miss out on. For anything else HN, Youtube, or even just googling is good enough.
"82 You fell behind while reading this."
Okay, goodbye.
I can subscribe to both types of feeds.
Unread emails don't mean someone wrote to me either. Most of them are marketing or confirmations of autopayments.
but why? this is something written to be read, is it not? it's not some kind of presentation, right? why ignore that job so entirely. this was so tedious.
Attention economy is real and people’s monkey brains are being systematically abused, but at least in this very specific case, feeling bad because of urgency artifacts is just a skill issue.
The UI of RSS readers isn’t just a case of influence by adjacency. It actually reflects the underlying structure of RSS, that is a collection of feeds with multiple issues over time. Sure it can be revolutionized, but there are just so many other problems with the users need to focus on.
It’s not that the product lacks the potential of anesthesia over those pains. It’s just that when those particular pains happen, you need to face them head-on and not go around it with some fancy tech.
It is just absurd how such a powerful tool, a remnant of the OG internet that somehow survives, such as this tool for content distribution without algorithmic manipulation, makes people feel bad because how effective it is at bringing abundance.
Anxiety is just a disease and in this case a fancy UI is just a hit of opium. The problem is still there. Might as well just deal with it.
The described problem doesn't exist for people that use email as email.
I trimmed the feeds way down, and now just receive a couple literally by email. Doesn't fix the feeling, but merges it with the rest of my email so it's just the one inbox's unread count.
If I were designing the interface, I think I'd do it like a book or magazine - except indefinite length. Each feed is a different book, new entries get tacked on the back. No unread count, maybe a sort of bookmark shows how far 'through' you are, but there's no particular expectation to finish, since you never will for as long as the feed's active anyway.
and such metaphor exchange predates 2002 NetNewsWire by far.
Many other misconcepts start from here on in the article. Like popularity of RSS due to this software and not due to people acquiring more Internet culture.
Even wikipedia article is off: "According to FeedBurner, NetNewsWire was the most popular desktop newsreader on all platforms in 2005."
NetNewsWire supported platforms in 2005: Macos PPC.
Am I getting all this wrong?
[0] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/feeeed-rss-reader-and-more/id1...
Ultimately I decided against it because I like being able to use a web-app based reader (Tiny Tiny RSS [2]) both on my work computer and my phone for RSS.
[1]: https://github.com/rss2email/rss2email
[2]: https://tt-rss.org/
The real issue is explain to the masses that what we know is there for a mix of rational and legacy stuff mimicking we should slice. And that's a very hard issue.
Tabbed pages, resizable and draggable boxes, per-box layout options: https://images.sftcdn.net/images/t_app-cover-l,f_auto/p/0281...
I have tried to remind myself in the past that literally nobody cares if I am behind on the TV shows I'm wanting to watch. Just me. So...I like the term "phantom obligation". I'll definitely tuck that away in my brain for later use.
It had a magic simplicity that could be summed up as: "without me doing anything, give me the next thing I want".
Similar story with Google Podcasts IIRC, none of the current ones work the way that did either.
> The guilt you feel for something no one asked you to do.
Another name for it might be parasocial obligation.
Edit: to be just slightly nicer about it: having a plain text version is great, that's a really good thing. But the "that's a valid choice" paragraph is unnecessary and just distracts from your actual article. If I pick the plain-text version it's because I want to just get straight to the point (other people may have other reasons), and I certainly don't need your validation.
If you turn on your browser's "reader mode" the article is more readable.
