It might sound strange for a blogger, but I’m giving up on RSS. With over 75 blogs in a Feedly queue that publish new content regularly there is just too much to keep track of.
This is part of a larger effort to streamline workflows and create some margin in my life. As a family man with two jobs and many side projects, I could use a little margin.
How about you?
Here’s the reasoning for dropping RSS in favor of Twitter:
1. No unread pile up or guilt complex
With blogs publishing daily or weekly that’s a lot of content to consume. And last I checked reading blogs doesn’t pay the bills. When I fall behind and the RSS feed starts getting clogged I feel guilty for not reading and click the “mark all as read” button. In the end, it’s not doing me or the blogger any good.
2. Stay current
The RSS queue gets outdated pretty fast, especially if you follow tech or news sites. Yesterday’s news quickly becomes last week’s news. The conversation on Twitter is constantly happening in real time. This allows you to see what people are reading and recommending right now.
3. Relevant conversation
RSS is stale because you’re not engaging in any conversation. Either in comments on a blog or live on Twitter. By constructing specific Twitter lists for bloggers and brands you can jump into the conversation that is happening in the moment. This replaces folders or categories in a RSS reader.
4. Export to Pocket/Instapaper
As you’re scanning Twitter and you see a headline that catches your eye, you might not have time to read the article on the spot. Thankfully, most Twitter apps have “read it later” integration with 3rd party services like Pocket or Instapaper. The trick is to not feel guilty when it gets clogged up.
I’m a week into this experiment and it feels so good. There is more margin in the day for writing and jumping into live conversations online. I still need to get Twitter lists built up, but freedom from RSS is energizing.
Do you use RSS?
If so, how many blogs are in your feed
If not, how do you follow your favorite blogs?
Scott Lee says
I would do just the opposite. I’d give up Twitter in a heartbeat.
I feel more bogged down by Twitter than anything else. With Twitter there’s an expectation to always be using it. Always consume. Making sure you never miss a tweet from that key person.
With RSS I can subscribe and consume on my own time. I never miss an article. If I go on vacation for a week, I know that I can come back and read that really great piece that was published days ago. Whereas if I relied on Twitter I’d have to scroll backwards through time, through all the noise, to find and potentially miss the same article.
I’m not looking to reverse your decision but simply offering my advice; maybe you should trim your RSS feed 😉
Chuck Steel says
I still think that RSS feeds are a better way of keeping up with things, especially since the right reader can allow you to read the way you want, and give you flexibility to read feeds differently.
1. A good reader can be configured to automatically mark items as read, so if you don’t like unread posts piling up you don’t have to see things that are over a day old.
2. I have adjusted my reader to show newest items first so that I’m always viewing the latest content quicker. Otherwise I do agree that you are reading old news and trying to catch up. If I get a feed that has a lot of older content that I know is outdated then I don’t feel guilty about marking the rest as read.
3. Unless you’re always on twitter then you’ll be engaging tweets that might be as old as the blog post you’re no longer reading. I don’t see any difference between the two. I was able to click on the link to this post and start commenting pretty quickly and I feel engaged with your blog every day (even if I don’t often comment).
4. My feed reader allows me to star items on mobile so I can go back and check them out later. There’s no need to integrate with a third party service.
Another advantage that I appreciate to RSS is the archive that I get of posts. Searching for past tweets has never been easy but finding old blog posts is rarely a problem for me.
Andrew Fallows says
I agree with all of these points.
Personally, because I keep my feed very lean (see my top-level comment), I don’t have a problem with reading oldest first, but I would go newest first if I wanted to slog through a bunch of high volume blogs.
Adam Shields says
Agree, RSS is way better than twitter for blogs.
Andrew Fallows says
I used to follow some very high volume blogs via RSS (Make, Lifehacker, etc) and had enough of them in my Feedly subs that I would get 100+ new articles per day. I had Feedly connected to Pocket with the *intention* that I would curate a reading list throughout the day and then at the end of the day I would read the articles I had marked as worth saving.
The problem with this plan was that I would spent 15+ minutes just skimming for worthwhile articles and most days at the end of the day I didn’t feel like digging into the ones I had saved, anyway. I spent way too much time reading headlines and no time reading articles.
I’m still using RSS, but I completely changed my approach. I now only subscribe to (comparatively) low volume blogs that have a much more favorable signal-to-noise ratio. My current blog list is: ChurchMag (hi), Church Marketing Sucks, Coding Horror, and The Daily WTF. I’m on the lookout for more feeds, but I’m deliberately keeping the list to sites that post content I really will read.
Now, I set aside 15-20 minutes per day to *read* my feeds. I don’t read every article in depth, but even if I read most of them every day, it takes less time that just curating did before.
Ben Brandt says
I highly encourage this approach. I went through the exact same thought process a few months ago, and haven’t looked back since.
No more guilt, and I was already seeing half the headlines on twitter anyway. The Tweetbot + Pocket workflow has worked great for me. Keep it up, and soon enough you’ll forget you ever had a pile of RSS feeds to check 🙂
Maybe Google wasn’t crazy when they retired Google Reader after all….
Peter Schott says
I use Twitter, but trying to follow anything important through Twitter is an exercise in futility. I’m not always on Twitter and updates flash past way too quickly to follow. Using something like “OutTwit” (sp?) just moves the RSS problem into Outlook and kind of defeats that purpose.
I like RSS – read/consume on my schedule. I don’t intend to give it up anytime soon, even if it does take a while to skim through the post titles sometimes. I can step away and still get an idea of what’s been posted. I can easily just “catch up” and start over if I don’t want to slog through a ton of posts after I’ve been gone. More importantly, I generally get updates from sites I want to follow. Not all worthwhile sites have a twitter feed that posts their new content. For many sites, I don’t necessarily want an interaction – I want to read the info and often leave it at that.
Andrewnim says
Guilt? Didn’t we get rid of that one? I will stick with my RSS, as other have said I keep it lean. I can pick it up when it suites me and never feel I have to read everything or engage with everything. Its like email I scan and discard. I then keep stuff in Feedly to read later. Some times I then drop as now old but mostly I enjoy reading and thinking about what they wrote when I have time.
Maybe its an old fashioned news paper mentality but at least in an article in my feed the comments are reasoned and laid out, not just “me too” comments I see so much on Twitter which I use less and less.
One think that does annoy me is when you follow a RSS feed to source and a video or podcast starts to auto run.
I think I have actually come to prefer the quiet time RSS allows, again like a news paper wit a coffee, relax and get the news with some “facts” not just opinion.
Which is why I generally do not watch TV news or read a news paper.
Maybe we need a simpler way to engage with the feed via Feedly or else where. I think a few of us engaged with this one.
Kelley Langkamp says
I’m guessing that I’m in the minority in that I don’t use Twitter at all. My life has enough “noise” in it and I just haven’t seen the need to add Twitter.
I do have a fairly extensive RSS feed that I read using the Brief add-on for Firefox. Most of the blogs are pretty infrequent posters which is fine. It’s largely church IT peeps that post when the are working on some kind of major project. The most frequent posters are ChurchMag and Church Marketing Sucks. I just glance through my feed while I eat my lunch and read what interests me. Normally, I finish my reading before I finish my lunch.
Matt Smith says
I can really see Twitter being a natural progression from RSS for many people. In fact it’s clear that more people are familiar with Twitter as a news source that ever were with RSS. RSS (although standing for really simple syntonisation) never bridged the gap between ‘nerd’ and consumer use. My friends and parents would have no idea what RSS was or is.
Rafael says
I already switched to Twitter lists for some content like daily news where there is a lot going on during a day and the items get obsolete pretty fast or light-hearted content that I’m not that much into. I added the lists to Flipboard and can consume the feeds either in a magazine-like style or in several Twitter clients on any platform. From my experience in the recent months (it’s probably already years ago when I introduced this change) I’ve observed the following:
1) My approach to RSS readers was that I had to read or at least check every item like it would be an email. It was a good feeling to finally browse when I want to and how long I want to. New content doesn’t mean there’s a long-tailed unread count anymore.
2) It’s easy to launch an app, consume what’s currently popular and then leave. This is lightning fast. It’s subjectively easier for my mind than launching a RSS reader.
3) It gets problematic when you’re interested in a particular subject and already browsed through the most recent items (and mentally “mark them as read” in your head). When my interest for this particular subject is still there I have a hard time to flip through all pages or scroll through the timeline until I reach the point where I discover content that I’ve missed. It’s daunting for my mind and I always think: “Oh, you already read this particular article.”
4) The internet is a massive echo chamber, but I have the subjective impression that Twitter is more problematic in this regard than the older RSS model. Copying is cheap, almost free, on the internet, but Twitter makes it even easier. Curating specific lists is a more daunting task than managing your subscriptions.
5) It’s almost impossible to discover interesting things that aren’t part of the echo chamber. Twitter has so much noise that you aren’t able to consume more than the things that are currently the most popular. This is a shame, because we need more diverse content, more different opinions and more new things. It’s already depressing to see that the popular things on the internet are also the things that are printed in classic magazines. I don’t read dead-tree stuff anymore, but when I take a quick look into a magazine in the shop I often think: “Oh, that was also a big thing on the internet two weeks ago”. I have RSS subscriptions from people who write very interesting articles, but only a handful a year. The classic RSS model reminds me when this happens and I won’t miss an article. This doesn’t work on Twitter, because:
6) There are Twitter accounts that only mirror a RSS feed, but most of them also have noise in the form of short 140 char sized opinions or other uninteresting stuff. People who write five posts a year on their web site are often active on Twitter and write a couple of hundred (if not thousand) items a year that aren’t particularly interesting. I only want to know personal things for a handful of people. It’s really uninteresting if somebody who writes interesting articles about politics got a coffee right now. It’s a massive waste of time. I also have a coffee right now. So what? You came here to read about RSS readers, not my coffee consumption. Right? I want to engage with people, but I don’t want to talk about their habits. It’s their life.
My model has worked well so far, because I’ve split the subscriptions based on their frequency and decay. I can’t keep up with my RSS subscriptions anymore (since Spring last year). I almost always have an unread count of 1000–10000 items, but I simply don’t care anymore. If you stop thinking about unread counts and don’t treat your RSS reader like an email client, everything is fine. There are also feed readers that stopped counting unread items and just display a dot if you’re the type of person that gets guilty. I had this feeling, but this can be unlearned. Just change your perspective. There are even RSS readers that can mark items as read after a particular time like two weeks or one month.