[mattlanger]

What I've been realizing more and more lately is how much I would appreciate a reader without any concept of an unread item count.

I assume this feature made its way into the genre as a legacy from the traditional email clients that seem to have inspired most feed readers, but while an unread count has a place in email (albeit a complicated one, cf. Inbox Zero) it seems utterly bizarre in the world of RSS. And for two reasons.

First, it's just stressful. It represents yet another item on this long list of things I haven't accomplished (and probably can't accomplish), a list that only grows longer as I come across more sources of information on the internet, subscribe to more feeds, follow more Twitter accounts, etc.

And second, as an offline analog, I've never walked into a library or a bookstore or a newsstand and been given a list of books or periodicals I've not yet read. Similarly, when my newspapers pile up in the recycling bin they don't proffer me with a running tally of all the articles I skipped. While I understand this is a feature that an RSS reader can offer that these examples cannot, it still seems to me to be a stifling and oppressive thing whose benefit doesn't nearly outweigh the stress it adds to my life.

At the end of the day it's ok to miss something. As Dave Winer said, "if it's important it will come back around again; if not, well no one can know everything."

(related/full disclosure: I'm actually hard at work on my own RSS reader intended to address this and other issues, which explains why I've been thinking so much about this stuff.)

[davidcuddeback]

> At the end of the day it's ok to miss something. As Dave Winer said, "if it's important it will come back around again; if not, well no one can know everything."

You've inspired me to rethink my perspective of my RSS reader. Thanks.

[mrbird]

Agreed. What matters is how important and relevant each feed is to you at the current time. Put the ones I'm most likely to read at the top.

You could try to improve this with ML or stasticial models, but I don't even think you'd have to get that sophisticated to make a big improvement.

[frio]

That's actually something I thought on for a while, but never got the time to implement. Sort of an anti-Reddit; you add your RSS feeds, and then like or dislike various things you read. The software, using various ranking metrics, then begins to recognise the content in the RSS feeds, and displays what you consider more interesting more prominently (so it acts as the ranking algorithm without social input).

I don't think something like that would be hard to implement. Ranking metrics could be simple at first: whether a site is "preferred", whether content is agreed with or disagreed with (the software should display both prominently, otherwise it ends up as a circlejerk), and whether the content is interesting or disinteresting.

However, the big problem I saw with such a setup was that it de-socializes the web; while I get a custom news feed, I don't get the quality comments I generally find on aggregators like HN or Reddit (so long as it's a decent subreddit anyway). So, the next iteration could use a distributed database backend (like CouchDB) to allow comments to be shared cross-node; people share a small web presence on their site, and you can choose to follow their comments on articles, like some sort of distributed Twitter.

The self-defeating part of the exercise that got me was that at that point, you've basically made discovery difficult. Which you'd address with a central hub. At which point, why not just use HN/Reddit anyway?

[jokermatt999]

> What matters is how important and relevant each feed is to you at the current time. Put the ones I'm most likely to read at the top.

Google Reader's "Sort by magic" attempts to do this. It'd be nice to have more information on how it works though.

Also, don't underestimate the power of tagging your RSS feeds. Just like people set up GMail/Outlook/etc labels for important people or emails, you can set up tags for important feeds that you don't want to miss. Why not tag all of the "must read" feeds, the "skim" feeds, and the "eh" feeds, so that you can click on the "eh" label, and mark all as read if you get behind?

Google Reader is already a pretty powerful tool for feed reading (especially in conjunction with Yahoo Pipes or similar), and a lot of issues with RSS can already be solved with the tools at hand.

[mattlanger]

Tagging! If only! That's one of the features I've long wanted, a one-to-many relationship between feeds and categories, as opposed to the inverse we get with folders. What if I want to categorize something as "must read" in addition to "technology"? What you describe here is a useful trick, but it means I'm stuck labeling my feeds in a manner directly related to my need to be able to mark-as-read.

[jokermatt999]

Ahh, I forgot that tagging is item by item, but feeds are folder by folder only. My apologies. I'll go make a feature request for it. It seems odd that they wouldn't already have this.

[bdarnell]

Google Reader's folders do allow for tag-like multiple categorization. If you use drag and drop then it acts like folders (and removes the feed from its previous location), but if you use the "Feed settings" dropdown in the blue bar you can check multiple folders and the feed will appear in all of them.

You can also turn off display of unread counts with the menu under the little downward triangle in the left column. These features are pretty undiscoverable, but they're there.

[Lewisham]

I thought "Sort by Magic" was simply a means of floating posts from low-volume blogs to the top, so they don't get lost under a sea of Gawker.

[mattlanger]

Got definite plans for this in the pipeline, in addition to filtering out dupes.