Beautiful essay by Terry Godier about RSS reader UI and software creating obligations:
An interface that shows you an unread count is making an argument: that reading is something to be counted, that progress is something to be measured, that your relationship to this content is one of obligation.
@tg Thanks! I think what you’ve written is really going to resonate with people and comes along at the perfect time. (I’ve also been working on an RSS reader, though mostly for the web… Looking forward to whatever you’re working on!)
@manton I had this article set away to blog about, as it was published just after your previous post “Velocity and authenticity” that hits on similar notes regarding the sense of obligation we have against a flood of content.
Focusing on a book called The Score and “how tech apps metrics are able to influence your values and behaviour”. It really hit a note for me, now excuse me as I rush off to fill my Apple Watch rings 🥲
@tg @manton Nice essay! It made me think, too, of Robin Sloan’s Spring ’83 www.robinsloan.com/lab/speci…
@manton Great post! Also very adjacent from something I wrote about recently: https://blog.mikeswanson.com/backseat-software/
@manton This was a great read! Thanks, @manton! I even reached out to Terry to thank him for writing what he did. The feeling he is describing is something I even journaled about early this morning before I read this article just now. Great timing. And looking forward to the reader you’re working on, too!
@manton I'd argue that others have tried to change RSS into something more The River style. Reader's radically new(er) social web reader is some parts RSS, some parts social media, some parts video logs. Some people like it. I do not. I like to have a carefully crafted feed that I control. The issue with all the others is the algorithm's. Traditonal RSS may have unread counts but that's the beauty, you can turn them off. I dip in when I want and only read the articles I feel interested in.
I've been debating getting back into reading RSS feeds with something like https://github.com/harshit181/RSSPub which turns RSS feeds into a newspaper which I can treat in the same way without any unread count or backlog
GitHub - harshit181/RSSPub: Turn your RSS feeds and Read later articles into a personal daily newspaper for your e-reader.
@quarterswede @manton New Reeeder actually re-vitalize my RSS usage, though I kinda wish there maybe was a kind of best of noth worlds approach.
@manton @brentsimmons Would it be possible to implement this in @NetNewsWire as well? For example, instead of the number of unread articles per feed, perhaps just a dot or similar marker.
@manton I’m currently using Miniflux which is pretty chill and lo-fi in the way it uses RSS feeds but always interested in other approaches and services. Looking forward to hearing more!
@manton I’m working on a feed reader off and on which builds a daily edition at the same point each day, this means you know the edition is static and I hope to kill off the FOMO with the news cycle. 
@manton While it’s true that a count is a count I think “progress is something to be measured, that your relationship to this content is one of obligation.” is a stretch and simply exposes the author’s own feelings towards that count. For me the count simply says: this is how many items are new since you last looked. I then skim the headlines, read any items that actually interest me and mark the rest as Read. No obligations, no measurement. If the unread count is huge because I’ve been busy I may just Mark All Read without the preliminary skim.
@Miraz This highlights to me how no one interface is going to be right for everyone. Some people hesitate to use “mark all as read” often because they feel like they’re missing something.
@manton Slightly more lighthearted, but as I reread my own comment to you I thought of the saying: a bad worker always blames their tools. The tool is the unread count. What we do with that is up to us. It’s like people who blame their smartphone for their inability to concentrate or to hold a conversation without looking at their phone. (I’ll admit to designs that use our natures against us, with addictive infinite scrolling or related content etc.) I also fully support MB’s lack of likes and so on which would distort our approach as bloggers. Maybe I’m just a person who’s full of contradictions…
@Miraz I have to agree with this. But for some (me included) that count feels like an obligation. I liken it to the way people feel the need to finish a book even when they’re not enjoying it. Needless to say that’s on us. But when I look at something I added specifically in my RSS reader it’s because that person is someone I want to read regularly, then the feeling of obligation sets in. I got past the book thing and I think I could get past the unread count too but its a long-lived habit.
