This link argues no. I would argue yes, because of a technical solution and a phenomenon I’ve observed.
The technical problem:
It’s not enough to interleave their posts into a “river” or “stream” paradigm, where only the most recent N items are shown in one big, combined, reverse-chronological list (much like a Twitter timeline), because many of them would get buried in the noise of higher-volume feeds and people’s tweets.
One of the really nice things about RSS is what it doesn’t do. It doesn’t order your content by obscure algorithms aiming to vacuum you further and further into an advertising-driven time suck, as Twitter now does.
That doesn’t mean, however, that your only option is to present behavior chronologically.
The technical solution: I have my RSS reader do a round-robin ordering for each page displayed, so the higher-volume feeds pool at the bottom. This effect is more noted with a larger page size. For me, this works well enough. I don’t see why marking “read all” is a bad thing, and I do it decently regularly.
The phenomenon: Navigating directly to lifehacker.com or whatever other high-volume site feels like gambling. All the colorful previews are engaging, and it all seems to grab me more than my staid feed reader’s presentation. It’s tempting to roll the dice and see if there’s something new. It makes me less this to consume everything in my feed reader is what I guess I’m saying. That’s valuable to me.
I can certainly see where the article is coming from. It was, however, written without the knowledge of your technical solution’s existence. Neat!
I haven’t subscribed to high-volume sites yet, but I don’t frequent them either, so I guess I haven’t had this problem yet.
Thanks for linking to miniflux tho, I’m still looking for a favorite rss reader, and this looks very interesting. I’ll check it out!
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Yes. I use Inoreader and make sure to separate the high volume feeds in another folder, away from the low-volume ones. If, I’m really bored I can read through each title to see if there’s anything good. Otherwise I breeze through the high volume folders, just scanning for highlighted key words.
In most RSS readers you can put feeds into folders, I sort my high velocity feeds into one folder, and low velocity feeds either in another folder so they don’t get lost.
That way I don’t feel the need for a interleaving algorithm or to avoid subscribing to high volume sites, but the beauty of RSS is that you can decide for yourself what approach is best.
I think it is up to you. Personally I read everything I subscribe to. So most high-volume feeds are simply too much. That being said I definitely have a few noisier subscriptions that I often dismiss just based on the headline. But overall my usage seems aligned with the blog author’s.
But I don’t think that means you can’t use RSS like described. Personally once I hit then end of the feed I tend to open Hacker News, Reddit or of course Lemmy and read whatever is popular. This gives me a chance to look slightly outside of my bubble as well as find more interesting stuff to subscribe to. However I see no problem with having a ton of higher volume feeds that you skim instead of what I do.
