Massive Damage

My Random Thoughts on Life Without RSS

A little bit of background about myself: I have a horrible problem when it comes to maintaining my attention on the computer. So often I will sit down with the intention of getting some work done, only to get sidetracked by one little curiosity after another. Maybe I’ll read some news about an interesting computer game, which will lead me to research new video cards to play said game. That will lead to me research new power supplies to power that video card. And that will lead me to research new cases to house the power supply, video card, and the dozen other components that I bookmarked over the past hour, while I should have been doing my work. In order to alleviate the problem, I made a rule about eight months ago: I would only browse RSS feeds during my work day, and I would never read anything that wasn’t curated through RSS during my 7:30 AM - 4:00 PM work day. All of my… extracurricular browsing could be done afterwards, when I was in the comfort of my home with time to kill.

And RSS worked pretty well for me. By restricting myself, I was able to get the best of both worlds: I was keeping up with the daily happenings of the world, all the while getting my work done without being sidetracked for hours at a time. However, I recently read this article at Ars Technica that discusses the pitfalls of RSS with regards to personal productivity and personal sanity. It’s a great article, and I highly recommend checking it out. After that, I was inspired to take a week off of RSS, and get my news “the old-fashioned way”, to quote a term from the Ars article. Here are some of the positives and negatives that I discovered throughout my little adventure.

Positives:

Less stressful: Like the article that I linked eludes to, there’s a certain stress involved with constantly trying to zero out your RSS feed. My RSS feed has about fifteen subscriptions on it, and if I leave it for a couple of hours, it’s not unusual to have about sixty stories or more to sift through. Leaving it for a day (perhaps you decided to spend a day in the great outdoors) creates a gigantic mess that no sane person would ever attempt to read through in one sitting. Getting news in the traditional fashion means that there is no number staring you down. You don’t have to grind through hundreds of stories that may not even be interesting to you, and that means that you can…

Read stories in more detail: One of the consequences of the “unread stories” number is the inescapable temptation to skim through articles. No matter how enthralling that blog post may be, you can’t spend too much time on it, because you have about 144 more articles to go through after you’re done. During this past week, I found that I have been actually reading the stories that I saved into my Readability list. And not just skimming them either - I was actually reading them in detail. Sometimes I was even re-reading them to make sure I didn’t miss any important points. While my news excursions over the past week haven’t been as exhaustive as they were in the past, they were certainly a lot more enriching.

Save time by avoiding filtering process: This ties in to the first two points, but the filtering process of going through every crappy story to find the gems takes a considerable amount of time. I only had fifteen subscriptions, and it was still and ordeal for me. I can’t imagine what it’s like for people who have thirty or more subscriptions in their feed (and apparently such people exist). Sometimes browsing for stories at the actual website can be beneficial, because the formatting of the sites tends to bring the most “important” and breaking stories at the top, while those miscellaneous stories about the royal couple’s new tennis rackets tend to go to the bottom where you (thankfully) will never see it. Obviously allowing somebody else to determine what is important isn’t always a good thing, but there are benefits involved with outsourcing the filtering process to somebody else.

Negatives:

Will inevitably miss stories: When moving away from RSS and back into the traditional realm, one of the things that you have to accept is that you will miss stories. It is quite simply unavoidable. While a lot of those stories are trash as we have discussed, there are definitely some gems that will be lost in the shuffle. Video game websites are a prime example of this. Stories about big budget games often go to the top of the website, while stories about smaller games from indie studios get much less attention, and as a gamer, you run the risk of missing out on some great indie games, just because you will have missed every story that was ever written about them.

Must manually create a list of sites: This may not sound like a big deal, and for the most part it isn’t. I ended up creating a list of all my important websites in various categories (Technology, Politics, Gaming, and Canada) and then I bookmarked them into separate folders. I repeated the process on my iPhone, and for the most part, things went smoothly. However, you will run into the odd site every now and then that has a… less than optimal interface on a mobile device. The CBC’s website is one example of this, where browsing their five or six top stories is easy, but drilling down becomes an exercise in frustration. A lot of popular news websites have iPhone apps that are meant to provide a more intuitive means of finding stories, but a lot of them just run as slow as death. Again, the CBC is a prime example. If the situation is this shaky on the iPhone - the most developer-supported smartphone on the planet - I can’t imagine how inconsistent and frustrating it can be on an Android or Windows Phone 7 device (you BlackBerry folks still read newspapers, right?). One really nice thing about RSS (and the Reeder app in particular) is that it’s a consistent experience. No matter which subscription you’re looking at, it’s nice and tidy, if not particularly exciting.

Not as easy to share stories: Again, this is hardly a big deal, but one thing that I absolutely love about Reeder is its sharing tools. I can post an article on Pinboard, Twitter, Facebook, Readability, and Delicious all without ever leaving the app. While I don’t share stories very often (except maybe on Twitter, where I tend to be a little preachy), it’s nice to have the option without having to resort to little bookmarklets and Firefox extensions all over the place.

Overall, I think the experiment went fairly well. While I certainly missed a lot of stories, I still ended the week with the feeling that I learned a lot. Over the next week, I’m going to try RSS one more time, this time with a far more aggressive approach to filtering (i.e. I’ll be using the “mark all as read” button a lot more often). If the stress returns, then perhaps it will be my final foray into RSS, and my permanent return to the traditional world of manually curating news stories.