Infinite Scroll VS Responsibility to Manage
People want things to be easy, and they don’t want to feel obligated. I think this is why RSS has always had relatively low adoption rates, even in the blogging hey day of the mid-2000’s.
Feed readers have worked really hard in the last decade to adopt many of the things that have made social media platforms popular:
- Signing up is easy: you only really need an email and a password. There’s no need for a username because you aren’t broadcasting anything, only consuming. Your email is your login. Hell, these days, OAuth is pervasive enough that you can just sign up with your Google account or Apple ID or a myriad of other existing accounts. You don’t need a separate login at all.
- Adding content is easy: right after signing up for any feed reader, users are prompted with a search for websites or the option to browse broad categories of topics, which feature particular feeds, to add. This is still a step down from a lot of social media though, which now often start serving up content immediately, without the user needing to even think of anyone to follow.
- Algorithms are optional: despite the frequent loud grumbles against achronological feeds, algorithmic feeds must appeal to some broad swath of people, because even feed readers added the option. Chronological is always default though.
Getting your content through a feed reader is almost as convenient as getting it through a social media app, so why is adoption still so low?
Social Media’s Walled Gardens
One problem is that the walled gardens (or “silos“) of social media make it difficult to access that content from the outside.
If your favourite artist only posts on Twitter, then I guess you have to have Twitter to follow them1. Some feed readers, like Feedly, allow you to add Twitter feeds, but only as a paid feature. Some platforms, like YouTube, do have feeds available, so you can follow your favourite YouTubers via your feed reader, but isn’t obvious at all.
Content creator not having the time or technical knowledge or incentive to set up outside of social media is an unfortunate catch-22, but it’s a lot easier to start using a feed reader than it is to build a website to serve a feed, so I think change has to come from that end first.
Responsibility to Manage
I think the other major obstacle in feed reader and RSS adoption is that people hate “mark all as read,” but they also hate “having to” clear out their readers.
Twitter never tells you (anymore) how many unread tweets you have. Instagram will only tell you that you’ve read “all” the new posts, even if it also just showed you the same post ten times (seriously, why is Instagram’s algorithm so bad?), and you aren’t quite sure you can actually believe it when it says you’ve reached the end.
Feed readers, by contrast, will tell you exactly how many posts are still unread (though I believe Feedly will politely abbreviate to “1000+” after you’ve hit a thousand).
The other thing that tells you exactly how many things you still have to look at is email, and most people hate email for this reason. Getting the unread number down feels like a chore and an obligation. As more stuff rolls in, the number becomes unwieldy and impossible. And you forget — you forget that you actually wanted these things. You forget that it’s art, that it’s comics, that it’s an essay from a writer you like, that it’s amusement and entertainment and news.
And then you go back to social media, because it will never tell you you’re behind. You can always be in the moment. Algorithms keep you from missing the good stuff. Everything else filters to the bottom, and you’ll never know about it, so you’ll never feel bad about missing it. Anyway, you can scroll forever, you consume so much content, so surely you aren’t missing anything important. Artists always retweet at peak hours or whatever, right? So you definitely won’t miss stuff.
Social media takes the pressure off. You don’t have to reach the bottom of the timeline. No one’s keeping track.
Feed readers will always let you know, and that’s the crux of it. People don’t want to know.
Nevermind that knowing lets you make informed decisions about what you don’t actually need to read or look at. Unlike with work emails (although this is arguable, tbh), you don’t actually have to read every post or watch every video or even look at every comic page. Feed readers always let you look at your numbers by individual feed, so you can see exactly where all your unread content is coming from. You can decide that you don’t care about certain sources sometimes.
Skim the headlines from that local news feed. If nothing catches your eye, just mark as read! If you don’t even have time to skim and the headlines are piled up from the last two months, mark as read! It’s from two months ago. You can decide that that news probably isn’t relevant anymore.
Are you 30 pages behind on a webcomic? What a joy to have that many pages to read at once! But if you’re not in the mood or don’t have time, you can just treat that unread number as a little treat for later instead of a burden. Those 30 pages are more like 30 pieces of candy in the cupboard than 30 emails from your boss.
Or maybe you’re not into that comic anymore. Remove the feed, then! Make that informed decision. Or make a rule, follow it, and let that set you free: if you haven’t read it in a month, mark as read. (This is Feedly’s default, actually.)
Addendum, May 2022: A friend pointed out that it’s perhaps not great to simply advise people to “care less” or to ignore anxiety regarding unread counts. This is fair enough! It would be great if more feed readers could implement an option that just hides the unread count and if things disappear after 30 days, then that’s that. This seems like a pretty simple solution that is also easy to implement. Get on it, Feedly!
In the meantime, you could implement this yourself if you 1) use Feedly out of a desktop browser and 2) use a CSS tweaker like Stylebot. Just add .LeftnavListRow__count {display: none} as a rule.
Convenience VS Control, Again
Social media removes the pressure, the burden, and the responsibility of management. It removes the need for decisions. It makes everything easy. Life is hard enough. What’s wrong with easy?
Nothing, of course, until it’s not nothing.
Nothing, until you realise you haven’t seen posts from your favourite artist in a while, and it’s not because they’re inactive. Nothing, until you miss a sale, or a commission slot opening, or something else you were looking forward to, because algorithms. Nothing, until your favourite writer is harassed off the platform. Nothing, until you’re harassed off the platform. And so on.
Feed readers connect you to independent sites, incentivising people to build those independent sites. The Internet shouldn’t only be people posting to small handful of all-powerful platforms, but it’s hard for creators to tough it on their own if their audiences and supporters are only spending time in walled gardens. For as long as creators are financially supported by their audiences, they need to be where their audiences are.
And so, the onus is on the masses to take (back) control of their own experiences.
A feed reader is the daily newspaper delivery to your private cottage. You can read it in whatever order you want. You can toss away the parts you don’t want to read. You don’t have to stop visiting the walled gardens, but in case they ever kick you out, or they burn to the ground, or they’re taken over by a billionaire you don’t like, it’s good to have that paper delivery to keep you connected to things you care about.
1 Nitter is an alternative to Twitter’s frontend and has native RSS support, so that’s an option.
I tried to figure out how to set up a nitter account but it’s so confusing whenever I see something on github. Is it an extension to download or do I have to put code together? Interesting read though! Personally I have serious FOMO even if it can get overwhelming to have unread posts/messages. But I’ll spend an entire night trying to be sure I didn’t miss anything if I don’t have the control to read what I’m trying to catch updates on lol.
Nitter is just an alternative front-end for Twitter, meaning it is just an interface through which you can see Twitter accounts and tweets — you don’t sign up for it. All Twitter accounts show up automatically on Nitter. The idea is just to allow people to access Twitter content without needing a Twitter account or being signed into Twitter.
RSS feed compatibility extends this by letting people add Nitter feeds to a feed reader — this can be good if you are someone who prefers to make sure they don’t miss anything. :O
Thank you for explaining! I think I may just be dumb though, but I can’t figure out how to use the github code or what an instance is. Usually these github pages have a list of files, a wiki, and other links but I never can find a faq, or a users guide for dummies of sorts, for the absolute beginner, and I think that is a huge hurdle. I’m not asking you to hold my hand, by the way. I think it just adds to what you talk about in your article, that it’s a big jump for those not familiar with it to use an RSS feed. I’ve always known about them, but never was able to set one up.
Definitely agree that there are still lots of unfortunate technical hurdles preventing more widespread adoption of alternatives. I’m constantly frustrated that so many of these alternatives are primarily geared towards techy people and not a mainstream audience.
An instance is basically an installation of a piece of software. In this case, creating your own instance of Nitter would mean installing the Nitter source code on your own server, and then you’d be able to have your own version of Nitter’s site, and you’d be able to see people’s Twitter feeds on your private instance, instead of relying on Twitter or Nitter.net. Obviously hosting a private instance isn’t a feasible step for the average person, so the web extensions are a good alternative which allow people to just install the extension and then use other people’s instances of Nitter (and similar) to view Twitter and other social media sites without directly accessing those sites.
Annnd I think I finally found where they are pointing to browser extensions after I gave it another look. This is cool! Thank you, I am going to try these out!
I am a total rando who found you yesterday, but you got me to finally try an RSS reader, and I will be working on adding an RSS feed to my website. Thank you for introducing me to this wonderful thing!
I would love to make my website as awesome as yours. I’ll go through your blog archive, see what I can learn!
Stoked to hear it! Hope you enjoy your feed reader experience and that setting up a feed for your own site is a smooth experience!
Really interesting post, thank you for this! I’ve been using Feedly since Google Reader shut down (moment of silence) and never quite made the jump to social media, despite FOMO, precisely for the reasons you mention here. One thing I really like about feedly is the ability to sort feeds into different categories, so blogs where I want to read every post go into one group (actually multiple, for different topics), and sites where I prefer to skim headlines and then pick out a handful to read go into another group. When I tried out Tumblr in…2015? Maybe? I couldn’t figure out a way to filter the dashboard, which made me drop it pretty quickly. (I think Tumblr is even the least algorithm-driven socmed so I would probably last less than an hour on Twitter haha) I guess one disadvantage is that feeds encourage reading without engaging, which is my default state, whereas on social media it’s lower-effort to like/comment/reblog/whatever.
Yes, absolutely! I love being able to sort feeds into categories because it makes it way easier to choose what I’m in the mood to read/look at.
Tumblr’s dashboard remains chronological, I think, but I’m not sure because I never actually look at it — I follow all Tumblogs via Feedly because Tumblr supports RSS by default. Sometimes I have to open the post in Tumblr (it won’t display in full in Feedly for Reasons), but this is still much preferable to me than the dashboard (though you can also enable pagination for the dashboard so it isn’t infinite scroll). The main downside to following Tumblr sites/accounts via Feedly is that name/URL changing is still a common norm on the site, and when someone changes their “username,” their feed breaks, and unless they announce this in a post prior to changing the name, you’d never know.
There are both positives and negatives to engagement being slightly more difficult on an independent site than on social media though. Shouting into the void and not getting feedback when you post work can be demoralising for creators, though I think this is mostly because they’re already conditioned for immediate and constant feedback. Before everyone got a taste of what it was like to have something go viral or even semi-viral, people were more content to put things online and only get an occasional comment about it. That said, the lack of virality in an independently-hosted environment is exactly why indie creators couldn’t (easily) make it big in pre-social Internet. That’s the biggest trade off from a creator’s POV and why I don’t think creators will ever abandon social media entirely, even if they do build their own sites.
For the consumer, having to include an email and knowing that your comment will likely get axed if it’s abusive or offensive gets people to think twice, but it may also deter simple “nice!”-type comments. Still, even in the absence of simple “retweet/reblog to share” mechanisms, plenty of people have always made the effort to share cool things they found with others. Newsletters and blog posts comprising almost entirely of “links to cool stuff I found this week” have been a thing this whole time, etc. And I think if a creator didn’t have a social media presence at all, people might comment on their blog (or email them) more just because it’s the only place they can interact.
It has been interesting to me, anyway, who comments on these blog posts and who keeps tweeting at me about them. If I weren’t still on Twitter, would they post here? Or would they just keep their thoughts and questions to themselves? (Or would they tweet about it and just ask Twitter at large to answer them, instead of me?)