Most RSS readers are wrong

By Dave Winer on 1/20/07; 8:04:02 PM.

Read this piece for a clue as to what's wrong with RSS readers.  

One of the first rules of software design is also the primary rule of business -- "The user is always right."  

Most RSS readers remind the user, all the time, how wrong he or she is. Or inadequate or lazy or behind in their work. 

Who needs that. I sure don't. And if I'm designing software that I'm using myself, and it's always telling me how I'm fucking up, you can be sure I'm going to want to change the software, not the user.  

Think about it this way. Suppose you read the paper every day. What if at the top of the paper it told you how many articles from previous issues you hadn't read. Whoa. When you subscribed to the paper did you mean to imply that you would read all the articles? 

Emphatically: News is not email.  

Unlike email, every article is not necessarily something you should read, or even look at. 

I read so few articles that I want my software to work differently, I want it to make it easy for me to give a fraction of a glance to every new article and if I'm not interested, or too busy -- too bad. No need to count the number of articles that didn't get my attention. It's a useless piece of data.  

The author comes within an inch of getting the answer. \"Here's a simple trick to handle this load -- goto the root folder and select 'Mark All Items as Read.' Now open the Techmeme River of News website and read the important stories that you might have missed while on vacation.\" 

Good idea! Now have the software do all that for you. 

And not just when you come back from vacation, every day, rain or shine. 

And then you'll find you can subscribe to even more feeds.  

9/20/05: "Let the news flow by you and relax like someone sitting on the bank of a river looking for something interesting as you while away the time. That's how news works, and RSS is, emphatically, for news." 

Try this one out. Imagine you're fishing, and there was some nerd on the other side of the river, shouting at you, the number of fish that went by that you didn't catch. How long before you'd want to kill the nerd??