Why I Don't Use RSS Anymore

Then you are missing out and are letting the masses decide what you read. Technical experts have highly targeted RSS feeds and thus highly relevant information. Once you give up on that you've really just given up.

I'm actually very sad that people don't understand the power of RSS. Of course you have to be stupid to push Reddit through Google Reader, but that does not mean RSS is dead as much as email is dead because we have Facebook messaging. While that analogy sounds outrageous, think about it: you won't kick yourself because you missed the top post in Reddit from the morning (maybe it annoys you that you don't understand the windfall of followup posts) but I sure as hell don't want to miss the one important publication that got published in a journal about my research. Sure, my unread count is now 2000, but I can still rest assured that my procrastination will not make things I haven't read to just disappear.<p>I used to really love some subreddits, especially r/askscience. I used to be able to just put an RSS feed and never miss a single question I could help with. But now its overwhelming; I can't do anything about it. So I just didn't even bother going there for a while. Until I figured out ways to filter the posts in the subreddit and feed them into RSS (I used <a href="http://ifttt.com/" rel="nofollow">http://ifttt.com/</a> for that btw) and now I can at least try to answer questions of my interest.<p>While social aggregation sites are good to go through while munching dinner, when you need to consume data for real knowledge acquisition, I don't think you can beat RSS. For that I hope RSS never dies in spite of all the ignorance around it.

For high traffic sites, RSS is pretty unusable (mostly because the state of the art in clients seems to be fixated on read/unread counts. Feed a Fever looked interesting <a href="http://feedafever.com/" rel="nofollow">http://feedafever.com/</a> but never really seemed to take off) but there are always going to be never-want-to-miss sites.<p>I have a collection of blogs and sites where I want to read every thing that person says. There are many people that post infrequently, post extremely insightful commentary and yet don't show up in my social media feeds.

Many excellent sites publish new stuff very rarely. RSS is the best way to follow those sites.

Google Reader allows me to mix high traffic and "I don't want to miss anything" sites.<p>I make extensive use of tags, and put my "not to miss" feeds under a "favorite" tag, that I always read. 2-3 other tags I read all from as well.<p>And the rest (including HN), I only read in "All items", sorted by "magic". That way, I know I will see if something big happened on these sites (it's sorted mostly by the amount of "+1", I think) in priority, and the rest, maybe later.<p>Then, during the weekend (slow update days), I purge all Google Reader, prepared for Monday, and it goes for another week.<p>That's the most effective way I've found to follow tech and gaming news, since I started. It's a good compromise in my opinion, since many of my "favorite" feeds are not really popular or likely to appear on Reddit or HN.

"Unread item overload" is why I started using the PostRank Extension (<a href="https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/pnngeaoibaajihakbnngcfecdkinjjpf" rel="nofollow">https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/pnngeaoibaajihakbn...</a>)<p>It plugs into Google Reader (and even HN!) really well, and can quickly help you pick out the best links from 100's of RSS items easily.

The high number of grammatical errors caused me to quit reading in the middle.

Depends on what you're interested in. I was once subscribed (Opera's RSS client, just for the record) to feeds with a high content volume (Ars Technica, space.com), which is basically unmanageable because it leads to thousands of unread messages.<p>I scrapped those feeds and kept the ones that post new content rarely enough for me to forget about them but care for enough to want to know immediately when this happens.