This might get a little nerdy. Bear with me.
Real Simple Syndication, or RSS for short, is one of the greatest inventions on the modern web. It allows one to follow a wide variety of websites that utilize RSS feeds with a dedicated application or website. Practically every website and blog has a free-to-use RSS feed, and there are a ton of paid and free feed readers to choose from.
Basically, it consolidates web content into an inbox where one can click to read new blog posts, social media posts, news posts, etc. It saves you from actually visiting all the sites you might visit on a given day into one place where everything is ready for you to read.
I opened my RSS reader of choice, Inoreader, last Wednesday morning and stared at the number.
An even 900 unread items.
That’s not a reading list. It’s a backlog. It’s a number that sits in the corner of your screen and quietly tells you that you’re already behind, that you’re missing out, that there’s always more, and that you can never, ever catch up. It was depressing.
I’ve had an RSS reader in some form or another since the Google Reader days. For a long time, I thought of it as a healthy alternative to social media. With RSS feeds, I was curating. I was choosing my sources. I was in control, unlike those poor souls getting spoon-fed crap by that nasty algorithm. I admit, I felt slightly superior about this.
However, somewhere along the way, I hit 90 feeds. Then 110. Each one had felt like a small act of curiosity. A tech blog here. A film critic there. Three different newsletter writers who covered sports. A handful of sites I liked once, in say 2019, and never really loved again. Each individual subscription was justifiable… at least at the time. As I went on, my unread items would simply accumulate, more and more each hour, whether I read any of them or not.
I’m currently sitting at 258 feeds. I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s all too much.
Social media, especially over the last several years, has replaced keeping up with our friends and family with an endless stream of algorithmic content. Guess what? I did it to myself. No algorithm needed. I had personally constructed my own firehose and opened it every morning, wondering why I felt wet.
As I was contemplating the ridiculous number of things to read in my feed, I realized there is no meaningful difference between a feed that overwhelms you by design, like Facebook, Instagram, and the like, and one that overwhelms you by accident because you never actually did any real curation or culling.
My RSS feeds became a blur. I found I was skimming and deleting and barely making a dent in the unread count. I was consuming and not getting anything out of it.
I needed to simplify.
In the case of my overwhelming RSS feeds, I needed subtraction. I needed to let some things go.
So, I commenced the great RSS culling.
I spent a few hours going through every feed. This was not a reorganization. I simply opened each feed up in Inoreader and asked one question for each, “Do I actually look forward to reading this? Yes or no.”
I went from 258 feeds to 135.
It felt a tiny bit scary. There was a small sense of “Fear of Missing Out,” but I plowed through. A quick first pass and I nipped 123 feeds. After a few weeks, I’m going to do this again and see if I can’t reduce the number to under 100.
The next step is curating the 500+ items I’d saved to read later. I really wanted to just delete them all and start over, but I didn’t. I’m going to tackle that at a future date.
After reducing my feed count, I archived or deleted what I had sitting in my Newsfeed. Now I had an empty inbox. My goal was not to look at my RSS feeds in the evening and see what my item number would look like in the morning.
In the morning, I saw 81 items in my Newsfeed.
I skimmed the headlines, deleted a bunch of items I didn’t care about, and in no time, the feed was down to 57.
The reduction in digital clutter and the feeling of accomplishment after going through my feed were surprising and welcome.
If you use RSS, awesome. If you are a power user like me and follow 250+ feeds, it might be time to curate and cull your feed. I’m not saying you need to cut nearly half of your feeds as I did. However, I think it’s worth asking if the feeds you are following are serving you.
I’m down to 135 feeds. I’ll reduce it even more after a few days. I’ve taken control back, and it feels better than I imagined.
Be seeing you.
