I didn’t read my news feeds yesterday and now look what’s gone and happened… The worst part is I have to clear all those unread articles and I have this sick compulsion to at least skim them all, you know, just in case there’s a really interesting article I won’t come across elsewhere. I suppose RSS feeds are a lot like email that in a way, but do you read every email that reaches your inbox? Surely a certain amount of it is spam you can toss out immediately, or have transparently tossed out for you, but you can’t do that with RSS — at least I can’t — and it’s all there waiting to be looked at it.

I’ve read tips on how to reduce RSS clutter: assign “must-read” subscriptions to one folder and “like-to-read” subscriptions to another. The former you read as normal while the latter only if you have time, otherwise you just mark the whole mess as read and get back to whatever else there is to do on the internet. Porn, I suppose. That makes a lot of sense, and frankly a number of the feeds I read overlap and I see the same story several times over, but I just can’t bring myself to do it.

I like to think to myself that I weigh all my news feeds equally because I’m a guy with such a well-rounded tastes that I can’t simply cut stuff out without part of my equally well-rounded personality suffering somewhat. That could be it, but more likely it’s because I’m a completist nerd. I love it, but it sucks.