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RSS readers make me want to jump into a vat of acid!

What triggered this? I dunno, man, I guess I saw some new app being kickstarted by The Iconfactory and I’m sure some people will love it, but I see something built around the concept of “a single chronological timeline of your most important social media services, RSS feeds, and other sources,” and I just want to put my head in the toilet and scream and scream and scream until I have displaced all of the oxygen in my body with toilet water and I drown in the toilet because my shit gills have yet to evolve.

I’m not at “jump into a vat of acid” level of repulsion with the standard RSS reader, but I find them to be a place where content I ostensibly care about goes to live in quiet purgatory, never to be discovered again.

I will admit that there is something inherently alluring about organizing all of the information you intend to absorb into one place, but I find, in practice, the incessant drip, drip, drip to overwhelm, rather than delight.

I still find myself falling back to RSS readers because I want to stay unplugged from the urgency and hysterics of social media, but I too find the singular, linear nature of these readers to somehow be both overwhelming and guilt-inducing (I will never be able to read it all).

Aside

In the last post I included Jon-Kyle Mohr’s essay on building with AI and off-handedly mentioned Cycle—an app he’s built—analogizing it to an RSS reader. But that comparison isn’t quite fair. Cycle caught my eye precisely because it seems to be recognizing both the overwhelm factor and the purgatory I describe, and trying to solve for both. I’ve only used it briefly, so don’t consider this a full endorsement, but I am excited to see something new in this space.