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Digg Reader To Shut Down This Month -- Latest RSS Service To Bite the Dust (betanews.com)
Digg announced this week that it's shutting down Digg Reader, an app which allows users to follow RSS feeds from sites. From a report: Following the closure of Google Reader, RSS fans flocked to the likes of Feedly, The Old Reader, Digg Reader and Inoreader. Now Digg Reader has announced that it is to close, and users are being advised to export their feeds so they can be imported into an alternative service. Users do not have a great deal of time to grab their data and take it elsewhere. The RSS reader is due to close on March 26, meaning there's less than two weeks to go. No reason has been given for the closure, but presumably the venture either didn't prove as popular as expected, or it was rather more costly to run than anticipated.
I mostly use it to view a collection of articles from various sources, and comics from various sources. Instead of having to visit each and every site and keeping track of which articles I have read and not read an RSS reader does that for me.
Visiting one link I can view all the slashdot tech articles, lifehacker, dilbert comics, commitstrip, etc. There may be other ways to emulate this on social media platforms but the fact I can pick and choose exactly what I want to read makes it so much easier to keep track of exactly what I want.
Something like 90% of my browsing gets done through RSS. I'm happily subscribed to INOreader, in the hopes that it will stay alive for a long time. Here is how I use RSS. On one page, I get the following notifications, bundled into the appropriate folders:
* All of my mainstream news from a half dozen different websites, with a headline and 1-2 sentence intro. This allows me to decide which ones are worth reading, and which ones to skip. It is super quick to get through a lot of news this way, and I avoid going to all of the different websites, their shitastic auto-playing videos, poorly laid out pages, etc.
* All of my web comics. About 2/3 display right in the reader, the other 1/3 I have to go to. But all in one folder, so no bookmarking, opening in tabs, etc.
* The limited social media feeds I follow, both Twitter and Facebook. Just the posts from the creators, none of the reposts, retweets, replies, or any of that shit. It's a minimal way to keep up with asshats who insist on using social media. (Hello local brewery, which only posts their taplist and hours on facebook...)
* Stupid shit that I keep around for when I need some lowbrow entertainment. Cat memes and failure gifs.
* STEM websites posting content I may or may not be interested in. The posts build up in that folder until I'm feeling sciency, then I can browse through a bunch of different fields and some of the new stuff coming out.
Having all of that in one place limits the mental energy it takes to track down all those disparate things. When I want to read my comics, pop open the comic folder, and I can read a couple of weeks of comics. When I want science, I can do that with science. I don't have to bookmark a thousand pages and open them in different tabs, and try to figure out how long it's been since I've been there.
Most places do a crappy job with archives. RSS lets me save and favorite things for later. And unread things are all in date order, so when I get around to it, I have an idea how old it is.
Trying to take in most modern websites is brain-fuzzing. Graphics and moving shit, boxes of articles, teasers and the like, infinite scrolling, etc. Every one is different, and they all suck. RSS gives me every website in the same format. Small image, title, couple of sentences.
Scrolling past a headline and it's marked as read. Unless I unmark it. And if I go to long and have 500 unread articles, I can just mark ones older than X days, weeks, months as read. It really simplifies how one interacts with content on the web. It's just so easy and organized. I really can't be bothered to do the web without RSS.
Oh, and INOreader has a great mobile app too, so I have the same thing on my browser as on my phone.
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