I’ve come to hate unread indicators. These things:
Unread indicators nag at you, demanding your attention. The bright red colour pulls your eye towards it. Even worse is when feeds show unread items in boldface, creating typographical clutter and disharmony. It’s bothersome, like a crooked picture frame, a visual rendering of an itch. It demands to be put right.
Maybe there are type-A personalities (the kind of people who can GTD and manage their time with calendars and shit) who can get value out of these things. Not me. In my experience there are only two attractors of behaviour:
The first one turns reading into an unpleasant chore – into work. Work items pile onto your reading queue, on a schedule you don’t control. You come to resent the people you’re subscribed to: “stop posting so many interesting things faster than I can keep up with! stop giving me work to do!”. This state is only meta-stable.
Eventually your discipline falters and you decay into the second mode, the ground state. 10 unread items becomes 20, then 50, then 500. You’re never going to get through them all. You sigh, and declare bankruptcy. Select-all, “mark as read”. A lie (you haven’t read them), and an admission of failure (you’re never going to read them). If only you could stay on top of things better. Tomorrow, new articles roll in, relentlessly, and the cycle starts anew.
The unread indicator is useless for its intended purpose; the only meaningful values are “zero”, “one”, and “many”. Its revealed purpose is to be a source of negative feelings. You use the reader less and less, and eventually stop entirely. Entropy wins.
The problem is that an RSS feed is not like an email inbox. Emails are often time-sensitive, and have some kind of next-action associated with them: click some login link, reply to a question, pay some bill. It’s useful to track which have been read and which haven’t. “Inbox zero” is a plausibly-useful goal.
But with RSS feed articles, it doesn’t really matter if you read them now, or later, or never. And there’s usually no follow-on action – you just read it, and you’re done. So why bother tracking read status?
So I turned them all off. Specifically, I forked yarr and commented out a few lines. Now I can keep up with blogs without being nagged for not reading something. I’m not checking off items on a todo list. I just read things when and if I feel like it, calmly, without manufactured urgency.
It’s just a feed, and I decide when I’m full.