I recently declared feed bankruptcy.

At various points in my week // day, I type "kottke.org" into my browser, hit enter, and read whatever is there. Then I type "chorus.fm" and do the same thing. Then Daring Fireball. Then Hacker News.

I read good things, on good websites.

And it feels like an exercise in nostalgia.

Between 2010 and now, we collectively decided that manually checking websites was for suckers. The feed would come to us. First through RSS readers (remember Google Reader?), then through Twitter and Facebook, then through every app that realized engagement metrics improved when you could just keep scrolling, from Substack to Matter to God knows what else.

I got on board with this program enthusiastically.

I assembled curated lists of journalists, and groups and files and bookmarks and RSS feeds of exactly the sites I wanted to follow that then became bloated through a "Gotta Catch 'Em All" mentality. When Twitter became unusable, I moved everything into my feed reader. When social media became intolerable, I congratulated myself for having the discipline to stick with RSS instead.

The thing about feeds is that they turn reading into a game of inbox zero. You have 247 unread items. You had 12 unread items but then you checked again and now you have 34 unread items. The number goes up, you make it go down, it goes up again. At no point in this process are you actually deciding what to read. You're deciding what to mark as read.

These are different activities.

When you visit a website directly, you see what that website's creator chose to prioritize today. When you read from a feed, you see everything, in reverse chronological order, weighted equally. That essay someone spent three weeks on appears in your feed with exactly the same visual emphasis as their quick link to a mildly interesting paper. Your feed reader doesn't care which one took more effort or which one the creator thinks you should read first. Everything is a feed item, and feed items must be processed. This trains you to check constantly. If you don't check for two days, you have "fallen behind." You have 89 unread items, and they're piling up while you're reading this sentence.

I'm not arguing against RSS feeds or claiming that everyone should abandon them; RSS is one of the few parts of the modern internet I still deeply love and respect. I think I'm more arguing against my own obsessive impulsivity and addiction.

I'm trying to understand why I personally found myself scrolling through my carefully curated feed reader with the same glazed, compulsive energy I brought to Twitter. Different content, same brain state. The problem wasn't what was in the feed; the problem was the feed itself, and what feeds do to attention.

Attention, I think, has two modes that we've stopped distinguishing clearly. There's the mode where you decide in advance what you're going to pay attention to, and there's the mode where you let a stream of items compete for your attention in real time. Reading a book is the first mode. Scrolling through anything is the second mode. The two modes train different cognitive muscles, and I have let the second mode atrophy the first.

When I type "kottke.org" into my browser, I'm making an active decision that involves some amount of transaction cost. I have to find it in my bookmarks, or type it into the address bar. Then I have to wait (a second, maybe two) for the page to load. Then I'm seeing whatever is there right now, which might be a lot or a little, but I'm not seeing "unread count: 23." I'm seeing a website. Websites have a top and a bottom. When you reach the bottom, you're done. You can leave. There's nothing to mark as read.

You can argue that I could have just checked my RSS feed once a day, read whatever looked interesting, and marked the rest as read without guilt. You'd be right. I could have done that. But I didn't do that, and I don't think I'm unusual in not doing that. The affordances of the feed reader made this approach harder than it sounds. Every time I opened the app, it showed me the count. The count implied I was behind. Being behind implied I should catch up. The app wanted me to process items, and I'm apparently very susceptible to doing what apps want me to do.

Going back to checking websites manually creates a different set of affordances. I can't be "behind" on Daring Fireball because there's no count of how many posts I've missed. Either there's new stuff on the site or there isn't. If there is, I can read what looks interesting. If there isn't, or if nothing looks interesting, I close the tab and check back tomorrow or next week or whenever I remember to check back. The website doesn't care when I return. It will still be there.

Does anyone else remember the experience of having a few sites you checked regularly? Sometimes there was new stuff, sometimes there wasn't. You didn't expect to see everything they'd ever posted, just whatever was currently on the front page. You certainly didn't expect to be notified whenever they posted something new. They were places you visited, not feeds you subscribed to.

The economics of this were different too. Websites wanted you to visit regularly, but they knew they couldn't demand constant attention. They had to be good enough that you'd remember to come back. Feeds changed the economics. Once you were subscribed, the website was guaranteed to appear in your stream. They didn't need you to remember them anymore. They just needed you to post frequently enough that you'd show up in the feed regularly. Frequency became more important than memorability.

I recognize there's some romantic nostalgia in all of this. The old web was also full of garbage, and having to manually check twenty websites every day was tedious in its own way. Feeds solved real problems.

I'm just noting that I personally got better at processing feeds and worse at choosing what to pay attention to, and the tradeoff has stopped being worth it.

So now I'm back to checking websites. I have maybe seven or eight sites I visit regularly. I miss some stuff, obviously. Things get published that I never see. But I also find that I'm reading more carefully and finishing more of what I start. I'm not trying to get through the feed. I'm just reading things that seem worth reading when I happen across them.

Will I stick with this?

Unclear.

For now, though, there's something refreshing about treating websites like places again instead of sources.

You don't subscribe to a place.

You just visit it when you feel like visiting it, and see what's there.

www.joanwestenberg.com

I Have Declared Feed Bankruptcy.