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Comment by caryme | Hacker News Reader

To me, possibly the single best thing about Twitter is that it is missable and ignorable. If ignore my RSS reader for a while and come back, I'm overwhelmed by the number of unread posts and feel the need to catch up.

At Twitter (and Facebook for that matter) on the other hand, I can just pick up at the top of the stream. No bold number is telling me "you haven't read this!" I can simply ignore the tweets I missed, and pick up at the present.

Google adding this bold unread buzz number is already making me feel like I can get behind. And this right next to my inbox unread email count - something that I actually do need to keep in check.

I don't need social media adding unread anxiety.

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I totally agree. I was really annoyed by the distraction until I discovered that I could just drag it into the [X More] group under my labels. No more pesky buzz reminders for me!

You can actually remove it completely by going to the bottom of gmail, and turn Buzz off.

That's a good point, but it also makes it two clicks away. I would think the best design would be to have it one click away while not providing unread-anxiety.

Agree. I think this is why I abandoned the Google Reader. First, I started culling all the frequently updated, seldom read feeds because they were inflating my unread count, then I stopped checking in. I went back to visiting the sites to see if anything new showed up.

Not sure how they would solve this, but I think you may be on to something. Emails are a burden. If you want to sell me something recreational, it can't trigger such an association.

You can turn off unread counts, which helps a fair bit. You'll know there's something unread, but there's less anxiety about the volume of things that are unread. Combined with a willingness to use Mark All Read without having looked at everything in a feed has made it pretty usable for me.

I've never really thought about it much. I'm just looking back and noticing that once I hadn't checked in for a week, I didn't want to check in. I was procrastinating about checking my feed reader instead of procrastinating by checking my feed reader.

Huh. I totally ignore buzzes in the way that I ignore tweets. I read them only when I have the time. I have no idea why buzz is generating so much Google hate.

Right now, I'm almost always catching up on twitter, even overnight. I ignore buzzes that I missed (mainly because the interface is too confusing to quickly read what's new).

To me, twitter is the main way of keeping up with what's going on with my friends and the world (I rarely consciously read "news"), so I want to miss as little as possible. I'm following around 350 people, mostly from my time zone. When I don't sleep in, catching up with the night timeline takes about 15 minutes; to me this is time well spent.

I don't know what role buzz will serve when the dust settles down; since the unread count doesn't distinguish uninteresting-comments-on-buzzes-I've-read from really new stuff, I'm mostly ignoring it anyway.

You have succinctly summed it all up. I take pride in inbox zero and I cannot stand that Buzz unread indicator. I don't mind the link or the service, just don't put the number of unread there.

You just made me delete my last RSS subscriptions. Now I rely on finding links in twitter messages. I am going to miss things. Looking forward to it.

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