1120 Subscribers in 2 Days: My Foray into E-mail Newsletters
peterc.org
peterc.org
If I subscribed to more newsletters, I imagine that it'd end up being the same, though.
I only subscribe to a couple of real life magazines and newspapers - these take up to an hour each to read. Below this, I subscribe to about 10-20 e-mail newsletters I read frequently. Then about 100-150 RSS feeds. Then 800 people on Twitter.. I'm assuming other people are similar, but I could be wrong!
At each level of this pyramid, the content becomes more granular, river-like, and easier to ignore. If RSS is overwhelming me, I "mark all as read" for that day. With Twitter, I don't even bother "catching up," I just swim in the current river of tweets when I have a spare minute..
I surely do the same thing you do for Twitter, but not everyone is like that. People that follow a lot of people tweet repeat things because they understand others treat Twitter like this, but then people who read it less get mad.
I think those people fear missing something. Mostly because I used to be in that group. With age, though, I realized a) that almost nothing is that important in the grand scale of life that it matters if I miss it, and b) if something is important, it'll bubble through another way anyway.