Appreciation of the mark-all-as-read button
manuelmoreale.com
manuelmoreale.com
I use the excellent vore (vore.website) for rss and I just get a chronological list off my RSS feeds. My brain has a feature called "memory" that stops me accidentally reading any articles twice, and even better, I don't have a feeling of obligation to my rss feed reader.
When I pop into my RSS reader, my sole goal is to read something new. I want to read from one publication at a time, and I want to know I've seen everything they post (not every article is worth reading, but if their best content isn't so good that I care about missing it, they aren't worth subscribing to).
Without read/unread this doesn't work. I've got too many feeds to just remember the latest thing I've read in each. And I want my RSS reader to only show publications with new articles, rather than clicking one after another like pulling a slot machine to see if it has new articles. And my memory isn't perfect — I may mistakenly think I've already read something (especially when a big story is covered repeatedly in many places). It's nicer to just let the computer worry about it.
This is one of the big reasons I convert my social media follows into RSS (I just did bsky last night). I want an inbox!
For me, it doesn't feel like an obligation. It feels peaceful knowing I definitely saw everything I might care about, and that I delegated the tedious parts to a machine.
I thia is exactly what makes RSS great. You and me can both subscribe to the same blog/podcast/whatever, but choose different technologies that fit how we want to use it. That's something that could never really happen on traditional social media.
That's a waste of a manual refresh action - if you only open the reader when you want to read something, there is no point in not auto-refreshing on open so you can... read something.
> I can mark everything as read and get back to a neutral state. And just like that, I’m done with my timeline. Isn’t that amazing?
Not really, you've described a workflow with the same "FOMO" and "chore" downsides: you have to invest time into reviewing the whole batch of downloaded content otherwise if you mark everything as read you fear you've missed something important that you haven't reviewed it. Some clients can even auto-mark links on scroll so you reduce the risk of mislabeling, but these are still not refined enough controls to tacke the issue.
(and yes, of course there are ads in RSS)
I’m not wasting a manual refresh action. I’m adding some intentionality and some friction in my digital interactions.
Life is not just about optimizing everything.
As for the FOMO, I disagree. Posts are still there. Blogs are still out there. An RSS reader is not where the content lives but just an interface.
And no, there are no ads in RSS. Because the people I follow don’t share ads. Same is not true for social media where a 3rd party can inject whatever the hell they want.
That's what's opening an app is
> An RSS reader is not where the content lives but just an interface.
Yes it practically is, do you remember all the source links to be able to visit and read them without RSS? Do you also remember which ones you've saved in your favourites so you haven't skipped something important on second review?
> Same is not true for social media
It is true, if you can be so selective about sources you read, you can also be selective about social media you choose, and there are some that have no ads
I hate things that auto refresh instead of just coming back to where I left off. Obviously if it's empty, sure refresh, but if it's outdated because I backgrounded it for a couple of days, let me decide to refresh or not.
I know that Instagram has this silly feature of "shake to show a 'report a bug' prompt" - I know it because it occasionally turns on for no apparent reason.
It's even less discoverable than any undocumented gesture out there. Percussive maintenance is a joke, and the only people who actually shake something in anger are fictional characters in movies and animation, because that's done for comedic effect. And maybe people with serious anger management issues. Neither connotation make this gesture a sensible choice.
It’s not discoverable, but it is in the user guide.
If you find yourself accidentally activating it, you can turn it off in accessibility settings.
If you would rather have a button for it, you can turn on assistive touch.
In Outlook, because I have so many folders due to sieve rules, I scroll to the bottom of my account where there is an unread emails view that I scroll through and mark the ones read that need to be, then right click the whole folder and hit mark all as read.
Then I just have to wait for 15 minutes as Outlook figures out how to synchronize all that!
K-9 at least on the 6.x version that I remain on so I don't get dragged into Thunderbird Mobile and it's nasty new UI, the only way to set something to appear in the unified inbox is to go folder by agonizing folder and add it, not something I want to spend the time to do, so I end up scrolling through folders and looking at messages manually.
Remembering the last thing you already been shown and not presenting it anymore is what computers used to do, back in the 1970s.
(a third advantage to RSS: because local storage is dirt cheap, it's searchable — even the stuff I'd mark-all-as-read'ed)
(when I made hotkeys to view alphabetical splits, so if I don't read for a while i still don't get presented with more than a screenful of titles at once, thanks to newsboat(1) keeping its state in SQLite, I was able to base my counts off having queried the database of everything I'd already RSS'ed, interacted with or not)
For context, I'm thinking very generally here rather than about specific use cases, but it seems to me that anything happening 'automatically' in this area can be problematic. I'm not sure what the best setup is, but I think any system that shows a list of time-sensitive stuff (email, rss feeds) should at least be keeping a record of 'times shown', 'times opened', etc.
I've got my hotkeys configured so I get a screenful of titles, pick 0-2 that look like they might be of interest, then mark-all-as-read to get a new screenful. Every now and then I get a little quick with the "Ay", and then either search, or if it was immediate markers' remorse, "l" to show read as well as unread, and pick up whatever I was FOMO'ing so hard on — often to be reminded to trust my initial judgement.
In the unlikely* event that doesn't work, well, feeds are entertainment anyway: if an idea is really important it'll come around again, maybe from the same source, maybe a different one.
* as I've said, the db elephants everything, so it's difficult to lose anything; currently it's using like 1/1000th of my disk space and I'm not sure it gets bigger much faster than storage gets cheaper.
Lagniappe: http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/elephant/elephant.html
all conversations on page selected - says You selected 50 conversations. next to it link text - Select all 2638 in inbox.
clicking select all 2638 in inbox selects all conversations.
next to checkbox where I selected conversations is a row of icons, first icon is an open mail that has the title "Mark all as read R"
When I use Mark all as read on selected conversations they become read, however they are still selected which is makes this stuff somewhat unclear.