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Comment by joebadmo | Hacker News Reader

Personally, I have different labels. I have a high volume label that I nuke with impunity, then another label with low volume feeds that I treat more like Marco describes in tfa.

This lets me keep up with all of those low volume feeds, but also skim the daily news when I have time.

I also prune my feeds pretty aggressively.

This is probably a much fiddlier setup than most people will want, but really so is any RSS reader.

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Yeah he lost me when he started saying that I'm doing it wrong just because I subscribe to high-volume feeds..

Years ago I came across someone's excellent strategy for organizing Google Reader under two top-level groups:

  * Must Read
  * Can Miss

Under those 2 labels I have other classifications, but those are the two main groups that all my feeds fall under.

The low-volume or high-importance feeds go into "Must Read" and the rest goes into "Can Miss".. Can Miss is for skimming, for catching up on the last few days of high-volume feeds or just for finding something to read through when I'm bored..

I regularly hit "Mark all as Read" on the "Can Miss" group, and I don't feel bad about it for a second, nor do I feel like I am somehow using RSS incorrectly.

But the "Must Read" label contains feeds that I really want to make sure I read all of, or don't miss anything from.. Like infrequently updated blogs, security update RSS feeds, some serial web comics or web shorts, etc.. In the last several years I don't think I've even once hit "Mark all as Read" in that label.

So while I agree that if your current approach to RSS is leading you to ignore most of what ends up in your reader, you might need a different approach, but that approach doesn't have to be "don't use RSS".

Yep, pretty much this for me too.

http://img255.imageshack.us/img255/1528/imageiq.png

I read all the things in the "Interesting" label, they get one new item once every few days at most.

In the mass news section, I keep up to date with the first site but all others I only check up infrequently (hence they regularly get to 1000+ and I don't mind, that's normal).

And the Occasional label is kinda in between, but in reality I don't really read anything there anymore.

I use Digg as my Can Miss folder. It's a surprisingly good filter for the day's news.

That's how I used to use Reader. One "Important" folder for stuff that I was very likely to read, and another for skimming.

It's a common complaint about Twitter that once you start following a few people who produce high volumes of crap, it becomes useless. The usual advice is to be quick to unfollow, but I've always missed a "must read" feature for Twitter, to specially mark those few people where you really do want to see every single tweet.

I'm playing with a couple of strategies: creating a list, and then viewing tweets on the list (which show up jumbled when the list is first created, but seem in order thereafter), and just having multiple accounts...

I like the "volume dial" on G+ Circles. Just wish it would let me filter circle posts by media type (i.e. block all images and videos, but show all text and link posts). I'm sure it can be done, as they just implemented this feature for Google+ searches.

This is what Twitter's Lists functionality is for. I have separate lists of people for topics I am interested in, such as running, android, infosec, etc. The downside is that people on your lists don't enjoy the same capabilities as the people you follow, so they can't DM and they might be insulted that you show as not following them.

I also had a 2 folder system, but subscribe to so few feeds that going away for a weekend only leaves me with a few hundred unread articles. Since many sites overlap in terms of content, I don't even always need to read every article anyway.

Yep. I read about 10% of Techdirt and Android Police but those 10% are usually things I'm really interested in so deleting them is not an option. So I usually just skip the headlines and open up whatever sounds interesting.

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