"There's a particular kind of guilt that visits me when I open my feed reader after a few days away. It's not the guilt of having done something wrong, exactly. It's more like the feeling of walking into a room where people have been waiting for you, except when you look around, the room is empty. There's no one there. There never was."
"If you've used almost any RSS reader in the past two decades, you know this layout intimately. There's a sidebar with your feeds organized into folders. There's a list of items, sorted by date, with little dots indicating what you haven't read yet. There's a reading pane where the content appears when you click."
An empty-room guilt arises when returning to a feed reader after days away, a small recurring feeling that shapes habits. RSS readers commonly use an email-like layout: a sidebar organizing feeds, a chronological list with unread markers, and a reading pane for selected items. That layout is not inevitable but the result of design choices. NetNewsWire Lite 1.0, released in 2002, established the single-window template for Mac OS X, influenced by Usenet app thinking, and that initial choice propagated until it became the default convention across many feed readers.
Read at Terry Godier
Unable to calculate read time
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