Phantom Obligation by https://indieweb.social/@tg

Email’s unread count means something specific: these are messages from real people who wrote to you and are, in some cases, actively waiting for your response. The number isn’t neutral information. It’s a measure of social debt.

But when we applied that same visual language to RSS (the unread counts, the bold text for new items, the sense of a backlog accumulating) we imported the anxiety without the cause.

I have wondered about this myself. My current practice involves reading what I want to read and then marking everything else as read with prejudice. It’s not ideal. There is this feeling of guilt I have, of a task that needs to be done, quite like email.

There should be a different design, a different paradigm. Maybe I should write my thoughts in a place.