I spent about three hours this week doing something I've been putting off since basically 2019: going through my old RSS subscriptions and cutting the dead weight. If you don't use an RSS reader anymore, first of all, you should, and second of all, this post might not be for you, but stick around anyway.
I still use Feedbin. Pay the $5 a month, have paid it for years, and I will die on this hill before I let some algorithm decide what tech news I see. But somewhere along the way my subscription list ballooned to 214 feeds and maybe 40 of them still post. The rest are just corpses — blogs where the last entry is from 2017, some abandoned company blog with three posts and a "we're excited to announce" tone that never got a fourth post, a couple of personal sites that clearly got sold off and now redirect to a crypto wallet ad (this happened to at least four blogs I used to genuinely enjoy, and it still makes me a little sad every time I notice it).
So I unsubscribed from about 170 of them in one sitting, which felt oddly cathartic, like cleaning out a garage. What's left is a leaner list, and honestly it's made my mornings better. I'm not scrolling through noise anymore, I'm reading maybe 12 things a day instead of skimming past 80.
The stuff that survived the cut
A few observations from actually doing this exercise, because I think they're useful beyond just "I did some digital spring cleaning in May":
- Almost every blog that's still active after ten-plus years has a very simple, almost ugly design. No fancy animations, no sticky headers eating half the screen, just text on a page. There's a lesson in there somewhere about what actually lasts.
- The blogs that died usually died within about 18 months of switching to a "content strategy." The second a personal blog starts publishing on a schedule with headlines optimized for search instead of for the person who wrote them, you can feel it curdle. I've caught myself doing this on techpad occasionally and I try to stop myself.
- A shocking number of feeds just silently changed their RSS URL at some point (usually during a CMS migration) and never redirected the old one. So I wasn't even getting 404s, I was getting nothing, for years, and didn't notice. That one bugs me more than it should.
Doing your own version of this
If you want to try the same thing, it doesn't take long. Export your OPML file from whatever reader you use (Feedbin has this under Settings, most others call it the same thing), open it in a text editor, and just skim the feed titles. You'll know within a few seconds which ones you haven't actually read in months. Delete ruthlessly. You can always resubscribe later if you miss something, which in my experience basically never happens.
I also went and re-added a handful of feeds I'd fallen off of years ago just to see if they were still alive. Two were. One of them, a blog about mechanical keyboards I used to read religiously around 2014, is somehow still going, still run by the same guy, still doing deep dives into switch types that nobody asked for but that I will read every single time. There's something genuinely nice about that kind of stubbornness. Fifteen years of one person just keeping a light on.
Which, I'll admit, is part of why I did this whole exercise in the first place. Techpad turns fifteen this coming November, and going through a decade-plus of other people's dead links made me think about what keeps a personal site alive versus what quietly kills it. My answer, at least for now, is pretty boring: write when you have something to say, don't force a schedule, and don't let the design get in the way of the words. I don't have a fancier theory than that, and honestly I'm suspicious of anyone who does.
Anyway. If your reader's a mess, go clean it out this weekend. It takes less time than you think and it's oddly satisfying, in the same way clearing out a junk drawer is satisfying even though nothing in the junk drawer was actually hurting you.