Iraqi Casualties

Why RSS feeds don't work for Reddit

(For those who don't know what Reddit is, it's a content aggregator, similar to Slashdot and Digg, but much better, and with personalized recommendations.)

The bulk of RSS-syndicated content — blogs, news sites, and most content aggregators like Slashdot — are essentially a chronological stream of data. New stories/links appear one by one, and there's really no other organization to it than that. There's no attempt to rank the entries by how relevant they are. They either are or aren't on the "front page" (or whatever page you're looking at), and then they're just sorted chronologically. Thus, RSS feeds, which basically assume such a sequential content stream, are perfectly suited for these sites.

Digg is an exception to this. With Digg, article A can be placed higher up than article B, even though it was submitted several hours earlier, simply because it's received more diggs. However, there is still a strong bias towards chronological arrangement. It's extremely rare for an article to last a full day on the front page, before other articles are considered more "relevant".

Yet, with Reddit, entries frequently remain on the front page for one day or more, as a nagging reminder that "hey, this is really popular, and you should read this if you haven't yet." For example, I haven't read This Essay Breaks the Law yet, even though it's been in the top three on my recommended page for over a day. Normally I wouldn't have read it, since there are plenty of contributions to the intellectual property debate and I usually don't feel they offer something new. But now it's on my to-do list, because so many people have read it and liked it.

Sometimes I'll go two or three days without having time to read stuff. When I check out Reddit after that period, I can immediately see the absolute most relevant stuff during that period, rather than artificially forcing myself to sludge through the same number of articles I would have read had I actually had the time those couple of days, as you might do if you're trying to keep track of the content on an RSS feed.

Also, sometimes I'll have a lot of free time or just be generally interested in checking new stuff out, and then I can browse through all the links in the first page or two of reddit recommendations. And, as always, they're organized as I'd want them to be: weighted by both relevance and timeliness.

What it comes down to is that Reddit's content isn't a "stream" so much as a constantly-shuffled pile of stuff, arranged by that weighting of relevance and timeliness I just mentioned. My Reddit RSS feed simply can't have the real-time organization that the Reddit site has, without being a mirror of it. And, in that case, what's the point of RSS?