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.
I've been thinking about this feeling for a long time. Longer than I probably should, given that it concerns something as mundane as reading articles on the internet. But I've come to believe that these small, repeated experiences shape us more than we like to admit.
So let me start with a question that's been nagging at me: why do RSS readers look like email clients?
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The shape is so ubiquitous it feels inevitable.
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.
The shape is so ubiquitous that it feels inevitable. But of course nothing in design is inevitable. Someone made a choice, and then other people followed that choice, and eventually the choice calcified into convention.
I know exactly who made that first choice,
because I asked.
His name is Brent Simmons. In 2002 he released NetNewsWire, the app that established the template nearly every RSS reader still follows today.
"I know the answer, or at least part of it. I wrote the first one of these. NetNewsWire Lite 1.0 was released in 2002, and it was the first RSS reader to resemble an email app."
"I was actually thinking about Usenet, not email, but whatever. The question I asked myself then was how would I design a Usenet app for (then-new) Mac OS X in the year 2002?"
"The answer was pretty clear to me: instead of multiple windows, a single window with a sidebar, list of posts, and detail view."
He made a pragmatic decision, not an ideological one. RSS was unknown to most people in 2002. By using a familiar layout, something people already understood from email, he reduced the learning curve to almost nothing.
It worked. NetNewsWire took off. Google Reader took off. A thousand readers bloomed, and nearly all of them borrowed Brent's basic shape.
But here's what struck me about the end of his response:
"The part I don't understand and can't explain is why RSS readers are still mostly following this UI."
"But every new RSS reader ought to consider not being yet another three-paned-aggregator. There are surely millions of users who might prefer a river of news or other paradigms."
"Why not have some fun and do something new, or at least different?"
The person who designed the original paradigm was asking, twenty-two years later, why everyone was still copying him.
When you dress a new thing in old clothes, people don't just learn the shape. They inherit the feelings, the assumptions, the emotional weight. You can't borrow the layout of an inbox without also borrowing some of its psychology.
Nothing happened. Nobody knows you're here.
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.
Nobody is waiting.
I've been trying to find the right name for this phenomenon, and I think I've finally landed on it: