Vibe Check: Reflective Essay

Unread (0)

It’s 12:40 a.m. and I just read that Reddit is closing the feeds, and I’m sitting here with Reeder open like it’s a wake.

I started with Google Reader, 2007, a dorm-room laptop with a cracked hinge. I learned j and k before I learned most of my professors’ names. Daring Fireball, Kottke, Waxy, a half-dead blog about typefaces, xkcd, the Ars Technica firehose I never finished. The unread count was a bolded number in parentheses, and I felt personally responsible for it.

Then Reader died in July 2013, and I carried my OPML file to Feedly like a refugee with one good suitcase. Later NetNewsWire, then Reeder, then Inoreader on the work machine.

The Reddit feeds were my favorite trick. Just tack .rss onto a subreddit and it was mine. r/AskHistorians top of the week. r/depthhub. A tiny subreddit about restoring old typewriters, eleven posts a month, which I read like letters from a distant cousin. I’d refresh and watch the new items slide in, the number climbing, a small private mail delivery nobody else was invited to.

Nobody ever recommended anything to me there. Nothing was ranked for me. I just chose, and the things I chose showed up.

I’m scrolling the folder called Reddit. Forty-one feeds, each now a countdown. I’m not deleting them yet. I’m hitting refresh once more, just to watch it check.

Subscribed

I keep thinking about Google Reader. 2013, the shutdown announcement, everyone scrambling for exports. I moved to Feedly that same week and told myself nothing had really changed. Something had.

Tonight it’s Reddit. And I know it’s just feeds, just a format, but I keep inventorying anyway. The subreddit for my city that told me about the bridge closure before the news did. r/whatisthisthing, which I read like a serial novel. A tiny woodworking community where a man named Dale posted a dovetail joint every Friday for two years, and I never commented once, but I noticed when he stopped.

There was a feeling I haven’t had anywhere else: opening the aggregator with coffee, the unread count waiting like mail. Not an algorithm’s guess at what would keep me angry or scrolling — just the things I had chosen, in order, marked read when I was done. Done. There was a done. I remember the empty state. “All caught up.” A small, clean room.

I taught my dad to use an RSS reader in 2009 so he could follow three photography blogs. He’s gone now, but I still have his OPML file somewhere. Seventeen feeds. Most of them dead links by now.

What we’re losing isn’t plumbing. It’s the last place where reading the internet felt like tending a garden instead of being dragged through a casino.

It’s midnight. I’m going to export my subscriptions. Again.

An imagined midnight blog entry:

It’s 12:17, and I’ve opened NetNewsWire without quite deciding to. The unread count is 43. I leave it there for a moment.

In Google Reader, I had a folder called “morning”: BBC World, NASA’s image of the day, Kottke, a few photography blogs whose authors I knew only by their kitchen windows. Later, in Feedly, I added Reddit feeds—r/AskHistorians, r/space, r/Breadit. Things I wanted to remember to look at, without having to remember where to look.

I followed the Curiosity landing that way, refreshing between updates, then stayed up reading someone’s account of watching it with their father. On a winter commute, I saved a long answer about medieval sleep and missed my stop. For months I followed a stranger’s attempts to make decent sourdough. Eventually there was a loaf with an open crumb, and I was absurdly pleased.

The aggregator would populate in little batches. Three posts, then twelve. A title arriving from a quiet blog could change what I did with the next half hour.

Tonight I’m thinking about the Reddit feeds still sitting in my sidebar. I’ll probably leave them there after they stop updating. I’ve done that before.

There’s a photography blog in “morning” that hasn’t posted since 2018. I still check it sometimes. I remember the window.

I had Reddit feeds in NetNewsWire for years. r/askhistorians, r/woodworking, r/whatisthisthing. The last one was my favorite — someone would post a blurry photo of a rusted object and within minutes a stranger would identify it as a specific kind of boot jack or a piece of a loom. I never posted. I just watched.

The feeds lived alongside my friend Mara’s blog and a couple of small poetry journals and the AP wire. Everything in one list, everything in order, everything quiet. No algorithm deciding what I’d see. Just the slow accumulation of other people’s attention.

There was a feeling — I don’t know how to describe it without sounding sentimental — of opening the app in the morning and seeing the unread counts. Not anxiety. Something closer to a garden you tended by not tending it. The posts were just there, waiting, patient.

I know I could find these communities elsewhere. I know the content will still exist. But the shape of it will be different. It was the shape I liked. The quietness of it. The fact that I chose each one and they came to me in a line, like letters.

It’s late. I’m tired. I just wanted to say I noticed.

It’s past midnight and I just read that Reddit is turning off the RSS feeds. I keep thinking about my OPML file, the one I’ve carried between readers for fifteen years. NetNewsWire on the Mac, then Reeder on the iPad, syncing through Feedly like a nervous system I maintained by hand.

I remember subscribing to r/AskHistorians and waiting for the long answers to arrive in the queue, fully formed. Watching the unread count tick from 4 to 37 overnight, then sitting with coffee while the aggregator populated — each post landing with its own small weight. The r/analog feed delivering grainy photos of someone’s Pentax and a story about their father’s camera.

There was a particular quiet thrill in pulling the thread of a feed, knowing the new items came because they existed and I had asked for them, not because a machine guessed I might engage. Now that thread goes silent. It’s a small absence in the machine, but I feel the shape of it.

It’s past midnight and I just read the news. Reddit is killing its RSS feeds and shutting down public API access. They’re blaming AI bots for scraping. I don’t want to argue about whether that’s right. I just want to sit here for a minute and remember what I’m losing.

I remember Google Reader. I remember the exact day it shut down in 2013, and how I scrambled to export my subscriptions with Takeout. I had hundreds of feeds in folders: tech blogs like Daring Fireball and Kottke.org, webcomics like xkcd, niche forums, a few Reddit subs — r/AskHistorians, r/MechanicalKeyboards — piped in through RSS because I never wanted to actually visit Reddit itself.

There was a ritual to it. Open the aggregator, watch the unread count climb, then work through it like a stack of letters. NetNewsWire on my Mac, Feedly on my phone later, then Tiny Tiny RSS when I wanted to self-host everything. The joy wasn’t just the content. It was the quiet, chronological, unalgorithmic sense that the world was handing me its updates and I could get to them whenever I felt like it. No feed deciding what mattered. Just a list, growing slowly, waiting patiently.

Now another door closes. Another place where I chose what to see gets replaced by a place that chooses for me. I don’t have a big point to make tonight. I just wanted to write this down before the feeds go dark — one more small way I followed the world, gone.