Phantom Obligation
62 points by aarroyoc
62 points by aarroyoc
No animations version: https://www.terrygodier.com/phantom-obligation/ascii
I was into this until I hit this paragraph:
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.
I can’t remember last time I had an email from an actual person. It’s usually order & shipping confirmations, utility payment reminders, appointment reminders of various kinds, spam from me getting the opt-out vs opt-in to marketing wrong on a form, unsolicited spam, etc.
It jarred enough that I came here to comment about it immediately. Now to decide whether to bother continue reading…
I do still get some email from real people. Not all that much, but occasionally - and that tends to be the email that I actually do want to pay attention to.
Problem is, it quickly gets buried underneath the flood of automated email unless I do something about that. I figured out a heuristic recently that's been pretty effective and blogged about it: basically, filter out email with an external image embedded in it. I think email like that is almost always sent from an automated system of some sort :)
You should submit this as a story!
@jfred : I agree. That's a really good piece. And if you don't submit your own post, I plan to submit it, because I think that's a neat heuristic and I'm curious how it'll line up once other people add their observations around here.
I automatically mark all email that contains the word “unsubscribe” as read. That way, I only get notifications for real emails, but receipts and confirmations and mailing lists still end up in my inbox.
Yeah. The badge on my iOS Mail icon says “237k”. I have a friend who’s devoted to “inbox zero”, and I like to scare them with it.
(Early versions of iOS topped out at “1k+”, but now it’s not afraid to tell the shocking truth.)
I have a friend who’s devoted to “inbox zero”, and I like to scare them with it.
It makes me feel a little better that I'm not the only one who does that to a friend. Also, your total makes my 91k-ish badge feel damn close to "inbox zero".
She gets her revenge by showing me her battery indicator below 15% and triggering my battery anxiety, then refusing my offer of an external battery + cable.
I’ve just disabled badges. Not because the mail unread counter is so high (I too maintain a clean inbox), but just because no email is so important/urgent that I should get instantly notified.
I can’t remember last time I had an email from an actual person.
Going through my old e-mails, we used to e-mail each other all the time about stuff even with people not in computing per se. It's a shame we don't do that anymore. I agree my inbox is almost entirely transactional junk.
You can still have people sending you emails, but you have to put some effort into it. I keep two email accounts (one on protonmail, and one on a tildeverse server); I use one for Amazon and other services, and one for talking to people.
Also, you really do have to advertise the email as your primary point of contact. I only give my phone number out on a strictly need-to-know basis (and only to people I see in person and often), so email tends to be where everything else happens. (I do advertise my IRC as well, but "nobody" uses IRC regularly, so that doesn't really matter.)
Looking now, I can see five different people that contacted me in the past month.
That no-animation version should be the only one. I literally could not bring myself to complete the animated version. Being drip-fed a few sentences (which often read like they were written by a robot, whether they were or not) was just too painful to complete. There are some good ideas though.
That campfire interface idea in particular is intriguing. I could really see that working for my RSS experience. It’s not unlike what HN and lobste.rs do, bubbling recent stuff to the top. I’d never though of using it for RSS, but it makes some sense. Maybe it only works, though, if each data source posts on approximately the same pace? Otherwise the feed with dozens of posts a minute will overwhelm the feed with one a day.
That no-animation version should be the only one. I literally could not bring myself to complete the animated version. Being drip-fed a few sentences (which often read like they were written by a robot, whether they were or not) was just too painful to complete.
It's annoying how the animations seem to appear once the actual element is like mid-viewport, and then the elements disappear again when you scroll upwards. Very frustrating experience.
That no-animation version should be the only one. I literally could not bring myself to complete the animated version. Being drip-fed a few sentences (which often read like they were written by a robot, whether they were or not) was just too painful to complete.
I disagree, I actually quite enjoyed reading through the page with animations. It felt very well crafted, with many of the visuals contributing to the argument. I really enjoyed the designs for the river, campfire, window, and library segments, and the anxiety I felt watching the pulsing number at the beginning of the page did well in proving the point of the essay.
While I agree that the plain text version is important to include, I don't want to discredit the amount of effort put into the visuals of this essay.
You know what would be interesting? A ranked feed view for RSS that incorporated the user's own input.
With social sites like HN/Lobsters/Reddit/Tildes, the ranking is a combination of recency and community votes. If a user posts too much, a moderator might step in to say "Cut it out," but ideally that's the exception. Most feedback comes from votes, and that helps prevent frequent-but-uninteresting content from dominating.
With one's personal collection of RSS feeds, you don't have a community, but you could still have "voting" in combination with classic ML techniques like naive Bayes or logistic regression. I'm wondering how much mileage one would get out of that.
Email's unread count means something specific: these are messages from real people
I don't know how this is for others, but as of a few years, this no longer holds for me; the vast majority is automated (unsollicited newsletters, spam, invoices, status updates, notifications).
I don't see much spam. I unsubscribe from anything I don't want and block anything I can't unsubscribe from. When I get an email it's a really strong signal that it's relevant to me.
A better question is why are the unread counts in a bright red circle? I use Feedly, it has unread counts but they are deemphasized.
FWIW Dave Winer (old school internet curmudgeon, outline enthusiast, and creator of RSS) proposed a "River of News" about 15 years ago or more. He was basically questioning the same thing this piece is doing - emulating a mail reader when it comes to RSS.
Both kinds of feeds exist: some contain news that when I miss nothing is lost, while other feeds contain announcements that I don't want to miss, or other content I rather keep on unread to catch up later than let fade away.
I similarly didn’t like the email inbox metaphor so I designed my rss reader as an infinitely scrollable feed instead:
The underlying assumption of feedi’s design is that a scrollable feed, as seen in social media apps like Twitter, is a very convenient way to present information to the user. It’s not the interface but what content, the when and how it gets placed in front of me that I want to change and get a better handle on. Most importantly, I don’t want to have to actively manage an inbox—some daily backlog to clear. I want an app that automatically does the right thing by default, acknowledging that there’s an infinite stream of potentially interesting information to read about every day.
I like the sentiment here, but what they're describing is actually a well-known principle called Jakob's Law and they nail the explanation:
By using a familiar layout, something people already understood from email, he reduced the learning curve to almost nothing.
But it's interesting they don't name it directly.
For anyone curious: https://lawsofux.com/jakobs-law/
Worth noting that email isn't the only mental model we could lean on today. Social feeds, for instance, might actually be more intuitive for certain use cases now.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but even before Nielsen "coined" Jakobs Law, many of us who cared about UX were very well aware of the "Familiar vs Novel" principle, as it applies not only in the digital realm, but also for physical products, which we've been building for quite a while already.
For those interested in practical examples of the idea outlined in this post (= alternative RSS aggregator interfaces), I recommend lenns.io. It divides posts into the categories today, week, and month. Entries older than a month simply disappear. If you have a large volume of entries, you can also provide a per-RSS-feed prioritization, which makes posts coming from a higher-priority RSS feed appear above those with a lower prio. I like it a lot, and have been using it for at least two years now. I'm planning to make a similar system for a blogroll on my site, as soon as I figure out how to refresh my SSG-based site on a daily basis with minimal configuration/dependencies.
This is "marketing" or "growth" or just "psychological manipulation". Maybe not so much on an RSS reader or in an email client.
We see that with companies intruding your "this might be important" channels. From (non-electronic) mails to cold calls, from e-mails to whatsapp and apps in general.
It's a cancer, yet most companies hire legions of people whose whole goal is to spread said cancer and the world rewards them for it.
See also login streaks, preying on the same psychology.
It's disgusting, but normalized, accepted, even incentivized and rewarded.
This is one of my issues with RSS, it doesn't have infinite scroll like many social media platforms today, but somehow I feel mandated to read everything to lower the number of unread stories. And what is worse, some RSS readers auto expire stories, which is more pressure to read it, otherwise I will lose its visibility and then I'll forget about it. In the end though, most stories don't need to be read, you will probably won't have any significant advantage reading all of them... but the mind is tricky.
I like the ideas behind this, but I just couldn't continue reading the obviously AI-generated prose. It feels deeply grating to be reading what is supposed to be a humanistic post in such an impersonal and contrived style.
as the author of this piece I can assure you that no ai was used in writing it. it makes me sad :(
I hate having to ponder the provenance of any article I read. I did question this one because of the style of short, punchy sentences, but decided it was human-written because of the lack of specific AI tells.
totally get it. I think what you're seeing with my essay is just my extraordinarily neurotic way of refining and cutting and polishing in my editor. I use a Mac writing app called Hemingway that encourages me to be brutal about trimming sentences.
I’ve been maintaining my own RSS reader for 20 years now, and my design principles are: 1) no unread counts, and 2) only check feeds occasionally, don’t worry about missing an article.
The difference also looks similar to IRC plus public logs somewhere vs full-backlog client for firehose-type chats (like project support channel for newcomers).
No animation version
Is there a version with legible text? Why do people think tiny and low-contrast equates to cool?? It's especially frustrating from someone who clearly cares about design and its effect on people.
[Edit because in my frustration I hastily posted only my complaint] Good ideas here though. Would like to see some of these more fleshed out. If nothing else, the term "phantom obligation" is succinct and poignant.
great stuff. i'm also susceptible to "notification guilt" when it comes to applications, and had the same revelation about rss - this is exactly the reason i built vore.website -- a chronological, simple, guilt-free rss reader that is light & easy to use, and free for all. if this article resonates with you, give it a shot!
Nice article, cool presentation.
And yet I (personally) fundamentally disagree with the premise. Maybe it's true for some people, but I'm a "completionist" who still does not feel compelled to catch up. I have 2 RSS readers (does not really matter why, short version is that I consume different types of sites differently) and both have vast amounts of unread items and I don't care a bit.
By completionist I mean: if I could only get a snapshot of the the last 5 posts per feed, or a random selection, I would simply not subscribe at all.
I don’t have this issue as much with my use of Inoreader, mainly because I:
That said, it sucks that it’s effectively up to the individual user to curate the settings like this.