Explicit Reading

Since the recent explosion of very bespoke software since I set up the fleet, there are a few patterns I've realised work much better for my brain. Chief among them is: mark as read should be an explicit action. By that I mean, apps that track unread state should not mark an item as read as a side effect of me opening it. It should require a second, explicit action to mark something as read. This could be a button at the bottom of an article, or replying to an email, but never implicit from just navigating through the app. I've been working custom an RSS client called Dripfeed with a rarity weighted algorithm. The scaling on my algorithm means that infrequent feeds are very strongly boosted, which is good but it meant that articles I already read would stick around at the top of my main feed for months. This led to building a priority queue style sort, with all unread items sitting above all read items. This helped, but meant when I opened posts they would be immediately banished from…