Bruce Eckel is an intelligent guy. He wrote “Thinking in Java“, in case you did not know him. In this post he discusses the RSS phenomena and why it’s wrong.
Now I can agree to the fact that RSS readers create way more traffic than people that ordinarily surf to a website and click on a bunch of hyperlinks. RSS readers do in fact poll each website the reader is subscribed to whether there is a change. Yet. Can’t agree more.
But this (knowing a subscription changed the day/minute/second it has changed) is not the reason why I use an RSS reader. Nor is it anonymity. The reason is the sheer number of subscriptions I have. How on earth am I supposed to click through a couple of hundred websites to see if something changed? And when I am at number 176, of course just when I missed it, number 173 has changed. So while waiting for an answer in a forum, a patch to a bug or just the news about the latest release of your my favorite piece of software, I missed it because I was manually browsing the internet. Manually browsing the internet is from the past century. The internet is too big to do that.
Of course I could subscribe to a mailinglist. And create a gazillion message-rules in my mailreader. Why? I have an RSS reader. And yes, it gives me anonymity as well. Even Artima needs you to sign in to even comment on Bruce’s post. Why? Afraid that Anonymous_Coward would leave an inappropriate comment? Don’t allow anonymous commenting then. Create a clever check for the email address or display the IP-address. Why should I want an Artima ID just to place some comments?
Get a life. If you don’t want traffic on your website, don’t create an RSS-feed. How’s that?
One other thing: how about reversing the situation. You update your website, and you send a notification to all subscribers. Do you know what would happen? Right. Your ISP would cut you off, because of….spamming activities.