David Sparks on why he still uses RSS:

As social networks took off, a lot of my friends that were previously big RSS fans gave up on the technology and instead relied upon sources like Twitter and Facebook to get their news.

…and then…

That only works if you go into Twitter much more frequently than I do. That’s why RSS is such a great solution for me. If a few days go by, I can open RSS and go through my carefully curated list of websites and get caught back up with the world.

I often make the case that new ways of doing things is better than the old. I believe Workflow is better than any scripting language for most people to do simple things with their computers, I believe obscuring the file system from users makes most tasks better, and I believe streaming music is better than dragging a bunch of MP3s over to a media player. And while I believe curated news services like Apple News and Flipboard can be better news-reading experiences for most people, I still prefer RSS for the websites that really matter to me.

I echo David’s sentiment about being able to catch up at my own speed, and I’d add that RSS is really the only way to know that I’m catching everything from the sites that I’m subscribed. Yes, it turns my news app into another app with an unread count, but the sites that I subscribe to are my favorite websites, and therefore are things I’m happy to see pile up. Having 100 new posts from my favorite writers is a lot more exciting than having 100 emails to sift through.