I just yanked all of my RSS subscriptions from my RSS Reader for DZone. What is DZone, you ask? DZone is a site for news for developers. At least, that's what it should be. What I've found time and time again is a lot of half-baked ideas on some blog somewhere, or worse, some ad-hominem attack against a particular development language or community. While I'm up for the usual sparring contests that arise from geek passions (Ruby vs. Java vs. Python vs. Algol66 vs Etc.) what sent me over the edge was the RSS feeds themselves. What should be a site where the good links get promoted higher than the bad links unfortunately becomes a flood of all of the links in the RSS reader. How do I put the benefits of the community "group-think" to work for me in my RSS reader? Unfortunately, I don't think there's a way to just have a feed of the top-rated stories for the day. So, I suffer with things like "Thanks to Zed, Ruby related posts on jroller are at an all time low", and other advertising dreck. Worse, I have to click over to the DZone site itself to get to the actual site, so I've already invested two clicks to get to what I want. No thanks.

I've really liked some of the planets out there (Planet Ruby, Planet Python, Planet Ubuntu, etc.) Sure, they're susceptible to the same problems as DZone (unfiltered access), but I can make the determination in my RSS reader of whether or not I want to read the article any further. It fits right in with my 2 minute rule for reading RSS feeds. Plus, I get all of the content in the post (full text feeds rock), so if I want to click on something else in the article, I can.

I'll still keep likely keep m DZone account for a while, but unless it can shed some of the issues I have with the RSS feeds (which, coincidentally are the same reasons I read Slashdot rather than Digg - I like edited content, thanks), I won't be resubscribing anytime soon.