Someone I know once described Twitter as being a river that you dipped into when you had the time and the interest. I think RSS was similar but, as you say, the clients had a somewhat different model. You could get around by having a priority category or something like that.

https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/tech/TwitterBreakin...

> I need to treat it as a stream that I dip my toe into every so often