Dear Gawker, "Why?"

So, um, earlier this week, the unthinkable happened: all the Gawker related blogs (including my faves, io9 and Jezebel) went from full feed RSS (where their entire article plus pictures were accessible) to limited (a small, tiny picture plus a paragraph).

I wrestled with what I should do. io9 has been my favorite source of Sci Fi nerd news for at least six months now. But it interrupts the flow of my reading if I have to click out every single time one of their articles.

And Jezebel is a nice addition, but since I'm subscribed to several other feminist-type blogs, I was ready to pull the trigger:



But then I read about how they now have a VIP RSS feed that still has the full feed, so don't worry! You can just subscribe to that one! Only....why make the change in the first place? Seems kind of silly.

I know there are reasons (websites views, stealing content, etc) to make it limited feed, but this is what happened in the few days between when the feed went limited and I discovered the VIP one: I began to imagine my life without Jezebel. Not so much io9, but suddenly, I couldn't even see the good parts of Jezebel, so why subscribe?

The same feeling came up a little with io9, but to a lesser extent. I had to be really interested in the article to read it. Now I was skipping more articles than I read. Its possible that I would eventually unsubscribe from it, too.

Another blog that I really, really enjoyed was a blog about Mad Men called Basket of Kisses. But the second they went to limited feed and confirmed it would stay that way...I stopped subscribing and stopped visiting. Actually had not been back since, until I decided to reference it.

After all, if you want me to pay attention to your product (blog in this case), you shouldn't make it super hard to get to. Did you really want to question my loyalty when there are so many options?