The creator of Instapaper doesn't see the value-add of using an RSS reader to skim the postings of a high-volume site, for readability/usability reasons?
He didn't say anything to that effect at all. The only things that come close to that characterization are:
1. "If a site posts many items each day and you barely read any of them, delete that feed." (emphasis mine) If you're skimming all the items in a feed and deriving value from it, this piece of advice doesn't apply.
2. "RSS works best when following a large number of infrequently updated sites." Works best, not only works.
3. "It’s not enough to interleave their posts into a “river” or “stream” paradigm [...] because many of them would get buried in the noise of higher-volume feeds and people’s tweets." It's not enough, not that it's categorically not valuable.
The whole article dovetails nicely with Instapaper's purpose, which is to ensure you don't miss reading articles you find important. Relying solely on a river of news that's filled with high volume sources leads to a high chance of missing stuff you otherwise want to keep close tabs on. Pretty uncontroversial stuff.
> "You shouldn’t come back to hundreds or thousands of unread articles." ... "you shouldn’t subscribe to feeds that would generate that kind of unread volume." ... "you’re using it in a way that’s not good for you."
These sorts of prescriptive statements don't read as "I see the value others may derive from other use cases." They explicitly read as "I don't see the value" and "I've looked and I don't think it exists."
Further, using an RSS reader to skim a frequently-updated site, of which I read only a few articles, is precisely the point.
High quantities of postings exacerbates the flaws of their designs. But with RSS, it's easy to skim pages of headlines. After a long weekend I can deal with hundreds of unread articles precisely because I'm interested in so little.
If there were aggregating services that delivered what I was looking for, I'd certainly prefer that. But I haven't found them.
That's a curious blind-spot.