David Megginson posted today about The case against easier feed subscriptions, noting that if it’s too easy to subscribe to a feed, it will also be too easy to sneak a subscription into someone’s feed reader and use it for illegitimate purposes. The response I posted was as follows:

“Good point! The approach I’d favor would be to make it easy to view a feed, but require another click to subscribe to it. It’s a little odd to me that feed readers require you to subscribe to a feed in order to view it. Subscribing to a feed is like bookmarking a webpage. While your web browser may keep a temporary history of every page you’ve viewed, it doesn’t bookmark all of them automatically. Feed readers should offer this same mode of operation.”