For me the hassle of checking different things in different place made it so that I would only check "a few" places.

With RSS I'm crawling under a huge load of articles that I always have to clear up. I used to be extremely addicted to that, I used it to get through work stuff now and when I have weeks of articles pilling up in my feed I feel bad.

I use it, and definitely love that, but it def. re-enforce addiction, not the contrary.

For me it cured the addiction. On my view I could see if there are relevant news and if not get done very fast as to compared to visiting each site on my own. Then the occasional backlog made me realize that most isn't even relevant. That lead to a more healthy relationship with news.