"Almost nobody uses feed readers" - prove it. I'll read that as "I stopped using it, therefore how could anyone else possibly want to?"

"which is why Google shut down Reader in the first place" - nope, Google wants to stuff us all into their walled Google+ crap and feed us ads. Notice the lack of RSS feeds for updates.

"You guys are a small but INCREDIBLY vocal minority" - this is a discussion that involves Google's cack handed behaviour with Reader, what do you expect. If you don't use RSS then why the hell do you care, stay out of the discussion.

> You guys are a small but INCREDIBLY vocal minority.

24-36m people is a vocal minority?

what kind of geek doesn't have EZRSS and a few other torrent feeds fed into Sickbeard or FlexGet for automatic television/movie/game downloading?

Me.

I have never watched much TV, skip most movies, and am unable to play any first shooter from Doom onwards without getting motion sick. Plus I think that I should respect copyrights.

Let me turn it around. What true nerd would consider consumption of mass market media a defining characteristic of nerdom? As opposed to, say, burying your nose in a math text for fun?

> [...] am unable to play any first shooter from Doom onwards without getting motion sick.

Wow, I thought this was just me! This prevents me from playing even the good stuff like Portal, which is a terrible pity.

Try increasing the FOV.

I tried to watch a video of Portal. I failed.

It was clear to me that increasing the field of view would not help.

Thank you for calling me on the No True Scotsman fallacy, then perpetuating the same in your reply. :)

Shame about your respect for copyright in the digital age; I'm in full agreement with you otherwise.

I didn't say I don't use RSS; I just don't use it for news (or any kind of reading). I plumb it into automation quite often, though.

and you use google reader for your plumbing? does that not seem a little robust for such an activity?

I'd say that is a fairly mainstream geek kind of thing, I associate it with the kind of video game playing, reddit frequenting geek. (Yes overly broad stereotypes).

I would never participate in automatic torrenting; I am pretty discerning about what I watch.

Additionally, RSS feeds just seem pointless to me; I visit web sites when I want to consume information from them. I dislike the idea of turning my computer into a television.

You can still be discerning in your automatic torrenting. For instance, Flexget has an option to download S01E01's of television, and the ability to check Metacritic ratings for Games/Movies before downloading (I have a threshold of 75% or above). While I tend to find a bunch of tripe television (the wife enjoys it, and I built her media center out of love), I happily delete the awful stuff, and don't add it to the list of "automatically download this title" shows I've curated.