To solve your problem: in Google Reader, click the dropdown in the Subscriptions pane and click "Hide unread counts".

Nice tip, thanks.

You'll probably want to also do this for the "All items" section as well, that'll take care of the unread count in the page's title.

Ah, I never noticed that :-)

I keep pruning, but I haven't been able to get away, partly because I read things that never show up anywhere else, plus it's still the most efficient mechanism of consuming information, at least for me, since you can crunch through full text posts in one location. That said, other sources, notably Friendfeed and aggregators have resulted in the removal of all feeds where the good stories end up bubbling to the top there.

This logic makes no sense to me. To me the whole point of a feed reader is to not miss items. So you're saying you went to Twitter so you could "ignore it when you don't want" but that means you never needed a feed reader in the first place.

I mean, if you don't care about missing important items and Twitter works for you that's great. But to me it doesn't solve the problem feed readers are trying to solve.

I don't think that's the original problem at all. the original problem was simply aggregating a bunch of feeds into one page. I use my feed reader a lot and have no problems with using the "mark all as read" button every so often.

I also use Twitter as a sort of malformed feed reader. In fact, I blogged about it a bit ago, so in lieu of writing something new: http://scigrad.blogspot.com/2009/04/science-twittering.html