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If you’re reading this, you’ve come back to your senses after being knocked cold by a second SCS post in a single day.

Check out what happens when new business requirements collide with existing user behavior: The Last Word (for Now) on Our RSS Feed: An Excruciatingly Long and Boring Post That Will Please Exactly No One.

The Freakonomics authors moved their blog to nytimes.com. Because Times advertisers pay considerably more (as in, they pay period) based on the site visit metric, the Freakonomics Blog’s RSS feed provides no profit if it doesn’t result in a pageview on nytimes.com. Thus, the decision to restrict the feed to a summary, alienating the users who always read the Freakonomics Blog in their blog reader.

Well, we are still giving away our content for free. It’s just that you have to come to NYTimes.com to read it. I don’t blame feed readers for being disappointed about no longer receiving the content they’d gotten used to, for free, delivered so they can read it offline, etc. That’s what accommodation and loss aversion are about: if something you have is taken away, it’s more painful than if you’d never had it in the first place.

I like to think I would go down swinging in defense of the full RSS feed (and I would go down, there’s no doubt I would lose that battle). Generally, I think it’s bad form to expect people to modify their behavior to accommodate your changes, unless the modification is clearly better for everyone.