I have not done any throttling yet. I do however feel more relaxed looking at the list of unplayed episodes, so that counts for something.
After thinking about podcasts, I started on my RSS feeds. That seemed a reasonable place to cut things too. I looked at my subscriptions and realized just how few feeds I subscribe to. I subscribe to about twenty feeds, all of them very low volume by any measure. Perhaps a fourth of them are likely to have updates on a single day. One of my first thoughts after realizing just how low the numbers were was of course to cancel my feed service subscription. I am on my second year of subscribing to Feed wrangler and all over very happy with the service (and supporting an indie developer), but I am also very sensitive to subscriptions. Am I really benefitting enough to continue paying? With this few feeds I would easily be covered just surfing into each site once a day.
But that is really the value provided by RSS: saving me from reflexively surfing to a bunch of sites I follow while guaranteeing I will not miss anything by forgetting to check in for a few days. I am never at risk of missing anything, and so can lead a more relaxed life.
That is, I think, still worth paying for, regardless of the number of sites on the list. I would not be happier cancelling the service, replacing it with nothing, and I definitely would not be happier using a free option with a dubious future, dubious advertising, or both.
(… perhaps there is an open source RSS server I could set up by myself? Now that could be fun …)