I agree that not showing any message is generally preferable.
GP seemed fixated on showing a lecture, which I thought was strictly worse than just showing a short message.
> If you're going to show that message, why are you a feed reader at all?
What? The feed readers I used showed status messages. Status messages are nice, they give the operator a fighting chance to understand what's going on and fix things if they've gone wrong.
If you're going to show that message, why are you a feed reader at all? Open the webpage and show the content.