Over reliance on algorithms has degraded the user experience to the point that the average user is drowning in ragebait and extremist politics, because they drive up engagement. Just like a toddler, algorithms don’t discriminate between good and bad attention, so everything that gets clicks is thrust forward. Now, you could hope to train the algorithm to show you only postive things, but engagement is engagement and the algorithm curators often engage in rage farming, where your feed is injected with things that are likely to enrage you.
You can avoid this by installing an RSS reader, going to your favorite sites, and manually adding a RSS feed. Now, your reader has things that you manually selected, with the added bonus of having a content pipe free of malicious interference. You can also divide topics in a way that you can avoid certain themes and news until you decide to engage them.
Over reliance on algorhythms has degraded the user experience to the point that the average user is drowning in ragebait and extremist politics, because they drive up engagement
People on Reddit, a vote based platform, used to say this all the time and the front page was filled with ragebait.
Even here, sort by hot or top and most of it is anti-reddit/meta/twitter/capitalism memes or infuriating news articles.
Go back further, what hits the front page of large newspapers? Not puppies, that’s for sure.
At some point we have to stop blaming “the algorithm” and recognize that it’s human behaviour to seek out ragebait that trains the algorithms. Only way to remove ragebait from algorithmic or voter based platforms is to retrain the way we seek content really.
There was a time when Digg and Google Reader were still around that I never touched Reddit. I would just have Google Reader with a bunch of useful RSS feeds and if I wanted to have some social element, there was Digg. Then Digg shit the bed, Google got bored of Reader and I ended up on Reddit.
I think you’re right. It’s time to get RSS back in place.
Correct me if I am wrong, but doesn’t most RSS feeds just have the Title and a snippet these days. You still have to click through to read the article, right?
They mostly do by default, which is pretty annoying. But there are ways around it. I’m currently self-hosting a Miniflux instance where I can set per-feed whether or not it will try to parse the full text of each article. Most of the time that works, but on the off chance it doesn’t I fall back to Morss by prepending the feed with
http://fulltext/
Wow I’ve been doing this for years and my kids thought I was a dinosaur. Is it cool again?
RSS is the best – I’ve been self hosting a personal tt-rss server since the time google reader went down and never looked back when it comes to “a place to scroll and get all kinds of great info/news/entertainment/etc” and for the most part even a lot of the “big places” still support it, or you an use services like https://morss.it/ to generate them.
Let’s take this opportunity to list out your favourite RSS websites. Let us know what all are your favourites.
Here are a few TTRPG sites with RSS that I subscribe to
The Monsters Know What They’re Doing
I also like Autosport for F1 news
The Verge is a cool website with RSS
I’ve been using Inoreader for a couple of years and it’s just perfect. I was using Feedly before this, but Ino was just better at the time.
If you want to keep up to date with your feeds on multiple platforms you might consider a self hosted solution like freeRSS or a website like theoldreader.com I use the ladder but in the last few days I noticed an increase in ads which might indicate that it’s time for a change
Reeder for iOS is a great app. I think one of the most minimal and beautiful apps. It’s paid though.
I like FeedMe (on Android). It’s really versatile to customise the UX to your liking.
I’d like to see RSS feeds as communitys/magazines.
Youtube has rss feeds as well, but nowadays they’re hidden in the page source (you can just search for rss in the source)
Works for streamers as well, but the rss feed with trigger twice. Once for when they schedule the stream, and once for when the stream ends.
I’ve been using RSS for a decade or more–and love it. I currently have over 100 subscriptions at Feedly.com, which is my current favorite all-platform reader.
deleted by creator
There’s over a hundred of them! News (NYT, WP, LA Times), Movies & TV, I have custom RSS feeds based on Google Alerts… BoingBoing, Gizmodo…on and on. I believe it’s an official Shit Ton of them…
My problem with rss is that I can’t get rss feeds from 10 different websites and curate them into a single feed. The services I looked at charged out the ass for this and I couldn’t find a program to do it locally.
I don’t want to subscribe to someone else’s feed.
I use an app called feeder. It works really well and is FOSS.
Feedly
