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.
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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.
Feedly does a good job with the free version. I just went back to it a few weeks ago.
I have found myself using Feedly more these past few weeks as well.
If you’re on Android, a great companion is the FeedMe app. It has a lot more customization options and can download (for offline reading) full articles, rather than just showing the snippet Feedly does.
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/
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.
Because it makes you think and gives you the opportunity to assess your own moral and ethical values. Reading things that you agree with is passive. Lots of people prefer things they can interact with
This is what I pretty much said - algorithms are amplifying already existing negative trends, and those who control them design the user experience for maximum engagement at the cost of the user’s mental wellbeing. We can shrug our shoulders and say “that’s just human nature” which does nothing to improve the situation, or we can create our own experience and “retrain the way we seek content” as you put it.
Right, but what I mean is it’s not just “algorithms” though, and tailoring your feed to be the top of reddit or lemmy (or other voter based platform) isn’t necessarily going to fix the ragebait issue. My comment wasn’t meant to disagree with your post, more of an addition.
Let’s take this opportunity to list out your favourite RSS websites. Let us know what all are your favourites.
The Verge is a cool website with RSS
https://zapier.com/blog/how-to-find-rss-feed-url/
I found this page pretty useful. It turns out WordPress does rss by default and a lot of websites are built on it. So there’s a good chance if a website doesn’t advertise if it has an rss feed available there will still be one at url.com/feed
I like using kill-the-newsletter.com to turn email newsletters into an RSS feed rather than filling up my email inbox
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Yeah, I tried doing this a while ago but got frustrated at how difficult it was to find good RSS feeds. I ended up using it mostly for local news and not much else.
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Lemmy supports RSS! You can use it to subscribe to communities and, even better, your inbox! Easy way to be notified of replies/dms/etc.
This is especially wonderful if you have multiple Lenny accounts, all your inboxes in one place!
Wow I’ve been doing this for years and my kids thought I was a dinosaur. Is it cool again?
It is cool again. (from another dinosaur)
Super cool
Taking the opportunity to plug my new favorite RSS app, Feeder. I found it recently from another Lemmy user. It’s FOSS, no ads, beautiful, and has lots of features. Here it is on Google Play and F-Droid.
Thanks, Nunti has been a pain in the ass for a while now and I’ve been looking to switch
One could also add SubReddits as RSS feeds. I wonder if we can do that for Lemmy also
You can! There is a RSS logo you can click on when you’re on the desktop version on Lemmy.
I have a list of all my subreddits as RSS feeds. Did some text transforming to add the RSS links and used an OPML generator to make the file. I was not adding 600+ subreddits individually, lol.
I’ve collected loads of RSS feeds, from Congress (bills and other happenings, etc.) to the NY Times, and Science Daily with their topic feeds. GitHub has a few OPML files, though some of the feeds are out of date. Tumblr used to have a way to export your followed blogs as OPML, but that broke at some point in 2020. Mastodon has RSS feeds for every profile, but it’s a pain to collect, as their CSV export outputs the address in the wrong format for the feed.
I use Feedbro on Firefox, and QuiteRSS & RSS Owlnix on my Windows desktop. I also use Podcast Addict on my phone for my podcasts and keep a copy of the OPML file in my RSS reader as backup.
Reeder for iOS is a great app. I think one of the most minimal and beautiful apps. It’s paid though.
Reeder is great. Well worth the $5.
Is it better than Inoreader? I’ve been trying to find a good IOS RSS reader and cannot find one I like, Inoreader is the closest but it’s only decent.
I really don’t follow any news website but I want to try this. So are there any Android apps which would suggest me some RSS feeds based on my interests?
Actually only news feed I can kind followed for a while was Google Discover. It would somehow(obviously with the data it stole frok me) would curate me articles which grab my interest. I wonder if there is any app like Google Discover but FOSS or at least privacy oriented.
Anyone got a good recommendation for Firefox?
Inoreader is web based RSS aggregator.
Feedbro is a very good RSS reader. It installs as an extension to Firefox.
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.
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.
What are you subbed too? Looking for recomendations.
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…
Been a Feedly user for years and I love it. I browse it throughout the day.
The majority of my information comes from RSS feeds. However, I depend on Lemmy (formerly I depended on Reddit) for the things that pop up in an area of interest that I might other wise have missed.
