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.
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.
Seconding Feedly. I was Google Reader ride or die till the last day, and Feedly stepped up and offered an account import iirc so people could just swap right over. Did so immediately and have been with them ever since.
Hasn’t been a single news story or article (in my fields of interest) that has popped up on Reddit over the last 12+ years that I haven’t also seen via RSS feeds +/- an hour of it’s appearance. Just have to deal once every couple years with removing/replacing a dead/changed feed and that’s a mild enough annoyance with any RSS reader.
I’d suggest getting into the !selfhosted@lemmy.world community. Plenty of alternatives to host your own rss feed manager that helps to keep that feeling of “freedom” when reading your stuff. I’m personally attached to freshrss, and it works great!
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/
Let’s take this opportunity to list out your favourite RSS websites. Let us know what all are your favourites.
I like https://medium.com/feed/@doctorow and https://www.techdirt.com/feed/
https://www.weather.gov has good local weather if you want that in your RSS feed
https://www.weather.gov has good local weather if you want that in your RSS feed
How do you get an RSS feed for your local weather?
They’ve got a little tool to help you pick the ones near you/of interest, mine is a local airport https://w1.weather.gov/xml/current_obs/
and remember, the weather channel is the reason the weather service hasn’t made this a convenient website/app!
Edit: and here’s the one that tells you local watches and warnings for your county! https://alerts.weather.gov/index.php
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
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
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.
Firefox has addons that can help: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/get-rss-feed-url/reviews/
safari, chrome etc also have 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.
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.
Wow I’ve been doing this for years and my kids thought I was a dinosaur. Is it cool again?
It’s always been cool, but a lot of people gave it up due to lack of good quality tools and content sites actively working against it. Glad to see the community is still alive and trying to get back to it.
Well when I first started, a lot of the smaller news outlets didn’t support rss but I actually wrote some scraper scripts for the ones that interested me. Then there was kind of a golden age where everyone had rss. And then yeah, they started hiding everything behind paywalls and what not. So today, I get as much news as I can through rss and some extra paid content through an Apple News+ subscription. If only the latter allowed you to rss its channels, but it looks pretty locked down.
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.
