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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Thank you for this YSK post, I’ve set up my first reader/feed and think this will be a nice value-added system since ditching Reddit a few weeks back. Especially in concert with Lemmy!
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 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/
I’d suggest getting into the [email protected] 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!
Having used many alternatives including feedly that is mentioned below, I highly recommend inoreader.
I’ve been using Thunderbird for programming.dev feeds. I don’t know if there’s anything better but it works for me
Haha just saw this from lemmy
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
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.
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.
Been a Feedly user for years and I love it. I browse it throughout the day.
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!
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.
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
Newsblur is my favorite. It’s paid, but I find the subscription fee reasonable.
Has some of the old social features of gReader, but it’s not that active.
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.
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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…
Love feedly - been using it since Google Reader was discontinued
That’s exactly when I found it as well… 👍
I did this a few days ago and fucked up. do not add sites that requires a paid subscription. lol
How does one do this? Because I can think of a few ideas for this.
Try inoreader and subscribe to sites you need + set up some filters to weed out bad stuff. The latter is unfortunately a premium option, but worth those a few $.
Just imagine - why exactly do you need to learn about yet another case of [todler/infant/baby/child] [killed/abused] across the ocean?
I’m really liking the app Read You on Android, but there are many others. Pretty much any news site or blog or something you can add it by URL. Sometimes you need to add /rss to the end of it.
Outlook and Thunderbirds both have embedded RSS readers.
Just download an RSS reader - there are mobile ones like feedly, and in-browser ones Like FeedBro for Firefox. After that, find an RSS feed for your site, and add it to your reader
Love Feedbro. Got it running on a server to post Twitter posts into my Discord server as it still seems to work seemlessly with Twitter
Twitter has RSS feeds? More importantly, Feedbro can still access them?
Yeah just add a feed in Feedbro and the URL just needs to be the URL of the Twitter profile and it will pick it up. It broke during Musk’s little bitch fit the other day but it’s working again now. So much better than actually having to use Twitter!
I’ve had a good experience with Feedly. they have a free and paid tier. I use the free one, and even keep up with one subreddit that won’t be migrating. I also added my local news websites which eliminated a need for Facebook.
I don’t know anything about RSS. Can someone point me in the right direction to start?
In a nutshell, an RSS feed reader will aggregate any articles/posts from sites you choose. I pull all my local news and a subreddit into my reader.
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.
