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.
I’d like to see RSS feeds as communitys/magazines.
Reeder for iOS is a great app. I think one of the most minimal and beautiful apps. It’s paid though.
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 like FeedMe (on Android). It’s really versatile to customise the UX to your liking.
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
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.
Wow I’ve been doing this for years and my kids thought I was a dinosaur. Is it cool again?
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.
Feedly
I use an app called feeder. It works really well and is FOSS.
