The way we consume content on the internet is increasingly driven by walled-garden platforms and black-box feed algorithms. This shift is making our media diets miserable. Ironically, a solution to the problem predates algorithmic feeds, social media and other forms of informational junk food. It is called RSS (Really Simple Syndication) and it is beautiful.
What the hell is RSS?#
RSS is just a format that defines how websites can publish updates (articles, posts, episodes, and so on) in a standard feed that you can subscribe to using an RSS reader (or aggregator). Don’t worry if this sounds extremely uninteresting to you; there aren’t many people that get excited about format specifications; the beauty of RSS is in its simplicity. Any content management system or blog platform supports RSS out of the box, and often enables it by default. As a result, a large portion of the content on the internet is available to you in feeds that you can tap into. But this time, you’re in full control of what you’re receiving, and the feeds are purely reverse chronological bliss. Coincidentally, you might already be using RSS without even knowing, because the whole podcasting world runs on RSS.
There are many amazing articles about the utility and elegance of RSS, and I do not think the world needs another, so I will spare you and instead focus on my personal experience and tips. If you are interested in a deeper dive, I highly recommend Molly White’s article Curate your own newspaper with RSS. It is a convincing, well-written article that you can also listen to in Molly’s own voice if you wish to.
Broken distribution models#
Here’s a little story about the promise of social media. In 2011, my band was getting a little more serious and preparing to record our first album. Facebook was rapidly growing all over the world, so I created an account - mostly to manage my band’s Facebook page. Back then, social media (and Facebook in particular) felt very different: vibrant and full of promise for the brave new future of web 2.0. I looked up all my favorite bands so that every time they put out an album or tour near me, I wouldn’t miss it. Many bands either lacked proper websites or rarely updated them in a useful way, so this felt like the perfect use case for Facebook.
It didn’t take long for me to start seeing the cracks. As Facebook would push for more engagement, some bands would flood their pages with multiple posts per day, especially if they were touring or had a new release coming up. Others would be more restrained, but then their posts would often be lost in the feed. There was no way to opt in only for a certain type of updates from my followed pages, and the increasingly algorithmic feed would simply prioritize posts by engagement. I realized that I wouldn’t be able to get just the important updates; instead, I’d get a wild mish-mash of engagement-bait that I wasn’t willing to work my way through. And don’t get me started about how over time, page owners had to pay to promote their posts to get any reach on the platform - that is simply extortion.
I no longer use Facebook (or any similar social media for that matter) for many reasons, though algorithmic feeds are at the top of the list. Algorithms on social media are very unlikely to be written with your best interest in mind: The goal of social media is to keep you glued to the feed for as long as possible. It optimizes for the most time spent, for engagement, for serving the most ads. It will not necessarily optimize for keeping you well informed, showing you balanced opinions, giving you control or even showing you all the information you’d like. The misalignment of incentives has become very apparent in the last few years, but the problem goes deeper. Any type of curation (because algorithmic feeds are simply curation machines) will never be flexible enough to account for every person’s needs. The story we are sold with algorithmic curation is that it adapts to everyone’s taste and interests, but that’s only true until the interests of the advertisers enter the picture.
How I use RSS#
My RSS journey starting many moons ago with Opera and Thunderbird, continued with Google Reader (RIP) and The Old Reader, and finally led me to running my own instance of FreshRSS. However, in the last year, I have read most of the content from my RSS feeds on my phone via the FeedMe app. I find that it scratches the itch of unlocking your phone and wanting to see something novel (probably gravitating towards social media). On the upside, it feeds me only articles and media that a) I have picked upfront and nothing more, b) is typically longer-form and more thoughtful than your typical social media posts.
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