I don't like RSS readers. I know, this is blasphemous especially on a website where I'm actively encouraging you to subscribe through RSS. As someone writing stuff, RSS is great for me. I don't have to think about it, the requests are pretty light weight, I don't need to think about your personal data or what client you are using. So as a protocol RSS is great, no notes.
However as something I'm going to consume, it's frankly a giant chore. I feel pressured by RSS readers, where there is this endlessly growing backlog of things I haven't read. I rarely want to read all of a websites content from beginning to end, instead I like to jump between them. I also don't really care if the content is chronological, like an old post about something interesting isn't less compelling to me than a newer post.
What I want, as a user experience, is something akin to TikTok. The whole appeal of TikTok, for those who haven't wasted hours of their lives on it, is that I get served content based on an algorithm that determines what I might think is useful or fun. However what I would like is to go through content from random small websites. I want to sit somewhere and passively consume random small creators content, then upvote some of that content and the service should show that more often to other users. That's it. No advertising, no collecting tons of user data about me, just a very simple "I have 15 minutes to kill before the next meeting, show me some random stuff."
In this case the "algorithm" is pretty simple: if more people like a thing, more people see it. But with Google on its way to replacing search results with LLM generated content, I just wanted to have something that let me play around with the small web the way that I used to.
There actually used to be a service like this called StumbleUpon which was more focused on pushing users towards popular sites. It has been taken down, presumably because there was no money in a browser plugin that sent users to other websites whose advertising you didn't control.
TL;DR
You can go download the Firefox extension now and try this out and skip the rest of this if you want. https://timewasterpro.xyz/ If you hate it or find problems, let me know on Mastodon. https://c.im/@matdevdug
Functionality
So I wanted to do something pretty basic. You hit a button, get served a new website. If you like the website, upvote it, otherwise downvote it. If you think it has objectionable content then hit report. You have to make an account (because I couldn't think of another way to do it) and then if you submit links and other people like it, you climb a Leaderboard.
On the backend I want to (very slowly so I don't cost anyone a bunch of money) crawl a bunch of RSS feeds, stick the pages in a database and then serve them up to users. Then I want to track what sites get upvotes and return those more often to other users so that "high quality" content shows up more often. "High quality" would be defined by the community or just me if I'm the only user.
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