YSK: Use RSS feeds to curate your online experience
YSK: Use RSS feeds to curate your online experience
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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Let’s take this opportunity to list out your favourite RSS websites. Let us know what all are your favourites.
The Verge is a cool website with RSS
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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 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
I'm a big user user of weather.gov, but curious what you mean by blaming weather service for this not being convenient?
Tech dirt isn’t adding for some reason
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 themThis is a tricky problem to solve for sure. I've been battling it for a while myself.
For an app, I really enjoy using Pluma RSS for Android. It's been in Beta for a while.. but it's quite sleek and easy to use. I'm not sure why it has a 3.7 on the Play Store, but it works for me.
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.