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.
Over reliance on algorhythms has degraded the user experience to the point that the average user is drowning in ragebait and extremist politics, because they drive up engagement
People on Reddit, a vote based platform, used to say this all the time and the front page was filled with ragebait.
Even here, sort by hot or top and most of it is anti-reddit/meta/twitter/capitalism memes or infuriating news articles.
Go back further, what hits the front page of large newspapers? Not puppies, that’s for sure.
At some point we have to stop blaming “the algorithm” and recognize that it’s human behaviour to seek out ragebait that trains the algorithms. Only way to remove ragebait from algorithmic or voter based platforms is to retrain the way we seek content really.
Because it makes you think and gives you the opportunity to assess your own moral and ethical values. Reading things that you agree with is passive. Lots of people prefer things they can interact with
This is what I pretty much said - algorithms are amplifying already existing negative trends, and those who control them design the user experience for maximum engagement at the cost of the user’s mental wellbeing. We can shrug our shoulders and say “that’s just human nature” which does nothing to improve the situation, or we can create our own experience and “retrain the way we seek content” as you put it.
Right, but what I mean is it’s not just “algorithms” though, and tailoring your feed to be the top of reddit or lemmy (or other voter based platform) isn’t necessarily going to fix the ragebait issue. My comment wasn’t meant to disagree with your post, more of an addition.
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
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 using kill-the-newsletter.com to turn email newsletters into an RSS feed rather than filling up my email inbox
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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.
This is a tricky problem to solve for sure. I’ve been battling it for a while myself.
Firefox has addons that can help: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/get-rss-feed-url/reviews/
safari, chrome etc also have them
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’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.
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.
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/
Feedly does a good job with the free version. I just went back to it a few weeks ago.
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.
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!
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.
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)
This is how the Reddit “addicts” can get by without Reddit and help generate content elsewhere. Find an interesting article that you’d like to discuss or see other people’s opinion on in your RSS feed? Post it to kbin or Lemmy (or whatever you use).
I completely forgot RSS was a thing even though I’m kinda old. Just got the Feeder app on iOS and added a bunch of feeds I’m interested in. Now I can scroll through and it’s kinda like browsing Reddit but without the comments section.
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.
Been a Feedly user for years and I love it. I browse it throughout the day.
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.
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
RSS is the best – I’ve been self hosting a personal tt-rss server since the time google reader went down and never looked back when it comes to “a place to scroll and get all kinds of great info/news/entertainment/etc” and for the most part even a lot of the “big places” still support it, or you an use services like https://morss.it/ to generate them.
I have a list of all my subreddits as RSS feeds. Did some text transforming to add the RSS links and used an OPML generator to make the file. I was not adding 600+ subreddits individually, lol.
I’ve collected loads of RSS feeds, from Congress (bills and other happenings, etc.) to the NY Times, and Science Daily with their topic feeds. GitHub has a few OPML files, though some of the feeds are out of date. Tumblr used to have a way to export your followed blogs as OPML, but that broke at some point in 2020. Mastodon has RSS feeds for every profile, but it’s a pain to collect, as their CSV export outputs the address in the wrong format for the feed.
I use Feedbro on Firefox, and QuiteRSS & RSS Owlnix on my Windows desktop. I also use Podcast Addict on my phone for my podcasts and keep a copy of the OPML file in my RSS reader as backup.
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!
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.
On most rss readers you can just paste in the url of a youtube channel and it’ll find the rss feed for you, no need to dig about in the code. Worked for me in everything I’ve used over the years.
I like FeedMe (on Android). It’s really versatile to customise the UX to your liking.
