this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2023
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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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[–] [email protected] 54 points 1 year ago (5 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Feedly does a good job with the free version. I just went back to it a few weeks ago.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

Seconding Feedly. I was Google Reader ride or die till the last day, and Feedly stepped up and offered an account import iirc so people could just swap right over. Did so immediately and have been with them ever since.

Hasn't been a single news story or article (in my fields of interest) that has popped up on Reddit over the last 12+ years that I haven't also seen via RSS feeds +/- an hour of it's appearance. Just have to deal once every couple years with removing/replacing a dead/changed feed and that's a mild enough annoyance with any RSS reader.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

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!

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[–] [email protected] 37 points 1 year ago (12 children)

Let’s take this opportunity to list out your favourite RSS websites. Let us know what all are your favourites.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago

The Verge is a cool website with RSS

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

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

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

I like using kill-the-newsletter.com to turn email newsletters into an RSS feed rather than filling up my email inbox

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Here are a few TTRPG sites with RSS that I subscribe to

The Alexandrian

The Monsters Know What They’re Doing

Dicebreaker

Sly Flourish

I also like Autosport for F1 news

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[–] [email protected] 33 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Wow I've been doing this for years and my kids thought I was a dinosaur. Is it cool again?

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It is cool again. (from another dinosaur)

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It's always been cool, but a lot of people gave it up due to lack of good quality tools and content sites actively working against it. Glad to see the community is still alive and trying to get back to it.

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Shameless plug: I made a magazine, @rss, for RSS. It has approximately zero content right now but I'd love for people to start using it to exchange ideas, comments, and questions about feeds.

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (6 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (3 children)

FreshRSS or Tiny Tiny RSS are just a couple of self hosted options. I just setup FreshRSS last week and am using FeedMe app on Android to read my feeds.

My only issue so far is not every site has RSS feeds anymore. I tried RSS-Bridge in docker, but had issues figuring out how to enable the bridges, the documentation for it isn't great.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (6 children)

Reeder for iOS is a great app. I think one of the most minimal and beautiful apps. It’s paid though.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

NetNewsWire is also great and it's free

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Came here to big up Reeder! You can switch on Bionic Reading too which is a game changer for us dyslexics and tbh all apps ought to have it

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

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

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

One could also add SubReddits as RSS feeds. I wonder if we can do that for Lemmy also

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago

You can! There is a RSS logo you can click on when you’re on the desktop version on Lemmy.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (4 children)

How does one do this? Because I can think of a few ideas for this.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Just download an RSS reader - there are mobile ones like feedly, and in-browser ones Like FeedBro for Firefox. After that, find an RSS feed for your site, and add it to your reader

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Try inoreader and subscribe to sites you need + set up some filters to weed out bad stuff. The latter is unfortunately a premium option, but worth those a few $.

Just imagine - why exactly do you need to learn about yet another case of [todler/infant/baby/child] [killed/abused] across the ocean?

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I've actually created a Lemmy instance (Lemmy.link) to bridge the gap between RSS feeds and Lemmy. We have 36 communities (topics) you can subscribe to from your home instance. Each community has the RSS sources listed in the "Feeds" section of the community sidebar. I'm always open to feedback on new community ideas or how to make it better. Currently I'm working on having the bot parse the article and ignore if it is an ad or sponsored and also including the channel name in the subject line for YouTube sources. Eventually I'd also like to train a model on which topics don't receive upvotes or comments and attempt to ignore them for a better signal:noise ratio.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (4 children)

I've been using RSS for a decade or more--and love it. I currently have over 100 subscriptions at Feedly.com, which is my current favorite all-platform reader.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I’ve been using Thunderbird for programming.dev feeds. I don’t know if there’s anything better but it works for me

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

I really don't follow any news website but I want to try this. So are there any Android apps which would suggest me some RSS feeds based on my interests?

Actually only news feed I can kind followed for a while was Google Discover. It would somehow(obviously with the data it stole frok me) would curate me articles which grab my interest. I wonder if there is any app like Google Discover but FOSS or at least privacy oriented.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Anyone got a good recommendation for Firefox?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Inoreader is web based RSS aggregator.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I don't know anything about RSS. Can someone point me in the right direction to start?

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Serious question. Why don’t sites stop providing a feed and force users to their website to get ads showing?

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

A lot of sites will show an article stub in the feed, then make you go to the full site to read the whole thing.

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