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.

  • tunetardis@lemmy.caEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

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

  • Steev@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    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.

    • boxvoy@programming.devEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      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?

      • sneakyninjapants@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        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/

  • Steeve@lemmy.caEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    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.

  • CupDock@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    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.

  • DBT@kbin.social
    1·
    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.

  • bastage@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    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.

  • CaptainLemmit@feddit.itEnglish
    1·
    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

  • AnonTwo@kbin.social
    1·
    1 year ago

    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.

  • wilberfan@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    1 year ago

    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.

      • wilberfan@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        1 year ago

        There’s over a hundred of them! News (NYT, WP, LA Times), Movies & TV, I have custom RSS feeds based on Google Alerts… BoingBoing, Gizmodo…on and on. I believe it’s an official Shit Ton of them…

  • Fizz@lemmy.nzEnglish
    0·
    1 year ago

    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.