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.
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.
Let’s take this opportunity to list out your favourite RSS websites. Let us know what all are your favourites.
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.
I like using kill-the-newsletter.com to turn email newsletters into an RSS feed rather than filling up my email inbox
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
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
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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.
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.
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The Verge is a cool website with RSS
I mostly do comics:
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 FeedMe (on Android). It’s really versatile to customise the UX to your liking.
One could also add SubReddits as RSS feeds. I wonder if we can do that for Lemmy also
You can! There is a RSS logo you can click on when you’re on the desktop version on Lemmy.
Reeder for iOS is a great app. I think one of the most minimal and beautiful apps. It’s paid though.
Agree that Reeder is excellent!
Reeder is great. Well worth the $5.
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
Is it better than Inoreader? I’ve been trying to find a good IOS RSS reader and cannot find one I like, Inoreader is the closest but it’s only decent.
They look similarly minimalist. I like reeder because it really boils thing down to the essential.
NetNewsWire is also great and it’s free
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.
Having used many alternatives including feedly that is mentioned below, I highly recommend inoreader.
I’d suggest getting into the !selfhosted@lemmy.world 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!
Feedly does a good job with the free version. I just went back to it a few weeks 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.
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.
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/
I’ve been using Thunderbird for programming.dev feeds. I don’t know if there’s anything better but it works for me
Haha just saw this from lemmy
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)
Super cool
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.
Well when I first started, a lot of the smaller news outlets didn’t support rss but I actually wrote some scraper scripts for the ones that interested me. Then there was kind of a golden age where everyone had rss. And then yeah, they started hiding everything behind paywalls and what not. So today, I get as much news as I can through rss and some extra paid content through an Apple News+ subscription. If only the latter allowed you to rss its channels, but it looks pretty locked down.
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.
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!
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.
Thanks, Nunti has been a pain in the ass for a while now and I’ve been looking to switch
Newsblur is my favorite. It’s paid, but I find the subscription fee reasonable.
Has some of the old social features of gReader, but it’s not that active.
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.
What are you subbed too? Looking for recomendations.
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…
Love feedly - been using it since Google Reader was discontinued
That’s exactly when I found it as well… 👍
I don’t know anything about RSS. Can someone point me in the right direction to start?
In a nutshell, an RSS feed reader will aggregate any articles/posts from sites you choose. I pull all my local news and a subreddit into my reader.
I did this a few days ago and fucked up. do not add sites that requires a paid subscription. lol
