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.

  • Steev@lemmy.worldEnglish
    44·
    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.

    • nadram@lemmy.worldEnglish
      16·
      1 year ago

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

      • GeekFTW@kbin.social
        5·
        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.

      • mikelykzit@lemmy.mlEnglish
        2·
        1 year 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.

    • boxvoy@programming.devEnglish
      2·
      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
        2·
        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/

    • Marks@kbin.social
      2·
      1 year ago

      Having used many alternatives including feedly that is mentioned below, I highly recommend inoreader.

  • Steeve@lemmy.caEnglish
    31·
    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.

    • Touching_Grass@lemmy.worldEnglish
      4·
      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

    • Rooty@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      3·
      1 year ago

      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.

      • Steeve@lemmy.caEnglish
        2·
        1 year ago

        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.

  • CupDock@lemmy.worldEnglish
    18·
    1 year ago

    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.

  • tunetardis@lemmy.caEnglish
    16·
    1 year ago

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

    • fuzzzerd@kbin.social
      3·
      1 year ago

      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.

      • tunetardis@lemmy.ca
        1·
        1 year ago

        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.

  • CupDock@lemmy.worldEnglish
    11·
    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
    11·
    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.

    • Rooty@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      13·
      1 year ago

      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

      • RamesesKnibs@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        1 year ago

        Love Feedbro. Got it running on a server to post Twitter posts into my Discord server as it still seems to work seemlessly with Twitter

          • RamesesKnibs@lemmy.worldEnglish
            3·
            1 year ago

            Yeah just add a feed in Feedbro and the URL just needs to be the URL of the Twitter profile and it will pick it up. It broke during Musk’s little bitch fit the other day but it’s working again now. So much better than actually having to use Twitter!

      • Capricorny90210@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        1 year ago

        I’ve had a good experience with Feedly. they have a free and paid tier. I use the free one, and even keep up with one subreddit that won’t be migrating. I also added my local news websites which eliminated a need for Facebook.

    • JesterRaiin@lemmy.worldEnglish
      5·
      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?

    • jetsetdorito@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      I’m really liking the app Read You on Android, but there are many others. Pretty much any news site or blog or something you can add it by URL. Sometimes you need to add /rss to the end of it.

    • alphapro784@lemmy.mlEnglish
      8·
      1 year ago

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

  • wilberfan@lemmy.worldEnglish
    6·
    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.

  • Notorious@lemmy.linkEnglish
    6·
    1 year ago

    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.

    • boxvoy@programming.devEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      Was planning on doing something similar. I think adding more topics like science and specific sports could be useful.

      Edit: My scrolling cut off half the list of communities. Looks like you already have those.

  • ravynstoneabbey@lemmy.worldEnglish
    5·
    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.

  • bastage@lemmy.worldEnglish
    5·
    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.