Reading RSS content is a skilled activity

I keep coming back to the idea of curating my own reading through RSS.

I missed the first wave: mostly stuck to aggregators and blogs, but eventually set up a Feedly account. Like others here, I found maintaining a meaningful list takes real energy. It's easy to over-subscribe and end up with a second inbox.

Still, I think the effort is worth it. The best systems I've worked on always rewarded small, regular maintenance over trying to automate everything away. Feels like curating information works the same way.

It takes effort indeed. Just as putting up a little homepage, writing articles, essays or short tidbits, and publishing an RSS feed for that.

What I do with my self-built reader (link in bio) to have it not function as a newsfeed from regular social media, is to only get the latest posts from randomly selected feeds. I don't need all of the unread posts from all of the sources (there are 1415 now in my list) every time. This is also nicer for the publishers (that may be you, fellow HNer!), since every request to your feed is actually read.

In the beginning of using my own reader I was really craving the dopamine shot from regular social media, it literally took me two years to get used to my self-inflicted info diet. Now it's really a calm blessing, especially because I read stuff posted by yet another internet fellow who has a blog. Way more human.

Using RSS is different and should be different. Wanting RSS and the social open web, and then transforming it to regular social media with notifications and a firehose of news is the same as building a new barebones electric pickup truck and then wanting it to connect to an app.

There is a misunderstanding about RSS and escaping algorithms. Sure, you are not under the social media control but you certainly are under the publisher control. Now you have to see everything that they publish. Which makes it the absolutely worst way to consume news. It becomes overwhelming and if you want inbox zero it’s another digital burden. The result is that I pretty much lost interest on following some websites through RSS because even though I do like some of the articles, it’s another way of doomscrolling when searching for the one thing that will give you the dopamine hit.

So after excluding the vast majority of websites, I was left with 10-20 websites that I did enjoy ~60% of the content they put out and I've subscribed to their newsletter. Which in most cases is full of tracking links but that’s a case for another topic.

> And that's also where the magic lies because it's that very process of engaging with content and deciding whether or not it has value to you that makes using an RSS reader a better experience and one where you own your attention.

Back when RSS was more popular, the tyranny of never-ending backlogs was a topic that was discussed somewhat regularly, but it gets glossed over a little these days since RSS talk is naturally enclosed within a layer of nostalgia

For a few years now my approach has basically been "read it now or read it never" - this means that my RSS feeds are typically empty and I never save anything to "read it later" queues

If it's something I'm supposed to read, it'll probably be resurfaced one way or another (or maybe it won't, and that's fine too) at a later time when I'm immediately ready to pick up what is being put down

My problem with RSS is that I tend to subscribe to too many things and then it's too much. Also I wanted a solution that was free or self hosted, but I realized it's much better if someone manages the complexity for me, so I just ended up going with the paid hosting for miniflux (https://miniflux.app/).

Now I've just subscribed to a few things I care about, I open the website from time to time, quickly mark as "read" stuff I'm not interested in, and when I have more time I just go through everything that is still unread, because it's been "filtered in". Seems to work!

I think self curation is a theme not directly discussed.

The recurring problem is other people trying to tell you what information you should see, resulting in suboptimal aggregations. If you don't curate your own stuff, you'll slide into whatever state of mind your curator wants you to slide into.

Algorithmic feeds are widely accepted to cause doomscrolling, and my experience with RSS is similar to the author: it goes well, but then whenever an aggregate source of any kind is added, it drowns out everything else. This wouldn't be a problem if everything from the source was a good read. The issue is any aggregation by someone who isn't you isn't going to be perfect for you.

My brain wants to make a link between collateralised debt obligations causing the recession, and aggregate info sources and algo feeds causing the collapse of the modern internet. Basically, everyone realises 90% of what they have in their feed/inbox is actually worthless and we only have it because the people who we get stuff from mixed it with a few good/relevant pieces of information so we trusted/assumed the rest would be good/relevant.

Life takes effort, if you outsource the effort, your life requires less effort but is less likely to be what you want. The same applies to curating the content you consume. It's easy to accidentally outsource.

I don't think this is just about RSS:

> So, how do we decide and filter for ourselves? My favored approach is fairly old fashioned: Chains of trust. We start by finding someone whose judgement we trust and subscribing to their feed, and then we find out who they trust and subscribe to their feed, and so on. Part of the judgement that we're looking for in these trustees is not simply whether or not content is accurate but whether or not it is worth our attention.

This goes for any form of social media beyond just blogs. Find people who have good taste, good judgement and demonstrate their credibility in the subjects that matter to you. Collect those people - follow them on social media, hang out with them on Discord, attend events that they go to, subscribe to their blogs and their newsletters, read their papers (for academia), pay attention to the people THEY respect.

Repeat that a bunch of times and you can become incredibly well informed on almost any topic.

I adore RSS. Some gems I've found:

https://hnrss.org/

https://rsshub.app/twitter/user/{username} for twitter accounts

Append .rss to any subreddit URL you want updates on

YouTube also has an RSS feed for channels

For HN summaries via RSS I've been using gophersignal.com which is FOSS and been pretty happy with it and the dev is adorable.

https://gophersignal.com/

> We start by finding someone whose judgement we trust and subscribing to their feed...

...and in no time at all, these "someones" will be made offers not all of them will refuse to parlay their trusted judgements into income by marketing agencies. It seems trust will not only need to be gained but also somehow maintained.

This is perfectly reasonable, but I think it is a bit general. The notion of a chain of trust leading to a curated feed can equally apply to YouTube if you stick to the subscribed channels view.

There are also specific skills I've picked up from being subscribed to the Hacker News "top" RSS feed. Namely judicious use of the "mark all as read" button.

Media theory and critical thinking are sorely lacking in public education, and the lack of media literacy has never been more apparent. It sounded absurd, taking precious time away from teaching math to watch movies? But this is the first generation coming of age right now to have been exposed to mass communications in ways/amounts that have never existed--I suppose that's been true of each of the last several dozen generations, but it's crossed a threshold that I believe necessitates special care in raising adults who can better discern trustworthy sources, interpret and think critically about what they see/hear/read, and do precisely as this article recommends and filter your incoming information in a thoughtful and intentional way.

I also find myself wanting to go back to RSS for the exact same reasons of 1st paragraph. You own your content and host it. Unfortunately all the RSS readers are too raw and I think one of them has to port over Twitter features, things like: more ephemeral feed instead of an inbox, reply, quote tweet, retweet, like, follow, and new: LLM-driven customizable algorithmic feed.

Oh Lord. I miss the hell out of bloglines and wish we could go back to the glory days of RSS but this headline reads like a guy tipping his Trilby before explaining Rock and Mirty.