Hello once again!
Today I want to quickly introduce you to a piece of ingenious technology that you might never have heard about if you are less than 30 years old at the time this post goes out. If you are above that age, you may have forgotten this existed. I don’t blame you. I am of course talking about a special something called RSS.
Way back before social media existed, people had to constantly check websites they were interested in (e.g., personal blogs, news sites) for updates. Of course this was quite tedious to do. Luckily, in the late 90’s some people at a former big-tech company called Netscape finally succeeded in popularizing a standardized format for websites to publish their updates in, which could be automatically accessed by other computers. They managed to pull this off because back then people commonly used “web portals” (think a browser start page that a corporation controls). The general idea was to help new internet users navigate the internet by showing them what sort of information is available on the mysterious inter-webs. Netscape’s portal was quite popular at the time and of course companies wanted their content to be featured on users pages, so they quickly adopted the “Really Simple Syndication” format. This allowed people to customize their portals with whatever content they wanted to follow.
Since then, we seem to have shifted away from this decentralized, user-centric approach to content procurement, instead adopting more centralized services, like social media platforms, which focus on algorithm-centric content delivery. I am speculating here, but intuitively this may have happened for two big reasons. Firstly, finding and accumulating feeds of interest is effortful and time consuming for the user. Social media feeds do this for you, and they actually try to both the following and exploring at the same time, by mixing things you’re not following but might like into your feed. Secondly, I suspect single corporations could not make as much money with RSS feeds as social media companies. As a centralized service, you are in complete control of what your users see, meaning you can extract much greater value for the advertisers that fund your company.
While I am sure many people have greatly benefitted from the existence of these services, for example by being able to gain much more interest in their person or business thanks to the more centralized structure of these networks, I also can’t help but feel that the average user is being taken advantage of. This is because these services still struggle to contain dubious information, and otherwise extreme content, while also using very aggressive methods of advertising. Besides the obvious benefits of having access to content recommendation systems, I suspect many people feel compelled to use these services because everyone else is, and/or don’t know that there are alternatives with which you can remove some of these drawbacks (if they annoy you). Using RSS is one such alternative, because it allows you to just follow the content you want, across sites. Many sites including Youtube, Reddit, almost all news sites, podcasts, and academic journals still use RSS feeds, meaning you totally can get the content without the “algorithm” shenanigans. And guess what, even when sites no longer support RSS, there are tools like Politepol, which let you easily generate an RSS feed for any website.
So if you are interested in taking back a bit of control, here is what I would recommend that I feel is pragmatic:
- To address the feeling of being locked in because everyone else is using [service], try using a unified messenger app like Beeper, which lets you retain all those DMs that are being left on read, across services. Or leave everyone behind and move to a hut in the woods cold turkey, up to you.
- Try out some RSS reader service. Inoreader has a very generous free offering, and is super easy to use because you can just paste in the name or URL of the page you want to follow. The RSS feed reader built-into the Vivaldi browser is also pretty nice because it has no usage limits and Vivaldi helps you locate the RSS feed on websites, although it lacks some of the organization features Inoreader offers. There are also lots of Free Open-Source (FOSS) alternatives that people like. Naturally, there’s an Emacs package that does it.
In case you didn’t realize, my page (like most blogs) has an RSS feed, so if you’re feeling crazy, why not give that new RSS reader a test drive?
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