I came of age in the era of budding social media platforms, and that was my primary way to consume feeds and news online for the past 10 years or so (I include reddit in the "social media" category, especially more recently). Now, being older and having witnessed the many many problems that social media companies have exacerbated in society, I’ve started looking for other ways to read what's going on in the world.<p>This search has brought me to RSS. I use the same reader app as the author, and I absolutely love it. No addictive feed design, no ads built to manipulate me based on my mood and scrolling patterns. I hope RSS sticks around.
If anyone is interested in the early conflicts (Dave Winer threatening to sue Roger Cadenhead) that shaped RSS, I wrote a fight-by-fight, meeting-by-meeting history of the conflict, back in 2006, which was widely discussed back at the time, including by some of the central figures in the story, such as Sam Ruby:<p><a href="http://www.smashcompany.com/technology/rss-has-been-damaged-by-in-fighting-among-those-who-advocate-for-it" rel="nofollow">http://www.smashcompany.com/technology/rss-has-been-damaged-...</a>
I think the issue here is that you're comparing RSS with Social Media only as a consumer. But in Social Media you're also producing content and interacting with other users, and also watching interactions between users, that's for me a big difference between RSS and Social Media too.<p>RSS for me it's like reading the news paper, while Social Media would be to go to a bar with some friends and talk about the news/hot topic of the moment. They cover different needs.
For a more technical discussion of what RSS gets right (or not), see:<p><a href="https://nullprogram.com/blog/2013/09/23/" rel="nofollow">https://nullprogram.com/blog/2013/09/23/</a>
Anyone have recommendations for an RSS Reader for Android? Specifically, I'm looking for one that:<p>- doesn't have advertisements or tracking<p>- doesn't require an account<p>And I am <i>definitely</i> willing to pay for it.
My RSS reader (Feedbin + the Reeder app) really is my little corner of coziness on my phone or computer.<p>Three times a day I spend 10-20 minutes to skim through the headlines and fully read the interesting stuff.<p>So in 30-60 minutes per day, I stay up to date on all important, interesting and worthwhile stuff going on. It’s fantastic.
As far as infinite scroll goes it's a matter of how many RSS feeds you pull down. My opml feedlist is almost 2 MB at this point and almost recreates the infinite scroll feel of a centralized social media aggregator.
My take on the problem of filtering crap while still allowing the unexpected useful content to come through is filtering out everything unwanted.<p>Back in the Usenet days I solve the same problem with liberal use of filters in nn. I could filter out any thread with disruptive participants, or using keywords against titles/post content. Other than the horrible UX for defining the filters it was actually working quite well.<p>I wish there was more RSS readers with advanced filtering capabilities. I haven't tried Feedly's mute filters feature yet. On paper it looks like exactly what I'd need.
I think “notmuch” is actually a great solution to handle email (or a corpus of articles such as RSS) with a combination of search/filters and tags. The interface is also ripe to easily plug in ML based filters or other social curation filters (Eg: re-shared by my friends) if we manage to build good ones.<p>If only we had a pleasant graphical interface on top (which played nice with HTML email), rather than needing to use text-based interfaces, I think it would be a HUGE improvement over most mail clients out there.
He must be using a different RSS than me, because RSS for me is another endless feed.<p>If the answer is "you're not curating the list of people you follow well enough", then I don't see how RSS is different than any other network. Re: Twitter, is very common to hear people say "You have to curate your feed!", or "You have to use lists!". RSS is the same, if you subscribe to a handful of personal pages, then RSS will be nice. If you use RSS to subscribe to magazines, you're going to get a big list of articles. The same applies to FB or Twitter.
RSS is great. I'm still using it extensively and taken up maintaining the TT-RSS full feed plugin Feediron for the last few years because it's been so essential for my workflow.<p><a href="https://github.com/feediron/ttrss_plugin-feediron" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/feediron/ttrss_plugin-feediron</a>
Quote: "Why does using opening my RSS inbox feel so much better than typing in gmail.com or tapping the iMessages icon or, heavens forbid, opening up Twitter?"<p>Exactly because you're using gmail, iMessage and Twitter. How about using Protonmail only? And ditch the rest in oblivion? Try that then tell me how much better you'll feel.
RSS is great but it's one-way broadcasting. Internet should really be two-way where reader should be able to communicate back to the author <i>inside the same medium</i>.