RSS is cool

I’ve Watched a Video

I’ve just watched the latest Technology Connections video on YouTube. I watch most of his videos and really like them since they are always a great start to a new rabbit hole.

What the Video Was About (very short)

This time, he spoke about how we are increasingly letting the algorithms choose what we see on the internet, which is obviously a bad thing. I think one of the biggest issues might be the danger of doom scrolling and wasting a lot of time doing nothing. He explains that there is a personal feed on YouTube which only shows videos from channels you are subscribed to. I have to admit that I didn’t know that. I used this to check which channels I was subscribed to and made a few modifications. After realizing that I had indeed lost a lot of time watching videos I didn’t even want to see in the first place, I hope to use that personalized feed more often now.

My Thoughts

Some of my friends might have heard before that I really like RSS feeds. They allow me to only read news I really want to read. No clickbait titles or even ads. It is the feeling of freedom that amazes me so much. I am in control of the feeds I am “subscribing” to by putting the feeds’ URLs into my RSS reader—that’s it. No suggested articles about things I am not interested in.

I love podcasts. One more cool thing about RSS is that it is the default format for publishing podcasts, which means I can not only subscribe to my favorite news or blogs but also to podcast series! If social media platforms supported RSS (which wouldn’t be a hard thing to do), it would be pretty easy to add the posts of my favorite people there too. I’ve heard that some platforms already support it, but I guess most providers like Twitter or Meta just have no reason to support RSS since it would only move people away from those doom-scrolling platforms.

Last night, I added a few of my favorite news, blogs, and podcasts to my RSS reader (Akregator on PC and Feeder on my phone). I am super curious to see how this will affect my screen time and even the amount of traffic on my devices. I will report back as soon as I have more information about that.

My Blog as RSS feed

Just in case you already use a RSS reader yourself, this is where you can find my posts: feed