Working with RSS
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Late last fall, I decided upon starting using a RSS reader again as one of my primary ways of consuming news and other written content. I wrote about it in the article in November: Intentional Consumption and why I am using RSS in 2024 and beyond, and what I wrote about then I still believe in now. Rather than be swayed by algorithmic timelines, RSS allows me to curate a collection of writers into a centralized location and get a chronological feed of their content.
About a week ago I read a piece posted on Hacker News, Reading RSS content is a skilled activity, and I agree with the author's sentiment that curating RSS is thing you do have to put some effort into rather than passively being given content from other avenues. Frequently I do have days where I go ahead and scroll through the feed and just clean things out based on content I didn't read / don't want to save for further recall, very similar to cleaning my email every so often. The main chunk that I have to clean is feeds from sites like The Verge which I get their full feed, which is nice at one end, but it's a large news organization and there is a good amount of content I am not personally am interested in so I clear them away. Individual writers / personal websites & blogs I have a much easier time managing due to them posting less frequently week to week compared to news organizations who post many articles every single day.
As well, for that content that I do want to save for later use, I either throw it from the RSS feed view in Readwise into the Inbox, from there I can go further with it and either post about it in my Weeknotes or more fleshed-out articles. Readwise itself also has some filtered views to split up the firehose into more digestible entrypoints, but I have yet to go too deep in such.
Overall, I feel RSS as a consumption medium is a much better avenue than the mindless scroll. There's a fixed point of when content actually runs out and as I work more and more on curating good sources, the quality of the content overall goes up rather than relying on algorithms trying to push content they think I may like.