I Ditched the Algorithm for RSS—and You Should Too

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Style Pass

2025-01-16 12:30:05

Because once in a while, I'll find a post so good that it teaches me something I never knew before, and all the scrolling feels worth it. But I've stumbled upon an old piece of free and open source tech, relatively unknown today, which is THE solution of solving the problems with modern media without sacrificing accessible, good content: RSS.

Reddit, Facebook, Twitter — platforms built for engagement, not efficiency. Instead of showing you high-quality posts upfront, they pad your feed with memes, spam, and astroturfing. There is only so much 'good' content created in a day. By padding your feed with trash, they make the limited amount of good posts "last longer". These sites want you to spend more time scrolling on their website, so they feed you scraps which makes the occasional great post feels like a jackpot. This concept, operant conditioning, was developed by B.F. Skinner — Yes, the mind behind the Skinnerbox.

While some sites offer filtering or sorting options, manually settings these options every time you want to access a subreddit is just not doable.