YSK: Use RSS feeds to curate your online experience

Rooty@lemmy.world to You Should Know@lemmy.world – 401 points –

Over reliance on algorithms has degraded the user experience to the point that the average user is drowning in ragebait and extremist politics, because they drive up engagement. Just like a toddler, algorithms don't discriminate between good and bad attention, so everything that gets clicks is thrust forward. Now, you could hope to train the algorithm to show you only postive things, but engagement is engagement and the algorithm curators often engage in rage farming, where your feed is injected with things that are likely to enrage you.

You can avoid this by installing an RSS reader, going to your favorite sites, and manually adding a RSS feed. Now, your reader has things that you manually selected, with the added bonus of having a content pipe free of malicious interference. You can also divide topics in a way that you can avoid certain themes and news until you decide to engage them.

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Let’s take this opportunity to list out your favourite RSS websites. Let us know what all are your favourites.

https://zapier.com/blog/how-to-find-rss-feed-url/

I found this page pretty useful. It turns out WordPress does rss by default and a lot of websites are built on it. So there's a good chance if a website doesn't advertise if it has an rss feed available there will still be one at url.com/feed

I like https://medium.com/feed/@doctorow and https://www.techdirt.com/feed/

https://www.weather.gov has good local weather if you want that in your RSS feed

https://www.weather.gov has good local weather if you want that in your RSS feed

How do you get an RSS feed for your local weather?

They've got a little tool to help you pick the ones near you/of interest, mine is a local airport https://w1.weather.gov/xml/current\_obs/

and remember, the weather channel is the reason the weather service hasn't made this a convenient website/app!

Edit: and here's the one that tells you local watches and warnings for your county! https://alerts.weather.gov/index.php

I'm a big user user of weather.gov, but curious what you mean by blaming weather service for this not being convenient?

I like using kill-the-newsletter.com to turn email newsletters into an RSS feed rather than filling up my email inbox

Yeah, I tried doing this a while ago but got frustrated at how difficult it was to find good RSS feeds. I ended up using it mostly for local news and not much else.

This is a tricky problem to solve for sure. I've been battling it for a while myself.

I've been using Inoreader for a couple of years and it's just perfect. I was using Feedly before this, but Ino was just better at the time.

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