Are there any apps with kind of an educational feed for mindless scrolling?

adONis@lemmy.world to Ask Lemmy@lemmy.world – 102 points –

We all get bored sometimess and scroll mindlessly through various social media feeds, like instagram (fuck you), reddit (fuck you) or lemmy (no offense, love you guys).

Most of the time content is a wild mix of everything, from news to memes and educational stuff, and very hard to filter out.

Is there anything out there that contains educational stuff only? where you can just sit there, scroll through it and learn something. thinking of like a short text or image showing some facts, or some math examples, or physics, or whatever.

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I say this with complete sincerity: I think you’re looking for a book! Maybe consider an ereader app for your phone

Specifically an encyclopedia.

Going down a Wikipedia rabbit hole can be a reasonable digital alternative.

"Educational" and "mindless" are fairly mutually exclusive.

But I agree, what you want is a book.

I absolutely disagree with you. Watching Our Universe on Netflix while high is definitely 100% educational and mindless.

What you're looking for is called RSS. Install a RSS client, subscribe to some blogs or interesting sites like Aeon, Psyche, Nautilus, Longreads or Hacker News and add them to your client. Then you can scroll mindlessly through your own curated list of educational content.

Well TikTok actually has a pretty good algo (At least awhile ago, it might have become enshittified since) once you use it enough to train it beyond the default new profile feed.

When I was on it, I had gotten the algo to spit out mostly cool educational stuff. Like chemical fun, space stuff, Hank Green stuff, technical things (Like programming tips, cybersecurity, homelab etc) and other nerdy things (Like Star Trek stuffs) with a bit of memes sprinkled in

I don't agree with the other commenters about books, I see what you're asking for at least, books are more for when you want to dive more in depth in a specific topic

Nope to TikTok since I don't want an algo deciding what I get to see and what not, and this sounds identical to Instagram, more or less

If you don’t want an algorithm to decide for you then you’re not looking for a scroll. Even Lemmy has an algorithm. You’re looking for a library card.

You're looking for an algo of some kind, that's what enables the "endless scrolling". Instagram stories or whatever their TT clone is called is definitely much worse than TT itself, yea it's an algo but I can tell you that it's algo is really good at sticking to things that are of interest to you (Provided you are at least a bit mindful of what you're watching during it's training phase)

If you really don't want an algo of any kind, then I'll have to agree with others, what you want is a book.

Well TikTok actually has a pretty good algo

It's still pretty good, especially with the Revanced version that cuts the ads and trackers

Why not just visit a couple communities that have info that you can learn from, like "TIL"?

Could also look into Kahn Academy website, don't know if they have a free app. That's loaded with educational stuff.

Seriously important to make your subscriptions very carefully in apps like lemmey, reddit (if you have access to a third party app) and newpipe (youtube where you can set your startup tab).

It makes all the difference in the world never to land on /r/all, suggested for you or any sort of trending pages.

Read books like the others have said and only subscribe to channels and communities that forward your productive aims.

Make another account on Lemmy and only subscribe to communities you wanna learn about

I always enjoy reading Popular Mechanics magazines. They have a digital subscription available.

Octal for hackernews. Lots of peer reviewed papers, reports, and good articles. And lots of smart people in the comments. No memes, no bs.