RSS against doom scrolling

I used to doom scroll. I still do, but I used to, too. Reddit used to be my grind in the mornings. And during the day. And in the evening - most often until the night. On top of that, I watched YouTube - long and short form. I had Instagram and Twitter at one point, too. All of these took away a surprising amount of time during the day.

It was Aaron Schwartz Memorial Day at some secluded subreddit when I remembered he worked on RSS. Despite being a developer, I never looked into what RSS feeds were about or how they worked.

The general gist of using RSS was straightforward: have an RSS reader app and add a link to an RSS feed. The app then polls the link to populate a list of content according to the blog or whatever context it represents. Usually you don’t have to find the exact RSS link to include in the app, but for example, the domain or any of the blog post urls suffice, and the app will find the RSS feed using that - quick and easy.

Having been troubled about my borderline addiction to social media or, more specifically, deviating to realms not relevant to my interests - I thought I would try using mainly RSS feeds. I quit Reddit, Twitter, and Instagram. While at it, I turned off all suggestions and profiling on YouTube. RSS was now my main handle for social media.

Collating a list of sources to follow was slow at first but soon started to gather momentum. On the side, I set up a Mastodon account and followed a handful of content creators on YouTube for variety. The lure of the alternative weened off in due time.

It’s been about 3 years now, and I’m more than happy with this setup. Getting a glimpse of what it used to be for me from people around me reminds the difference between these two approaches: there’s more control and serenity - space for my thoughts - but I still feel in the loop. Albeit still succumbing to the calls of the sirens, this approach does not cater for recommendation algorithms.

Mindfully selecting those you follow pre-emptively weeds out the crap, and the feeds are simultaneously less “excessive”. Back in the era of mainstream TV broadcasts, at least in Europe, where cable TV was not the norm, people would check in if “there was anything good on TV”. The TV was the equivalent of modern-day social media having an externally curated, and often subpar, stream of content. More importantly, it was often the case that “there was nothing on TV”, and you would switch it off and think of something else.

Contrary to the TV era, when the internet became superfluous and ubiquitous, “there was always something on”. What you grab onto when you are bored or restless relates strongly to the habits you form. And habits have a strong correlation with one’s personality. Not to sound completionist, perfectionist or in other ways lacking a sense of reality - we all have our faults with weak moments and should be kind to ourselves - but that circle of FOMO, in which we default to stifling our inner voices with what is often human generated slop, has an unhealthy effect on us.

Finally, another way to mitigate my tendency to follow content mindlessly is to consider what form of content to digest. The content I follow is often medium-length and mostly centred around science and software development, with artsy topics on the side from which to draw inspiration. If I don’t have the energy to read through a medium-to-long-length post, it’s probably not a good time to be reading posts in the first place. If I am too tired to realize I am slipping, having the content length as a barrier for entry helps me notice that and makes me switch the feeds off and think of something else.

I will conclude this with suggestions to get started with this type of content filtering strategy.

Steer clear of sources that saturate the feed burying the variety; volume and quality tend to correlate inversely. That is why, though Hacker News has good threads, searching for a method of filtering the posts relevant to me was crucial. Also, for this reason, I have not included the excellent publication of https://phys.org.

What I did, in the beginning, was to set up an RSS feed using the Hacker News filter via https://hnRSS.org. Then, every time I would read an interesting post, I would add that to my list of feeds. After adding a few bloggers to my collection, I would further restrict the HN filter for balance.

For Mastodon profiles to follow, I checked through a few websites that gathered researchers and the like.

The emphasis in my method was to keep the inclusion process manual overviewing every addition instead of using searches, categories or recommendations.

Here are blog suggestions to follow using RSS: