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I ditched the algorithm for RSS

(joeyehand.com)
744 points DearNarwhal | 2 comments | 16 Jan 25 12:18 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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s1mplicissimus ◴[16 Jan 25 17:07 UTC] No.42727908[source]▶
If I remember correctly "the algorithm" as a concept of feed curation has been introduced by facebook ( or youtube?), long after RSS was used by blogs and podcasts. Heck, even Twitter used to have an RSS feed they killed a looong time ago [1]

I also remember that in the beginning I was chuckling to myself "who on earth would want to have their feed curated by a black box whose target function cannot be checked? If I wanted that, I could just keep reading a single newspaper." - turns out I was very wrong and lots of people seem to prefer just getting washed in a steady stream of somewhat internally consistent worldview.

Would be really nice to see RSS make a comeback

[1] https://sociable.co/social-media/twitter-rss-feed-creator/

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1. nzach ◴[16 Jan 25 18:27 UTC] No.42728952[source]▶
>I could just keep reading a single newspaper

Completely unrelated, but this is the strategy I use. I try to keep out of the news but about once a week I go to the newspaper site to read what happened.

The obvious downside is that I get an extremely biased view on reality, so I try to account for that when reading the news.

But this gives me the advantage of consistency. I know how they generally report things and this makes spotting 'anomalies' a little easier.

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2. oidar ◴[16 Jan 25 18:54 UTC] No.42729323[source]▶
AP, Reuters, and UPI are all pretty center for the politics - and free.