A few months ago, my brain was overwhelmed by too many feeds. Unlike Johnny 5 in Short Circuit, I couldn’t process all the input. The YouTube homepage, Threads, Mastodon, and my RSS reader all combined to frazzle my 3-pound gray matter. So I cut them off for a break while enjoying long-form book reading. Since then, I resumed social media. And just a few days ago, I rediscovered the bright side of RSS.
Death By Ad Overload
To keep up with my favorite websites and blogs during my RSS hiatus, I went old-school by bookmarking everything in one big folder. Then I’d manually surf the web to each site when I wanted to catch up with the latest. It was fine but also awful.
Personal blogs are good and simple. But corporate money-making news sites are the worst. Too often, the content is obscured by various and numerous unrelated ads. I visit sites to read articles but instead must fight disrupting images and videos.
The latest version of Safari, my web-browser of choice, has a really cool new tool called, “Hide Distracting Items…” It works well at making gross ads vanish. But the fact that I need to use such a tool in order to make sites readable is a travesty of the open-web. It’s no wonder many folks use ad-blockers, because ads are content-blockers.
It seems that websites don’t want people to read their articles but instead want to sell ad space. The “content” is bait, switched out with ads.
Well, for some reason, last week I got the notion to re-try my RSS reader. Let me tell you, it was insta-awesome! It feels SO GOOD to be back on RSS. It lets me just read articles from the web — crazy, I know. RSS makes websites legible, stripping out all the distracting garbage.
RSS is also super-convenient. It makes following many sites and staying up-to-date seamless. It’s trivial to use and ensures I don’t miss a single blog post or editorial piece from my favorite blogs and sites.
Now, these facts are not news to me. I’ve used RSS off and on for many years. It just seems far more refreshing and relieving than ever before, and I think it’s because the web is far worse than ever before, overrun with terrible ads.
There are some sites that crash Safari on iPhone because the webpage chokes on ads and the underlying code. Safari has a “Reading View” that I sometimes use to make a web page readable, but even that is less convenient and less effective than relying on a good RSS reader.
My current RSS service is Feedly, and my current RSS app is NetNewsWire. I use it on my iPhone, iPad, and MacBook. It’s excellent.
Beware Content Overload
While RSS is great at delivering the web content I want without the crappy ads I don’t want, there’s a danger. Ads overload websites; similarly, RSS feeds can overload your brain. That’s why I stopped using it before.
With so many blogs and sites and feeds so easily consumed by clicking through an RSS reader, it can cause me to get in the rut of skimming headlines, staying superficial. This means I get in a mode where it’s hard for my brain to go deep and focus reading on an article. I begin to skim and scan the piece instead of just reading it. Not healthy.
Along with many headlines and snippets, there are number-counts. Trying to get all the numbers of articles down to zero is somewhat an exercise in futility. Again, it makes my brain skew away from really reading a whole article at a quality level of comprehension.
Summary
It’s hard for me to reiterate just how nice it is to be back, enjoying the streamlined delivery and clean readable content of RSS. The web is accessible thanks to this protocol.
If you haven’t tried RSS, do yourself a favor and fix that. Like me, you might find relief from an ad-dominated netscape.
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