Comment by s1mplicissimus

Comment by s1mplicissimus 2 days ago

12 replies

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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/

dleeftink 2 days ago

> lots of people

Depends, as all things. See for instance the Twitter (increased engagement) study [0] or the more recent Facebook study (little effect) [1]. For more recent investigations on user perceptions see [2] and [3].

[0]: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01972243.2023.2...

[1]: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abp9364

[2]: https://jsb.journals.ekb.eg/index.php/FAQ/journal/journal/ar...

[3]: https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3687046

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zahlman 2 days ago

>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.

If you're putting together an RSS feed from creators you like, isn't that liable to happen anyway?

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  • s1mplicissimus 2 days ago

    Interesting point. Yes, if you pick too narrow a set of feeds, they might not even prompt you to engage with other sources, leading to our good old filter bubble effect. I'd still posit the risk of that happening is way higher when you only have a centralized platform like, say, twitter, controlling the push-factor based on payment. With RSS, I can still adjust my feed exactly to my preferences once I notice a bias or degradation in quality of certain feeds. This cannot be done if my feed is controlled by a machine optimized for maximizing engagement/advertisement $.

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  • dartos 2 days ago

    I think the “washed in a steady stream” part is missing from RSS feeds.

    You’d need to join like meta rss feeds.

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    • criddell 2 days ago

      Meta et al have an infinite feed. You can scroll forever.

      My news reader had 6 articles in it yesterday and that's it. I can reload as many times as I want and that won't change.

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      • reverendsteveii 2 days ago

        little "m" meta, as in "rss feeds about rss feeds" rather than big "M" Meta the company

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        • dartos a day ago

          Yes, I realize now that it was a little confusing.

          Meta is still Facebook in my mind.

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nzach 2 days ago

>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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  • oidar 2 days ago

    AP, Reuters, and UPI are all pretty center for the politics - and free.

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wussboy 2 days ago

Many people do not have the technical expertise to set up an RSS feed and so fell into the algo by default.

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  • stonogo a day ago

    This is partly because the ad-funded browser hegemony removed all the features that made them easy to use, via the common "break it, wait for usage to drop off, then claim nobody uses it and delete it" project management path.

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aaronax 2 days ago

Some people seems to prefer just getting washed in a steady stream of whatever gambling/flashing lights/gacha stuff too.

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