Over reliance on algorithms has degraded the user experience to the point that the average user is drowning in ragebait and extremist politics, because they drive up engagement. Just like a toddler, algorithms don’t discriminate between good and bad attention, so everything that gets clicks is thrust forward. Now, you could hope to train the algorithm to show you only postive things, but engagement is engagement and the algorithm curators often engage in rage farming, where your feed is injected with things that are likely to enrage you.
You can avoid this by installing an RSS reader, going to your favorite sites, and manually adding a RSS feed. Now, your reader has things that you manually selected, with the added bonus of having a content pipe free of malicious interference. You can also divide topics in a way that you can avoid certain themes and news until you decide to engage them.
There was a time when Digg and Google Reader were still around that I never touched Reddit. I would just have Google Reader with a bunch of useful RSS feeds and if I wanted to have some social element, there was Digg. Then Digg shit the bed, Google got bored of Reader and I ended up on Reddit.
I think you’re right. It’s time to get RSS back in place.
Correct me if I am wrong, but doesn’t most RSS feeds just have the Title and a snippet these days. You still have to click through to read the article, right?
They mostly do by default, which is pretty annoying. But there are ways around it. I’m currently self-hosting a Miniflux instance where I can set per-feed whether or not it will try to parse the full text of each article. Most of the time that works, but on the off chance it doesn’t I fall back to Morss by prepending the feed with
http://fulltext/