Reading RSS content is a skilled activity - David Oliver

[rcjordan]

https://www.doliver.org/articles/rss-as-a-skill

[ergophobe]

I've bailed on all of my attempts at using RSS readers up to this point because there's simply too much content to sift through.

As he goes on to say, if this is your problem with RSS, I that means you simply are using it wrong.

It reminds me of something a friend who said who used to run workshops on designing and building tiny houses. People often criticize the designs and suggest something more akin to sailboat design where every nook and cranny is utilized to maximize storage. His comment was that the point of a tiny house is to minimize and the approach of cramming as much as you can into a small space misses the point.

A boat is literally constrained. Every additional cubic meter is costly. A small increase in size means a huge increase in budget. But a tiny house is a choice and if you want more space, it's generally cheaper just to build a bigger house than to build a small house with the storage of a bigger house.

Anyway... that probably makes no sense at all and the analogy is obscure at best.

What I mean to say is that if you look at an RSS reader as a convenient way to plough through tons of content by aggregating it in one place, it's just the wrong approach. To me, it's a tool for making sure all that disparate content does not get put on the menu in the first place.

Then it's worthwhile to have some way of breaking through your filter bubble, such as:

 - a couple of feeds in a subfolder that have a fire hose of information that you occasionally glance at, maybe read a couple things, then mark it all as read.

 - an occasional look at a few different major outlets in areas that interest you and, occasionally, ones that don't

 - a well-crafted feed on social media, but that can be a challenge to get diversity without noise/outrage/disinformation

Anyway, that's a bit neither here nor there because I find fewer and fewer people I know use an RSS reader and more and more people have no idea what one is.

I did recently inspire my wife to transfer most newsletters she gets to RSS feeds. One win

[rcjordan]

> if you look at an RSS reader as a convenient way to plough through tons of content by aggregating it in one place, it's just the wrong approach.

Hhh, that's exactly how I use it.  ...But that's to feed that unwashed 'ton of content' through my TMky grinder. What passes muster for several thousand long-term curated key words/phrases get shown to me.

[ergophobe]

>> exactly how I use it

I was thinking of you when I wrote that. You are still doing something way more intentional than the person who is trying just dump everything in their reader. With your TM scripts and keyword lists and so forth, you are doing more of an automatic curation. I think of that as more similar to what I do (limit the number of sources) than to the person who just adds hundreds of feeds into an amorphous fire hose.

Just in general, if you are totally overwhelmed by your RSS feed, you're in the wrong paradigm