RSS Can Save Us From Social Media’s Algorithms

This was originally going to be a post about improving the display of RSS feeds in web browsers. That post is still in the works, but I realized that I should probably first explain why people ought to care about RSS at all, and why it’s such a vital and important technology in our social media-dominated age.

The promise of social media is that we’ll experience a deeper connection with our friends and loved ones as we share updates, interesting links, photos and videos, and of course, silly memes with one another. The reality of social media is very different. Log into Facebook or Instagram, and you’re far more likely to see updates that those platforms’ algorithms think you’ll like rather than stuff by the people you actually know.

Social media algorithms prioritize engagement over value. That explains why those 15 minutes you intend to spend on Instagram just looking at your friends’ latest photos inevitably turns into an hour (or two) of mindless scrolling through reels by complete strangers. Engagement is the name of the game here; the longer social media platforms can hold your attention hostage, the more data they can gather and the more money they can make.

Fortunately, something exists that can restore some control over your online experience.

RSS — which stands for “Really Simple Syndication” — is an online data format that enables websites to publish a “web feed” of their latest posts and updates. Many popular blogging platforms and CMSes like Ghost and WordPress automatically publish web feeds, which can be subscribed to and viewed using a “newsreader” tool like Inoreader, Feedbin, or Newsblur. There are also numerous newsreader apps that you can install on your computer, including NetNewsWire, Reeder, and Fluent.

(A brief technical note: There are two main formats for web feeds: RSS and Atom. Explaining the differences between them is beyond the scope of this post, but both are well-established and widely supported. For brevity’s sake, I’ll be using “RSS” as a catchall in this post, but everything I write is also true of Atom.)

RSS web feeds offer multiple benefits:

• If you read a lot of blogs, news sites, etc., then you no longer have to manually visit each and every one of them in order to see their latest content. Instead, fire up your newsreader and voila! All of your favorite websites’ latest posts and articles are compiled for your perusal.
• Web feeds aren’t controlled by secretive algorithms. You only see posts from those websites that you’ve actually subscribed to sans any external influence, and in chronological order to boot.
• Web feeds are private. You don’t have to worry about some tech giant harvesting your data to sell to advertisers or monitoring what you’re looking at in order to better determine what they’ll show you.
• RSS isn’t proprietary, so it’s not controlled by the dictates or fate of any one company. As Brent Simmons put it, “Any number of companies can go out of business, but nobody can stop anybody from publishing and reading RSS feeds.”
• You control what you see. Don’t want to see a particular website’s latest posts anymore? Simply unsubscribe from them in your newsreader. And if you change your mind at a later point, you can always re-subscribe. It’s entirely up to you.

That said, web feeds do have some potential downsides:

• Some websites post partial feeds that only contain headlines and brief summaries, thus requiring you to visit them to see the full post or article. I personally don’t consider this a big deal, but some might find it inconvenient.
• Viewing posts in a newsreader means you won’t see any of the source website’s styling, formatting, and design, but rather, whatever style your newsreader applies to all posts. Sometimes, though, that styling enhances the reading experience, or provides useful contextual information. That, or it just looks pretty. Indeed, I occasionally choose to read some websites’ original posts rather than the newsreader versions precisely because I enjoy looking at their designs.
• Because of their simple nature — it’s right there in the name — RSS web feeds are text-centric. Images and videos can also appear, but anything more complicated — e.g., interactive widgets — probably won’t. And if it does, it’ll probably look a mess and/or not function correctly.
• If you subscribe to a lot of feeds, you might become overwhelmed by all of the unread posts awaiting you — something that Terry Godier has written about quite thoughtfully.

Any such downsides are far outweighed, though, by the aforementioned benefits of web feeds.

Unfortunately, web browsers have actually made it harder to find and use web feeds. Firefox and Safari once had built-in RSS support, meaning you could use them as a newsreader. These days, however, visiting a feed link in a web browser returns a wall of code, downloads a file to your computer, or prompts you to find an RSS application — none of which are particularly helpful in the moment.

What’s more, browsers no longer alert you when a website offers a feed, meaning you won’t know that you could subscribe even if you wanted to. While newsreaders like Inoreader offer discovery tools that can help you find your favorite websites’ feeds (if they exist), it’s disappointing that browsers have dropped this feature altogether.

If you’ve been reading Opus for any length of time, then you know that one of my chief soapboxes is that we need to stop ceding control of our online experiences to companies who only care about investors and advertisers (and kowtowing to Trump). We need to regain control over how we publish and share content (e.g., by hosting our own websites and building our own platforms) as well as how we view content. RSS web feeds are one of the most direct and effective ways of achieving the latter.