alt Hacker NewsIf 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/
Replies
>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?
>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.
Many people do not have the technical expertise to set up an RSS feed and so fell into the algo by default.
Some people seems to prefer just getting washed in a steady stream of whatever gambling/flashing lights/gacha stuff too.
> 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