Say Yes to RSS

Based on talking to friends and reading articles on the web, I am fairly sure that most people don't know about RSS. And that's a shame.

RSS, or Really Simple Syndication, is an information-sharing protocol that's been around for about 20 years. It let lets you use a program called a feed reader to get a feed of articles from a website. I've been using one almost since it was first developed. I still haven't forgiven Google for killing off Google Reader. Now I use Feedly, which has become my primary interface to the Internet.

You might say that it sounds like Twitter or Facebook's news feed, so why use it? Unlike those other feeds, you are control of your RSS feed – you control what sites you want to receive articles from and how to organize them. There's no algorithm making choices for you, as Patrick Howell O'Neill points out in this article from Gizmodo.

Here’s what’s important: RSS is very much still here. Better yet, RSS can be a healthy alternative when Twitter is making you feel like shit. In 2019, that’s, like, most of the time.

On the surface, Twitter’s main value proposition is that it delivers up-to-the-second news. Let’s just be honest with ourselves: 99 percent of the time, we don’t need up-to-the-second news. Most of us would do much better waiting until someone has had time to process the news and write more than 280 characters to explain in full what’s going on. Ideally, that happens on news websites themselves, which more often than not still offer RSS feeds. Gizmodo, for instance, is putting RSS out into the world at this very moment.

RSS has the advantage of feeling slow without being slow. You can get an article in your RSS reader as soon as it’s been published—and how much faster are you really looking to go? What you don’t get is the flash flood of half-thoughts and hot takes.

For me, the main advantage of Feedly over Twitter is how it lets me organize the flow of information coming at me. I subscribe to about 250 feeds or sites. I group them by categories (Favourites, Writing, Science Fiction, etc.). I can scan through a bunch of sites to see what's new and view individual articles that look interesting. I can also tag articles and save them for future reference.

This is a screen shot of my Feedly in action.

It's an incredibly powerful tool and I couldn't manage without it.

If you want to find out more about feed readers, here's an article with reviews of some of the current tools.