Reading RSS content is a worthwhile but skillful activity

Shit's gotten weird out there. The internet has devolved from something that was mostly quirky and altruistic to something that, in many ways, is straight-up evil. Companies have commoditized user attention through an economic framework that is completely divorced from the user's experience: Advertisers go to some ad platform, set up a few tags, and third parties shill for them without knowing anything about advertiser or user. The user's experience is determined by some algorithm whose sole purpose is to increase engagement, so the effects on the user are harmful and unknown, and advertisers don't care.

Enter RSS: An opportunity to reclaim your attention through simple and open tech. Unfortunately, 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. But, I'm finally realizing what was right in front of my face: The experience of using an RSS reader is and should be characteristically different than using other forms of social media. With an RSS reader, you decide what you see; in order to decide you must start with something undecided meaning unfiltered.

So, how do we decide and filter for ourselves? My favored approach is fairly old fashioned: Chains of trust. We start by finding someone whose judgement we trust and subscribing to their feed, and then we find out who they trust and subscribe to their feed, and so on. Part of the judgement that we're looking for in these trustees is not simply whether or not content is accurate but whether or not it is worth our attention. Over time, we can curate our little garden of content, make it diverse, and eliminate unnecessary noise. But, much like a real garden, pruning and weeding is essential and intentional. So, using an RSS reader is more than having a nice aggregator: It's a skill and a routine. And that's also where the magic lies because it's that very process of engaging with content and deciding whether or not it has value to you that makes using an RSS reader a better experience and one where you own your attention.