Hey all,
So I’ve been wanting to start using RSS recently. I’ve seen a lot of recommendations for using it to help curate what I’m interested in instead of what algorithms want me to engage with. But maybe I’m thinking of it wrong.
My understanding of RSS was that I find one of the many different RSS readers that I like, currently I’m using Akregator on Linux, then start subscribing to individual sites and sources. The idea being that I can go to one place and read everything I’m interested in.
But I can count on one hand, out of the 165 feeds I’ve subscribed to so far, the number that actually load the full article contents and images. Nearly every single one of them gives me a paragraph and a “Complete this story” or a “View full story here” or some other phrase.
If I load the full page inside the RSS app, I get all the nagware about signing up, give me cookies, just general obtrusive ads, blah blah blah. Obviously it’s using an internal web engine and not my actual browser with my ad blockers and VPN extension and stuff. So instead I just double-click the RSS link and it opens in my normal browser and I read it there.
So, that gets down to the crux of my question…at this point, what’s the difference between me just bookmarking the sites that I want and then just going there? If RSS only loads a paragraph anyways, what’s the point in using it?
Now I do understand that this isn’t RSS’s fault as a protocol, it’s how these sites are choosing to use it. I imagine they are just trying to get people to click to their site for views and whatnot but still…at least how I want to use it, it kinda defeats the purpose of RSS.
Am I missing something or is this something the community has been dealing with for a while now?
I think you are using RSS the way it was meant to be used, or, at least, the way I have been using it for years.
I my opinion, RSS isn’t meant to be your primary source of consumption, but your primary source of notification. For learning about new content being available. Instead of signing up for 165 newsletters, email subscriptions, or, in the worst form, downloading an app -> register an account -> subscribe to feed, you put the feed in your RSS client (which doesn’t require identifying yourself to the content provider in any form, registering interest, etc), and are notified when something new pops up.
Yeah that’s the feeling I’m getting too…just kinda get notified that something’s changed and to go look at it. Unfortunately not what I had in mind when I thought RSS might be the solution I was looking for.