Power of RSS Readers

RSS and newsletters are not about escaping social media, like the slow web, but about protecting yourself from media and information overload. If your RSS feed is an unmanageable, you are harming yourself.

Social media is about reading what's most popular, based on an algorithm. RSS is used for staying in touch with voices you absolutely do not want to miss, and are infrequently updated.

In a way RSS gives a voice for small indie content creators who don't have the following on twitter to generate enough traction for the article to show up in a Twitter feed.

• Don't subscribe to feeds of site you browser regularly
• Mark all as read should be an indicator for a noisy feed that can be deleted
• Use news aggregators
• Focus on content that doesn't show up on Twitter
• Actively think which feed the content fits into, Twitter? RSS? Or needs to be revisited synchronously, if the author isn't active anymore?

Highlights

RSS is best for following a large number of infrequently updated sites: sites that you’d never remember to check every day because they only post occasionally, and that your social-network friends won’t reliably find or link to.

Without RSS readers, the long tail would be cut off. The rich would get richer: only the big-name sites get regular readership without RSS, so the smaller sites would only get scraps of occasional Twitter links from the few people who remember to check them regularly, and that number would dwindle.

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Creator(s)

Marco Arment

Source

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Reason

I felt overwhelmed with information on Twitter and was looking for alternatives, to receive information slower, but without losing the most important highlights.