06-01-16

Day 153 / 517 –

I find myself less and less involved in social media these days.  I got burned out on it last year, and I’ve cut way back on my use.  Frankly, I’m happy I did.  I was spending way too much time and energy involved with it.

Social media is getting noisier and angrier, with fake accounts, spam accounts, bots, and the worst of all, the companies themselves.  Facebook creates ways to keep the things the people you follow from reaching you, Instagram might start doing the same thing (curated feeds), and Twitter finds new and clever ways to interrupt your feed with things you don’t care about.

In the Good Olde Days, we had Google Reader and RSS.  You subscribed to a blog (you see, a blog is / was a site where… never mind) in Google Reader, and every time it updated, it was in your feed, waiting for you to read it when you wanted.  It was beautiful.

But wait, how is that different from a social media feed?  Well, when my site updates, it doesn’t have to compete for your attention with a troll, or a food post, or a retweet of something you don’t care about, or the picture of someone’s beard whom you have never met and never will, or smh, or tbh, or tbt, or another ICYMI when you didn’t miss it in the first place and would never “miss” it in the first place, or having to click through to see what someone else said that you don’t care about, or clickbait, or or or….

In other words, Google Reader and RSS gave you what you wanted, when you were ready for it, without all the other crap.  And then they went away.  Google shut down Reader, and the world of social media took over.  And it’s sucked ever since.

But RSS is still alive and well.  A few companies came to the rescue.  I use Feedly for my RSS feeds, and use Digg Reader as a backup.  They both have mobile apps (I use Newsify on my iOS devices), and are fairly easy to use and unobtrusive. With Feedly, just put the URL of the site you want to follow into the Personalize section and you are good to go.

But here is the ninja thing I do on my desktop browser.  I have a pinned tab for my Feedly feed, so it is always available as the first tab, ready to go (I also have the local weather on Wunderground and the NHL scoreboard pinned, but that’s just me).  It takes more effort to go to Facebook or Twitter than it does to look at my Feedly tab and see content that I want to see, rather than what the other sites think I want to see.

So I encourage you to set up your own RSS reading site.  It is the first place I go online, because it puts the things I want and find interesting in front of me.  And it does it on my schedule.

Special thanks to Seth Godin.  His post today inspired this.  He says it better than I do, so please go read him.  I do, every day.