Because someone nominally appears in the media, I try to be aware of people’s attitudes toward it. One common abstention is that, for understandable reasons, people feel worn out because of the amount and composition of media that comes to them.
This fatigue is due to a few unifying factors. It is strongly observed that highly polarized players distort the nature of the information presented by the media.
Nearly two-thirds of Americans in the party population believed that “too much bias in reporting objective news reports” is a “big problem” for our media, the 2018 survey found.
Media consumers are concerned about how the invisible hand of algorithms affects the content they see.
About half of users are unsure of how Facebook’s news feed selects content, and about a quarter of Americans fear that Google will display dangerously false information, according to polls.
With these alarming doubts about the reliability of the media, consumers must endure simple exhaustion to maintain a steady and balanced use of the media. Anyone who spends time curating a collection of balanced and reliable newsletters should regularly review all of their sites or applications.
All of this said, and with the added pressure of staying professional, I can still follow all the publications I trust without coming back. I owe this ability to prevent the media saturation of the ancient Web tool - RSS.
Because I rely on this simple but effective tool to address just the kind of media consumption disruptions that many find most aggravating, I thought now was the right time to present it as a viable option. Next is my pitch to switch to RSS.
Stylish website for the more civilized age
Because you’re forgiven for not having any idea what RSS is, let’s start with that.
The RSS acronym has had a few different names over the years, but the purpose and underlying technology have remained relatively consistent.
Originally known as the "RDF Site Summary" RSS software, it was created by Netscape, the Web's esteemed oldest programmers as an information system for routinely updated Web content repositories, such as blogs. In particular, it was intended for use in "My Netscape," a kind of customized browser home page (back when they were the case).
When Netscape abandoned the project, the two competing teams took the mantle and went their own way in a slightly different way. By the time RSS 2.0 appeared, it was renamed "Really Simple Syndication," which was copyrighted by one group, and named the open Web standard.
Basically, RSS is a special XML format. Basically, XML takes the same syntactic concept of HTML, nested opening and closing tags, and generally applies it to structured data. As such, XML can be used to represent a huge spectrum of data formats.
The simple structure of RSS allows serialized web content to be identified, organized, and presented to users in virtually any format. In RSS, each source of web content is compressed into a "feed" - a complete RSS file that contains all the information an RSS aggregator program needs to display it.
The title-like section, which contains information about the feed itself (mainly the source of the content), is followed by the content itself, and each published song is bundled inside a tag. Each tag has subtags for the title tag, description, release date, and other information, all of which are specified as XML corner bracket tags.
As a cousin of constantly structured XML, RSS is organized in its original form so that programs can easily interpret and even read it to people (even if you have to squirm).
Most of the time, however, users interact with RSS feeds through an RSS aggregator, sometimes called an "RSS reader." At startup, these programs download updated copies of the corresponding feed file for each source because the publishers of the feed only add new content to the end of their RSS files. The program then reads, sorts, and displays all feeds to the user in some way.
The magic happens through the parsing of all RSS feeds and the numerous ways in which the process can repackage them. Consolidators get their name from their default mode of merging all feeds together, ordering all items from all feeds sequentially by release date and time. However, consolidators can do more. Users can group feeds based on a common theme so that all items in the grouped feeds are displayed chronologically.
Where it gets particularly high scores (no)
So what exactly separates RSS collectors from content consumption?
First, RSS allows you to follow only the feeds it has been told to, and nothing else. Once you’ve added RSS feeds to all your sources, you’re done - your readers will serve everything that those sources post.
Even better, virtually any web source can be developed as a feed. You can get RSS feeds for delivering videos, podcasts, and even profiles on certain social networks. If your favorite web content creator does not provide an RSS feed, there are services that can create an RSS feed from it.
Second, RSS aggregators give you the power to consume content the way you want. If you want to look at each source separately, you can do so. You can experience your content as a single stream if you want, or you can group feeds in a timely manner and own separate collections, for example, in terms of news, technology, art and culture, or any other organization that is most intuitive to you.
My favorite RSS aggregator feature is tracking countless items. Because it keeps track of the items you view and the ones you don’t, you can easily tell if you’re interested in your content.
In short, an RSS reader marks your content as read or unread. Unread content is everything your feeds have posted since your reader last reviewed new items, as well as any unread items left when you last closed your reader.
Most RSS collectors place this feature in front and in the middle because users tend to appreciate the new. The products listed are also accessible, but are usually pushed aside to make room for new arrivals. As soon as you mark something as read, it will be disabled. Depending on how your reader is configured, it will either be removed from the device or cached, containing an X number of the most recently read items and clearing the rest.
If you set your RSS reader to check your feed in the background and also turn on notifications, you can get Ping whenever new content appears. Not all feed readers will notify you of notifications. Rather, most of them only review and download content when you open them, which is exactly what I like.
However, if you keep your content up to date, some readers will send push notifications. For those who don’t, you can attach to other services To take a message from your RSS collector and let you grab.
We live the way the old Web does
Because these features are simple, they add a radical change to your media experience.
While RSS is not the only way, it is the most effective way to consume exclusively the media sources of your choice, not the presence of the biggest players on the Web. Unlike Facebook and Google, RSS does not screen your content using an algorithm to determine what you see.
Instead, your feeds deliver what your selected sources have published. As long as the sources you choose aren’t biased (or if they replace each other’s bias), the news is in balance. RSS ensures that you get everything your source publishes, so you don’t lose anything. When content is published, it appears unread - you only need it if you never check your reader.
In addition to this, RSS is a great way to prescribe “dose control” for your media diet. Your reader will automatically hide your readings, saving you from accidentally damaging something you don’t remember reading, and having to devote brain power to remembering everything you read. This is a big advantage over most news apps that showcase all of their latest stories and let you figure out what to check out.
As an extension, RSS follows what you have not read. That way, if you notice something unread, you know it’s new to you. Even better, the reader remembers all the unread content no matter how long it’s lingered there. No matter how many times you open an app, how much time it takes, or how many new products are piled on top of it, if you haven’t read it, it stays unread.
The dose guide really comes here: once you’ve read all of your countless items, you’re done. Your reader is no longer downloading content because nothing can be downloaded. You can close your app and know that nothing is readable anymore, and when you open the app later and there’s something new, it tells you.
Finally, RSS allows you to keep all your media in one place, which offers a number of benefits. One is that it streamlines and deepens the content experience at the same time. With just one reader app for all your sources, you avoid mental fatigue by opening multiple apps in a row and navigating through their different layouts.
Still, just because all of your feeds are in one place, doesn’t mean you have to dig through one huge pile. You can arrange them freely, but it makes sense to you. By grouping feeds of the same type together, all the contents of the feeds in the same group are displayed chronologically. This system allows you to view side-by-side material from different sources on the same topics or even the same event.
If that’s not enough to win, consider this: You’ll also get a serious security update from RSS. Because all of your content is in one place, you only trust one app that has access to your device.
RSS readers are also much simpler software, so they are probably more flawed than those that offer a wealth of features for experiencing rich content. An RSS reader is simply a respected XML designer that leaves little room for the developer.
Enter the content beast
Because RSS is an open standard, it offers countless experiences. This fact may leave you curious, but not knowing where to start. I encourage you to explore the abundance of options for yourself, here are some suggestions for diving.
One, find out which devices you want your aggregator on, and find a service that syncs between all of them. Maintaining conflicting, unreadable content quickly becomes tedious. There are many free services available that will provide you with any kind of cloud synchronization and multi-platform client applications.
Two, figure out where to get RSS feeds for your content. Some sync services allow you to search for feeds from thousands of sources, so they may cover you if your content isn’t too niche. For more obscure sources, you may need to make a trench.
Start by looking at the main and menu pages of your web feed, as it may have a small radio wave icon that links to an RSS feed, or a page that works (like we do here). If you're with, you can search the site for a feed using the Google search trick. Searching for "site: URL rss" - without quotes and your source URL - will return hits from this site that contain "rss".
If all else fails, you can try creating a feed of your favorite site content. Some services read the HTML of a site and try to convert it to RSS. Granted, the mileage may vary, but you probably won’t have to resort to this step.
Actually, it’s not much: Find a reader, find a feed, add it to the reader, and start spoiling the content. In fact, it’s so easy that I have the same RSS installation as what I did before I learned anything about the technology. So for those of you who take the plunge, I hope RSS gives you the same representativeness in terms of media consumption as I do.
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