Don't be a slave to the algorithm

The problem - social media cesspool and the algorithm

Have you noticed that recently, your LinkedIn, Facebook, or other social media feeds have become a cesspool of aggressive ads, wannabe influencers, and otherwise irrelevant content? Me too!

Some examples from my recent LinkedIn feed:

• A rant about the existence of caps lock key.
• A text wall about how putting a message on a tree during a blackout is “#ThinkOutsideTheBox”, followed by a lengthy praise of the breadth of skills involved in this endeavour.
• How a new fancy AI tool is going to make you irrelevant in your job, vibe coding is the doom of all engineers, and a random prompting course is going to be your saviour. Usually made by a person who has little to no experience in the field. Bonus points if they are a self-proclaimed expert in the field of AI and call themselves AI Guy.
• folks showing their totally creative AI-generated art. And the usual, some totally real stories about how someone did something completely normal and how it taught them about sales or hiring or life. Then reposted as their own story by countless other people.

I wouldn’t even mind the content of these posts if they were from people I know, but they are not. They are from people I have no idea who they are and how they ended up on my feed. I don’t even know if they are real people or just bots. In my experience, on LinkedIn, out of 10 posts, only 2 are from profiles I follow. The rest is either suggested or sponsored content. On Facebook, the situation is even worse. I checked around 20 posts, and only 1 was from a group I follow. The rest was a mix of ads, sponsored content and posts from random profiles (though somehow matching my interests).

Why do I say recently? Back in the day (though I can’t tell when exactly), you would only see posts from people you follow, your classmates, some fan pages and groups. Your friends haven’t posted any content recently? The feed wouldn’t be filled with random posts only so that you could scroll mindlessly.

Now, say I follow a few profiles I care about that post enriching content. I would first have to find them in the sea of irrelevant posts and ads. This is a waste of time. I don’t want to scroll through 20 posts to find the one that interests me. I want to see the content I care about first. And I don’t want to miss it if I don’t visit my feed for a month due to a long trekking trip.

Removing the shackles and the noise

The solution is simple, well-known, and relevant now more than ever: RSS!

Social media platforms don’t want you to use RSS. They don’t support it, because they want you to spend as much time on their platform as possible, dead scrolling through addictive but otherwise garbage content, taking away what’s most valuable: your time and focus. Don’t let them.

It’s a technology over 26 years old and still used by many websites, most personal blogs (including this one), and even some news outlets. It allows you to subscribe to a feed of posts from a website and get notified when new content is published. You can use an RSS reader to aggregate all your feeds in one place without any distractions. Only authors you know publish solid content, even once a year (which would’ve been lost in social media noise if you were to be on vacation or busy with work). That nasty Facebook/YouTube/LinkedIn algorithm won’t decide that you shouldn’t see a post from your computer science teacher because they happened to use potentially sensitive terms like master and slave in their published paper.

I won’t delve much into how to set up an RSS reader. There are plenty of guides that could help you out, and it wouldn’t be helpful to repeat them here. Ultimately, you’ll need to decide which RSS reader to use. There are plenty of them with different features, licenses and pricing. Some are open source, some are paid, some are free. Some are web-based, some are desktop applications, and some are mobile apps. You can even self-host your own RSS reader, especially if you are privacy-conscious. The paid ones have a free tier with limited features. Those features might include:

• subscribing to social media accounts, including YouTube channels, podcasts, etc.
• following content changes on a website (e.g. if a website doesn’t have an RSS feed, you can still subscribe to it and get notified when the content changes),
• subscribing to a newsletter (it would not end up in your inbox but in your RSS reader),
• AI summarization of the content.

There is usually a free trial for the premium features, so you can try them out before committing to a paid plan. I recommend trying out a few different ones to see which one best fits your needs. Top 5 RSS readers are a good starting point.

The drawbacks and how to mitigate them

To no surprise, there are some drawbacks to using RSS as your primary source of information:

• Your friends and family’s content likely won’t be there unless they have a blog or a website. This can be mitigated by using more feature-rich RSS readers that allow you to subscribe to social media, such as Inoreader or Feedly. Those features usually require a premium account.
• Content discovery. You won’t be able to discover new authors or content as easily as on social media. I recommend combining RSS and social media to discover new content. You can then subscribe to the RSS feed of the authors you like. Asking folks on Reddit or other forums for recommendations is also a good idea. Of course, at least skim through the content before subscribing to it. You don’t want to end up with your own personal cesspool of irrelevant content, aka MyLinkedInFeed!
• You get to be called a fossil. 🦕 Oh well!

Do it!

That’s all. It was a lengthy post, but if you integrate RSS into your daily routine, cutting out the social media fat, you can focus on the content that matters to you. And you will get back the time that you spent reading my post. Win-win!