Why You Should Use RSS (Why Modern Social Media Sucks)
I don't hide the fact that I absolutely despise social media.
Let me explain my reasoning. I don't necessarily believe that social media is inherently bad; rather, I believe its practicality has strayed too far from its actual intended purpose.
So what is the purpose of social media? Or, even broader, what is social media?
I would define a social media platform as a technologically-built platform intended for internet communication, whether through forums, data sharing (images, videos), or instant messaging. It's an umbrella term under which all the major contenders (instagram, facebook, messenger, tiktok, snapchat, etc) share a common trait. So what is the purpose of these platforms?
From a consumer perspective, I believe that the purpose of a social media platform is to bring the average user enjoyment and allow a user to connect with other people across the globe. This is what I would call the intent of social media. With the intent of social media clarified, we need to ask ourselves: does this intent hold true in practice? I argue that it does not hold true in practice for most social media platforms, and I want to give a few reasons why I've mostly stopped using modern social media, and what social media alternatives I would suggest.
First, I want to explain why modern social media fails to bring the average user enjoyment. From a completely subjective point of view, I would be willing to state that an average person does not receive any gratification from scrolling through their feed on Instagram for one hour. In fact, most social media platforms are built around a capitalist idea of likes, upvotes, or comments. We receive instant gratification the moment we receive a like or upvote on one of our posts. But is it really gratification, or is it the relief that other people care about our actions?
Last fall I read an amazing article (I recommend reading its entirety) written by Gregory Robson regarding the overabundance of stimuli present in our daily lives. Even under the COVID-19 quarantine, we are bombarded with notifications, phone vibrations, emails, noises, lights, and signs that fill the sensory center of our brains. Robson argues in his article that while each individual proponent we sense may be inherently good (for example, a mobile phone), the combination of these items actually lower our overall social utility. I agree with his statement wholeheartedly and I believe it holds true especially in regards to modern social media. With each social media platform we join, our attention is subsequently divded into notifications specific to each platform, likes for a certain photo on instagram, views on a video on tiktok, et cetera, et cetera. Because of this division of attention, a single like on a photo or video gives no one instant gratitude. As the scale of these platforms increase, we expect the scale of our gratification to increase as well, and we begin to expect 400, 500, 700 likes on each photo. We expect thousands of video views, 50 comments, and when we fail to achieve these hardly realistic goals, we begin to develop feelings of discontent and depression. I argue that social media platforms do not give anyone a feeling of gratification, but rather, a feeling of discontent, because our expectations exceed reality as a platform scales. And as such, scrolling for an hour on instagram will actually make any user feel less content with their social media profile maintenance. It's a mind game of who can get the most likes, the most views, the greatest upvotes, and this mentality is unhealthy and harmful. While each individual platform may be intended to give its users connection and feelings of gratitude, it does the opposite in practice.
The Threat of Comprehensive Overstimulation in Modern Societies
I also believe that the content featured on these platforms do not reflect the intent of the platform creators, and I'll use Instagram as a prime example. I remember using Instagram for the first time in 2014 after some consistent peer pressure to "get Instagram" to "check out cool photography" and "aesthetic food photos". In 2020, I can't say that I see much of these things anymore, and only a remnant remains of the original Instagram content. Because of the "popularity pressure", people want to show their face. They feel a need to be recognized for their likes, or associate their likes to their body image. Thus, the content on Instagram spirals downward into a battle of who can show the most sexualized photo of themselves to receive upvotes. With this pressure to conform, the idea of displaying art or beauty in nature is replaced with highly sexualized content consumed by a younger generation. Combined with a pressure to receive likes, users feel a need to boast about their personal lives - photos of a relationship, material wealth, and personal beauty. There's nothing objectively beneficial about this shift in content creation. Don't believe me? Try scrolling on Instagram for as little as ten minutes, and you can easily confirm the shift in content creation.
But even if social media content could be deemed morally acceptable, I believe corporations controlling these platforms also play a hand in my disgust for social media. The sole business purpose of a social media platform is to generate revenue. Regarding a "free to use" platform, the only foreseeable way a corporation can generate profit is through ad revenue. This means littering a user's feed with irritating content the user did not purposefully subscribe to.
So the question now is, how does a corporation change a user's feed whilst keeping the user "entertained" on their platform? And the magic answer is personalization. We notice if we see fifty diaper ads on instagram in a row, but if it displays ads for Youtubers I know? I don't care. And it's how they personalize our feeds that could be viewed as morally impermissible.
Most sites tend to use cookies, bots, and other analytics services to better personalize their platform towards your desires. As a web developer, I can confirm how many undercover invasions of privacy a company can incorporate into a site. Apps can use your location. They can listen to your voice. They can record when you scroll down the page. They can record what posts you've viewed. They can record what buttons you click on, what posts you've liked, and more. At my internship this summer I learned of mouseflow, a technology that allows a site to screen record a user's cursor while the user is browsing the site. The list of analytics goes on and on. We've become so comfortable with these invasions of privacy that we've become complacent, neglecting our privacy completely. I don't believe that any company should have rights to spy on my personal life because I want to message my friends or look at art. For this reason alone, I want to leave social media completely.
button tracking with Google Analytics
All in all, I believe that most modern social media platforms are terrible. They don't give us any gratification, they host often sexualized and inappropriate content, and they often breach our privacy. This is a terrible system for us to allow younger generations to thrive on, and it needs to change.
By now you should have seen my title for this extended rant and you're probably wondering what the heck RSS is, but I'll explain RSS in a bit. Let me preface by saying that regardless of the state of modern social media, I still want to socially connect with my peers. By forgoing my usage of social media, how can I keep contact with my friends? How can I stay up to date on news? I think there's more than a few answers to this question.
First, it's time to stop letting your technology control you, and instead, for you to control your technology. Over the past few weeks, I've been turning my phone off completely and leaving it in one of my desk compartments. The amount of dead time I've been aimlessly scrolling on Reddit or Instagram has become immediately apparent, and in the past week alone, I've probably saved hundreds of hours putting my time towards more beneficial hobbies and skills. I think we instinctively glue our minds to our devices and forget about the real world around us. I'm not saying you should never use social media. I'm saying that you can use social media in a healthy amount, and change your feed content to reflect your interests. I've gotten used to checking my phone only once or twice per day, then turning it off for the remainder of the day (yes, completely off), and in the rare cases I'm expecting a phone call, I'll leave it on. Likewise, I've started to unfollow a lot of accounts and people, and started to follow content more aligned with my interests and values. I know some of these are my friends, but as a minor shoutout and plug, I really appreciate the following accounts like and others. People should follow and appreciate the things they personally enjoy rather than following what other people enjoy.
And now I'll talk a bit about RSS and why I've starting using Newsboat as my primary social media platform (if you can even call it social media). In the early years of the twenty first century, the concept of following or subscribing to a profile or site didn't really exist, and the only way to follow content was to actively check that site. RSS, or "Really Simple Syndication", is a content feed that allows a user to add sites and profiles to their feed, and all the content aggregated from these sites will be streamlined into a single source. How it works is that most popular sites host code files specific to an article, user, or profile. Once you gather all these urls for content you wish to follow, you can use an RSS reader to input all urls, and it will streamline that content for you, free of ads and useless information you don't care for. The concept of RSS used to be very popular in the early 2000s, but has since become obsolete with the creation of modern social media; however, I still believe it holds more potential than any existing social media site today. With RSS, you don't have to use multiple social media apps to view the posts of each account you follow, and instead, it is possible to aggregate all these posts onto one site.
I think newsboat is very minimal, but I'm able to aggregate my feeds into a simple interface where I can view only the content I want to see. The beauty of RSS is that there are many RSS readers, and you can choose which reader you would like to use to aggregate all content. I personally suggest feedly, a user-friendly modern RSS reader.
Most modern sites offer RSS urls for a user to subscribe to their content. Using RSS, you can subscribe to exactly the content you wish to see without ads and social media overhead.
It's hard for me to describe how effective RSS is without providing examples, so below is a few feeds I currently follow. You're welcome to use my feeds to see why you might consider using RSS.
https://rss-endpoints.netlify.app/.netlify/functions/gis
https://www.romanzolotarev.com/rss.xml
https://dataswamp.org/~solene/rss.xml
https://onetapestry.com/feed/atom
https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UC9q4FW3t7AasK7o49C-Mq6w
https://share.tube/feeds/videos.xml?accountId=108
https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCamvct0fdKsWoR5DuYdFzww
https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCveuCkTaxr5cDc60eaf4dmQ
https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UC6VBSriBtTgTXohF15Yo9sQ
https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCKab3hYnOoTZZbEUQBMx-ww
https://www.webtoons.com/en/challenge/summoned/rss?title_no=365069
https://www.reddit.com/r/freebsd.rss
https://www.reddit.com/r/openbsd.rss
https://www.reddit.com/r/suckless.rss
So I'll close my thoughts with a few questions that everyone should ask themselves. Do you enjoy your time spent on a specific social media platform? And if not, why not? And, more importantly, are you in control of your technology? Or does your technology control you?