🔗 I Ditched the Algorithm for RSS—and You Should Too

I waste too much time scrolling through social media. It's bad for my health, so why do I keep doing it?

Because once in a while, I'll find a post so good that it teaches me something I never knew before, and all the scrolling feels worth it. But I've stumbled upon an old piece of free and open source tech, relatively unknown today, which is THE solution of solving the problems with modern media without sacrificing accessible, good content: RSS.

Reddit, Facebook, Twitter — platforms built for engagement, not efficiency. Instead of showing you high-quality posts upfront, they pad your feed with memes, spam, and astroturfing. There is only so much 'good' content created in a day. By padding your feed with trash, they make the limited amount of good posts "last longer". These sites want you to spend more time scrolling on their website, so they feed you scraps which makes the occasional great post feels like a jackpot.
This concept, operant conditioning, was developed by B.F. Skinner — Yes, the mind behind the Skinnerbox.

While some sites offer filtering or sorting options, manually settings these options every time you want to access a subreddit is just not doable.

You could, of course, stop consuming content from these websites. However, this would mean potentially missing really good content; content you'd learn from, interesting ideas, and more.
But it doesn't have to be this way. You can reclaim your attention span while still having access to the same quality content as before.

RSS is like your youtube subscription feed in hyperdrive. Subscribe to sites you love and decide what shows up — no exploitative social media algorithm needed. No more ads or algorithms deciding how to keep you doomscrolling. This 1999 tech actually solves a lot of 2025 problems.
Here's the kicker: Most websites, even social media, quietly support RSS feeds.

You can filter out keywords, set minimum upvotes or like counts, and much more! Modern RSS clients allow you to make filters using Regex, and there are a lot of software and services you can use to tune up your filtering to 11.

TL;DR: Never see noise, and never miss hidden gems again!

But how do you get started with RSS? It's easier than you think!