@pluralistic I wrote and have been been using my own feed reader, Temboz, for over 24 years now. The two essential features of any good reader in my book are:

1) filtering. Don't want to hear about the inane Kardashians or the insane Trump any more? Double-click on their occurrence, click "thumbs-down", adjust the filtering setting and boom, mental health restored.

2) giving you control over the order articles are shown, as opposed to the Meta or Google algorithm that does not have your best interests at heart.

@pluralistic 'Of course, tying individual executives' bonuses to making a number go up has a predictably perverse outcome. As Goodhart's law has it, "Any metric becomes a target, and then ceases to be a useful metric.'

We're living this in the Salesforce ecosystem right now. They recently replaced all their well-functioning support forms with agents powered by their bet-the-company AI bots. And the outcome is predictable: it's twice as hard for partners and customers to get the specific help they need, and which they knew how to easily get from the support forms. Many of these forms kicked off automated processes that are essential to partner business. Now you have to argue with a bot that gets things wrong, requires more effort to interact with, and acts as a case deflection tool. All because someone had a number-go-up metric to meet.

@pluralistic
You can roll your own reader!

This weekend I built my own locally hosted rss+ reader. Yes, used Claude.
Why? I want features, my features & cuz I can now, thx Claude. No worries about sunset, lives on NAS.

My Features? Crawler enhanced, Jina API allows me to scrape pages without rss or decent html feeds. Jina also does tagging and categorization, creates summary cards for every story. The next layer creates briefs of any feed with LLM. Great read aloud too.

@pluralistic Very informative and as always tremendous depth and knowledge. I, however, am always jolted into a mild repelling with your term #enshittification which is apt for it's descriptor and wondered if 'nshtifi' might be an alternative. Thanks for the RSS knowledge, I like them but have been dredging of late so your tips are very welcome. Best, David

@pluralistic Fantastic article that resonates on every level. Newsboat (command line RSS reader) + cron scheduling has been my go-to when the news cycle gets overwhelming (such as over the past week). I wrote about it several years ago: https://noisediver.org/lifehack-using-automation-to-deal-with-compulsive-news-reading/

@pluralistic Despite being on the web for over 25 years, I don't think I've ever used an RSS reader. You've convinced me to start, and with your blog feed of course!

@pluralistic I should setup Miniflux again...

@pluralistic RSS are also avaliable at Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/vivaldibrowser.rss and Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCHkYOD-3fZbuGhwsADBd9ZQ

@pluralistic

Open source RSS readers I highly recommend are 'NetNewsWire' on iOS and MacOS (my favourite so far) and 'Capy Reader' or 'Read You' on Android.

@pluralistic some RSS readers, like FreshRSS I'm using, also support feeds from parsed HTML with content selected by XPath (or other means). This way I can have feeds for websites that don't publish RSS.

@pluralistic

using self-hosted selfoss for.. I dont know, whenever goole reader was killed.

#Pluralistic

@pluralistic These are great recommendations, and I can't wait to try them!

It's interesting how, as web search fails, word of mouth has been taking its place. In that spirit, I'd like to add that I use uBlock Origin rules to block parts of specific websites that I don't like. For example, these two custom rules will banish the New York Times Opinion section:

www.nytimes.com# #div.css-1w1paqe:has(section#large-opinion-label)

www.nytimes.com# #li[data-testid="nav-item-Opinion"]

@pluralistic interesting. And the most often I read your pieces through the Inoreader app 🙂

@pluralistic I fucking love RSS!