The View From RSS

I read a lot on the web. I almost never look at websites, though. I consume almost everything through an RSS reader. As AI reshapes the way online information is organised and consumed, it increasingly feels like I'm behind the scenes, watching the performance from the wings rather than seeing it from the front as intended. I thought I'd tell you why I do this and what it looks like.

I've been an RSS-first reader since I was a student in the mid-2000s. Back then, publications made it an attractive prospect. Many had bespoke feeds based on specific subjects or writers that you could follow. Before social media became the dominant way to keep up with your preferred media and personalities, you could use these feeds to curate your own little magazine in your feed reader of choice, made up just of the stuff you found most interesting. It was excellent.

Many years later, I started working for The Browser, a newsletter that curates a daily selection of the best articles, videos and podcasts available on the web. From my predecessor, I inherited a bundle of over a thousand RSS feeds that he used to put each edition together. It contained feeds for every major English-language media outlet, plus hundreds of niche publications and personal blogs. It had been collected over many years, assembled with taste and shrewdness. By this time, we were well into the era of declining online advertising revenues, rising paywalls and link rot. Taking custody of this RSS collection felt momentous, even a bit counter-cultural. In the 2020s, this isn't how you are supposed to read on the internet.

I've been using the feeds daily ever since. I've added to the collection: I'm now getting close to 2,000 publications. A lot of the growth has been driven by the atomisation of media. When an outlet shuts down, I do my best to find and follow the new destinations of its best writers. I use Feedly as my reader nowadays and all I have to do to follow a Substack is paste its url into the "follow source" field. Even if they don't advertise the fact anymore, most outlets do still have at least a "whole site" feed; for those that don't, my reader can usually pull something out of the website's architecture.

To put together each edition of The Browser, I (or my co-editor, we job share) scan through all of the new articles published since I last checked the feeds. There are often several thousand. I don't read everything in full, of course. I've become very good over the years at allowing my eye to slide over everything, stopping when I see a headline or phrase that looks promising. I keep a running list of likely candidates and then appraise them properly once I've finished the scroll.

The final selection goes out in the newsletter to our paid subscribers. I feel confident that it lives up to our "writing of lasting value" tagline, because I have glanced through, and in a lot of cases read, a vast amount of what was published that day. Along the way, I pick up a lot of other material that I find personally interesting or amusing but that doesn't fit The Browser's rubric. That's what you see on Thursdays, if you look at my "Thursday Thirteen" link roundups.

So what does the online world look from the vantage point of an RSS fanatic? Mostly, quite spare and minimalist. Not all feeds bring images through with the text, and a lot of embeds don't work either. If these seem important, I click through to see the original, but that doesn't happen very often. My reader just sorts all entries chronologically, so I see a random jumble of everything as I scroll backwards. To give you an idea of what a mixture it is, here are the subjects of the five articles at the top of my feeds right now: shark hunting in India, praise kink, 1970s architecture, AI's influence on filmmaking, and the growth of the anti-system voter in the US. I suppose I could sort the feeds into subject matter folders, but I find the constant variety makes all the information easier to parse. I think it helps me do a better job of sifting out the good stuff, too.

A homepage is a curated display of the articles that its editor wants to present to visitors. An RSS feed includes everything that is published. I find it interesting sometimes to compare what comes through to me on the feeds vs what is given promotion and prominence. When you read via RSS, you see all of the SEO articles that the casual web reader never sees but which drive search traffic towards the site. These are things like videogame cheats, Wordle hints, explanations of movie post-credit scenes, information on how to watch sports matches. Lists with titles like "What's good to watch on Netflix this month" or explainers on how to unsubscribe from streaming services are common too. Betting odds — "what are the odds on the Logan Paul-Anthony Joshua fight" — come up a lot. Instructions on how to circumvent paywalls or get around age verification requirements are becoming more common.

There's now an ever-increasing amount of explainer content that looks to me like it's tailored towards search engines' AI summary tools, too. Pieces about whether a certain app or service is down or advice on how to unblock sites that are banned in various territories fall into this category. The same goes for long summaries of books or films, many of which themselves look like they have been written by AI. The machine feeds the machine.

I also see a lot of what I think of affiliate bait product reviews — a "review" that sets out a problem and then makes extravagant promises about the problem solving brilliance of of a particular device or piece of software. This will invariable turn out to be something that the publication earns money for promoting. Re-packaged playlists are also common. An outlet will write up the "songs of the summer", which is actually just a list of tracks lifted from an existing playlist on Spotify or Apple Music, rather than original editorial. These will never appear anywhere prominent on a site's landing pages. They're just there to capture search clicks or referrals.

My favourite thing to see on the feeds, though, is the evidence that there are humans still out there generating content. Sometimes an article will have a temporary headline with "TKTKTK" in it, which was captured by the aggregator before it was updated to its final version. The multiple outcome pieces especially make me chuckle: I, too, have been a web editor under pressure to get an article out the second the polls close or a casting is announced, making multiple versions on the sly in the CMS and then only promoting the one that turned out to be correct to the homepage.

When people go live on Substack or other platforms, the videos get added to their feeds with auto-generated thumbnails. I'll be scrolling and sometimes the blurry resting face of a journalist I used to work with will suddenly pop up. I always enjoy that. There's a culture on Substack, too, of creating "hidden open threads" for only those who know how to find them to add comments. I see all of those, just by being an RSS reader.

My favourite thing of all, though, is when people have fun with the differing perspective that RSS gives you on the web. Dave Rupert runs an "RSS Club", where members pledge to publish stuff to their feeds that never appears anywhere else — a secret, just for those in the know. Many use it for more personal writing, or works in progress, or art that they don't want to expose to the whole internet yet. Somehow, still using RSS, which is a beautifully simple bit of tech from the early days of the web, makes you part of a community of like-minded strangers. When I've spent hours scrolling through my never-ending stream of text that nobody else ever sees, I feel a warm glow when I come across something that was written just for me.

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