Recently I saw some people complaining about seeing more and more articles that are of poor quality. Those "10 things you must know about x" or other empty content that are created for the sake of getting views. Sometimes, they are even written using AI and without much thought.
I felt tired of these articles some time ago too. And this is why I stopped going to popular websites to search for articles to read. And I started to add feeds to my RSS reader. I now enjoy discovering new articles again!
I thought it would be interesting to share my journey to start using an RSS reader.
Finding feeds to follow
To be able to enjoy the magic of an RSS feed reader, we first need to add some feeds to it. Otherwise, it kind of lacks interesting things to read.
To tackle this problem, I found a way that works well for me. I started following content curators, either by following them on social media or by subscribing to their newsletter.
And now, every time I find an article that I find interesting, I go check the others articles on the website where it was posted. If I find other articles that are interesting, I add the website to my RSS reader.
And enjoying the RSS Reader magic!
This is where the efforts to find feeds to follow pay off. Since we added only the feeds of websites that we find interesting, there are mostly articles that are interesting on our RSS reader.
We just need to regularly check it to find the next thing we want to read. I say regularly only because I find letting unread content pile up might make using the RSS reader demotivating.
I find it useful to mark every article that I do not intend to read as read when I look at my feed. This way, there are only articles that I want to read or new articles that might be interesting. An alternative would be marking everything as read and adding articles we intend to read on a "read it later" app, like Pocket.
But some websites make it harder to follow them
Most websites I found interesting since I started using an RSS reader have an RSS feed. But some have none.
This is where the choice of RSS reader might be important. Because some readers have options to get content from regular websites by loading the page and extracting the content to add to the feed.
There are also websites that take a URL and generate an RSS feed that can be added to any RSS reader.
I still didn't find websites that I could not follow. But those that don't have an RSS feed definitely make it harder. And I sometimes decided they weren't interesting enough to take the extra step.