Over reliance on algorithms has degraded the user experience to the point that the average user is drowning in ragebait and extremist politics, because they drive up engagement. Just like a toddler, algorithms don’t discriminate between good and bad attention, so everything that gets clicks is thrust forward. Now, you could hope to train the algorithm to show you only postive things, but engagement is engagement and the algorithm curators often engage in rage farming, where your feed is injected with things that are likely to enrage you.
You can avoid this by installing an RSS reader, going to your favorite sites, and manually adding a RSS feed. Now, your reader has things that you manually selected, with the added bonus of having a content pipe free of malicious interference. You can also divide topics in a way that you can avoid certain themes and news until you decide to engage them.
It’s always been cool, but a lot of people gave it up due to lack of good quality tools and content sites actively working against it. Glad to see the community is still alive and trying to get back to it.
Well when I first started, a lot of the smaller news outlets didn’t support rss but I actually wrote some scraper scripts for the ones that interested me. Then there was kind of a golden age where everyone had rss. And then yeah, they started hiding everything behind paywalls and what not. So today, I get as much news as I can through rss and some extra paid content through an Apple News+ subscription. If only the latter allowed you to rss its channels, but it looks pretty locked down.