I use Feedly to follow several RSS feeds, including everything from the EA forum, LessWrong, etc. This lets me read more EA-adjacent/aligned content than if I visited each website infrequently because Feedly has an easy to use app on my phone.
Here is a screenshot on browser of my Feedly sidebar. (I almost never use a browser)
Here is an example of the Feedly ‘firehose’ from my mobile phone, previewing several posts from EA forum and elsewhere.
I liken it to a ‘fire hose’ in that I get everything, including all the personal blogs and low-effort content that would otherwise be hidden by the website sorting algorithm. There’s also no (displayed) information in Feedly about the number or content of comments—instead I need to open each interesting post to find out if someone has commented on it.
For some posts, the post content is the most valuable. In other posts, the commentary is the most valuable, and Feedly/RSS does a bad job of exposing this value to me easily. I also find that engagement is highest within the first 1-2 days of a post, but takes several hours to start.
All of this is to say that I think the ‘right’ feed is probably still something like one or more RSS feeds—especially given their interoperability and ease of use—but that the user experience is likely to be highly variable depending on their needs and appetite for other- vs self-curation of what is in the feed.
I use Feedly to follow several RSS feeds, including everything from the EA forum, LessWrong, etc. This lets me read more EA-adjacent/aligned content than if I visited each website infrequently because Feedly has an easy to use app on my phone.
I liken it to a ‘fire hose’ in that I get everything, including all the personal blogs and low-effort content that would otherwise be hidden by the website sorting algorithm. There’s also no (displayed) information in Feedly about the number or content of comments—instead I need to open each interesting post to find out if someone has commented on it.
For some posts, the post content is the most valuable. In other posts, the commentary is the most valuable, and Feedly/RSS does a bad job of exposing this value to me easily. I also find that engagement is highest within the first 1-2 days of a post, but takes several hours to start.
All of this is to say that I think the ‘right’ feed is probably still something like one or more RSS feeds—especially given their interoperability and ease of use—but that the user experience is likely to be highly variable depending on their needs and appetite for other- vs self-curation of what is in the feed.
This is exactly my point. Imagine you could customise your RSS feed like you do your front page.