How To Take Back Control of What You Read On The Internet

How to Take Back Control of
What You Read on the Internet

Social-media algorithms show us what they want us to see, not
what we want to see. But there is an alternative.
By Yair Rosenberg
Paul Spella / The Atlantic; Getty
MARCH 6, 2023
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The social-media web is built on a lie. Platforms such as Facebook,
Instagram, and Twitter enticed countless users to join with the promise
that they could see everything their friends or favorite celebrities
posted in one convenient location.
Over time, though, the sites were carefully calibrated to filter what
users saw—regardless of their stated preferences—in order to
manipulate their attention and keep them on the platform. Algorithmic
timelines quietly replaced chronological ones, until our social-media
feeds no longer took direction from us, but rather directed us where
they wanted us to go.
Lately, this deception has become more transparent. Last month, Elon
Musk reportedly had his engineers alter Twitter’s algorithm so that it
fed his own tweets to the platform’s users, whether they followed him
or not. (Musk denies having done so.) This might seem to say more
about Musk’s vanity than about social media in its entirety. But in his
typically crass way, Musk was just making obvious what was always
the case for his industry. Meta did the same when it launched Meta
Verified, a subscription service that promised it would provide paying
users with “increased visibility and reach.”
These developments underscore a stark reality: As long as we rely on

social-media sites to curate what we read, we allow them to control
what we read, and their interests are not our interests. Fortunately,
there already exists a long-standing alternative that provides users
with what social media does not deliver: RSS.
Introducing a quarter-century-old technology as if it were novel might

seem a little strange. But despite the syndication format’s cult
following, most internet users have never heard of it. That’s
unfortunate, because RSS provides everyday internet users with an
easy way to organize all of their online-content consumption—news
media, blogs, YouTube channels, even search results for favorite
terms—in one place, curated by the user, not an algorithm. The
answer to our relatively recent social-media woes has been sitting
there all along.
Charlie Warzel: The open secret of a Google search
But though RSS is remarkably useful, it can be daunting to the

uninitiated, and it lacks the slick marketing and cultural footprint of
the social-media giants. So I thought I’d offer a simple guide for
anyone who wants to take back control of their online experience.
Get an RSS reader.

At its core, RSS is an underlying internet protocol that keeps track of
the content published on a given website. To access this material, you
need an RSS reader, which turns these feeds into a format you can
peruse on your computer or phone. I have used Feedly for many years,
and find it extremely easy to manage: Just pop in a link to a website or
social-media page, and the service will automatically grab its RSS
feed, if there is one, and add its content. Non-paying users get up to
100 feeds, while paying users have no limits. Several other excellent
RSS readers—such as Inoreader and NewsBlur—have similar
arrangements. And my friends with Apple devices rave
about NetNewsWire, which is completely free. These apps work in
your browser and on your phone, so your reading is always synced
and available wherever you are.
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Fill your reader with subscriptions to things you like to read.

This is the fun part. Do you want The Atlantic’s latest stories? There’s
a feed for that. Would you rather just follow a specific section? There
are feeds for those too. Want to get more specialized? There are even
unique feeds for every individual Atlantic writer (such as myself). Do
you enjoy Substack newsletters, but are afraid that they will overload
your inbox? Each of them has an RSS feed, so now you can offload
their editions to your RSS reader instead and enjoy them alongside
everything else you read. You can do the same with your favorite web
comics, such as xkcd.
Many sites publicly link to their RSS feeds on their pages, but you
don’t actually have to hunt for them. Just copy the URL of any page
into your reader—e.g., “TheAtlantic.com”—and the reader you have
chosen should be able to find any RSS feeds connected to it. What’s
more, if a page doesn’t have a feed, many of today’s readers can build
one for you. And if your RSS reader doesn’t have that functionality,
you can use an app such as Fetch RSS, RSS.app, or FiveFilters (free
but more technical) to create a custom feed yourself, and then just add
it to your reader.
Subscribe to social-media feeds you don’t want to miss—and

you’ll never miss them.
Unlike the algorithmic timelines of the social-media giants, RSS
readers don’t suppress content based on what they think will and
won’t arrest your attention. This means you will receive every single
post of every single social feed you subscribe to, in whatever order it
was posted, and you can scroll through and select whichever items
you’d like to explore. For instance, each YouTube channel has its own
feed, so with RSS, you can always find each video an artist posts. The
same is true for Reddit pages, if there are subreddits you want to keep
track of. And although it’s not as seamless, building feeds for
Instagram and TikTok accounts is easy as well. Twitter and Facebook
don’t always play nice with RSS, but many of today’s readers can
grab content from them too.
Get fancy and follow things you can’t on social media.

Many years back, as part of my day job covering the Middle East, I
met an aspiring right-wing politician and thought he might be going
places. So I set up an RSS feed for all YouTube-video search results
that included his name, which enabled me to follow his rise. This
meant I was ready when, in 2021, Naftali Bennett briefly dethroned
Benjamin Netanyahu and became the prime minister of Israel. But
search-result feeds like these can be useful for everyone, not just
political junkies. For example, I have one for every YouTube
appearance of The High Kings, my favorite Irish folk band, which
means that my RSS reader catches every live performance of theirs
that gets uploaded, including new songs before they’re recorded in
studio.
Services such as RSS.app can take any YouTube search query and
turn it into a personalized feed for your reader. Google’s own Google
Alerts can do the same for any internet search term. One trick I
recommend: Put any multi-word search term in quotation marks (as in,
“vegan birthday cake”), which restricts the search results to exact
mentions of that phrase; otherwise, you’ll get results in your feed that
only partially match your query.
THE INTERNET has introduced many problems into our ever more
chaotic digital lives, but in the case of RSS, it has also provided a
solution. The question is whether enough users are willing to
implement it.
Read: The Supreme Court actually understands the internet
In 2013, Google shut down its celebrated RSS client, Google Reader,
citing a decline in RSS usage. Today, millions of people still use RSS
readers, but many times more use social-media sites and don’t even
know that RSS exists. This imbalance means that media outlets and
other content providers have greater incentive to invest in social-
media infrastructure rather than RSS support, leading some to drop the
latter entirely. But though the internet’s creative output deserves our
attention, social-media companies do not. When the primary way we
read online is filtered through the algorithms of capricious
corporations that can change what we see on a whim, both writers and
readers suffer. RSS is a reminder that it doesn’t have to be this way.
Enjoy unlimited access to The Atlantic.

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How to Take Back Control of

What You Read on the Internet

Paul Spella / The Atlantic; Getty

These developments underscore a stark reality: As long as we rely on

Introducing a quarter-century-old technology as if it were novel might

Charlie Warzel: The open secret of a Google search

But though RSS is remarkably useful, it can be daunting to the

Get an RSS reader.

Why Is There Financing for Everything Now?

How the Ballpoint Pen Killed Cursive

Fill your reader with subscriptions to things you like to read.

Subscribe to social-media feeds you don’t want to miss—and

Get fancy and follow things you can’t on social media.

Read: The Supreme Court actually understands the internet

Enjoy unlimited access to The Atlantic.

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