RSS: Brought down by the algorithm but still alive

 

I make no secret of the fact that I really like RSS. It is not that I dislike algorithms. They have their place. But there are things I want to follow closely, and I do not want to miss a beat.

Let me take you back to the summer of 2004: 

I was a new faculty member, living in a new town, and most of my friends were scattered across other cities and countries. The internet was how I stayed connected to people and ideas. While spending time online, I found blogs. Not celebrity blogs or corporate content, but blogs written by people like me. 

As I started following more and more bloggers, I discovered RSS. At the time, I used a reader called Bloglines. It aggregated all of my favorite blogs into one place. I loved that I could add new blogs as I found them and then simply check one site to see what had been updated. It was so much better than clicking from blog to blog, hoping something new had been posted. Soon I realized I could subscribe to more than blogs. News outlets offered topic-specific feeds, so I could follow only the areas I cared about. Journals had feeds that notified me when new articles were published. RSS became an easy, efficient way to track people, topics, and publications across the web. It felt organized and intentional. I controlled what I saw.

At some point, the big companies caught on. Google launched its own RSS reader, folded it into its ecosystem alongside Blogger, and bought out competitors. This is a familiar story. For a while, it worked beautifully. And then Google Reader was shut down.

The explanation was that people no longer used it. That was not entirely true. But by then, something else had taken over.

Algorithmic feeds.

Platforms like Facebook shifted away from simple, chronological content. If you were an early Facebook user, you might remember how different it felt. Posts appeared slowly. You primarily saw updates from people you actually knew. Now the feed is fast, dense, and filled with content chosen for you based on your past engagement.

Those algorithms are designed to keep us scrolling. The more time we spend on the platform, the more profitable it becomes. From a business perspective, it makes perfect sense. But it also means we are no longer just seeing what we chose to follow. If we were limited to posts from people and organizations we explicitly subscribed to, many of us would encounter far less content. And perhaps we would spend less time there.

Some people have stepped away from these platforms for exactly that reason. Even for those of us who remain, something about that earlier experience is still appealing. I miss the clarity of RSS. I miss opening a feed and knowing that what I saw was exactly what I had asked to see.

I would go back to that in a heartbeat.

That said, RSS is not dead. It quietly thrives in places like podcasting. When you subscribe to a podcast, you are using RSS. You expect to be notified when a new episode drops. You are not looking for a random algorithmic suggestion to start with episode 35 of something you have never heard before. You want your content in order, from the sources you choose. So RSS is still here. We just don't talk about it much anymore. And we no longer have the same level of awareness or easy access to RSS-style aggregation across our everyday online experiences.

Maybe that is what I miss most: the sense of control I had when RSS was Queen.