My personal antidote to the “check lesswrong. check mad investor chaos. work 5 mins. check mad investor chaos. check lesswrong” problem has been to channel everything I possibly can into an RSS aggregator. No need for me to be twitchily refreshing and checking; I have a computer to do that for me.
Also helps, I think, that I’m then removed from the algorithmically-mediated Skinner box of someone else deciding what my news feed is. I just get a simple chronological list of headlines from sites I’ve chosen—nothing that’s being shared or promoted or trending or whatever, and with my own defined rules/filters to remove categories of post I’m not interested in seeing. Also no fear of missing out, because my unread items will still be there later whenever I come back for them.
Still occasionally has the problem of turning into an attention-suck by way of being subscribed to too many things, or to sites that produce too many updates. Still need to be alert to whether individual sites are a true benefit to be subscribed to. Still need to keep a lid on feed-reading from consuming all of my time.
So it’s not a solution to “I read too much internet”, but I think it’s at least an improvement over other ways of reading the internet.
I’m using Inoreader, paying for the “Pro” tier of features.
I’m getting particular use out of their duplicate filters, regex-based content filters, receiving newsletters as a feed, and automated scraping/monitoring of sites that don’t publish their own feed.
Have also used the custom CSS option to productively disagree with some of the choices made when they re-designed the interface. But I think that’s available on the cheaper “Supporter” tier too.
There has in the past been a “buy 18 months for the price of 12” discount available at least annually (around Black Friday possibly; might have been New Years). Which I’ve used to keep the cost down.
My personal antidote to the “check lesswrong. check mad investor chaos. work 5 mins. check mad investor chaos. check lesswrong” problem has been to channel everything I possibly can into an RSS aggregator. No need for me to be twitchily refreshing and checking; I have a computer to do that for me.
Also helps, I think, that I’m then removed from the algorithmically-mediated Skinner box of someone else deciding what my news feed is. I just get a simple chronological list of headlines from sites I’ve chosen—nothing that’s being shared or promoted or trending or whatever, and with my own defined rules/filters to remove categories of post I’m not interested in seeing. Also no fear of missing out, because my unread items will still be there later whenever I come back for them.
Still occasionally has the problem of turning into an attention-suck by way of being subscribed to too many things, or to sites that produce too many updates. Still need to be alert to whether individual sites are a true benefit to be subscribed to. Still need to keep a lid on feed-reading from consuming all of my time.
So it’s not a solution to “I read too much internet”, but I think it’s at least an improvement over other ways of reading the internet.
May I ask what software you use for your RSS aggregator?
I checked out a bunch and chose inoreader, although I needed to pay to get all the features I wanted.
I’m using Inoreader, paying for the “Pro” tier of features.
I’m getting particular use out of their duplicate filters, regex-based content filters, receiving newsletters as a feed, and automated scraping/monitoring of sites that don’t publish their own feed.
Have also used the custom CSS option to productively disagree with some of the choices made when they re-designed the interface. But I think that’s available on the cheaper “Supporter” tier too.
There has in the past been a “buy 18 months for the price of 12” discount available at least annually (around Black Friday possibly; might have been New Years). Which I’ve used to keep the cost down.