There is a good reason people call Twitter the hell website.
Cynicism, egos, unprovoked hostility, unchecked propaganda, sexism, bigotry, and outright hateâTwitter is as full of it as virtually anywhere online, and worse, itâs unbearably nonstop. The design of the place feels uniquely unhealthy due in large part to its speed and unrelenting stream. Opening up TweetDeck, the Twitter-owned client favored by maniacs like me thanks to its real-time updating feature, can seem like stepping into an oncoming tidal wave and getting swept out to sea. Before too long, you feel exhausted and ready to give up.
Many of us have to be on Twitter due to our jobs, some of us just feel like we have to be. Iâm here to offer a few ancient and unsexy alternatives to Twitter as life preservers. Weâre doing a nautical theme today, by the way, I hope thatâs cool with you. No reason.
In 2019, social media is water in our lungs (Iâm sorry, Iâm sorry, thatâs the last one). With so many of us contemplating deleting our accounts or at least cutting down on that screen time, itâs time to reconsider something that feels lost in this era of algorithm-fueled newsfeeds and timelines: RSS.
RSS is a family of technologies that give you a simple feed from a spot on the webâa news site, a podcast, a blogâinto your RSS reader. Itâs a timeline of sorts, yes, but it runs at a sane speed, and it stays in your control, unlike Facebook or Twitterâs unknowable whims, and it excludes the vast majority of toxic noise that characterizes so much of social media. Folks, RSS is still good. More than just good, RSS is better in many ways than Twitter.
Invented exactly 20 years ago this month on the back-end of a feverish dot-com boom, RSS (Real Simple Syndication) has persisted as a technology despite Googleâs infamous abandonment with the death of Google Reader and Silicon Valley social media companies trying and succeeding to supplant it. In the six years since Google shut down Reader, there have been a million words written about the technologyâs rise and apparent fall.
Hereâs whatâs important: RSS is very much still here. Better yet, RSS can be a healthy alternative when Twitter is making you feel like shit. In 2019, thatâs, like, most of the time.
On the surface, Twitterâs main value proposition is that it delivers up-to-the-second news. Letâs just be honest with ourselves: 99 percent of the time, we donât need up-to-the-second news. Most of us would do much better waiting until someone has had time to process the news and write more than 280 characters to explain in full whatâs going on. Ideally, that happens on news websites themselves, which more often than not still offer RSS feeds. Gizmodo, for instance, is putting RSS out into the world at this very moment.
RSS has the advantage of feeling slow without being slow. You can get an article in your RSS reader as soon as itâs been publishedâand how much faster are you really looking to go? What you donât get is the flash flood of half-thoughts and hot takes.
Look, Iâm not going to pretend I have this abyssal hellscape figured out. Iâm not performatively quitting Twitter, this is not a blog about a black-and-white solution requiring you to quit social media and live in a monastery, even though that sounds pretty great. Itâs about an alternative to a tool that, after a while, can be a hindrance rather than a helpâat least to my sanity. The idea of seeking out the âslow webâ has been around for a long time. But thereâs nothing wrong with wanting to get the latest news as it happens. Itâs just a matter of striking the right balance, which RSS provides.
Itâs an easy process to start. First, choose an RSS reader. My two favorites are Feedly and NewsBlur. I prefer NewsBlur because I like the iOS app more, but Feedly is very popular and good, so give either one a try. They both accomplish the same goal.
Then, find your feeds. Iâd start with, at most, 10 news sites to subscribe to. This will give you a feel for how fast you want the feed to move. Too slow? Add more. To fast? Delete a few. I try to narrow things down even further: Instead of subscribing to the New York Times, which publishes dozens of items per day, I subscribe specifically to the Timesâ tech section, which means I get a much more curated selection. For whichever site you want to subscribe to, you should be able to copy and paste the URL into your reader and subscribe from there.
If RSS alone doesnât quite do it for you, there are other tools that make finding online content less soul-sucking.
The first complement to my RSS reader is my Nuzzel account. Like RSS, Nuzzel is years old, and itâs relatively slow. I cannot stress enough: Slow can be good. Nuzzel looks at your Twitter account and surfaces the stories being shared most within the last few hours or daysâan easy way to parse through the headlines your follows think are most important without necessarily getting caught in the hair-trigger tweets that can make it a relentless cesspool.
In the same realm of slow tech, thereâs a ânewâ trend thatâs actually older than RSS itself: The email newsletter. Everyone and their dad seem to have one these days, and thereâs even a New York Times trend piece on the whole phenomenon, which is how you know itâs already old and uncool as hell. Perfect.
An email newsletter avoids most of the pitfalls of Twitter hell while still delivering on many of value points. If youâre on Twitter to dive into a specific worldâtech, basketball, national security, make up, whateverâthereâs almost certainly a good newsletter for it, whether itâs from a specific publication or a smart individual who wants to write and riff but who probably hates Twitter as much as the rest of us. Get the intelligence and links delivered to your inbox daily and then move on. No getting wiped out by the endless social media riptide. Oh, by the way, weâre back to nautical.
For newsletters, you can do two things. First, your news websites and blogs of choice probably have newsletters that you can sign up for from the home pageâwhich you probably already know thanks to the charming pop-ups that everyone uses because fuck you thatâs why. Second, there are two startups behind many of todayâs active newsletters: Substack and Revue. Take a look at both sites and see what interests you.
At the end of the day, weâre probably not going to be able to escape social media entirely. I couldnât even if I wanted to since itâs part of my job, as it may be part of yours. For us poor soulsâand those of you who are, for some reason, online all day by choiceâknow that itâs okay to slow down. Youâre not missing anything.
