I’ve been trying to start the habit of reading RSS feeds over “curated content” from YouTube, Reddit, Instagram, etc. since a couple years ago. I ended up with NetNewsWire because, well, everything’s just perfect. However, whenever I find the time I still find myself doom-scrolling, instead of actually reading a book or my feeds.
I am subscribed to several IMO quality feeds in different things I’m interested in, such as BasicAppleGuy, Quanta Magazine, Freethink, Aeon/Psyche, Wallpaper*, etc. (Not Daring Fireball or Michael Tsai because they updates too frequently and the unread notification annoys me, sorry.)
How do you all find motivation to read your feeds? Did any particular way of curating/organizing your feeds help? Or maybe developing a habit of reading in the morning or before bed?
So the first thing I do is I have badge counts turned off, Then I have groups/ folders that are ‘morning’ ‘after work’ and ‘sometime maybe’ and over the year have kind evolved things that I find are ‘right’ for those groups. Do I stick to only reading those folders at those times? No, but keeping the morning and after work lists manageable and that are more ‘timely’ content it does frame my habits a bit. It has been nice the last year or so that I have been framing it this way. Ask me next year and I might have a totally different structure, Brent did get me hooked on NNW are pretty long time ago…
My solution for doomscrolling is quite simple: I just have nothing to scroll. I stopped using Twitter, and for Reddit i used their rss feed from old reddit, though I removed because I decided it wasn’t worth the time mostly. Mastodon failed to stick with me in general but I added as rss feeds a few people who are interesting to me. Beyond that I never really used social media even before it enshittifed.
Notifications for frequently updated feeds aren’t a problem for me because I don’t have any notifications for NWW and the same goes for the most of the apps on my phone. For my iPad I have notifications disabled completely. I just open NWW whenever I have a free time, no matter how many posts there are. If unread counter inside NWW is still a problem for you, then I guess you can look for the RSS reader called Current, as it addresses exactly this problem, though I personally don’t consider this as a problem.
My personal way of organising feeds is rather disorganised, I started with a few feeds and when they linked to another site with a feed and I liked the site, then I just added those feeds. New feeds are linking to more sites with feeds and it results in a cycle which can be limited only by you. When I add feeds, I group them into a few categories: News for short and time-sensitive feeds (like Daring Fireball), Articles for feeds with mostly long posts or infrequent updates and Regular for feeds with many short posts which aren’t critical to be in News group (like Unsung). I also have a group called Doom, for news which I don’t want to see in main news group and I intentionally keep it light on feeds.
As a longtime RSS addict, this question reads to me like “how can I start smoking cigarettes?”
I was nigh-endlessly scrolling newsfeeds before I was endlessly scrolling social media, so in some ways they’re the same to me. But what sucks me into social media more than my newsreader are the notifications. Notifications ends up making social media a destination about me as much or more than a place to stay up on news, friends and my interests. I really should turn more of them off. One of my worst app habits is to always agree to turn them on under the belief that I’ll turn them off if I dislike them (except I never do the second part).
My FOMO and strong opinions have never really allowed me be a passive participant on social media, but the engagement carrot and stick are hollow. I get about as much fake engagement as real, but both send real notifications that short circuit my brain’s ability to focus.
But like others have said, your biggest motivation to read feeds will come from blocking out the other places you would have received similar information. Video killed the radio star, and all that stuff.
I registered for the forum just to reply to this, though my answer is similar to sdevore’s: following someone else’s advice years back (don’t remember who), I made three folders uncreatively named A, B, and C. Feeds in the “C” folder are the ones I don’t mind scrolling through (NYT, Wired, local news). The “A” feeds are the ones I definitely want to read every article from. And the “B” feeds are somewhere in between.
If I’m ever feeling swamped by all the RSS (especially when I don’t check for a day or more) then I simply mark all the “C” feeds as read. Ditto for “B” if I only have time to read my top-priority feeds.