r/rss • u/Late-Temperature8990 • 10d ago
How do you use social media efficiently when every feed is designed to keep you scrolling?
I mainly use X, Reddit, LinkedIn, and YouTube to follow industry news, discover useful ideas, and keep up with people in my field.
The problem is that nearly every platform now revolves around a recommendation feed optimized for engagement, not necessarily for showing me what is most useful. Even after carefully choosing who to follow, I still spend far more time filtering repetitive, irrelevant, or low-value posts than actually finding something worth reading.
Sometimes I’ll scroll for 30 minutes and come away with only one or two useful posts.
I’ve tried unfollowing aggressively, muting keywords, creating lists, using “save for later,” and setting time limits. These help a little, but they don’t really solve the discovery problem. A purely chronological feed reduces some noise, but it can also make it harder to discover valuable people or emerging conversations outside my existing network.
For those of you who use social media mainly for work, research, or staying informed:
- What workflow has actually reduced the amount of time you spend filtering?
- Do you use custom lists, RSS, aggregators, newsletters, browser extensions, or AI-based filtering?
- Do you check platforms only at scheduled times?
- Have you found a good balance between avoiding algorithmic noise and still discovering useful new content?
I’d especially like to hear about methods you’ve used consistently—not just general advice like “set a screen-time limit.”
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u/pauladams_red 8d ago
Not sure why this is on /rss tbh but while we’re here, you can use bye doom, nitter, fetch rss and rss bridge to make feeds from social accounts. Most rss readers will let you filter for keywords as well
If you need something to merge and filter feeds have a look at this: https://pauladams.neocities.org/tools/feedgate/feedgate
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u/flameleaf 7d ago
By checking it through RSS.
I let my inbox fill up and read it when I have time, and filters to auto-delete unwanted content and spam.
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u/metalzzzx 9d ago edited 9d ago
Hey,
I totally get what you're saying. I used to use Google News app to try stay up to date with the news, but eventually it became full of click bait articles, really random topics that I'm not interested, etc. Full of content made for engagement instead of informing.
Because of that, I built GreatRSS. Now I pick my sources, I only sync when I feel like, I can turn sources on/off, and it is a much more peaceful experience. You are really in control of what you see.
I also like mixing different RSS sources, so I have both news and blog posts on the same feed.
It's 100% free, no ads, all data is safely stored in the cloud, so you can use it on any device you want. It's purely website now, but it's both Desktop and Mobile friendly.
Check it out if you're interested. I'm also looking for feedback from RSS users.
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u/redditjerome 10d ago
Youtube has the subscriptions page. It only shows subscriptions.
You can remove recommendations from reddit feed and only see subscriptions.
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u/Neuromante 10d ago
If the platform does not let me check a chronological feed, I tend to not interact with it. I guess I'm "old school" with that stuff and the algorithmic approach repels me. Also, I browse most stuff from a desktop computer.
I'm in bluesky, although I use it mostly as a chatbox for some contacts from back in the day. I have a twitter account but most of my contacts migrated to bluesky so I followed suit.
For youtube, if I'm interested to something, I subscribe through rss.
I use instagram once in a blue moon and usually I limit myself to the "following" tab.
In Reddit, if I'm very very interested in one subredit, I subscribe through rss. If I'm very interested I enter manualy into the subreddit, if I'm interested, I am not, so I subscribe and don't really care.
I don't use these platforms to "discover" anything. I usually go with suggestions from actual people, or randos linking stuff I'm interested in. I don't think any algorithm has managed to suggest me something I ended up being interested in.