Control your browsing habits with RSS

Stop doom-scrolling and take back control of your time by embracing old technology

Six weeks ago I deleted the Reddit app from my phone. Time had a weird way of disappearing quickly while I was doomscrolling through my home feed and never reaching the bottom of it. Hours (!) of my day were lost, each and every day, all because I couldn’t curb my bad habits for the longest time.

Every social media app has this “feature” now: Instagram, Reddit, TikTok, X (Twitter) all serve you an endless stream of content so you can keep looking for that dopamine hit. Of course, they also serve you a lot of ads while you browse, the capitalist machine has to be fed and your attention is the food. I felt so frustrated with my own browsing behaviour because I was feeling bad while doing it, yet I couldn’t seem to stop. Who’s boss in my head? It’s like there are two people in my brain: a sensible one and a freaking child that wants everything right now. I can’t let the child win, so the main culprit was axed: Reddit.

Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash<

Good news, however! I have a reasonably good control over my browsing habits now, for the first time in years. I now use old-fashioned technology and I recommend you do the same. Take back control of your time and your browsing habits.

RSS to the rescue

This is what I do: I start the morning by reading the newspaper on my iPad. I skip the most depressing stories to save my sanity, but I do want to be sort of up to date with what’s happening in the world.

After that, I go to my RSS app and browse the articles from websites I added myself. They are all topics that interest me: Nintento games, heavy metal, Japan and gym/body building articles.

For the non-technical reader: What is RSS? RSS stands for RDF Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication. It’s a web feed that allows you to access updates from websites. You can subscribe to a website’s RSS feed (if they have one) via an app or in your browser and stay up to date about the topics you choose. This technology has been around since 1995, but it wasn’t exactly popular right from the start.

I think in our current age RSS deserves to be way more popular, exactly because our browsing behaviour is being widely manipulated. With RSS, you can take back control and skip seeing a lot of advertisement as well.

On my iPad, I installed the app lire: RSS Reader to aggregate my RSS feeds. I grouped my interests in folders and that’s all I will read. My browsing is now time-boxed, based on my interests and I no longer see the random stuff that the big social media companies want me to see. I can’t begin to tell you how amazing it is. We’re going full circle, as I think many people see the tactics of big social media companies for what they are: manipulative. We will circle back to older technologies that don’t have the manipulation built-in. RSS is a perfect example of such a technology.

Thanks to RSS I am now in control of my browsing habits. I never had TikTok and thanks to the world’s biggest man child I’m no longer interested in Twitter (X). The only social medium I regularly use is Instagram, but I’m not worried about my usage of that app.

Out of curiosity, I visited Reddit on my computer last week. Immediately, I felt that familiar, horrible feeling again. Like a drug addict, I was looking for a good post to read (I always loved the drama from the sub-reddit Am I The Asshole) to get a dopamine hit while also feeling controlled by the child in my brain. I was just tired after doing some writing for my book, but Reddit wasn’t helping me to feel any better. Realising this, I closed the website and felt relieved that I now have a different approach. I won’t be returning any time soon.

What about you, dear reader. Will you control your browsing habits? Maybe you already do? Please let me know how you manage your time on the interwebs!