February 13 2026
i stopped using twitter at the start of this year. of the many things i detest about the current
state of that abysmal platform, discovery (especially for technical resources) was not one of them.
with that discovery, though, comes the sycophanctic, engagement-bait slop of the post-post modern age
where every tech poster is pandering to a monetization model that incentivizes detail expansions and
reply-able replies.
i’d rather not consume an endless algorithm with twenty-line linkedinian prefaces of TEN GAME-CHANGING WAYS THIS DISTRIBUTED SYSTEMS PAPER RESUSCITATED MY DEAD DOG but maybe that’s just me.
quitting the platform cold turkey lead me on a search to find (on some level) a way to have novel and
interesting computing information distilled to me. rss is a format i’ve been fond of for several years,
partly owing to its developer, but mostly due to how nice a universal implementable notion of feeds for content on the web has always seemed.
step 1 is getting the baby a feeder. sorry, erm, i meant, a feed reader… or well, genuinely a Feeder. extremely clean, material design, open-source, and (crucially) supporting tags! im sure there are better options, but since this was exclusively to replace
the tech doom-scroll, a simple Android app is befitting. i don’t need accounts, cloud syncing, and proxies: i just want to read.
step 2 is putting some milk in there. i imagined rss to be a dying trade given how old the technology is and how increasingly gatekept and proprietary feed-style websites had shifted to becoming. it turns out there is rss everywhere for those with eyes to see… even where it isn’t.
in a couple of days i’ve aggregated dozens of feeds with my favorites being arXiv and Hacker News (places i frequented anyways) and a multitude of aggregated blogs that i even have the capacity to backread.
aside: one thing i’ve always conceded to LLMs as a practical usecase is the semantic relatedness they provide. they’re even not a bad shout here for the purpose of discovering Y related individuals given X source individuals and discovering blogs from there.
there’s definitely room for better discovery. there needs to be a better and more abstract layer here of using an RSS feed for the purpose of relating RSS feeds to each other. even though it conflicts with the choose-exactly-what-you-choose nature an RSS purist would have you believe, i have a feeling that it’d be helpful for the ecosystem and prevent it from waning off.
it’s also really freeing to not have to have my tech information in what was mostly 280 character limits. the realization that i can maintain reading through what i care about and skim through what i don’t is intensely freeing given that agency has been propagated to me instead of inherently toggled off.
im left feeling like this entire shift has been catastrophically beneficial… has greatly increased the density and quality of computing news i receive, and has lead to the creation of a phenomenon which i refer to by nurture-scrolling.
embrace the nurture scroll, adopt RSS.