Reddit is out, RSS is back

I deleted Reddit off my phone last week. Not just logged out. Deleted.

The thing that finally did it was the recommendations. Every time I opened the app, the algorithm had decided I needed more doom. More bad news, more outrage, more threads full of people arguing about things that don’t affect me. I’d come away 20 minutes later feeling worse and having learned nothing I wanted to know.

So I’m going back to RSS. There’s something nice about opening a reader and seeing only the stuff I actually subscribed to. No trending tab, no algorithmic amplification of whatever’s making people angriest today. If a feed gets annoying, I unsubscribe. That’s the whole moderation model.

I’m self-hosting FreshRSS on my server and reading through NetNewsWire on my phone. A few dozen feeds, 10 minutes in the morning, and I’m done. It ends.

I should have done this a year ago.