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Why RSS Still Beats Facebook and Twitter for Tracking News (gizmodo.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: One of the main reasons RSS is so beloved of news gatherers is that it catches everything a site publishes -- not just the articles that have proved popular with other users, not just the articles from today, not just the articles that happened to be tweeted out while you were actually staring at Twitter. Everything. In our age of information overload that might seem like a bad idea, but RSS also cuts out everything you don't want to hear about. You're in full control of what's in your feed and what isn't, so you don't get friends and colleagues throwing links into your feeds that you've got no interest in reading. Perhaps most importantly, you don't need to be constantly online and constantly refreshing your feeds to make sure you don't miss anything. It's like putting a recording schedule in place for the shows you know you definitely want to catch rather than flicking through the channels hoping you land on something interesting. There's no rush with RSS -- you don't miss out on a day's worth of news, or TV recaps, or game reviews if you're offline for 24 hours. It's all waiting for you when you get back. And if you're on holiday and the unread article count starts to get scarily high, just hit the mark all as read button and you're back to a clean slate.
and thank you TheOldReader.com for allowing me to continue doing things this way. News, webcomics, blogs, podcasts, etc., etc. I've even contact web devs to see if they would add or fix newfeeds to make them easier to use and to skim through the summaries. I don't use Facebook, and I rarely look at Twitter. RSS/Atom is much better.
What's the practical benefit of "tracking news" supposed to be? News makes for poor entertainment. "Breaking" news tends to be inaccurate and the corrections usually don't rate headlines. It's also full of nonsense, like "someone said XYZ thing on twitter", or 50 different kinds of clickbait, or the latest dramatic semi-truthful story to troll the news consumers.
Conversations about the latest news are tedious. People just repeat the shit the newscasters and writers say, and most of them are repeating shit from other news. They all think very highly of themselves.
Unless you're tracking news for professional reasons, you're better off just reading it the next day on some web site. Or not reading it.
Not sure if anyone else has pointed out that RSS is decentralized (like the good old web 1.0 sites that serve it up), and therefore not subject to the whims of an editor like Facebook or Twitter.