Scroll Your Own Way*

*with apologies to Fleetwood Mac

Scrolling is a tool of our current digital existence, no matter how much we dislike our dependence on it. This is because most people are scrolling on an app platform where they have little control on the content they see. 

Social media algorithms mean you don’t see the posts of everyone you follow. You see only what is currently popular from some of them. Plus you see other stuff you don’t follow that their algorithm “think you might like”. Popular means engagement, so the original post is swarming with comments from strangers. You also see ads everywhere that often takes over the original material you are trying to consume. The interface itself is urging you to scroll! Like! Subscribe! Buy!

No thank you.

Digital life shouldn’t be this way. The best way to consume media is not with social media anyway. It exists on websites – blogs, news, magazines, opinions. Millions of new, and better quality articles created every week.

But you don’t want to visit dozens of websites to find out what’s new. What you need is a way to have the website content you choose come to you, when you want it.

This solution exists already in the form of a little known technology called RSS. It exists in the background of almost all websites. It’s a way for RSS apps to subscribe to that websites content and receive new articles when they are available.

In the RSS context, “SUBSCRIBE” doesn’t mean you pay, nor do you give your email. In fact the website owner won’t even know you’ve subscribed at all!

It’s like podcasts — but for reading.

This is not a paid sponsorship, but an RSS reader such as the no cost app called NetNewsWire. It shows you articles from your favorite blogs and news sites and keeps track of what you’ve read.

This means you can stop going from page to page in your browser looking for new articles to read. Do it the easy way instead: let a feed reader bring the news to you instead.

If you’ve been getting your news via Facebook and Twitter — with their ads, algorithms, user tracking, outrage, and misinformation — you can switch to your news feed reader to get news directly and more reliably from the sites you trust.

Take back control of your scroll. Scroll your own way.

Start with two or three sources. Maybe a news site and a couple of blogs you like such as, oh, I don’t know, chrisdenbow.website. His RSS feed is simply: https://chrisdenbow.website/feed

Give it a go, and after a few days, you’ll feel something magical happen. You have an app with a feed you can scroll through that you completely control. You decide what is in there. There is no algorithm. Just the latest posts from every site interleaved in reverse date order.

You don’t even need to leave the app to read. I subscribe only to full text feeds, so the entire article is readable within the app. No cookie pop ups or confusing menus to navigate.

There’s no comments or likes. If you no longer wish to see posts from a particular author, you remove their feed from your app and you never see them again.

Everyone should have the ability to scroll your own way.

While typing this up, I obviously sung this in my head the whole time.