If you’re browsing the internet regularly, you may have come across this symbol in the past. Every website that has been around since the 2000s has it tucked away somewhere. But do you know what it means?
Maybe the name RSS rings a bell, which is either short for Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication. Around 20 years ago, RSS was popularized by newspapers such as the New York Times as a means to distribute articles to readers; Essentially, you would „subscribe“ to a site's RSS feed by copying their specific URL into an RSS reader, and the reader would then collect and show you all the updates from sites you’ve subscribed to.
Think of it like Google News. It’s a feed that collects and shows you articles, blog posts, or whatever else you can find an RSS feed for. The crucial difference is that Google News is an algorithm that will continously mold itself to your interests and reading habits – it’s predatory for your attention, your clicks and your possible ad revenue. Under the guise of "personalized results"[1], it may create your own personal echo chamber, clickbait and pay-walled articles included!
An RSS feed is considerably more „low-tech“ in the sense that it will not preselect which articles to show you, it simply shows you all the articles from the feeds you’ve subscribed to, which means you're in full control of which newspapers or blogs you want to see in your feed. So, if you still want an echo chamber, build the damn thing yourself! Or subscribe to alternative and independent media that still supports RSS, most of which seem to be blacklisted from Google's corporate-friendly news algorithm in favor of yellow press riddled with ads.
Another curious thing about RSS feeds is that you don't even need to visit the news sites to read the articles most of the time, they will just load inside your reader. That might be part of the reason why companies like Google replaced RSS with their alternatives, because how are you gonna serve people ads if they're not even visiting your page?
If you want to get started, all you need is an RSS reader. Some email-clients like Thunderbird still support RSS feeds. Personally, I use inoreader as my dedicated reader because I don't like the idea of reading the news in my email client.
RSS feeds are one of those forgotten technologies that require maybe 20 minutes of setup and a minimum of tech literacy, but in return for your patience you get an application that doesn't algorithmically manipulate what you see and track what you do, but that just works.
Footnotes:
[1] I didn't know how to fit it organically into the post, but "personalized" anything might be one of the biggest traps of the modern internet. Advertisers (like Google) are tracking and profiling you and your online activity and selling it back to you as a "personalized experience".