Twitter, Newsletters and RSS Readers
For me, reading on the internet comes from different sources, like Blogs and Newsletters.
On top of that, of course, comes Twitter.
At one point, I decided to depend on Twitter to follow all the blogs and people I wanted to follow. I mainly use the Twitter lists to categorize that, for example, a list for Tech, Books, Movies, Sports, etc.
But I noticed after some time using Twitter that I stopped reading longer format of blog posts or articles. The only long-form of reading became either kindle books or audiobooks. Twitter makes it easy only to read short forms of writing (well, it’s the main idea of Twitter, you can’t complain about that), but as a side effect, it became harder for me to find and concentrate on reading longer format blog posts.
I'm thinking about using RSS readers again. I missed doing that for a while now. At least the longer reads will become in one place.
I tried Inoreader, and it seems fine for what I want to do. It also has a way to subscribe to newsletters to keep my email inbox a little bit cleaner.
I also found that you can subscribe to Twitter feeds using it. But the reading experience isn't that good compared to Twitter.
Around 2008 Twitter was supporting RSS. At that time, the experience was a bit comparable. But Twitter doesn’t support RSS anymore, and RSS readers still don’t match the reading experience of Twitter. It seems all of the modern RSS readers are still trying to clone the old Google Reader.
Yet, all RSS readers are providing more freedom in how you can sort the content without forced algorithms like in Twitter.
Maybe I will end up keeping both. Keep Twitter for what it is good at. Although it's not a happy solution since it means more time is needed to keep track of things. But each solution isn't good enough alone.
Maybe a better solution will come up. (?)