Discovering good writing with RSS to Kindle
Social media killed the discovery of good writing, because the incentives aren't there. Subscribing to a feed is deciding for yourself what goes in it.
Since starting RSS to Kindle, I’ve been interested in which blogs people choose to send to their Kindle.
Social media killed the discovery of good writing. The incentives aren’t there. LinkedIn, Facebook, Reddit, etc. have no reason to show well thought out blogs when they get more engagement from rage bait.
This is why I’m a big fan of RSS. It’s not meant to surface the most engaging content. Subscribing to a feed means intentionally deciding what goes into your feed.
After launching RSS to Kindle, I built a simple tool to see which feeds were popular. This is how I discovered Simon Willison. I really like his practical take on AI and coding without the hype. His writing never showed up in my X or LinkedIn feed, probably because it’s so balanced. It’s been a pleasure waking up each morning to his writing.
Recently, I’ve improved the discovery feed on RSS to Kindle to show which individual posts are popular with users — the idea being that a post is a gateway to subscribing to someone’s feed.
The algorithm took some tuning. The ranking is a mix of curated posts, recent posts, and the posts most often sent to Kindle.
Go check out the Discover tab and let me know what you think.
Originally published on martymarkenson.com.
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