Social Media is all about more.
Tumblr adds posts to my Dashboard in trying to get me to follow more blogs.
Twitter adds paid advertisements in trying to sell me things.
Facebook is one giant ad.
All of these services constantly recommend people they feel I’d enjoy following.
What if there was a site that gave you less? What about instead of recommending new people to follow or ads to buy from offered you a quieter experience?
Have you been following a person for years and never liking or sharing anything they post. What if the site asked you why you still followed them?
What about an RSS feed that you skip or skimmed through everyday? What if your RSS reader tracked your reading time versus post length. Then asked if you still wanted to read it.
I don’t want my media to ask me about new things. The purpose is not to replace what I read now with other things. I don’t want a paid-for promotion system. I don’t want the network to guess who I’d also like to follow.
I use Tiny Tiny RSS for my RSS reading. I host it on my server. I like it for a number of reasons, but one of them is it shows me inactive and troublesome feeds.
I can see who has not written in weeks or even years and remove those feeds. I can see what feeds are showing errors. Then I can visit the site and see if the feed has changed. Or if the site is gone, remove it.
It’s a simple feature but it goes a little way towards removing the cruft of social media and helping me trim down my lists.
Remove not replace is my mantra.