My source of news and articles has always been my RSS feeds. I began setting my OPML file up over 15 years ago, and I have ship-of-theseus-ed it until today, from RSS reader to RSS reader.
To my RSS feed reading I have added newsletters. Gmail rules route them into a folder structure more or less like RSS. I like that just like I can host my OPML anywhere and use any RSS reader, I can sign up to newsletters from any email address and use any email client to read them.
Over the past year, though, Twitter has emerged as a third pillar of how I get daily information. I don’t directly follow a lot of people, but two other features of the Twitter service have transformed my experience:
One, Twitter lists.
I use Lists for deliberate information consumption. Lists have existed for a long time, but it’s only in the past several months that I have created a lot of topical and interest-based private lists. So far, Twitter doesn’t show related content in lists the way it does in the main timeline – content such as ‘so-and-so liked’, or ‘so-and-so follows’ or ‘so-and-so received a reply’. Like earier times, it’s only a reverse-chronological list of tweets from people on that list. I like that third-party Twitter clients are able to support Lists, so I can read them distraction-free in Tweetbot.
Two, Twitter topics.
I’ve used this for even less time than lists, but it’s a promising discovery mechanism. Topics are only available in Twitter’s own app, which is a shame. At first I would rely on the topics Twitter suggested on the discover tab, but that selection turned out to be quite atrocious, so I picked a set from ‘Topics’ in the app’s main menu.
The verdict is that it’s just good enough to keep using, but it’s not great. It’s promising, and I hope Twitter gets good at this. There is incentive for them to do so: it’s where they display ads. Items from topics are displayed on the Discover tab, where there’s a large ad at the top and promoted hashtags to scroll through before you get to the actual content.
(Part 2)