A long snow-day ramble follows.

I’m putting my blog network back together, and to do that, I’ve been looking at RSS readers. Along the way, I’ve also been looking at RSS feeds, as in “does site xyz provide an RSS feed?” Used to be that one would look for the RSS-beacon logo as a sign that syndication was available. It was a pretty logo and an exciting sign of one of the read-write web’s most attractive features: the ability to construct one’s own virtual “newspaper” in a way that would deliver to you all the daily writings you wanted to read, easily and automatically. When in the pre-paywall days the New York Times began providing RSS feeds for each of its sections, I and other RSS boosters thrilled to the idea, and the demonstrable value, of assembling our own customized newspapers and having them delivered to us each day, perhaps even in updated versions throughout the day. Part of the idea was that one would save time, but an even better part–for me and for others–was that the whole process of choosing, curating, assembling, etc. would inject another layer of mindfulness and intentionality into one’s information regime.

Now the sea-change has come, but RSS is still here, even if it’s not talked about as RSS. For example, here’s the way Feedbro, a contemporary RSS reader, describes the benefits of using a feed reader:

Why Feedbro?
We believe time is our most valuable asset.

We believe it is waste of valuable time to spend minutes or even hours every day to go through dozens of websites, blogs, social media sites etc. manually.

We believe that all the new information that you are interested in, should be automatically aggregated into one place from various sources you care about (both Internet and intranet) into easy-to-read format and automatically filtered based on the rules you define.

We believe that the faster you learn, gain new knowledge and information the better you will succeed in life as an individual and as an organization. Therefore it is vital to learn new things every day and follow relevant and valuable sources of information effortlessly.

We believe privacy is important so that only you know what sources you follow.

[Emphasis mine.]

It’s strangely heartening to read in 2021 what so many of us were preaching back in 2005. Still here! Of course, sadder but wiser, we know that following information effortlessly is easier than ever, as is following disinformation, as is just plain following … and the real struggle is best encountered in moral philosophy, where questions of relevance and value are front and center and, at least in theory, debated in ways that seek to expose the faults in one’s own argument rather than conceal or deny them.

But I digress.

Here’s the statement I wasn’t expecting : “We believe privacy is important so that only you know what sources you follow.”

I’d never considered an RSS reader as potentially invasive, as tracking what I was reading. I’m sure that was and is naïve of me, but really, were RSS readers back in the day tracking the sources I followed? I don’t remember any talk about that. Maybe Google Reader was? They track everything. But even at that, I’m not remembering any privacy warnings from folks who’d know.

I’m accustomed to seeing earnest statements of care about my privacy all along the Web nowadays. I take them all with a grain of salt, just as I do with the recording that tells me my call is important and will be answered in the order in which it was received. Yet lately I’ve found myself clicking on the privacy statement more frequently, partly as a defense, but more so as a way to see the range of methodologies and rationales included in the “we care” sentiments.

Here’s the Feedbro privacy policy as articulated on their website: no, that’s too easy; you can’t find the link to the privacy policy until you go to the Add-On Store, where you can download and install the browser extension. Here you find a repeat of the website statement, but over on the left under “more information” you’ll also find a link to the privacy policy, which to my amateur eyes looks complete, specific, and reassuring:

Privacy policy for Feedbro

Feedbro fully respects your privacy.

Feedbro feed reader
– stores data only locally on your hard drive using chrome.storage.local API and HTML5 IndexedDB – it does not store anything on servers on the Internet
– does NOT share any data about your feed reading habits, subscriptions or any personal information
– does NOT access or change any information on the pages you visit (except to find RSS links on the page when you request it)

Required extension permissions:
– “Access your data for all websites”
This permission is needed so that Feedbro can read feeds from the URLs that you subscribe to.

– “Display notifications to you”
This permission is needed in order to display desktop notifications of new feed entries when a Rule is matched with an action to show a desktop notification.

– “Access browser tabs”
This permission is needed in order to enable “Find Feeds on Current Tab” feature which helps you to quickly find RSS/Atom feed links on the page that you are looking at. This is only done when the user requests it.

– “Store unlimited amount of client-side data”
This permission is needed to ensure that chrome.storage.local can hold all the feed subscriptions, rules and settings data.

I still can’t find substantial information about the company that makes Feedbro, Nodetics, as their home page simply describes their other extensions (all of them interesting) and general pitches for how these extensions will make my online life better and me more productive, etc. But right now, I see that Feedbro will work well for me as an RSS reader, and most importantly, it will not track me, which means it won’t be sharing that tracking data with third parties. Such tracking is usually excused on the basis of all the good relevant useful things that such tracking will be able to recommend to me. That’s as may be. Such tracking, as we should all now recognize, is almost always primarily about selling user information that enables better targeted advertising on behalf of third parties.  By contrast, from what I can tell here, Feedbro isn’t trying to automate or even nudge my own curation, nor are they tracking my activity and selling my tracks. Instead, Feedbro is helping me curate what I want with a modest side-benefit of simplified discovery of feeds.

How are they monetizing their business? That, too, I don’t know. I suspect there’s some kind of freemium plan–give “lite” versions for free and sell “pro” versions–but I really don’t know. I haven’t looked at the other extensions; the answers may be there. I don’t like not knowing how the business plans to make money, because I don’t want to become their product. But as of right now, that doesn’t seem to be a risk with Feedbro. (If you find it is, please let me know!)

Reader, I installed it.

I like Feedbro, quite a bit really. It has OPML functionality if I want to go to the next level and install Tiny Tiny RSS on my shared hosting. But for now, it’s moving me where I want to be, and it looks to have robust privacy protection.

Then I got to wondering what RSS feeds might still be out there. I thought of Substack, the new and lauded platform that’s essentially freemium blogging. If you like a writer, you can subscribe to a free feed and then pay more to get more from that writer. If you are a writer, now you can give away substantial samples of your work and build a readership without committing to a life of writing for free or trying to find a congenial employer who’ll pay you so long as they think they can sell your work.

I subscribe to a few Substack writers. I receive their newsletters via email, a surprisingly popular platform (email, that is) for that kind of reading. Tiny Newsletter was first across my radar, but now Substack seems the logical level-up for the same idea. But: could one read Substack in an RSS reader instead of an email inbox? All the usual advantages would apply.

Each Substack newsletter is an HTML email, so that means it’s a website. Every Substack writer has their own subdomain (e.g., https://zeynep.substack.com/ for Insight, which is Zeynep Tufekci’s Substack site). Substack is much like WordPress.com that way, but with specific writer-centered monetization benefits you can read about here.

So far so good. No charge until you make money, and Substack takes a cut as the platform provider, meaning, in essence, the distributor enhanced as a brand. The store you’d like to shop at.

But because I go in the side door sometimes, either out of sheer cussedness or (more often) location-based impulse, I didn’t go to substack.com to check for information about Substack and RSS. Had I done so, I’d have seen a fair amount of copy telling me that email newsletters were the New Thing and were actually cooler than feeds (even though an email newsletter subscription is itself a feed). I also didn’t just go to a newsletter site and enter the URL into my new Feedbro extension to see if Feedbro would detect an RSS feed. Instead, I googled Substack RSS, and I found a news article on The Verge about (wait for it) the RSS reader Substack has launched.

Why would Substack want to launch an RSS reader? “The goal was to ‘create a distraction free space’ for people whose email inbox isn’t their ideal reading experience, Substack CEO Chris Best told The Verge.” Oh. Okay, nothing wrong with that, though it’s strange to see that most routinely reviled of Internet phenomena, the email inbox, suddenly described as perhaps not the “ideal reading experience” for some people.

But here comes the punch. Substack has developed an RSS reader with the goal of enhancing the user experience by means of, you guessed it, recommendations:

“I think one of the reasons that we think an experience like this could be really good is it could be a way to discover new writers you want to subscribe to,” Best said.

As Substack adds discovery features, Best said the service will stay away from putting “a bunch of clicky stuff in there that’s super tantalizing,” and stick to the platform’s existing goal of fostering a relationship between readers and writers they can trust.

So no clickbait. Just relationships based on trust. And, as The Verge  notes, “Longer term, the service may finally give Substack a space to start recommending different newsletters to existing users.” Nothing wrong with that, except for the fact that such recommendations must rely on Substack tracking reading patterns–and employing algorithmically-generated targeted advertising for their own brand as the place you’ll find the only platform you’ll ever need to have machine-based cognitive autocompletion. (My words, not theirs, but isn’t “machine-based cognitive autocompletion” the zero-latency ad-to-consumption corporate dream?)

Oof.

All that’s left is to examine the Substack Privacy Policy, which I got to when I went to the Join Substack Reader Beta page and clicked on the link to the Terms of Service I’d have to accept to join that beta. I won’t describe the policy or even try to summarize it beyond stating that the writing is clear and the news is almost entirely bad. And here, as always, we find the enhanced-experience rationale:

“We may use this data to customize Content for you that we think you might like, based on your usage patterns.”

“Through cookies we place on your browser or device, we may collect information about your online activity after you leave our Services.  Just like any other usage information we collect, this information allows us to improve the Services and customize your online experience….”

And so forth. (It gets worse when it comes to privacy and third parties, but you see the idea.)

I know that I’m being tracked pretty much all the time. I know it’s hard to minimize it and probably impossible to evade it altogether unless I go off the grid entirely, and that’s probably not ever going to be an option. More to the point, I don’t want to go off the grid. But this idea of “customization” is something like the semantic web of Hell, and we’re all living with the consequences.

So I will not be joining the Substack Reader Beta. For my experience of reading writers I trust, one of the core experiences in my life and the basis of much of what I am about professionally as well, I want to be the person in charge of customizing my experience, and if I want a recommendation from my RSS reader, I’ll ask for it.

And now I have to think about whether I should be subscribing via email to any Substack newsletter, as it’s clear that what I thought to be a sustainable business model–take a distributor’s cut off the earnings of writers, a fair deal it seems to me for the benefits that accrue to the writers–is going down that slippery sewer pipe of “stand still and please wear this lovely bullseye so we can make you happy.” And I resent the way the language of experience, trust, and relationships becomes coarsened by a platform with a professed mission of supporting writers.

I can’t say that I feel better now, but maybe I’ve learned a little more than I knew at the outset.

See you tomorrow.