Isn't your source of RSS feeds the curation? Is that very different from Facebook or Twitter showing you the people you subscribe to?
I know Facebook and Twitter play stupid games with "the algorithm", injecting stuff you didn't ask for and hiding stuff from your friends, but in the end it's not as if you were just being force-fed solely stuff you had no interest in.
So wouldn't an RSS feed be just as much of a filter bubble, based on who you choose to subscribe to? You might feel better knowing that you were seeing it in a simple chronological order without the algorithmic opinion, but it doesn't seem like a solution to filter bubbles.
With Facebook and Twitter you subscribe to people and brands. It is trivially easy to make a social media post so they tend to be more numerous and less useful/informative. RSS is usually used to subscribe to blog posts/articles which tend to be more in depth. Someone upthread mentioned a magazine and I think that is a good comparison. Curated long form writing about subjects that interest you makes it quite a bit different than social media.
RSS is also handy for following blogs or websites that only post intermittently.
RSS and filter bubbles could go either way. Nothing stopping you from filling your feeds with folks that don't think the way you do. Most of us don't have the patience to wade through thoughts contrary to our own. That's the real issue when it comes to popping your filter bubble, not which tool you use to get the info.
I don't think anyone is claiming that RSS a solution to the filter bubble problem. But the benefit of RSS is that you create your own filter bubble, rather than relying on someone else's (often malicious) algorithm to do it for you.
Like I said, RSS is about you curating your feed. Using RSS, you don't see headlines from anything you didn't choose to see.
>in the end it's not as if you were just being force-fed solely stuff you had no interest in
That's trivially true. That said, if the choice, regarding seeing shit I'm not interested in/calculated ragebait/for-profit spam/etc, is between seeing it "never" and seeing it "sometimes, when someone else wants me to see it", the choice seems obvious.
>it doesn't seem like a solution to filter bubbles
I don't think it is either; that said, I still think it's better. Part of the conceptual transition from "personal newspaper" to "filter bubble" was the increasing prevalence of calculated ragebait/for-profit spam/etc on aggregators -- the pressures present in aggregators, and the inevitable comment sections, help shape content to be more ragey or spammy, to get that all-important engagement. That shaping happens everywhere on the aggregator -- here on HN, for instance, dang goes around silencing non-HNish comments with impunity and without appeals. This isn't a bad thing, but it is a shaping of the aggregator's content by shaping the aggregator's culture. If one spends all one's time on an aggregator, consuming that shaped culture, one's perspective can easily start to skew. With a "personal newspaper", one is more aware of the artificiality -- it's not a site itself, it's just the sum total of the RSS feeds of blogs X, Y, and Z. A "filter bubble"'s ostensibly organic culture, and ostensibly broader curation, helps one convince oneself that it's a community with justified beliefs.
RSS doesn't really afford that kind of escalation. If HN were dang's blog, the pressure he exerts would only affect the comments section of that blog. Sure, audience pressure can help make an RSS'd source more extreme, but if that pressure happens it's got to be occurring on the site's own commenting infrastructure, which means local moderation can sort it out. At a minimum, there's no chance of the contamination hopping RSS feed sources (at least, via RSS itself).
I know Facebook and Twitter play stupid games with "the algorithm", injecting stuff you didn't ask for and hiding stuff from your friends, but in the end it's not as if you were just being force-fed solely stuff you had no interest in.
So wouldn't an RSS feed be just as much of a filter bubble, based on who you choose to subscribe to? You might feel better knowing that you were seeing it in a simple chronological order without the algorithmic opinion, but it doesn't seem like a solution to filter bubbles.