Feed Content Reading Habits -- Self-Rescue of an Internet Exhaust Recycler

This post mainly discusses my adjustment of Feed content consumption ratio in information intake, and how I should approach this type of Feed information.

Current State

About 90% of my current information input comes from RSS - various personal blogs, news media, and even Telegram, YouTube, Bilibili, Pixiv, Twitter, and Podcasts. I collectively call these Feed content. Although the sources are diverse, they all consist of “highly fragmented, point-like information.” As for my situation:

1. Limited Energy: As a working professional, I don’t have much energy to tinker around and chase the latest trends like university students do. For example, yesterday after work, I spent all my attention just to solve something as simple as restarting my soft router and configuring the network.
2. Empty Brain: Although I frequently bookmark articles to Pinboard, I don’t actually have a deep understanding of most articles because most content falls outside my knowledge domain. Articles fail to connect well with my existing knowledge, resulting in forgetting after reading without any real absorption.

So I often end up sharing outdated news here, and I lack the ability to discern and analyze news. (Truly an internet exhaust recycler)

Books Have Irreplaceable Value

Books, as a medium, are destined by their length to explain things completely and comprehensively, basically presenting tree-like or systematic content. For example, I recently read some books about physical and mental health, such as Glucose Revolution, Why We Get Fat, Crazy Uric Acid, and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder.

After reading these books, I found that this level of depth cannot be achieved no matter how many health-related WeChat articles I read. Therefore, I plan to increase the proportion of book reading in my information intake, adjusting it to the same level as Feed reading, while limiting my Feed reading approach. (Of course, this doesn’t mean extremely refusing to read news)

Feed reading should be dessert, not the main course.

When to Read Feed Content

1. Spend time cleaning up subscriptions every Saturday morning.
2. Use Reminders to manage schedules, regularly reading friends’ social media, channels, blogs, and other information.
3. Perhaps there’s also a higher-frequency quick channel, but I haven’t figured out what information to include yet.
4. Deep reading time can be Everywhere and Nowhere

What to Focus on in Feed Content

Mainly for quickly determining whether I need to read deeply

1. Recent Behavioral Decisions: For example, when seeing a new game review, I need to assess whether I have time to experience this game in the next 12 months, rather than blindly placing an order.
2. Work Development Related Fields: Professional information needs careful reading and detailed analysis to avoid following the crowd. This is absolutely a field where I cannot become an NPC.
3. Challenging or Enriching Knowledge Systems: For example, articles that change some of my original fixed viewpoints and cognitions.
4. Speaking My Mind: Does it express something “I’ve thought about before but never clarified”?
5. Social Circle Relevance: For example, information about new restaurants that friends are enthusiastic about - I can share and plan gatherings after reading.
6. Timeliness: Will it still be meaningful ten years from now? This type can be put in the “read later” pile.

Postscript

Some prompts that sparked my thinking during this process:

1. How to define the word “Feed” and how it differs from “news” in Chinese? Did I use it correctly in this article?
2. In this article, is there a better, more interesting expression for “becoming an internet exhaust absorber”? And I didn’t provide any explanation - is this appropriate? I want to define it as consumers of information after N rounds of internet transmission.