Personal pipeline for content consumption
Personal pipeline for content consumption
Quick comment — hope that helps
I follow a good number of publications in my favorite way: the laziest way that is still free. I wanted to share it with you today. Unfortunately, none of the linked services sponsor this content, and I am getting no money for this advertising. It was unlikely, considering I did not contact any of them to ask for it.
For newsletters and blogs, I may subscribe with my email address to get a backup in my email and to be automatically migrated if the publication changes places, but I do not read the emails. Instead, I have automated the pipeline: with Zapier, I send the new RSS posts to Pocket, where I usually listen to them.
For Twitter threads, ThreadReader creates a single page to send to Pocket. There are lazier approaches, leaving the free category. If I remember correctly, ReadWise allows skipping ThreadReader by processing the threads independently, but it is not free.
For academic papers in arXiv, I usually send them in a WhatsApp message to mem.ai and forget about them indefinitely. Occasionally, I add them to Pocket after processing them with arXiv Vanity or ar5iv. If the paper is not published in arXiv, it misses the priority queue, which means I will read it at some point in the 25th century if I manage to stick around until then, and the paper is still relevant.
Sometimes, I watch YouTube videos. That is a short pipeline.1
I hope that helps, as helping you helps me. Perhaps if more people had used Google RSS Reader, it would not have been canceled, and RSS support would be even more widespread today. Consumers shape the market, and I like these things.
Perhaps it is worth mentioning the incentives misalignment:
As a consumer, I prefer RSS with written content. I can only assume everybody shares my own preferences; how could anyone think differently‽
For content producers, videos are probably more profitable than blog posts. Unless the blog posts are part of a funnel, this is something I have not thought through… If this newsletter were to be a funnel, what would you like to find on the other side? Feel free to reply to this email or comment on the web — it is the same thing.
Similarly, I prefer RSS to Twitter threads. It is always possible to publish a link to blog posts on Twitter, Mastodon, or both. On a side note, sharing a tweet to the Pocket app usually adds the linked blog post to the reading list, if there is one.