Signal to noise

I stopped reading feeds ranked by machines about a year ago, and the withdrawal was real and embarrassing: two weeks of reaching for a phantom limb that dispensed novelty. Then something older grew back in its place — an actual sense of who I read, rather than what I had been fed.

The mechanism matters. A ranked feed optimises for the marginal second of your attention, which means it optimises for whatever bypasses judgement. A chronological subscription — RSS, a newsletter, a friend's site checked on Sunday — optimises for nothing at all. It just delivers, in order, what someone chose to publish. The choosing is the signal. Everything a ranking adds is, definitionally, noise: it is the difference between what your people said and what a system predicts you'll react to.

This site ships full-text RSS per section, plus a combined feed — built in the standard-pages phase — precisely because of this post.

The practical setup is almost insultingly simple. A feed reader with maybe thirty subscriptions, weeded seasonally like a garden. No unread counts — that number is the ranking sneaking back in through the window. Sunday morning, coffee, read what's there, done. Some weeks that's forty minutes; some weeks it's five, because my thirty people had quiet weeks, and a system that can be quiet is precisely the point.

What I lost is real: serendipity at scale, the occasional gem from nowhere. What I got back is a reading life with a shape — authors whose thinking I can watch develop across months, disagreements that stay in context, and the restful knowledge that when there is nothing new, nothing pretends to be.