I used to be an RSS user, and I loved it. Most mornings started the same way, ginseng tea on the desk, laptop already warm, and Google Reader open before anything else so I could check what was new.

I could easily read blogs written by friends (people I actually wanted to hear from, not people I happened to know). I could also pick the brain of strangers I admired, bookworms, travelers, designers, developers, nerds scattered around the world, people I would probably enjoy being friends with but never met.

That simplicity was great for readers and bad for anyone trying to sell attention. RSS stripped pages down to the part that mattered and ignored the rest. No ads or tracking, and none of the urgency theater. That also meant no money, which explains how this story usually ends.

RSS had already existed for years before that moment, mostly living quietly in the background of blogs and personal sites. It started as a fairly nerdy idea in the early 2000s, a simple XML based way for websites to say “here is what’s new” in a format machines could understand and humans could benefit from. Blogs adopted it quickly. News outlets tolerated it. Big platforms embraced it just enough to look open, then they quietly lost interest once they naively realized how little leverage it actually gave them.

So, in 2013…

Google shut down its RSS reader.

I frustratedly migrated my feeds to other readers and pretended that was a solution. It worked for a while, but around the same time, social media and Google News got very good at hijacking attention. You stopped choosing what to read and started letting something choose for you. Checking in turned into staying indefinitely.

I could still see what friends were doing on social media. Google was giving me interesting things to read. If I measured how much time I spent consuming information, I would probably describe myself as informed. That metric looked good on paper.

I ended up forgetting about my RSS feeds. They faded from my radar, and I told myself that it was fine. What did not look as good was how I felt.

Over time, that tradeoff became impossible to ignore. The less time I spent on my phone or on social media, the better my days felt. I had more energy for new ideas. I was more willing to start projects instead of postponing them.

I even felt.. smarter? 🤷‍♂️, it’s hard to explain, I felt my brain more in sync. This was not a dramatic realization, just an accumulation of small, repeatable signals. So I started deleting things, one app at a time, watching the home screen get emptier and my mornings feel lighter.

Social media went first, which was easier than expected. Work related apps followed, which felt irresponsible until it did not. The last thing I could not let go of was Google News. Some of it was convenience, some of it was fear of missing out. Mostly it was that Google News lives inside the browser, which still feels nonnegotiable on a phone. I even tried removing the browser app entirely. That experiment did not survive long.

The journey to the RSS nostalgia

There were things I genuinely liked about Google News. It surfaced relevant topics often enough to feel useful. I could remove outlets I did not want to see anymore, which gave me a comforting illusion of control.

By the way, did you know that you can add this blog to your Google feed? Try it here.

Still, I would regularly get pulled into scrolling spirals or feel oddly irritated by publishers that hijack the back button just to dump a wall of clickbait in your face. This is directed at you, SF Gate.

Big tech has always had a weird relationship with aggregators, mostly because feeds threaten things platforms care deeply about: ads and data, plus control. RSS was inspired by an Apple research group initiative, briefly embraced by large platforms, and then slowly abandoned. A feed that gives readers everything and takes nothing back is hard to justify inside an ad driven model.

And then this morning happened.

Today as in Christmas Day. I woke up by an app I am building around gentler mornings and started testing iOS accessibility settings, things like font size, contrast, and other details that matter when you are designing for people who do not interact with screens the same way. For the record, I am officially using 110 percent font size on my phone now. Happy 40+ to me.

Well, somewhere in that wandering, and squinting a little more than I used to, I rediscovered Reader Mode in Safari and learned something I had completely missed.

You can make Reader the default!

For most websites, not all, but enough to change how the web feels. It is not an accident that Reader Mode does not work on many news articles opened from Google News, while the same article often works fine when accessed directly. Clean reading experiences being treated as optional instead of default is a business decision, not a technical limitation.

I turned it on and immediately felt transported back to how reading used to be. Articles looked like they were designed to be read instead of converted (well, sometimes an article converts your soul though).

Apple ships Reader Mode, and features like “hide distracting elements”, which quietly enable one of the best reading experiences on the modern web. This is where accessibility gets interesting, and a little uncomfortable for companies. That has always been a slightly contradictory position for a big tech company. Apple is not particularly fond of ads, and it also has history here. The Apple research group I mentioned earlier created important technologies around accessibility before being shut down under Steve Jobs.

News business model

I understand the challenge of news outlet business models, which are genuinely complicated. A feature like Reader Mode or LLMs does nothing to help a news-ad-driven strategy, so it is not surprising that companies look elsewhere for revenue. The New York Times Games (!!??) division becoming one of the company’s main revenue drivers says a lot about where sustainable attention is easier to build. Looks like we finally understood why people bought newspapers in the past, for the crosswords.

What surprised me most was how quickly my body reacted to this change. The tension I had normalized while reading simply disappeared. Especially in the morning, when my tolerance for persuasion is close to zero.

Reader Mode does not feel like RSS in how it works, but it feels like RSS in how it lands. It works directly from semantic HTML. It keeps the intent and discards the infrastructure. You arrive because you chose to, and you leave because you are done. Nothing in between tries to keep score.

I do not think RSS failed because people stopped caring about reading. I think it failed because it was bad for business. I am also fairly sure this feature does not make some companies very happy. SF Gate, again, is still able to inject ads into Reader Mode or force a refresh after a short delay, which conveniently breaks the reading flow. These patterns exist to reassert control, reintroduce tracking, and remind you who actually owns the surface you are reading on.

Reading as a special need

Universal design is often framed as altruism, sometimes as something utopic. Accessibility features take real effort to build, the return on that effort is hard to quantify, and the revenue upside is rarely obvious. Because those capabilities are usually used by fewer people, advertising stakeholders rarely worry about losing that audience, at least at first. That changes the moment uninterrupted reading starts to feel like a special need.

I did not plan to feel sentimental about it. I was just testing accessibility capabilities, half awake, thinking about font sizes and contrast ratios. Then I stumbled onto something I thought I had lost a long time ago, a good reading experience, one paragraph after another, without anything pulling at my attention.

It turns out the hard part was never giving up RSS. It was remembering that choosing how to read is still an option.

If my phone’s supposed to be so smart, why do I feel dumb and empty when I’m holding it? Especially in public.

I guess it all started with the miracle BlackBerry promised me back in the day…

“Imagine checking your email on your phone.“

That was the big trick pitch: a corporate fantasy carved into a tiny plastic keyboard. Productivity in my pocket and urgency on demand. Companies used to give them to leaders who would show off to their peers how important they were. High-achieving executives becoming gods: omnipresent, omniscient, and online.

They made a gadget that makes work tag along everywhere we go, kinda like a loyal dog that just won’t quit barking.

Loyal… and honestly, quite dumb.

That was the puppy tail-wag of the distraction beast I’d later ride.

Then…
the real smart phone

A calendar, a camera, a notepad, a map. Basically a whole bunch of “smart tools” all packed into a glass rectangle. It felt pretty cool, almost like magic. Like having more stuff made me smarter. Like strapping 30 books to my chest and calling myself a scholar. But I get it, if I wanted all those tools with me before, I’d need a huge backpack. Now, it fits right in my pocket.

Were these tools actually smart though? Or am I just dazzled by shiny stuff?

Because adding a calendar to a phone doesn’t make me wiser. Adding a camera doesn’t deepen my attention. Email in my pocket just means my responsibilities now commute with me. It was never about intelligence. It was about access and speed. About making everything available all the time, including all the things I wish would leave me alone.

Then…
social networks

A feed of friends. Updates. Photos. The digital town square. Cute, almost harmless… until it wasn’t.

The town square warped. The edges sharpened. Likes and dopamine hooks were discovered. Social networks metastasized into social media, a business model that survives by removing friction, slowing nothing down, feeding me faster than I can think.

And from that mutation came the final form: the short-video feed. Infinite, vertical, high-stimulation loops made by the unconscious math god with messed-up metrics to hijack whatever was left of my prefrontal cortex and replace it with pure reflex.

We accidentally find a drug inside ourselves that’s kicked off by a loop of images, sounds, and interactions, not by external chemicals. Like a nerd who hacked our brain just by showing us a funny cat video, and the expectation that in a swipe you’ll see something so cool… maybe not… probably… let’s try…🤷‍♂️

I’m too old to be affected

People love freaking out about kids and “brain rot”.
The truth is uglier. It fries everyone.

There are a bunch of laws about stopping kids from using certain apps or smartphones at all. This isn’t new, tech moguls are known for not letting their kids use what they create.

Well, but dopamine in the brain doesn’t care how old we are. We talk about dopamine like it’s some magical pleasure juice, but it’s more like the brain’s “hey, good job, do that again” notification. And social apps know this.

Scroll, surprise, scroll, surprise… that little unpredictability is the hook. Not the content, the “maybe”. My brain starts chasing the “maybe” like a dog that heard a treat bag.

The APA review basically said the same thing in fancier words: overstimulation trains your brain to want fast, easy rewards and ignore anything that takes effort. Reading. Deep focus. Making things that don’t give instant feedback. You start craving the hit more than the meaning.

No wonder everything feels kinda shallow. I trained myself that way. Or even worse, I let the apps do the training for me. If BlackBerry was like a loyal dog, now I’m the dog, and somehow TikTok trained my brain like a pup waiting for treats.

When I vent about this with friends, some give me weird looks like they don’t really get why it’s a big deal. They say it’s just a free way to have fun, connect with friends, and socialize. But half the time, I can’t even finish my rant before they’re glued back to their phones. That infuriates me, but I don’t feel mad at them. This kind of behavior was purposely designed to disconnect us, I can’t compete with cat videos and fish falling from sky. So here I am, talking to my future self, hoping he’ll actually listen.

Which is probably why a little voice decided to show up right now and poke me in the ribs:

“Ahhh Diego, weren’t you a tech-utopian-bro?”

– Yesterday Me

I like the utopian bit. The bro? Not so much. But I do like shiny objects, so maybe I’m just a crow in a hoodie. I loved the idea of a future rescued by clever inventions.

For years, I read all the stuff that backed up the dream. I followed futurists, TED talks, and those “everything’s getting better” charts. Then, inconveniently, I smelled something rotting and started checking other charts…

(Don’t worry, I’ll stay shallow here and won’t share the link, they don’t smell good, so we can keep living in our little utopian bubble.).

Like…

• The global happiness reports sinking.
• The mental health metrics twisting in uncomfortable ways.
• Life expectancy stalling.
• Loneliness breaking records.

(See, all good)

The shiny future started to look like a refurbished present. Same model, worse battery. These issues might not be caused by tech use, but when we see the problems more intense in countries with more access to technology, it makes me think that we should be more critical about the dark side of tech use.

But wait, there’s good news!

Some smart folks out there are escaping this trap, like Melanie Perkins, Canva’s CEO, famously keeps her phone clean. No email. No Slack. Closes the laptop and actually disappears for real.

Must be nice to have a team that keeps the world going while you chill. Be present feels like such a fancy treat when someone else covers the cost. I guess being smart means deleting apps from your phone and paying someone else to handle it for you.

So, unless you turned into a billionaire CEO, Dieguito, this isn’t really good news for you.

– Not Billionaire Diego

What about the rest of us?

I can’t outsource my worries.
I don’t have an assistant filtering my chaos.
I can’t “disconnect for clarity” when my entire life, job, and sense of self are stuffed inside the same device that is quietly hollowing me out.

And here’s the part I don’t love admitting:
I’ve tried everything.

Apps that block apps.
Reminders disguised as wisdom.
Daily goals plastered on my home screen.
The whole monk-mode starter kit.

I wishful thinking about an ideal self
that may never exist.

How about creating something?

One of my recent goals is to build stuff that solves my own problems. I’ve done this a bunch of times before, and the worst that happens is I just fix my own issue. The best case is helping more people get what they need.

Leandra and I have been talking about how to cut down on distractions and mindless social media scrolling so we can actually get stuff done. We’ve been thinking about making another one of those social media blocking apps. I think they help a bit, but we never really felt motivated to make just another tool like that (or we don’t have deep-thinking abilities anymore).

Those apps try all sorts of tricks, all gimmicks to be honest, just to sell some subscriptions. Our gimmick was just about trying to stir up some anger towards tech moguls, :p

Digital Marie Kondo Method

Also, I tried the “Does it give me joy?” approach from Marie Kondo’s method to organize your house, but I applied it to my phone to declutter things, and it helped a bit.

That was the day I removed Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, LinkedIn and many other apps from my phone, even though I needed them for work-related tasks. Now, I just reinstall them when needed and uninstall them immediately after. Or only access from my computer.

Surprisingly, just asking myself if a certain app was really making me happy was a pretty good way to decide if I should keep it or not.

Did it work?

Sometimes… for a day.
Sometimes… for a week.

After removing apps
and leaving my phone in other rooms
and keeping on airplane mode most of the time.

Still,
every single time,
it takes exactly one thing to break the spell.

A friend sends a video.
Or a meme.
Or a “you have to see this” link.

And just like that, I’m back inside the machine, scrolling like nothing happened.
Like a lab rat who memorized the maze but still runs it anyway.

And once the spell breaks, it’s the same old story.
No enlightenment. No clean slate.
Just me, my phone, and the familiar rhythm of autopilot behavior.

So I doom-scroll,
then blame myself for not being disciplined enough.
I binge short videos, then act surprised when books feel heavy.
I keep the “smart phone”, as if the name alone can save me from what it’s doing to my attention.

Really? This is sooo laaaame

Blackberry did pretty well for a while, then messed up, made a comeback, and guess who wants to use it now? Teens, not big executives.

Yep, there are some signs that the new generation is kinda tired of smartphones (or maybe just wanna be cool), so they’re using old-school tech or minimalist new products.

What really inspires me is that I truly believe that the generation clash to be different is always good for humanity. Refusing to go to war, to slave, or just blindly follow rules, breaking the “normal, natural, and necessary” stuff of each generation gives me hope.

Other people have made cool stuff like the light or minimal phone (I love it), the AI Pin (so obviously lame), and even OpenAI is building something (though I’m kinda skeptical about what they’ll create).

Because everything is connected now: my social life, work, entertainment, and education. It’s just easy to fall into small dopamine-triggering traps spread everywhere. It’s hard to escape. That’s the reason I’m quite skeptical any of those products will massively beat the smart phones we know today, unless they create a new vaccine to the dopamine loop.

Saying “lame” is so big yikes!

– Gen Alpha Diego

Yeah, I know! “Lame” is a bit outdated, like smartphones, ;p

The promise

We were sold smartphones as mind-expanders, little rectangles full of tools, connections and possibilities. Right now, my smartphone doesn’t really do much of that.

Somewhere along the way, those tools started shouting louder than our thoughts. I gave up attention for convenience. Depth for speed. Silence for noise. Control for the illusion of control.

Some days I feel it happening… The thinning focus… The impatience.

The absurd urge to check my phone even when I know there’s nothing waiting for me. It’s embarrassing to say out loud. But pretending I’m immune doesn’t make me any less fried.

To scape that, my dream smart device would totally get what’s happening around me. If I’m walking or traveling, it’d help me find my way or capture cool moments. When I’m working, it’d help me stay focused and get things done. And when I’m chilling with friends, it’d make those times more special.

And yet

Here’s the strange twist,
after all this doom and digital gloom,
some tiny part of me
is still optimistic.

I don’t know if it’s resilience
or delusion.
Maybe my brain is happily rotten
and still somehow hopeful.

Maybe this rant
is just to prove to myself
that I can still think
and rant.

it’s that one neuron
that refuses to give up,
the plasticity
being recycled daily.

And yet,
every day
I see tools
getting smarter.

We, not…
yet?