Scour and minifeed are 100X better than Instagram and X

Let’s face it: it doesn’t matter if you’re a fan of Elon or Mark. Our brains can’t handle the infinite feeds on social media.

We feel hungover after hours of scrolling through the prison of recommended content. Why? As the great pizza maker Chris Bianco once said, “Shit goes in, shit comes out.” No one wants their brain turning into a crappy pie.

Doomscrolling makes me feel like a well-trained dog, just waiting for someone to say, “Eat!” I had to do something about the algorithms pushing me toward a bunch of lifeless rabbit holes. I needed to invest more time in curating and archiving to hone my ideas. I decided to create and adhere to a feed filled with human-written posts from personal websites.

Lately, I’ve been using two services to personalize my feeds: Scour and Minifeed. I can’t believe they’re free. Both respect privacy and are transparent about their development roadmaps. Kudos to the amazing developers.

Now I spend a lot less time reading about the controversies of celebrities or billionaires. The other side of the Internet is filled with writers and programmers who actually take the time to reply to every email from their readers. This environment feels much better.