A good algorithm is a good thing. However what a good algorithm is for me is often different from what it is for those who maintain them. Outrage gets attention and sometimes it is needed, but there is a level of too much, and also a lot of outrage unfairly represents the issues and so it makes me mad even though if I understood the details I wouldn't be mad just concerned.
I want an algorithm that surfaces things of interest to me, then says "you have seen it all, go outside" (with an option of if I'm confined to a hospital bed to go on). Algorithm maintainers want me to keep scrolling for more ad dollars.
Or "you've seen it all. Bored? Click here to let your friends know you're looking for something to do/see who else is bored". Or "Bored? X needs volunteers!" Or some other positive suggestion to try to prevent a "eh guess I'll doomscroll something else" reaction.
That would be such a killer feature. And it could find other friends in the area and that are also free. Not like Meta doesn't have some kind of model for all that data already probably.
A long long time ago before reddit, facebook, digg, twitter, etc, there was usenet. It worked a bit like reddit but subreddits were called news groups.
There were many front ends for usenet, called news readers.
My favourite was "nn" short for "no news".
It showed you posts in groups you're subscribed to, allowed you to post comments, etc.
When you had finished getting up to date it would EXIT and print:
Ha! I had forgotten that message.Thank you for reminding me. I used to read comp.lang.lisp for the extensive and increasingly bizarre flame wars and for the wider philosophical discussions. Eventually I got to the point where I thought "OK I'm done now" and left and never went back.
I'd like to see an RSS item-level recommendation / discovery algorithm driven by recommendations made by a cohort of people who have similar likes to me. I wish there was a standards-based to publish a stream of my "likes" from my feed reader, and to "consume" the "likes" of others. When I add somebody's blog to my feed reader I'd expect it to pick up their "likes" (much like how people used to have a "blog roll" on their own site) and begin to consume the "feeds" from the sites they "like". It reminds me a bit of PHP's "web of trust".
Hacker News, arguably, functions in this capacity for me now. The cohort is the entire population (since we all see the same item rankings), though.
What you are describing is similar to how https://LinkLonk.com works (my side project) - when you "like" a link you get connected to the RSS feeds that posted that link and other users that also liked it. Then you get content from feeds and users that you are connected to. The more links in common you have with a feed or a user the more weight their other links have.
Do any of the web-based readers offer discovery based on matching your RSS list to other users' lists? Mine (Feedbin) doesn't, but I'd like it as an opt-in option.
You should read about OPML blogrolls [1], they are gaining traction in this space. Personally, I like the idea of manually exploring recommendations, so I built a browsable index [2]. But you can crawl the these as well and build all sorts of recommendations engines.
Here's what I do:
- six 'links to top posts from the past week' links for subreddits/HN, in rotation.
- a collection of RSS feeds from bloggers I've seen enough writing to recognize (and academic journals), which I check weekly
Every day is a focused collection of the most upvoted posts from one of those seven. It's hardly a perfect algorithm, but it at least disengages the worst instincts of FOMO. And the RSS feed can be seen as an escape hatch of sorts. If you really wanted to, you could try browsing /new once in a while as some kind of public penance or panning for gold.
edit: turns out the actual post is pretty close to this, with more RSS as a middleman. I just use Trello cards as rotating bookmarks, having given up on RSS being viable for anything other than the profitability of the RSS publisher.
Such an algorithm would require plenty of data to be well trained, and I fear that the same crowd that would value such an algorithm, prioritises privacy too much.
Perhaps malicious algorithms and tracking have driven us too paranoid to even collaborate on an algorithm that actually serves us.
You seem to be behind on English as spoken. From what I can reconstruct:
Algorithm (n) - a secretive set of systems, procedures and data that Big Tech uses to maliciously manipulate unsuspecting general public. Example usage: "Algorithm-free music discovery app for DJs"
I'm not joking, that example usage is taken from a live example.
There's been some conversation on Mastodon (and here) about its lack of algorithm
I really prefer my feed with no algorithm. I really like that it's just ordered by when it was posted, and if someone spams too much I'll remove them, and if my feed gets too much I'll curate it down a bit.
> I want an algorithm that surfaces things of interest to me, then says "you have seen it all, go outside" (with an option of if I'm confined to a hospital bed to go on).
[Acquire, or Employ your] good taste, sensibility & discipline.
Edit: For the record, "Employ your..." assumed that it if "good taste, sensibility & discipline" was not already acquired, it was already possessed and who I was responding to is able to put it to use.
Let those characteristics be your algorithm...or rather, your natural heuristic for living fair.
Has good faith met the end that it's said that chivalry saw?
> Yes, you can create an RSS feed from a Youtube Channel. You can can create an RSS feed from Reddit.
You don't have to create anything. YouTube and Reddit have never stopped publishing RSS feeds. I've personally been using RSS continuously for both sites without any issues for the past 15 years.
Both sites adhere to the standard link tag structure for declaring feed URLs in the headers of applicable pages. You can use a browser extension like 'Get RSS Feed URL' (https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/get-rss-feed-url/kf...) to easily expose the feeds associated with a page you're visiting without having to look for them in the page source.
I personally have all of my feed subscriptions -- blogs, podcasts, aggregators (including HN), YouTube channels, subreddits, etc. -- synchronized via TT-RSS on my VPS. I then use Liferea as my client (https://lzone.de/liferea), pulling from TT-RSS, for a high-quality, no-nonsense reading experience on the desktop.
On the rare occasions I still look at Twitter I use lists instead of follows, and this avoids both the awful algorithmic noise and means I'm not contributing to anyone's bullshit engagement KPIs.
I would still prefer an RSS feed, if there was a logged-out solution.
I was a heavy bloglines user back in the day and loved it. It was like a custom newspaper people printed for me and worked great.
I moved to twitter in 2009 and, for the most part, it was a better RSS experience. The udpates were smaller, more frequent. It was text only and had a size limit which automatically filtered for some level of linguistic ability. I used to only see people who I wanted to. It felt like a cross between IRC (which I used heavily at the time) and RSS and I quite loved it.
Over the years, the experience has degraded. Not just because of "the algorithm" but also because of influencers, social media marketing, spam, etc. But I had the frog in hot water experience and never really felt like moving away. I've blocked it on my work machine and use it only my phone via. the browser and a monochrome screen which makes it less compelling.
I've made a few friends and relationships on the platform and I think it peaked in 2015/2016 or so. Especially when you're in a city that's mostly on it. You run into people who you know "via. twitter". It's been a great ride but I do wish for some of the things of the RSS days.
Someone doesn't really need a reason to build something besides that they want to build it. I built many RSS readers and I was not trying to revolutionise anything, I was just having fun. This mindset of "revolution" and "disruption" will block you from actually just doing the things you want sometimes.
> Does the world need another RSS reader/mousetrap? We already have so many.
And we also have near-universal OPML import/export, so the cost of switching is minimised.
> What is your friend's idea to revolutionize with their new reader?
You don't need a revolution to make your app compelling, you just need to improve on status quo. RSS has a lot of shortcomings, most importantly discoverability.
Here's a simple idea: crowdsourced discovery. Users could opt-in to anonymously share their feed list (whole or parts); keyword-based categorisation could group them into topics; etc. The reader could use an algorithm (haha, we're coming full circle) to suggest interesting topics, feeds, posts. Honestly I'd be interested in something like <https://kagi.com/smallweb/>.
Rsshub can give you a RSS feed for Twitter but you have to give it a web session cookie which kinda freaks me out and probably violates the current TOS.
I'm building a web app which would extract blogs and their RSS feeds from all HN stories you've commented, upvoted or added to favorites – so that you could easily extract exactly the content you want. I plan on expanding it to handle content you've interacted from other social networks too.
I am a big proponent of RSS, but I think that it suffers from a lack of imagination these days, for example, the "quality filter" approach mentioned in this article is not very useful imo.
The biggest cost of RSS feed items as a consumer is figuring out whether something is worth reading. A lot of feeds these days don't provide anything useful in the body to make a determination on this, and others just dump the entire contents in the body, which means you're wasting a bunch of time reading N% of something until you realize you're not interested in it and it can be skipped.
In addition to this, RSS feeds tend to be structured to just throw everything at you, regardless of the topics you are interested in.
For a few years I have been publishing my own topic-specific feeds[1] for others to consume where I fill the body with my own personal highlights from the source, with a link through to the source (ie. the things I found interesting, the "hooks" that give a quick signal to a consumer if this might be something they want to invest time in reading). They have a couple of die-hard consumers, but ultimately this really a case of a niche within a niche.
I wish there were more feeds like this for me as a consumer, but unfortunately I get the feeling that this idea will never really become popular enough to catch on widely as RSS becomes less and less relevant to the mainstream.
Back when I heavily used RSS feed readers, the solution was simple:
1. Unsubscribe from feeds that put out too much content.
2. Optionally put them in their own category and ensure the main "view" doesn't include those items.
3. Realizing that overoptimizing for consuming the best content is (or at least should be) a sign of suboptimal mental health.
4. Timeboxing: Decide you'll spend no more than 30 minutes (even less is better) on them per day, and be OK missing out on everything you couldn't catch up on.
5. Ponder seriously about the value you are getting from doing this vs what else you could be doing. Do you want to spend this much time (whatever it is) daily when you are 50? 60? At some point, you may realize there are diminishing returns to keeping this up.
As I learned in the last year or two, consuming offline content is significantly superior than consuming blogs and news:
In order of importance I'd put them exactly in reverse :)
And I'd add:
6. Stop thinking of yourself as a consumer. A consumer blindly ingurgitates whatever's fed to them. You're a customer. With tastes and personal opinions. They depend on you to make a living, not you on them. And an unhappy customer moves their business elsewhere, doesn't stay on forever like being a consumer implies.
> The biggest cost of RSS feed items as a consumer is figuring out whether something is worth reading. A lot of feeds these days don't provide anything useful in the body to make a determination on this, and others just dump the entire contents in the body, which means you're wasting a bunch of time reading N% of something until you realize you're not interested in it and it can be skipped.
I think a big problem with this is that commercial websites believe that they have to update a million times a day to Feed the Algorithm™, which bloats their RSS feeds and any RSS reader you might have checking on it. Similarly, subscribing to a particularly active subreddit or three would also fill up your reader with trash.
I get a lot more use out of my RSS reader to check smaller, personal sites that don't update as often
There is a lot of interesting work in this space by the IndieWeb community. They've got a vision of (and lots of a spec for) a social reader[1] that uses RSS for lots of the things people got in the habit of with Web2 social media (comment, repost, etc)
(Although the IndieWeb community has this weird thing against "side files" and prefer having the content inside the HTML, marked up with Microformats2 special attributes. A social reader then polls the HTML and parses it additionally with the Microformats2 algorithm. I suspect this cultural preference is a result of the usage of static site builders of the early IndieWeb pioneers like Tantek.)
> The biggest cost of RSS feed items as a consumer is figuring out whether something is worth reading
I'm working on an RSS feed reader, and it has a feature that solves that problem. For every subscribed feed, it shows the percentage of items that you actually bookmark and read. So if there are feeds that you subscribed to but don't read, you can easily find out which they are and unsubscribe from them.
The issue is that it's not possible to separate feeds from items. Even if some feeds are largely unread, I subscribed to them because I liked something they posted on a specific topic, and I still want to get updates whenever there is another feed item related to that specific topic. Ultimately the "feed" is the mechanism of delivery, but I don't think it should be the primary mode of categorizing item consumption.
I've worked on this issue a little in a different context, where you can follow posts from people on Bluesky related to specific topics, and this is ideally what I would like to be able to do more of with RSS.[1]
I love RSS. I use RSS daily. I use link-aggregation websites like HN to find interesting authors and subscribe to any RSS feeds that they have. Highlights from my reader sync automatically into my Obsidian vault. It's great.
But I know I, and everyone else posting in this thread, are in the minority. It's clear that most people prefer algorithmic drip in a walled garden. There's a reason everyone flocks to those platforms when RSS superseded them. I don't think I need to re-hash why those platforms are bad for the health of the internet and society as a whole.
So what can be done at a structural level to fight this? What can be done to incentivize people to leave these algorithmic drip feeds to reverse this trend?
Build tools to make it easy for people to assemble their own chronological feeds that have quality UI / UX. IMHO the algorithmic feed's principle benefit is how easy it is for a user to curate something close to both what they want, and what they didn't know they want. We too often view things in terms of technical implementations and such, and lose focus on the core problems the user is actually having. Algorithmic feeds are great, because:
- User installs app, opens it
- User begins scrolling
- Within a few minutes they have an endless feed of mostly interesting content
That is REALLY hard to do without an algorithmic feed, and there are a lot of problems when they subscribe. Not insurmountable, just easily underestimated. The motto I keep repeating to myself when I fall into a doomerism about the inevitability of the algorithm, I just say "Its time to build" and hope I can find something on the other side, if I keep digging. The principle weapon against the algorithm is, I think, not needing an infinite pool of profit. I.e. Facebook could build great apps that weren't algorithmic, but it is highly likely they would make much less money. So not only won't they, they literally _aren't realistically allowed to do it_. Its a crazy thing to think through.
I don't think that's something that RSS (or any other alternative) can fix. I don't think RSS is as toxic as algorithmic feeds, but they are still cut from the same hyper-connected cloth. If you want to fight the algorithmic drip, promote people to connect with others in their community on a small scale.
Even if you have to use the internet to do it, making time to talk (with your vocal cords) to a friend on a regular basis can be much better than mindlessly scrolling or reading endless news feeds.
What might be even better are various other social activities away from a computer. It doesn't have to be highly social either. Just being in a park or library with other people silently reading or feeding ducks can be a highly positive semi-social experience. Just silently enjoying a common experience draws way more connection than the various "social" media apps out there.
I would argue for Twitter over a spotty collection of RSS feeds just because there's ironically more of a democratic aspect -- anyone can start tweeting about whatever. They can go viral and disappear, they can gradually build an audience, etc. They can interact with followers or reply guys or stay aloof; they can recommend content and become a mini content aggregator in their own right. People can be anonymous or they can use their real world cachet to build a following.
Accomplishing the same thing via publishing an RSS feed is a daunting task -- you need to build an RSS feed somewhere, you can't interact with others or be easily boosted by bigger accounts to start to gain a following.
The "walled" aspect of this is basically the limitations of what the platform will allow, which especially under the Musk regime is a good balance of only very light touches of moderation.
People talk about the feed and the algorithm, but no two people have the same feed; the accounts you choose to follow will determine what your feed looks like, together with some generally popular content.
1. Mandate that all platforms must have a reverse chronological feed as the default. Alternative "algorithmic" feeds must be explicitly opted in to (preferably with age verification).
2. Regulate out of existence the business model where time spent on site converts to revenue, and force people to directly pay for stuff. Levels of indirection in "payment" for services turn the free market into (even more of) a joke (Noam Chomsky already highlighted this when advertising was cohort based in print- and TV media long before the targeted advertising of today).
Would immediately increase the signal-to-noise ratio by many orders of magnitude.
Make it easier, probably. Even in the glory days of RSS I just never put in the effort to make it work for me. (sort of like how Twitter fans always told me I had to "curate" my feed better to make it less of a cesspool, but I actually just didn't care about randos yeeting random junk into the void).
Curating your feed requires a LOT of upfront investment, and then a nonzero amount of maintenance.
Readwise Reader. Yes, as another commenter stated it costs money, but it has many other features that I find useful such as good text-to-speech, integrations with other apps like Obsidian, and a good export feature if I want to switch to another feed app.
- i tried it, and it’s okay… however personally i much prefer a more private rss reader, where i don’t share all my personal data with yet another commercial company.
Also, it’s quite expensive.
The one thing that kills me is the number of "modern" blogs/sites that don't offer rss or atom is really frustrating. If I really like your site, please let me be an engaged reader and let me know when you have something valuable to say again!
I've even resorted to adding features in my personal feedreader to seek out common feed locations or APIs that common blogging tools leave on mostly unnoticed.
Back like 15 to 20 years ago when I ran or helped manage some hobbyist websites, I added RSS functionality if only because it was "popular" back then.
I can confidently tell you not a single bloody soul used it, at the height of adoption no less.
If I run a website again I definitely won't bother, it's additional maintenance for a feature nobody uses. The cost-to-benefit ratio makes no sense because the benefit is zero.
In an effort to bypass Google News and broaden my media bubble - I tried to find RSS feeds from our national newspapers. Most had RSS at some point, but almost none still had it running.
No blog is worth the hassle and honestly there is always a feed broken somewhere showing up in our reader we just wait for them to fix it. If they don't fix it then at some point it will just get deleted. That is just the reality of maintaining your own feed websites remove feeds sometimes and all you can do is go back see if its changed address and if not remove it.
I regularly get emails from people asking where my RSS feed is on my site (or why I don’t have one) when every page on it has the link tags in the header that allow it to be autodiscovered.
I will say something that’s potentially controversial, but — the problem with current times is the abundance of content. RSS worked for me in 2000s, because more or less, there were less interesting content/people writing things for public. Most decent things would get into people’s feeds, and generally everyone was happy. I can’t really see it being feasible nowadays, unless something (reads: algo) filters things that I’m definitely not interested in. Which, obviously, creates a whole different problem of siloed echo chambers. It becomes even a bigger problem when you try to move the conversations to the real world, because your friends wouldn’t have read the same things as your tailored algo recommended to you.
There’s also assumed-financial-incentives, which ruins most of blogs/content for me. That’s probably my cynicism, and maybe I just grew up, but every time I see any write up, my first question is how this person gets financial benefits from it. I just never thought that far until 2015.
Sorry for ranting, and obviously I have no solution to this problem.
> I will say something that’s potentially controversial, but — the problem with current times is the abundance of content.
FWIW, there's never not been an overabundance of content in the timeframe occupied by RSS, and RSS was created to allow one to aggregate the information one was specifically interested in in a standards-based way.
It sounds like you prefer "For You" algorithms, which is fine to the extent that you trust the filterer, and very convenient for a "sit back" consumption experience. The way that I enjoy some of that experience using RSS is by aggregating thoughtful aggregators like Kottke, MetaFilter, the Waxy.org linkblog, etc.
Indeed, my local government of Troy, Ohio (~25k population) offers RSS feeds with useful info about things like holiday closures, road construction, christmass tree pickup, etc. https://www.troyohio.gov/RSSFeed.aspx?ModID=1&CID=All-newsfl... There's also a calendar feed with city council meetings and such.
CivicPlus, the hosting company for Troy's site, does a fairly decent job. (They're rather pricey, in my opinion, though.)
Miami County government uses them to host some of the various County websites. We expose some RSS feeds, send email notifications, etc. The biggest problem with the platform is getting elected officials and departments to see the value in using the platform (versus just posting scanned PDFs, Excel files, and doing things "the old way"). The City has a little easier job because there aren't so many independent elected offices.
Just discovered a few US gov feeds yesterday, great resource. The Bureau of Labor Statistics also has quite a few feeds available: https://www.bls.gov/feed/
For those implementing feeds, "RSS" seems to get a lot of mentions, but how much of it is RSS-as-such and how much is "RSS" as a generic term for "feed", with Atom also perhaps being implemented:
Almost all of it. RSS is just a much more specific term than "feed" as many people talk about their Twitter or Facebook "feed". I have yet to see a reader that couldn't handle both RSS and Atom and you will see a mix of formats being produced.
One exceptions are sadly podcast feeds and clients. Although technically the additional podcast elements or just a basic "non-funky" podcast feed shouldn’t be a hard problem, the podcast ecosystem mostly ignored Atom and produced and parsed only RSS 2. Even Apple‘s iTunes/Podcasts.app which launched in 2005 with support for both, gave up official support for Atom some years ago.
Readit News
I want an algorithm that surfaces things of interest to me, then says "you have seen it all, go outside" (with an option of if I'm confined to a hospital bed to go on). Algorithm maintainers want me to keep scrolling for more ad dollars.
Or "you've seen it all. Bored? Click here to let your friends know you're looking for something to do/see who else is bored". Or "Bored? X needs volunteers!" Or some other positive suggestion to try to prevent a "eh guess I'll doomscroll something else" reaction.
There were many front ends for usenet, called news readers.
My favourite was "nn" short for "no news".
It showed you posts in groups you're subscribed to, allowed you to post comments, etc.
When you had finished getting up to date it would EXIT and print:
No news. (Is good news)
Yeah, it may be not as populated as in the 80s to mid 90s, but there are still enough active groups in usenet to waste uncounted hours every day...
Hacker News, arguably, functions in this capacity for me now. The cohort is the entire population (since we all see the same item rankings), though.
Highly recommended podcast episode: https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/scaling-blu...
[1] https://opml.org/blogroll.opml
[2] https://alexsci.com/rss-blogroll-network/discover/feed-c550c...
You can also see one in action on my blog's home page.
http://scripting.com/
And on a special site..
https://blogroll.social/
A blogroll is a kind of feed reader.
Every day is a focused collection of the most upvoted posts from one of those seven. It's hardly a perfect algorithm, but it at least disengages the worst instincts of FOMO. And the RSS feed can be seen as an escape hatch of sorts. If you really wanted to, you could try browsing /new once in a while as some kind of public penance or panning for gold.
edit: turns out the actual post is pretty close to this, with more RSS as a middleman. I just use Trello cards as rotating bookmarks, having given up on RSS being viable for anything other than the profitability of the RSS publisher.
I think there is a niche market for tools that allow individuals to train their own recommendation systems.
Perhaps malicious algorithms and tracking have driven us too paranoid to even collaborate on an algorithm that actually serves us.
Algorithm (n) - a secretive set of systems, procedures and data that Big Tech uses to maliciously manipulate unsuspecting general public. Example usage: "Algorithm-free music discovery app for DJs"
I'm not joking, that example usage is taken from a live example.
I really prefer my feed with no algorithm. I really like that it's just ordered by when it was posted, and if someone spams too much I'll remove them, and if my feed gets too much I'll curate it down a bit.
[Acquire, or Employ your] good taste, sensibility & discipline.
Edit: For the record, "Employ your..." assumed that it if "good taste, sensibility & discipline" was not already acquired, it was already possessed and who I was responding to is able to put it to use.
Let those characteristics be your algorithm...or rather, your natural heuristic for living fair.
Has good faith met the end that it's said that chivalry saw?
Yes, you can create an RSS feed from a Youtube Channel. You can can create an RSS feed from Reddit.
You can't to my best knowledge create an RSS feed anymore from Twitter
Newsletter to RSS: https://kill-the-newsletter.com/
More stuff:
Blogs & RSS https://rssfeedasap.com/https://code.rosaelefanten.org/rssparser.lisp/dir?ci=tip
This one you have to pay. I am considering it. Some RSS feeds don't work on my TinyTinyRSS. I think cloudflare, like always, is killing it:
https://politepol.com/en/prices
PS: If you have an idea for a RSS reader domain, please suggest.
You don't have to create anything. YouTube and Reddit have never stopped publishing RSS feeds. I've personally been using RSS continuously for both sites without any issues for the past 15 years.
Both sites adhere to the standard link tag structure for declaring feed URLs in the headers of applicable pages. You can use a browser extension like 'Get RSS Feed URL' (https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/get-rss-feed-url/kf...) to easily expose the feeds associated with a page you're visiting without having to look for them in the page source.
I personally have all of my feed subscriptions -- blogs, podcasts, aggregators (including HN), YouTube channels, subreddits, etc. -- synchronized via TT-RSS on my VPS. I then use Liferea as my client (https://lzone.de/liferea), pulling from TT-RSS, for a high-quality, no-nonsense reading experience on the desktop.
I would still prefer an RSS feed, if there was a logged-out solution.
I moved to twitter in 2009 and, for the most part, it was a better RSS experience. The udpates were smaller, more frequent. It was text only and had a size limit which automatically filtered for some level of linguistic ability. I used to only see people who I wanted to. It felt like a cross between IRC (which I used heavily at the time) and RSS and I quite loved it.
Over the years, the experience has degraded. Not just because of "the algorithm" but also because of influencers, social media marketing, spam, etc. But I had the frog in hot water experience and never really felt like moving away. I've blocked it on my work machine and use it only my phone via. the browser and a monochrome screen which makes it less compelling.
I've made a few friends and relationships on the platform and I think it peaked in 2015/2016 or so. Especially when you're in a city that's mostly on it. You run into people who you know "via. twitter". It's been a great ride but I do wish for some of the things of the RSS days.
https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=rss+readers
What is your friend's idea to revolutionize with their new reader?
And we also have near-universal OPML import/export, so the cost of switching is minimised.
> What is your friend's idea to revolutionize with their new reader?
You don't need a revolution to make your app compelling, you just need to improve on status quo. RSS has a lot of shortcomings, most importantly discoverability.
Here's a simple idea: crowdsourced discovery. Users could opt-in to anonymously share their feed list (whole or parts); keyword-based categorisation could group them into topics; etc. The reader could use an algorithm (haha, we're coming full circle) to suggest interesting topics, feeds, posts. Honestly I'd be interested in something like <https://kagi.com/smallweb/>.
Extra kudos if the dataset is released publicly.
The biggest cost of RSS feed items as a consumer is figuring out whether something is worth reading. A lot of feeds these days don't provide anything useful in the body to make a determination on this, and others just dump the entire contents in the body, which means you're wasting a bunch of time reading N% of something until you realize you're not interested in it and it can be skipped.
In addition to this, RSS feeds tend to be structured to just throw everything at you, regardless of the topics you are interested in.
For a few years I have been publishing my own topic-specific feeds[1] for others to consume where I fill the body with my own personal highlights from the source, with a link through to the source (ie. the things I found interesting, the "hooks" that give a quick signal to a consumer if this might be something they want to invest time in reading). They have a couple of die-hard consumers, but ultimately this really a case of a niche within a niche.
I wish there were more feeds like this for me as a consumer, but unfortunately I get the feeling that this idea will never really become popular enough to catch on widely as RSS becomes less and less relevant to the mainstream.
[1]: my software development topic RSS feed for example: https://notado.app/feeds/jado/software-development
1. Unsubscribe from feeds that put out too much content.
2. Optionally put them in their own category and ensure the main "view" doesn't include those items.
3. Realizing that overoptimizing for consuming the best content is (or at least should be) a sign of suboptimal mental health.
4. Timeboxing: Decide you'll spend no more than 30 minutes (even less is better) on them per day, and be OK missing out on everything you couldn't catch up on.
5. Ponder seriously about the value you are getting from doing this vs what else you could be doing. Do you want to spend this much time (whatever it is) daily when you are 50? 60? At some point, you may realize there are diminishing returns to keeping this up.
As I learned in the last year or two, consuming offline content is significantly superior than consuming blogs and news:
https://blog.nawaz.org/posts/2025/Jan/the-unexpected-benefit...
And I'd add:
6. Stop thinking of yourself as a consumer. A consumer blindly ingurgitates whatever's fed to them. You're a customer. With tastes and personal opinions. They depend on you to make a living, not you on them. And an unhappy customer moves their business elsewhere, doesn't stay on forever like being a consumer implies.
I think a big problem with this is that commercial websites believe that they have to update a million times a day to Feed the Algorithm™, which bloats their RSS feeds and any RSS reader you might have checking on it. Similarly, subscribing to a particularly active subreddit or three would also fill up your reader with trash.
I get a lot more use out of my RSS reader to check smaller, personal sites that don't update as often
[1] https://indieweb.org/social_reader
I'm working on an RSS feed reader, and it has a feature that solves that problem. For every subscribed feed, it shows the percentage of items that you actually bookmark and read. So if there are feeds that you subscribed to but don't read, you can easily find out which they are and unsubscribe from them.
It's called https://lighthouseapp.io
I've worked on this issue a little in a different context, where you can follow posts from people on Bluesky related to specific topics, and this is ideally what I would like to be able to do more of with RSS.[1]
[1]: https://bsky.app/profile/lgug2z.com/post/3lc47yru7vc2k
Here's how its algo works https://gitlab.com/ondrejfoltyn/nunti/-/issues/28
But I know I, and everyone else posting in this thread, are in the minority. It's clear that most people prefer algorithmic drip in a walled garden. There's a reason everyone flocks to those platforms when RSS superseded them. I don't think I need to re-hash why those platforms are bad for the health of the internet and society as a whole.
So what can be done at a structural level to fight this? What can be done to incentivize people to leave these algorithmic drip feeds to reverse this trend?
After you-ve hoarded a decent amount of feeds You should find 2-3 new ones on average per day and unsub 1-2.
Two good articles per day/session is enough if they are good enough. If it isnt you dont have enough feeds.
Even if you have to use the internet to do it, making time to talk (with your vocal cords) to a friend on a regular basis can be much better than mindlessly scrolling or reading endless news feeds.
What might be even better are various other social activities away from a computer. It doesn't have to be highly social either. Just being in a park or library with other people silently reading or feeding ducks can be a highly positive semi-social experience. Just silently enjoying a common experience draws way more connection than the various "social" media apps out there.
I would argue for Twitter over a spotty collection of RSS feeds just because there's ironically more of a democratic aspect -- anyone can start tweeting about whatever. They can go viral and disappear, they can gradually build an audience, etc. They can interact with followers or reply guys or stay aloof; they can recommend content and become a mini content aggregator in their own right. People can be anonymous or they can use their real world cachet to build a following.
Accomplishing the same thing via publishing an RSS feed is a daunting task -- you need to build an RSS feed somewhere, you can't interact with others or be easily boosted by bigger accounts to start to gain a following.
The "walled" aspect of this is basically the limitations of what the platform will allow, which especially under the Musk regime is a good balance of only very light touches of moderation.
People talk about the feed and the algorithm, but no two people have the same feed; the accounts you choose to follow will determine what your feed looks like, together with some generally popular content.
If you’re talking about the “following” feed that is also an “algorithm” albeit a simple one. But with injected ads it seems strictly worse than RSS.
2. Regulate out of existence the business model where time spent on site converts to revenue, and force people to directly pay for stuff. Levels of indirection in "payment" for services turn the free market into (even more of) a joke (Noam Chomsky already highlighted this when advertising was cohort based in print- and TV media long before the targeted advertising of today).
Would immediately increase the signal-to-noise ratio by many orders of magnitude.
Curating your feed requires a LOT of upfront investment, and then a nonzero amount of maintenance.
Which RSS reader do you use?
- i tried it, and it’s okay… however personally i much prefer a more private rss reader, where i don’t share all my personal data with yet another commercial company. Also, it’s quite expensive.
I've even resorted to adding features in my personal feedreader to seek out common feed locations or APIs that common blogging tools leave on mostly unnoticed.
I can confidently tell you not a single bloody soul used it, at the height of adoption no less.
If I run a website again I definitely won't bother, it's additional maintenance for a feature nobody uses. The cost-to-benefit ratio makes no sense because the benefit is zero.
Nobody emailed me or anything (I'm not a popular blogger), so I just turned the RSS generation off
I do use an RSS reader but because of the nature of the modern internet, it's a separate app.
There’s also assumed-financial-incentives, which ruins most of blogs/content for me. That’s probably my cynicism, and maybe I just grew up, but every time I see any write up, my first question is how this person gets financial benefits from it. I just never thought that far until 2015.
Sorry for ranting, and obviously I have no solution to this problem.
FWIW, there's never not been an overabundance of content in the timeframe occupied by RSS, and RSS was created to allow one to aggregate the information one was specifically interested in in a standards-based way.
It sounds like you prefer "For You" algorithms, which is fine to the extent that you trust the filterer, and very convenient for a "sit back" consumption experience. The way that I enjoy some of that experience using RSS is by aggregating thoughtful aggregators like Kottke, MetaFilter, the Waxy.org linkblog, etc.
Want to keep tabs on what Congress is up to? https://www.govinfo.gov/rss/bills.xml
Want to follow SEC press releases? https://www.sec.gov/news/pressreleases.rss
In WA state and want to follow bills related to schools? https://app.leg.wa.gov/bi/report/topicalindex/?biennium=2025...
The federal government has a big list at https://www.govinfo.gov/feeds. Your county might also have one (e.g. Spokane has https://www.spokanecounty.org/rss.aspx).
CivicPlus, the hosting company for Troy's site, does a fairly decent job. (They're rather pricey, in my opinion, though.)
Miami County government uses them to host some of the various County websites. We expose some RSS feeds, send email notifications, etc. The biggest problem with the platform is getting elected officials and departments to see the value in using the platform (versus just posting scanned PDFs, Excel files, and doing things "the old way"). The City has a little easier job because there aren't so many independent elected offices.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom_(web_standard)
Almost all of it. RSS is just a much more specific term than "feed" as many people talk about their Twitter or Facebook "feed". I have yet to see a reader that couldn't handle both RSS and Atom and you will see a mix of formats being produced.
I wrote a bit more detail about this in the past: https://kevincox.ca/2022/05/06/rss-feed-best-practices/#form...