Reading RSS content is a skilled activity
doliver.org80 points by d0liver 13 hours ago
80 points by d0liver 13 hours ago
> And that's also where the magic lies because it's that very process of engaging with content and deciding whether or not it has value to you that makes using an RSS reader a better experience and one where you own your attention.
Back when RSS was more popular, the tyranny of never-ending backlogs was a topic that was discussed somewhat regularly, but it gets glossed over a little these days since RSS talk is naturally enclosed within a layer of nostalgia
For a few years now my approach has basically been "read it now or read it never" - this means that my RSS feeds are typically empty and I never save anything to "read it later" queues
If it's something I'm supposed to read, it'll probably be resurfaced one way or another (or maybe it won't, and that's fine too) at a later time when I'm immediately ready to pick up what is being put down
RSS came of age in a very different time, when the world of computing was more, for lack of a better term, workstation-centric. People wanted RSS clients that were similar to email clients, or maybe even integrated directly into the email client, and they had this idea that they should 'catch up' on everything that was published since their last session, almost like it was a job.
Nowadays people have an implicit understanding that the net is vast and infinite, it's beyond the ability of one man to fully catch up, and you're just tuning into a slice of the data stream.
RSS clients never really departed from their roots of showing reverse chronological lists of all the posts, but this UI loses usefulness when the data stream gets too big. Commercial social media saw an opportunity and decided to make the algorithm that arranges the feed totally opaque - with that achieved, they proceeded to auction off each spot in it and get rich. Even worse than the reverse chronological firehose.
What we lack is a presentation that is actually good! I don't have the answer. One thing I want to experiment with, though, is digests. I use a straight reverse chronological UI that aggregates all my items in all my feeds. One thing I noticed is that this ends up wildly biased toward feeds that have lots of posts, like news aggregator websites, or Reddit. Anyone who's foolish enough to work hard and produce wonderful long form content with less frequency, gets lost in the firehose, which may tell us a lot about how the collapse-in-progress of our civilization got started. I have no idea how to solve this and do better than the UIs and algorithms that rule the world today. I do have it on my todo list to try a digest style UI - like perhaps each website gets one entry per day in my feed, and if they made multiple posts on that day, those are represented as multiple small title links in a compact format. Whereas a less frequent poster might even get an excerpt along with their title or something.
I did something like this with my reader:
- Only subscribed to lots of niche news and small websites (most of my list has the category 'dev blog' attached to it, so that's all of you guys/girls with a blog).
- Only get posts when I click, basically no automatic hoarding in the background (except for my Newspaper functionality, which does a little bit of background request for important feeds that I manually selected).
- Just pick the last post from a randomly selected feed. This really gets me going from reading about Linux, to reading about the best way to bake a cake, to reading about interior design, to reading about bikepacking... all in one sit.
- Or only pick from randomly selected feeds with a certain category, when I'm in the mood for a specific kind of news. For example, I want to know new videos on selected Youtube channels, or i only want to see posts with a picture attached (I call it 'photo feeds').
In my opinion the answer is curation. If you're getting so many magazines and newspapers in the post that you can't read them all, the answer isn't to hire someone to cut out random pages for you to read (oh, why are they all adverts?), the answer is to stop subscribing to so many publications.
I never fail to read all of my social media feeds and email messages, because I actively cancel subscriptions to stuff that I don't have time to read. After all, it's entertainment/casual education, not mandatory learning.
Most people never read most of the magazines and newspapers they got cover to cover. I certainly read a fairly small percentage of the New York Times.
> firehose
This is what the modern information space feels like in one word. It's impossible to read everything. But at the same time, it's not necessary to read everything.
> What we lack is a presentation that is actually good! I don't have the answer. One thing I want to experiment with, though, is digests.
Do you have a RSS feed that I can subscribe to so that I get notified when you publish your experiment?
I've never actually published any of the code I use to view my RSS feeds. This question comes up from time to time when I discuss the subject though! Maybe I will one of these days.
Someone I know once described Twitter as being a river that you dipped into when you had the time and the interest. I think RSS was similar but, as you say, the clients had a somewhat different model. You could get around by having a priority category or something like that.
https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/tech/TwitterBreakin...
> I need to treat it as a stream that I dip my toe into every so often
There are a couple readers that avoid that by providing a calmer experience without a firehose and without background fetching.
https://blogcat.org (I made this one)
https://fraidyc.at (this is the inspiration for many calm readers)
https://cblgh.itch.io/rad-reader (multiplatform and super calm)
Ended up abandoning Fraidycat after it atrophied (a number of the integrations that weren't plain RSS, like YouTube/Twitch, didn't work well, it ended up choking my browser, and then stopped working entirely)... did not know there were so many spiritual successors. Thanks!
Now... if anyone knows of an iOS equivalent, that'd be awesome.
It depends what you use it for. I’m a researcher and use it to follow scientific literature (relevant arXiv sections and scientific journals, as well as funding agency announcements), and keeping an eye on what’s up is then arguably part of the job.
If you use it for general news and blogs, that’s of course different. I completely agree with letting the FOMO go.
It takes effort indeed. Just as putting up a little homepage, writing articles, essays or short tidbits, and publishing an RSS feed for that.
What I do with my self-built reader (link in bio) to have it not function as a newsfeed from regular social media, is to only get the latest posts from randomly selected feeds. I don't need all of the unread posts from all of the sources (there are 1415 now in my list) every time. This is also nicer for the publishers (that may be you, fellow HNer!), since every request to your feed is actually read.
In the beginning of using my own reader I was really craving the dopamine shot from regular social media, it literally took me two years to get used to my self-inflicted info diet. Now it's really a calm blessing, especially because I read stuff posted by yet another internet fellow who has a blog. Way more human.
Using RSS is different and should be different. Wanting RSS and the social open web, and then transforming it to regular social media with notifications and a firehose of news is the same as building a new barebones electric pickup truck and then wanting it to connect to an app.
Seeing many posts here talking about how their feed reading experience is overwhelming cause it is a firehose of things they might not be interested in. So I wrote a little post about alternative experiences in RSS reading:
https://andregarzia.com/2025/04/rss-doesnt-necessarily-means...
You can have feed readers that provide a calmer UX. My own feed reader, BlogCat, lets you configure how many posts per website you want to see in the reader page and how often to fetch each site (with the default being daily). Without notifications or background fetching, you're in control of how often and when you want to see the posts from a website.
People here seem to fall into two camps:
(A) Studiously prune your feeds like a bonsai. As the author suggest, follow the chain of trust to a small number of voices (for me, something like Stratechery, Simon Willison, Inner Ring).
(B) Realise that RSS is another form of 'tyranny', this time at the hands of the publisher instead of the platform, where the composition of your feeds, and therefore what uses your attention, doesn't correlate highly with what matters to you.
I can feel the pickaxes being unsheathed as I type this but...I have reason to believe my (and others') LLM/embeddings-driven products are a good solution.
Position (A) isn't tenable if FOMO matters. Paraphrasing another comment here: 'Following arXiv is part of the job'.
So let's say you adopt position (B). You recognise that everything that matters to you is distributed across some set of feeds. But only a small proportion of the total material in those feeds matters to you. If you can articulate what matters then you can let an LLM or embeddings model use their attention, instead of yours, on the low-relevance items by filtering them out.
Some options:
- https;//scour.ing
- https://zacusca.net (disclosure: mine, and still pretty janky)
(I think) the thing is that you are not meant to get served content that is specifically for you. (insert this hole was made for me img) [1]) You get someone’s stream of content and you have to decide whether you are okay with the friction between what they are serving and yourself or if you are not and then unsubscribing.
This is the same reason why AI generated music is soulless and isn’t liked. If music can be made especially for you in milliseconds to soothe your mood or to suit your situation it isn’t art, it’s entertainment slop you’re consuming. Art and things created by other people doesn’t have to pander to you, it expresses something they made and you are allowed to observe or interact with it. What caused the creator to create it is what gives it meaning, when you start having to arbitrage your creations with the consumer (to become more appealing for more people) that’s when you start losing credibility and the start of selling out.
A few of the most heinous examples of people selling their dignity for ‘the algorithm’ to recommend their stuff to more consumers are those who impact their content for retention. An easy one is Mr. Beast, entire videos are focused solely around retention. If the team behind that channel finds something that gets them more appeal to their consumerbase they will implement or pivot towards it like there is no tomorrow.
Another scathing example is Jay Z, who - in Moment of Clarity - rapped
“ I dumb down for my audience and double my dollars They criticize me for it, yet they all yell "holla" If skills sold, truth be told, I'd probably be lyrically Talib Kweli Truthfully I wanna rhyme like Common Sense But I did 5 mill' – I ain't been rhyming like Common since (Woo!)”
admitting he has compromised his lyrical integrity for money and influence long before “the algorithm” was the all influential thing.
I guess when it comes down to it, it’s easier to make it in the world without integrity, but that definition of making it is more hollow.
There is a misunderstanding about RSS and escaping algorithms. Sure, you are not under the social media control but you certainly are under the publisher control. Now you have to see everything that they publish. Which makes it the absolutely worst way to consume news. It becomes overwhelming and if you want inbox zero it’s another digital burden. The result is that I pretty much lost interest on following some websites through RSS because even though I do like some of the articles, it’s another way of doomscrolling when searching for the one thing that will give you the dopamine hit.
So after excluding the vast majority of websites, I was left with 10-20 websites that I did enjoy ~60% of the content they put out and I've subscribed to their newsletter. Which in most cases is full of tracking links but that’s a case for another topic.
> Now you have to see everything that they publish. Which makes it the absolutely worst way to consume news.
I agree on the second part, but the first part is not necessary. RSS is technically not hard, one can write one's own reader very quickly. You don't have to consume everything a publishers publishes, I don't even see everything a publisher publishes because I don't even request everything a publisher publishes.
I think the (your? my?) curation should focus on selecting some good sources (like the article says), but this means in no way that you should see everything all the time. Only when you want, in a quantity that's doable for you.
I can and do filter on certain feeds. My reader (tiny tiny rss) supports filtering based on the contents of the articles.
I filter sponsored articles or ones that need a subscription, articles that are a series, links to podcasts, recurring series..
> Now you have to see everything that they publish.
Ha, that's almost word-for-word on https://zacusca.net. [0]
And Zacusca represents a third way (the first two being reverse chron and newsletters, which both put control in the publisher's hands). If you can articulate what you enjoy then you can filter the RSS according to that.
[0] I'm working on Zacusca. Other, frankly more developed, alternatives include: - https://feeds.fun/ - https://scour.ing/about
>and if you want inbox zero
There's your problem. Turn off the "unread" indicators and just chill. You're not going to read everything and that's okay.
I don't think this is just about RSS:
> So, how do we decide and filter for ourselves? My favored approach is fairly old fashioned: Chains of trust. We start by finding someone whose judgement we trust and subscribing to their feed, and then we find out who they trust and subscribe to their feed, and so on. Part of the judgement that we're looking for in these trustees is not simply whether or not content is accurate but whether or not it is worth our attention.
This goes for any form of social media beyond just blogs. Find people who have good taste, good judgement and demonstrate their credibility in the subjects that matter to you. Collect those people - follow them on social media, hang out with them on Discord, attend events that they go to, subscribe to their blogs and their newsletters, read their papers (for academia), pay attention to the people THEY respect.
Repeat that a bunch of times and you can become incredibly well informed on almost any topic.
I keep coming back to the idea of curating my own reading through RSS.
I missed the first wave: mostly stuck to aggregators and blogs, but eventually set up a Feedly account. Like others here, I found maintaining a meaningful list takes real energy. It's easy to over-subscribe and end up with a second inbox.
Still, I think the effort is worth it. The best systems I've worked on always rewarded small, regular maintenance over trying to automate everything away. Feels like curating information works the same way.
I adore RSS. Some gems I've found:
https://rsshub.app/twitter/user/{username} for twitter accounts
Append .rss to any subreddit URL you want updates on
YouTube also has an RSS feed for channels
>rsshub
This has been one of the key programs for me to move 90% of my "timeline" into an rss reader.
If you self-host it, you can also pass it authentication tokens to RSSify things like:
- your twitter timeline
- github notifications, issues, commits
- discord messages
- youtube subscriptions
- spotify/twitch/steam/etc.
An to add another project in a similar vein (scraping to turn pages into RSS): https://rss-bridge.org/
I think self curation is a theme not directly discussed.
The recurring problem is other people trying to tell you what information you should see, resulting in suboptimal aggregations. If you don't curate your own stuff, you'll slide into whatever state of mind your curator wants you to slide into.
Algorithmic feeds are widely accepted to cause doomscrolling, and my experience with RSS is similar to the author: it goes well, but then whenever an aggregate source of any kind is added, it drowns out everything else. This wouldn't be a problem if everything from the source was a good read. The issue is any aggregation by someone who isn't you isn't going to be perfect for you.
My brain wants to make a link between collateralised debt obligations causing the recession, and aggregate info sources and algo feeds causing the collapse of the modern internet. Basically, everyone realises 90% of what they have in their feed/inbox is actually worthless and we only have it because the people who we get stuff from mixed it with a few good/relevant pieces of information so we trusted/assumed the rest would be good/relevant.
Life takes effort, if you outsource the effort, your life requires less effort but is less likely to be what you want. The same applies to curating the content you consume. It's easy to accidentally outsource.
The way I have addressed this is using my own tool [1] which creates daily digests instead (MD files with date). This removes the stress to check everything or having hundreds of unread, I care only about the current day. If I get some time, say on the weekend, I could go in previous days and check if I skipped. I think its a better trade off than having so many unread stories that grow over time.
> We start by finding someone whose judgement we trust and subscribing to their feed, and then we find out who they trust and subscribe to their feed, and so on.
I do this, but then to avoid echo chambers I do occasional fault injection where I pick someone that one of my feed is at an opposite pole to in some salient, on some axis, and inject them to my feed for a while. Maybe I have something to learn from them, maybe I don’t, maybe they stay on the feed or maybe they are removed. I hope this helps me avoid groupthink.
I do the same. Case in point: I started to follow someone's blog because of their technical achievements, then I realized I don't like their political views _at all_, but I keep them on the list mostly to keep myself on my toes.
My problem with RSS is that I tend to subscribe to too many things and then it's too much. Also I wanted a solution that was free or self hosted, but I realized it's much better if someone manages the complexity for me, so I just ended up going with the paid hosting for miniflux (https://miniflux.app/).
Now I've just subscribed to a few things I care about, I open the website from time to time, quickly mark as "read" stuff I'm not interested in, and when I have more time I just go through everything that is still unread, because it's been "filtered in". Seems to work!
This is perfectly reasonable, but I think it is a bit general. The notion of a chain of trust leading to a curated feed can equally apply to YouTube if you stick to the subscribed channels view.
There are also specific skills I've picked up from being subscribed to the Hacker News "top" RSS feed. Namely judicious use of the "mark all as read" button.
Media theory and critical thinking are sorely lacking in public education, and the lack of media literacy has never been more apparent. It sounded absurd, taking precious time away from teaching math to watch movies? But this is the first generation coming of age right now to have been exposed to mass communications in ways/amounts that have never existed--I suppose that's been true of each of the last several dozen generations, but it's crossed a threshold that I believe necessitates special care in raising adults who can better discern trustworthy sources, interpret and think critically about what they see/hear/read, and do precisely as this article recommends and filter your incoming information in a thoughtful and intentional way.
For HN summaries via RSS I've been using gophersignal.com which is FOSS and been pretty happy with it and the dev is adorable.
I also find myself wanting to go back to RSS for the exact same reasons of 1st paragraph. You own your content and host it. Unfortunately all the RSS readers are too raw and I think one of them has to port over Twitter features, things like: more ephemeral feed instead of an inbox, reply, quote tweet, retweet, like, follow, and new: LLM-driven customizable algorithmic feed.
Do you think you could expand on that? Like how you might imagine an ideal workflow to go? Would there be like a sea of tags that you could wade through, or just an '/all', only items you specifically subscribe to + your connections subscriptions according to some ranking algo? Items would 'fall off' or out of view(?) after X time/X amount of browsing a differently weighted topic?
I ask because being honest, you're a big inspiration for myself, and inadvertently, adding an LLM-curated RSS feed reader as a planned feature to a project I'm working on. (I saw https://github.com/karpathy/LLM101n when I was getting interested in LLMs, and then got inspired by your project to start to attempt to build something like the primer from the diamond age.
Where that leads is that I see an RSS feed reader + curation via self-described or identified interests as being a 'core' piece of information gathering for the 'future' individual and have had it on the to-do list as a feature-add for my project.
> more ephemeral feed instead of an inbox
How would that work?
Let your reader only show randomly selected posts from all your feeds, for instance.
> We start by finding someone whose judgement we trust and subscribing to their feed...
...and in no time at all, these "someones" will be made offers not all of them will refuse to parlay their trusted judgements into income by marketing agencies. It seems trust will not only need to be gained but also somehow maintained.
Oh Lord. I miss the hell out of bloglines and wish we could go back to the glory days of RSS but this headline reads like a guy tipping his Trilby before explaining Rock and Mirty.
