Comment by bsnnkv
2 days ago
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.
[1]: my software development topic RSS feed for example: https://notado.app/feeds/jado/software-development
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:
https://blog.nawaz.org/posts/2025/Jan/the-unexpected-benefit...
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
The post proposes a solution to the overload of subscribing to subreddits by subscribing to a search for only the top posts from the subreddit.
I don't use reddit, so I'm probably missing something, but subscribing to only the 'best' posts doesn't sound like a way to find the 'hidden gems', it sounds more like a way to subscribe to whatever the users of the subreddit have collectively voted up that particular day.
1 reply →
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)
[1] https://indieweb.org/social_reader
(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.)
Yeah, I don't really grok the focus on MF2 given the wide adoption of RSS/Atom, but the social reader concept isn't one I've seen anyone else advocating for. It also suffers from the same spam problem of anything else that allows public submission of content. I've been exploring it more in the context of _private_ blogging were you already have a layer of access control.
> 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.
It's called https://lighthouseapp.io
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]
[1]: https://bsky.app/profile/lgug2z.com/post/3lc47yru7vc2k
You might find this interesting: https://gitlab.com/ondrejfoltyn/nunti
Here's how its algo works https://gitlab.com/ondrejfoltyn/nunti/-/issues/28