Comment by WorldMaker

I liked Newsblur's approach to this when I was using a firehose (I dropped most of my firehose-like feeds a couple years ago for various reasons including I didn't actually like most of them all that much). Newsblur has Focused versus Disliked and you can "train" all sorts of things to Like or Unlike about an article. You can Like an entire feed, but you can also Like things like specific authors or tags in a feed or words in a headline. Similarly you can use all the same tools to Unlike an article. If an article has more Likes than Unlikes it shows up in a Focused view and if an article has more Unlikes than Likes it shows up only in an "All" view, meaning it disappears from the default Unread view. When you have a limited amount of time you read Focused, when you have more time you read Unread, and if you want to check on spam or topics you dislike you can zoom out to "All" and spot-check feeds for Unliked articles.

Additionally, Newsblur added an automated "Infrequent Site Stories" for things it knows come from feeds that don't update all that frequently. (Which you can use in tandem with Focused view for even less time.)