alt Hacker NewsI ditched the algorithm for RSS
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> I waste too much time scrolling through social media. It's bad for my health, so why do I keep doing it? Because once in a while, I'll find a post so good that it teaches me something I never knew before, and all the scrolling feels worth it.
Intermittent reinforcement, the technique companies use to get people addicted to social media. Similar to how slot machines are designed.
Speaking of algorithms definitely a far fetched idea if there was a LLM esque tool trained on all digital data produced by humans since computers were a thing and had root level access to all devices on the planet could it alter shuffling algorithms even on self hosted stuff to display items a specific way?
I love the idea of owning my own feed very much. These days it feels like a local and/or private LLM that had some web crawling ability would be able to do a better job than RSS.
That seems like such an obvious project that someone's working on it, but the trick is that I would NOT subject myself to a monetized AI that is injecting content into my eyeballs that isn't in my best interest. So it's not necessarily something that fits current models of "the user is the product".
He gives a few good examples of well-supported RSS feeds, but the reality is, in 2025, RSS is dying. So many places have RSS feeds that constantly break, suddenly stop updating, get relocated without notice, or don't exist at all.
I took the other approach: I ditched the algorithm for newsletters: https://redditletter.com
My biggest complaint with the algorithm is to stop assuming what I like and pollute my feed with random irrelevant content.
News Explorer on iOS/iPadOS/MacOS is great if you want a one-time purchase app that syncs your RSS feeds across your devices.
I remember back when people were ditching RSS for twitter and I thought it was insane. Looks like I was right!
I’ve been meaning to give this a shot. I wonder if anyone has figured out how to fit Twitter into RSS? It’s obviously not a natural fit since there are many more posts but the average quality and length is lower. But if I could figure it out, then similar to what this article says, it would help permanently break the habit of endlessly scrolling a feed.
Not a single mention here of FeedFlow, available on F-Droid. An absolute gem of an app.
For anyone looking for an rss-to-email service, check out https://pico.sh/feeds
You can manage your email digests completely through the CLI and we are constantly making improvements to the service.
Most introductions to RSS assume that people want to know about RSS! And so here’s a more people-centric explainer instead: https://journal.jatan.space/why-use-rss/
I have my own little instance of FreshRSS and I love it. Both the software itself - any time I discover and report an issue, it gets taken seriously and fixed fairly quickly - and also my collection of feeds:
* High quality blogs (Bartosz Ciechanowski, Bits about Money, etc.)
* Local government announcements
* OpenWRT updates (subscribed to the releases/announcements forum)
* Price trackers for things I want to buy eventually but can wait until they go on sale (keepa, appagg)
* The Money Stuff newsletter (via kill-the-newsletter)
* Comics like XKCD
* Book authors I like (mostly via RSSBridge + goodreads)
* etc.
I use this method with X. I only follow a few accounts and exclusively use the following view (which prevents algorithmic content push).
The drawback is that it can become monotonous. However, there’s the “For You” view and the curated news section to mitigate this.
The thing that annoys me with RSS is the lack of paging. It's great to get updates, but most pages only have the last x articles in their feed. Which means a lot of older, still valuable content is not discoverable anymore.
I use and like RSS, but the problem with RSS is that it mostly only exposes you to voices you already know about.
(Ideally you can subscribe to people who deliberately amplify other voices - a reason I like link blogs - but it's hard to find dedicated curators like that.)
That's why I actively seek out algorithmic discovery. It's one of the things I like about Bluesky over Mastodon: Bluesky has a "discover" feed (and the ability to add more custom feeds too). It's good.
I've been meaning to get back on the RSS wagon. I ran TT-RSS some years ago and it fell apart at one time due to my lack of time to maintain it.
Is TT-RSS still the go-to, or is there something else I should take a look at?
In today's world, algorithms are essential. It's similar to scrolling through Netflix for a movie - you might spend 90 minutes, the length of a movie, just searching for the perfect one you haven't seen yet. To avoid that, we rely on algorithms that automatically tailor suggestions based on our personal preferences.
The next logical step, in my opinion for privacy-oriented users is to own their algorithms and have the ability to analyse and customise them. Who knows, we might even discover something new about ourselves. That could make for an interesting side project.
any advice on how to get the first n posts from the /front page of hn as an rss feed? since it keeps on changing, a daily snapshot (at midnight UTC for example) could be handy.
What client do you use on mobile and on desktop? I like very much Reeder Classic but perhaps there are better alternatives.
I've accepted RSS Not coming back. At this point just waiting for headless AI helper that browses through all my regular pages in the back ground and assemble into local RSS.
Has anyone been able to figure out how to generate RSS feeds for Nextdoor?
The one thing holding RSS back is that finding RSS feeds and subscribing to them in another app is frankly time consuming.
I built a free service for people who specifically want to track updates / features / releases to SaaS tools, services, and GitHub repos. https://www.getchangelog.com . It effectively is an RSS search engine + email digest
I think its unique because it uses a combination of LLM based web scraping to find rss feeds and I am working on a solution to generate RSS feeds from any blog / api changelog right now to expand the set of sources. I really wish RSS was more widespread and there was a better discovery solution.
Been on this tip for 6 months, glad to hear i am not alone
Just realized RSS+LLM might be a really nice combo.
Use RSS to get the full take then use a local LLM to filter out the noise and customize the feed to one's personal preferences.
redlib supports rss feeds and is a much better ad-free, tracker-free, distraction-free frontend for reddit
RSS is great, Nostr is potentially greater. A lot of work is being put in "transparent" and customizable algorithms for discoverability.
On the blogging side, I’m doing my bit for the web and built a new service minus the yucky bits of modern web (tracking, ads, paywalls, bloat…) https://lmno.lol does rss too. Full content of course.
For example, my blog https://lmno.lol/alvaro and https://lmno.lol/alvaro/feed
miniflux is where it's at
what we need next is a way to categorize, group subscribe to similar rss
I still miss Google Reader.
I agree. That’s why I created the simplest possible RSS reader[1]. I use it daily, but so far I’m the only user :D.
Going to be increasingly necessary as search engines continue to get worse.
I left most socials years ago. Feedly for aggregation and desktop reading, and Reeder as a client for it on iDevices.
I'm a huge fan of rss, bemoan Google's evil actions, etc.
I'll add my recommendation after looking for an rss reader for the longest time - Feeder. Free, open source and excellent.
Shout out to any share bro's out there! Long live RSS!
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Hi! I'm Aquako. I’m a Business Intelligence Data Analyst with 7+ years of experience delivering data-driven solutions at McKinsey & Company. My expertise lies in blending advanced analytics, data engineering, and visualization to solve complex business problems. Location : Paris, FR
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I am a generalist who loves building digital products Hello, I'm Kenny. I think a lot of the posts here are bots and I am not one of them.
I'm a software engineer with recent experience working in the mobile gaming industry as a UX engineer. I'm open to any junior or mid-level opportunities where I can grow as a software developer. I have a large range of interests, but especially enjoy projects that focus on entertainment and media! Send me an email, I'm happy to discuss more about my background.
I'm a fan of RSS too. Some people I know use substack to write. I would ideally like to use kill-the-newsletter for that but I had trouble with delivery with substack. Fortunately, these days LLMs are quite quick so I was able to whip up a little tool that does this for myself: https://github.com/roshan/superheap
It's incomplete but sufficient. LLMs drop the cost of software to near zero. I barely had to learn anything.