alt Hacker NewsI 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
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> 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)
> 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
You might find this interesting: https://gitlab.com/ondrejfoltyn/nunti
Here's how its algo works https://gitlab.com/ondrejfoltyn/nunti/-/issues/28
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...