I Ditched the Algorithm for RSS–and You Should Too
The article advocates for RSS feeds over social media algorithms, highlighting their ability to curate quality content, reduce information overload, and providing guidance on setting them up for various platforms.
Read original articleThe author discusses the benefits of using RSS feeds over traditional social media algorithms, which often prioritize engagement over quality content. The constant scrolling through platforms like Reddit, Facebook, and Twitter can lead to information overload and wasted time, as these sites tend to fill feeds with low-quality posts to keep users engaged. RSS, a technology dating back to 1999, allows users to subscribe to specific websites and curate their content without the interference of algorithms. The article provides a guide on how to set up RSS feeds for various platforms, including YouTube, IGN, HackerNews, and Reddit, emphasizing the ability to filter content based on personal preferences. The author highlights that many websites support RSS feeds, even if they do not prominently display them. By using RSS, individuals can reclaim their attention and focus on high-quality content, avoiding the noise of social media. The conclusion encourages readers to explore RSS as a means to stay informed and engaged with the content that truly matters to them.
- RSS feeds allow users to curate content without algorithmic interference.
- Social media platforms often prioritize engagement over quality, leading to information overload.
- The article provides practical steps for setting up RSS feeds for popular sites.
- Many websites support RSS feeds, even if not explicitly stated.
- Using RSS can help individuals focus on high-quality content and save time.
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- Many users express a strong preference for RSS feeds due to their ability to provide quality content without the noise of algorithms.
- Several commenters highlight the challenges of discovering and managing RSS feeds, noting that many modern sites lack proper RSS support.
- There is a recognition that while RSS offers control over content, it can lead to information overload if not managed properly.
- Some users advocate for integrating AI or machine learning to enhance RSS feed curation and discovery.
- Despite the enthusiasm for RSS, many acknowledge its declining relevance in a world dominated by algorithm-driven platforms.
I want an algorithm that surfaces things of interest to me, then says "you have seen it all, go outside" (with an option of if I'm confined to a hospital bed to go on). Algorithm maintainers want me to keep scrolling for more ad dollars.
Yes, you can create an RSS feed from a Youtube Channel. You can can create an RSS feed from Reddit.
You can't to my best knowledge create an RSS feed anymore from Twitter
Newsletter to RSS: https://kill-the-newsletter.com/
More stuff:
Blogs & RSS https://rssfeedasap.com/ https://code.rosaelefanten.org/rssparser.lisp/dir?ci=tip
This one you have to pay. I am considering it. Some RSS feeds don't work on my TinyTinyRSS. I think cloudflare, like always, is killing it:
https://politepol.com/en/prices
PS: If you have an idea for a RSS reader domain, please suggest.
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
But I know I, and everyone else posting in this thread, are in the minority. It's clear that most people prefer algorithmic drip in a walled garden. There's a reason everyone flocks to those platforms when RSS superseded them. I don't think I need to re-hash why those platforms are bad for the health of the internet and society as a whole.
So what can be done at a structural level to fight this? What can be done to incentivize people to leave these algorithmic drip feeds to reverse this trend?
I've even resorted to adding features in my personal feedreader to seek out common feed locations or APIs that common blogging tools leave on mostly unnoticed.
Want to keep tabs on what Congress is up to? https://www.govinfo.gov/rss/bills.xml
Want to follow SEC press releases? https://www.sec.gov/news/pressreleases.rss
In WA state and want to follow bills related to schools? https://app.leg.wa.gov/bi/report/topicalindex/?biennium=2025...
The federal government has a big list at https://www.govinfo.gov/feeds. Your county might also have one (e.g. Spokane has https://www.spokanecounty.org/rss.aspx).
There’s also assumed-financial-incentives, which ruins most of blogs/content for me. That’s probably my cynicism, and maybe I just grew up, but every time I see any write up, my first question is how this person gets financial benefits from it. I just never thought that far until 2015.
Sorry for ranting, and obviously I have no solution to this problem.
Very interested in hearing feedback!
If you click on the user icon and then login, I'll add you to the list and send you a once a day email with all the RSS feeds it found (see the sample by clicking the link inside the login dialog).
I have been collecting RSS feeds for the last few weeks using it (using self-hosted FreshRSS). Future versions I plan to offer a way to tell it to use your own feed reader, but you are welcome to create an account on my FreshRSS instance and save them there. For example, when I use my mobile phone, I wish it would send it to the Android RSS app Readrops using an Android intent. FreshRSS has a Google RSS Reader (RIP) compatible feed (?) so it works with any phone AFAIK.
I've definitely found it interesting to start my reading using RSS instead of randomly browsing. I am fascinated by who publishes RSS these days. Substack is pretty great that they offer RSS for every site.
I do see that I need an extra "introspection" to curate other articles in the feed. Often I'll subscribe and not have interest in many of the other articles, but if I subscribe it usually means there is at least one other good one. I'm sad the Hindenburg Research RSS feed is ending.
RSS is indeed a fun way to get closer to smart people and see fewer "advertising" posts.
There's an OPML export available as well: https://minifeed.net/blogs/opml.xml
BlueSky kinda addresses this issue with Feeds. I follow the people that post at a frequency that I know won't flood my main feed, then I have pinned a separate feed for news, another for photos of foxes and one for photos of cats. The app randomly inserts posts from those feeds into the main one (if you have enbaled "Show samples from your saved feeds" in https://bsky.app/settings/following-feed), so as I'm scrolling my "Following" feed, I also get some of that content, while keeping the main usable.
The main pro is that the signal to noise ratio is incalculably better than social media. It's trivial to obtain updates you're actually interested in when you control the filters.
The main con is that even though it has replaced social media, it's still not fulfilling, in the same way social media wasn't fulfilling. It's still a stream of often entertaining but mostly irrelevant information.
Add support for Paul Graham's outdated RSS Feed. OpenAI research. Etc...
Leave a request or a star!
Also wrote a full blog post about it here: https://olshansky.substack.com/p/no-rss-feed-no-problem-usin...
I have a graveyard of old blogs and webcomics whose URLs I can't bear to delete. I have a crapton of feeds still happily churning out articles.
While tiny tiny RSS is nice, I also wrote interface to read URLs from the net. https://github.com/rumca-js/crawler-buddy
This gives me clean data of web page, title, description, etc, which I can further integrate into my own RSS reader.
And using the tool, I've been filtering, changing and tweaking various RSS feeds along the way.
I absolutely love RSS and absolutely loved Yahoo Pipes. For me, that got me into mashing up stuff on the web.
For devs, RSS feeds also provide a very easy way to source data. No need to get API keys and tokens, it gives you real life dataset immediately and easily. And from there, you can create tools.
You can also subscribe to playlists, by subscribing to
https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?playlist_id=PLAYLIST_ID
Where `PLAYLIST_ID` is the string after `?list=` in a YouTube URL. Unfortunately, that feed always contains the top 15 items in a playlist and many channels order items in reverse order (i.e. they keep the oldest one at the top and add to the bottom), unitising the feed.That's how I found out about this post https://t.me/best_hn/99
I'm currently thinking about trying Feedly AI as an algorithm that could surface good content for me.
I also remember that in the beginning I was chuckling to myself "who on earth would want to have their feed curated by a black box whose target function cannot be checked? If I wanted that, I could just keep reading a single newspaper." - turns out I was very wrong and lots of people seem to prefer just getting washed in a steady stream of somewhat internally consistent worldview.
Would be really nice to see RSS make a comeback
[1] https://sociable.co/social-media/twitter-rss-feed-creator/
Heuristics for picking the most valued content is not always good. I see some posts on niche subs without much engagement, but align with my interests. Perhaps I can let a local LLM prioritize the feed based on my history or preference which I can tune as per my requirements rather than some black-box algorithm
The problem is with discovery, though (e.g. getting new information you wouldn't get with an RSS feed, such as YouTube videos). I still think you'd need to make your own algorithm based on your own parameters so you can get the benefits of discovery while also controlling what you see.
Mostly mind is video games related, so I have sites like Polygon, Nintendo Life, IGN, Rock Paper Shotgun, etc., but I've also added a few subreddits like /r/pcgaming and /r/dragonage. It also occasionally suggests other sources to me; it might suggest Gematsu because I seem to be interested in industry news, it's suggesting /r/gaming right now "because you follow eurogamer", and it's suggested a few YouTube channels as well. All of the suggestions have been relevant, all of them have been small cards sat in my feed being relatively unobtrusive and easy to scroll past or look into.
It also supports adding other random stuff into your feed, like your Birthdays calendar from your contacts, and a few other things that I don't remember because they're not relevant.
Techcrunch link because the website seems to be down.
[0] https://techcrunch.com/2024/03/11/feeeed-is-a-reader-app-tha...
My biggest problem so far is that the RSS data is often very lacking (body, images, etc) and that there are still lots of content I'd like to filter out by sentiment. Like if I follow a technology outlet I don't want to know that there's an absolute steal on Sonos Arc on Bestbuy because I'm generally not into consuming and I live in northern Europe.
I have high hopes for ML to populate the RSS data and filter content like this. I want to experiment with this.
I've been meaning to write about this but I recently found that I missed having one central place to share photos with people when I travel/build things/etc. When I thought about it further, I realized that I don't want the social media bits there - I just wanted the photos, self hosted, in something I could brand myself. This also solved for another problem I had, which is that I wanted to share my stuff across n platforms and got very tired of having to constantly provide any text context when doing so. Open graph tags work really well for "write once, share anywhere".
I have a working prototype up at https://photos.rymc.io/ and so far it's been great. I'll probably open source the stuff this year. It's not necessarily groundbreaking but I do think it's a decent approach; uploading auto-scrubs specific metadata, handles generating various previews, etc. Very easy to customize and just tries to do one thing well.
Notably, any page on it can be "followed" via RSS by just requesting it in the right format, e.g:
JSONFeed: https://photos.rymc.io/?format=json Atom: https://photos.rymc.io/?format=atom RSS: https://photos.rymc.io/?format=rss
It can be tag-specific too, so if someone's only interested in my travel photos, e.g:
JSONFeed: https://photos.rymc.io/tag/travel/?format=json
Back to the original point of the comment though: I'd like to find an app that I could give to e.g my dad and just let him browse things and see what I'm up to. None of the RSS apps I've tried fit well here though, with ReadKit on iOS coming somewhat close but it's a clunky experience.
If need be I'll just build my own at some point, it's not exactly rocket science... but it is time I could be doing other things. Anyone got any recs?
After Google Reader shut down paid for Feedly for a while before switching to self-hosted FreshRSS. (https://freshrss.org)
I'm not a web guy and I detest all forms of system administration, but I had no trouble setting it up on my host. I've got it configured to update its feeds one per hour from 6AM to 8PM. It just does its thing, and works fine on both desktop and mobile.
https://yt-better-subs.web.app/
I went through quite the hassle to get the app's oauth scopes approved with Google so that it can keep your subscriptions up-to-date as you add or remove YouTube channel subscriptions.
- github.com/trending daily, weekly, monthly group by 10 programming languages i'm familiar with. will add aggregator private upvote, hiding and 140 chars comment functionality
- grouped youtube channels by interests and tagged them in a cloud tag fashion - got RSS like feeds for ai, databases, c++, go, rust, robotics, etc topics, checking them them regularly on weekly and monthly, but no more doom scrolling or swipping next
Most interesting videos and repos has very few likes or views, and great depth. No way algo will push it up in my feed.
The result - no more time or interest to open up twitter, reddit or facebook feeds.
No stress. No feelings on "missing out"
50% of content correlates with the most trending topic on HN.
Thought to do HN weekly aggregation as a next step ... decided not to do
It's just a pleasure to use HN with comments section as its for me
I even use it to catch popular hacker news stories: hnrss.org/newest?points=150
http://sprout.rupy.se/feed?rss
http://sprout.rupy.se/feed?atom
http://sprout.rupy.se/feed?json
http://sprout.rupy.se/feed (my own :P)
It's open-source: http://github.com/tinspin/sprout
* OPML is a format that bundles feeds together to share with others.
* I publish an automated list of the feeds I'm subscribed to on my blog. [1]
* I pay for Feedly ($50/year and I don't regret it) which has API access, and I use an Azure function to produce it. I have a blog post if you're interested in setting something like that up for yourself. [2]
[1]: https://seankilleen.com/reading-list/
[2]: https://seankilleen.com/2019/01/tutorial-reading-list-feedly...
I heavily use RSS to curate most of the content, and I believe it's one of the best ways to get news and articles without the bias of an algorithm.
I haven't found anywhere else with the same quality of content/takes (purely from a philosophy/tech angle, politics aside), but there were too many videos in the feed
So I built a chrome extension to remove it, and my experience improved by a lot.
If anyone's interested (it's free):
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/remove-twitter-vide...
https://joeyehand.com/feed_rss_created.xml
I wonder why.
It's incomplete but sufficient. LLMs drop the cost of software to near zero. I barely had to learn anything.
Intermittent reinforcement, the technique companies use to get people addicted to social media. Similar to how slot machines are designed.
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".
You can manage your email digests completely through the CLI and we are constantly making improvements to the service.
* 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.
The drawback is that it can become monotonous. However, there’s the “For You” view and the curated news section to mitigate this.
(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.
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.
Is TT-RSS still the go-to, or is there something else I should take a look at?
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.
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.
For example, my blog https://lmno.lol/alvaro and https://lmno.lol/alvaro/feed
what we need next is a way to categorize, group subscribe to similar rss
I'll add my recommendation after looking for an rss reader for the longest time - Feeder. Free, open source and excellent.
Remote : Yes (including hybrid)
Willing to relocate : Yes (depending on offer)
Technologies : Python (AI/LLM)
Résumé/CV : https://github.com/your-fault-n%6Fw-us-english-launches Résumé/person : https://github.com/y%6Fur-fault-tuya-%6Fn-us-now Résumé/CV : https://github.com/now-y%6Fur-fault-xyz-%6Fn-us-014 Résumé/person : https://github.com/y%6Fur-fault-2025-fllmoies Résumé/profile : https://github.com/y%6Fur-fault-multisubs-%6Fn-us-88
Email : aquakwo112@gmail.com
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.
Related
Surfing the (Human-Made) Internet
The internet's evolution prompts a return to its human side, advocating for personal sites, niche content, and self-hosted platforms. Strategies include exploring blogrolls, creating link directories, and using alternative search engines. Embrace decentralized social media and RSS feeds for enriched online experiences.
Be Using an RSS Reader
Cory Doctorow advocates for using RSS readers to improve online privacy and control, arguing that collective action is needed to combat systemic issues caused by major platforms and their algorithms.
Appreciation of the mark-all-as-read button
The article praises the "mark all as read" button in RSS readers for enhancing user control and providing a distraction-free environment, contrasting it with the overwhelming nature of social media.
I wish your bespoke React-Tailwind-etc. static site generator had RSS
The author advocates for improved RSS functionality in modern static site generators, noting many blogs lack feeds or have issues, while traditional platforms like WordPress provide reliable RSS support.
RSS Tricks
George Hotelling discusses effective methods for utilizing RSS feeds, including tracking Reddit posts, YouTube channels, email newsletters, Mastodon hashtags, and creating feeds from various websites using RSS Bridge.