I ditched the algorithm for RSS

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

RSS Usage & Tools

  • Many commenters never left RSS and use it as their primary way to follow blogs, news, comics, YouTube, GitHub releases, and even government feeds.
  • Popular readers mentioned span desktop, mobile, and self‑hosted: NetNewsWire, Reeder, News Explorer, Feedly, Inoreader, FreshRSS, TinyTinyRSS, Miniflux, The Old Reader, Liferea, RSSGuard, Feedbin, Feeder, Vivaldi’s built‑in reader, Telegram RSS bots, and simple web readers.
  • Sync across devices and read/unread state are widely valued; iCloud, hosted services, and self‑hosted backends are all in use.

Discovery, Filtering, and “Owning the Algorithm”

  • RSS is praised for chronological control but criticized for poor discovery and topic‑level filtering.
  • Users want ways to:
    • Filter by keyword/regex, sentiment, topic tags, or per‑feed rate limits.
    • Separate high‑volume news sources from low‑volume personal blogs.
    • See statistics on what they actually read/bookmark to prune feeds.
  • Several tools and experiments try to add “good” algorithms on top of RSS: custom ranking, rules engines, OPML/blogroll networks, social readers, and collaborative “likes”‑based recommendation ideas.
  • Some argue users should own and tune their recommendation algorithms; others think this level of control is unrealistic for most people.

Content Volume, Quality, and Mental Health

  • Split views on overload: some “mainline” hundreds of news headlines efficiently; others find big outlets swamp small creators and cause FOMO.
  • Suggested coping strategies: unsubscribe aggressively, folder separation, timeboxing, focusing on rare long‑form blogs, or treating a near‑empty reader as a feature.
  • A few note that even curated RSS can still feel like an endless, low‑value stream similar to social media.

RSS Gaps, Workarounds, and New Projects

  • Many sites lack feeds or ship broken ones. Users work around this via: RSS bridges, scraping, CSS‑selector‑based feed generators, LLM‑assisted feed creation, newsletter‑to‑RSS, and changelog‑specific aggregators.
  • Numerous side projects are shared: curated blog directories, OPML exports of large feed lists, RSS‑based search/discovery engines, mashup tools (Pipes‑like), HN‑ and Reddit‑to‑RSS/email digests, YouTube subscription‑to‑RSS tools, and services adding AI tagging or RAG over feeds.

Social Media, Fediverse, and Protocol Debates

  • Several comments see RSS as the “original federated web,” contrasting it with opaque engagement‑driven algorithms.
  • Fediverse software broadly exposes RSS; there is debate over why newer protocols (e.g. Bluesky, Nostr) didn’t use RSS more directly.
  • Some still value algorithmic discovery (e.g., custom feeds on newer social networks) but want transparency, user choice, or externalized algorithms.

Perceived Trajectory of RSS

  • Opinions diverge: some see a modest comeback (more chatter, new tools); others insist RSS is slowly dying due to broken/removed feeds and lack of mainstream UX.
  • Common agreement: RSS excels for those willing to curate and tinker, but most people gravitate to frictionless, addictive algorithmic feeds.