I ditched the algorithm for RSS

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Many commenters describe replacing algorithmic social-media feeds with RSS readers to regain control over what they see, citing benefits like chronological order, fewer distractions, and the ability to follow blogs, news sites, YouTube channels, and even government feeds in one place. They swap recommendations for clients and self‑hosted aggregators, debate how to handle discovery and high‑volume sources without recreating addictive “infinite scroll” patterns, and explore hybrids such as RSS combined with local filtering, LLMs, or curated blogrolls. At the same time, people note practical hurdles—from broken or missing feeds to poor mobile UX and the dominance of ad‑driven platforms—which make it harder for RSS to reach a mainstream audience again.

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.