Pretty much disagree with this entirely.

Being in charge is the best bit, if you amass a big list of crap then you're doing it wrong. Sure it's a little more work than having some AI from a multinational advertising company dictating what you see, but then that's the price for freedom to choose.

The only issue I see, unsolved by RSS, is discovery. Most of my feeds are there by chance more than anything else.

The first thing I do when I find something interesting is search for a feed. If there isn't one, it's forgotten about, maybe a bookmark. If there is the feed sits in quarantine until I see if it's worth keeping. If I like it it stays, otherwise it's gone.

I then sit every morning with a coffee and scan my feeds, reading the ones that tickle my fancy.

I agree with the OP here. The biggest issue unsolved by RSS is customizability. You can pick what feeds you subscribe to, but that's your only level of control. HN, Reddit, Twitter, etc give you a feed of several hundreds posts per day. Most of them are irrelevant to my interests or filtering criteria. For example, I may only be interested in posts containing certain keywords, a certain amount of comment activity, or a certain number of upvotes/downvotes. Whatever it may be. The RSS protocol doesn't let you control this.

Of course, I can ignore anything I am not interested in. But the reality of the situation is that out of 30 minutes reading RSS feeds I spend 20 minutes filtering out stuff I am not interested in. Also, crucial information such as post popularity is missing because it's not available at publishing time and changes over time. "Social" is not part of the protocol.

You can argue that social media sites don't belong into RSS, but then you are removing the single biggest use case of RSS. If I can't put social media feeds into RSS it's useless to me because social media is exactly what overwhelms you with information and FOMO, which is what RSS should be solving.

Newsblur allows you to have precisely those type of keyword filters.

I agree with OP’s dissenter.

> Newsblur allows you to have precisely those type of keyword filters.

Indeed, many RSS readers do.

See also Hacker News RSS: https://hnrss.github.io

Sounds like a good application for a neural model to sieve out the stuff you’re interested in.

(And that stuff actually existed for a long time, CRM-114 is an example but not the first, I was playing with this in the early 00s with stuff that could categorize emails with Bayesian filtering etc, not just spam vs not.)

It seems like you are addicted to social media. Using RSS will cure you from it. Trust me.

> Being in charge of your own feed does not mean it will remain lean and sweet.

You're right. It does not automatically mean it. You have to maintain it just like anything else in life.

> is mostly just a fantasy.

It's a fantasy I live in daily.

> What happens in reality is that you more or less quickly ammass a big list of blogs and sources that gets updated by the hour

I guess this mostly depends on what kind of things you subscribe to. 95% of my sources are personal blogs of software developers or artists and most of them blog weekly or more rarely.

I couldn't handle a feed where sources update multiple times a day, it would just become a pain.

What do you mean with «liv[ing] a fantasy», the root poster wrote that browsing RSS is not an ideal session like reading the newspapers because through RSS there would be overflow and sieving - but the same is valid for newspapers unless you read a dazibao, so the fantasy seems to be that of the root poster...

My comment above about living in a fantasy was a reply to the root comment's notion that reading through RSS feed in the morning is a romantized, unachievable fantasy similar to a dad starting a day reading the newspaper (which is also not much of a fantasy as my dad has done that for decades).

So the morning routine I shared in the blog is the reality for me so I'm living that fantasy.

I wrote about many of those reasons in the blog post.

Cutting off the middle-man, slowing down the hectic life and staying in touch with my internet friends are a few of those reasons.

I follow a few RSS feeds, some become blue during the week because there are new entries, I go through them when I feel like it, probably once a week, maybe during the weekend or the evening.

I don't feel any FOMO, the entries aren't going anywhere if I don't read them now and I just ignore entries that don't attract me or I go through them fast.

> The ideal of browsing your RSS feed in the morning cup of coffee in hand just like your father read the morning paper and then got on with his day is mostly just a fantasy.

+1 with the others, that's exactly how I do it. Plus with the news sources I use (Reuters, BBC, HN, Slashdot, etc.) the headline is usually enough to give me the gist of it, so I don't even expand ~95% of the actual content

Wasted time compared to what? Not getting the news/posts/whatever? Having someone/something else that do the selection of what "should" be relevant to you and send you from the links to the full text?

HN does a good enough filtering, if you have it on your feed list. Some other aggregators can do the same. And the individual blog owners don't make a lot of posts daily. And more important than that, depending on your feed reader, you may get at most a headline, and then decide to read a bit more, or the full article. And of course, decide what feeds to follow based on their quality or your load/required time to go through it.

All of that is miles away from going to each site, see the already read content, ads, images/js. And we already know the dangers of letting something to do the selection of what we should read instead of us.

What you describe, sounds like there are some high frequency sources in your feeds.

IMO, these don't belong into RSS: I add no feed that updates more often than daily (doing some exceptions now and then, ofc). Things like news sites, forums, aggreagators etc. are prominent bookmarks in my browser instead (like, on a new tab).

In other words, if it's too much content, I go there by myself instead of having it delivered to me.

In yet another words, I ask myself, do I need to know about every single new thing on this site? If not, it's fine as a bookmark.

>IMO, these don't belong into RSS: I add no feed that updates more often than daily (doing some exceptions now and then, ofc). Things like news sites, forums, aggreagators etc. are prominent bookmarks in my browser instead (like, on a new tab).

This is a very good point, as aggregators (like HN) quickly overwhelm an RSS reader to the point updates from less frequent sites are buried in the topic stream.

That said, browser bookmarks have not evolved in years, and still have the same poor UX they always have.

The thing you are saying doesn't happen, is pretty much exactly what I do.

I browse my RSS feeds in the morning while I'm having my coffee. When my coffee's done I move on.

Why is this fictional?

My feed list is a text file in my personal git repo, pretty easy to update.

I find social media like Reddit sucks me into the eternal doomscroll far more easily than my self-curated RSS feeds. My feed list has an end. It's not tailored to show me "hot" (read: emotion, probably anger spiking) content. It's not really addictive.

RSS > all

That's exactly what happens. And even if you unfollow most feeds, it's normal to not be interested in most articles (e.g. HN feed alone).

Nevertheless, I think the sweet spot is having a curated list of feeds and then filtering a bit the posts. I've been pretty happy with a side project that does just that: filtering posts based on past reads using AI. Takes out half of the work and makes your feed more enjoyable.

> wasted time

Allocated time.

> ammass a big list ... you end up either ignoring most of the entries or ... sieving through a stream of countless new content

Like «the morning paper[s]», just bigger because of the larger availability.

Browsing HN is the same... A lot of content, so much to check, so little time.

So? That is the problem, the starting point. But look, it is also primarily a solution, it is a solution to begin with - it is a possibility otherwise missing. Solutions contain other problems of their own (you buy a car, you have to maintain it etc.) - that is the nature of things.

> RSS still leads to a lot of wasted time.

FOMO is big. Plus there's a dark cousin to Inbox Zero in there somewhere.

There are worse solutions than blocking distractions at the router during focus hours.

For me, RSS is the solution to FOMO because I don't need to worry about missing new posts because some algorithm decided not to show them to me or because I didn't happen to see them during the short window they were visible in other feeds.

> What happens in reality is that you more or less quickly ammass a big list of blogs and sources that gets updated by the hour

Maybe you do. I don't.

But you're not the only one misusing RSS. One of the things Larry Page said when he shut down Google Reader was that getting to the end of the RSS feed is like getting to the end of the Internet, and called RSS users "irrational".

Clearly Larry Page didn't understand RSS. If you can't get to the end of your RSS feed over the proverbial daily coffee, then you're using it wrong. And don't dismiss an entire technology just because you don't understand it.

Both reddit and hackernews have feeds. Nobody should be putting those feeds into their RSS reader.