The View from RSS
Source: Hacker News
My RSS‑first journey
I read a lot on the web, but I almost never look at websites directly. I consume almost everything through an RSS reader. As AI reshapes the way online information is organised and consumed, it increasingly feels like I’m watching the performance from the wings rather than seeing it from the front as intended. I thought I’d explain why I do this and what it looks like.
I’ve been an RSS‑first reader since I was a student in the mid‑2000s. Back then, publications made it an attractive prospect: many had bespoke feeds for specific subjects or writers that you could follow. Before social media became the dominant way to keep up with your preferred media and personalities, you could use these feeds to curate your own little magazine in your feed reader of choice, made up just of the stuff you found most interesting. It was excellent.
Working with The Browser’s RSS collection
Many years later I started working for The Browser, a newsletter that curates a daily selection of the best articles, videos, and podcasts available on the web. From my predecessor I inherited a bundle of over a thousand RSS feeds that he used to put each edition together. It contained feeds for every major English‑language media outlet, plus hundreds of niche publications and personal blogs—collected over many years with taste and shrewdness.
By this time we were well into the era of declining online‑advertising revenues, rising paywalls, and link rot. Taking custody of this RSS collection felt momentous, even a bit counter‑cultural. In the 2020s this isn’t how you are supposed to read on the internet.
Daily workflow and curation
I’ve been using the feeds daily ever since and have added to the collection; I’m now close to 2,000 publications. Much of the growth has been driven by the atomisation of media—when an outlet shuts down I try to find and follow the new destinations of its best writers. I use Feedly as my reader nowadays; to follow a Substack I simply paste its URL into the “follow source” field. Even if an outlet doesn’t advertise a full‑site feed, my reader can usually pull something out of the website’s architecture.
To put together each edition of The Browser, I (or my co‑editor, with whom I job‑share) scan through all of the new articles published since I last checked the feeds. There are often several thousand. I don’t read everything in full, of course. Over the years I’ve become very good at letting my eye slide over everything, stopping when a headline or phrase looks promising. I keep a running list of likely candidates and then appraise them properly once I’ve finished the scroll.
The final selection goes out in the newsletter to our paid subscribers. I feel confident that it lives up to our “writing of lasting value” tagline, because I have glanced through—and in many cases read—a vast amount of what was published that day. Along the way I pick up a lot of other material that I find personally interesting or amusing but that doesn’t fit The Browser’s rubric. That’s what you see on Thursdays in my “Thursday Thirteen” link round‑ups.
What RSS looks like from the inside
Mostly quite spare and minimalist. Not all feeds bring images through with the text, and a lot of embeds don’t work either. If these seem important, I click through to see the original, but that doesn’t happen very often. My reader just sorts all entries chronologically, so I see a random jumble of everything as I scroll backwards.
To give you an idea of the mixture, here are the subjects of the five articles at the top of my feeds right now:
- Shark hunting in India
- Praise kink
- 1970s architecture
- AI’s influence on filmmaking
- The growth of the anti‑system voter in the US
I could sort the feeds into subject‑matter folders, but I find the constant variety makes the information easier to parse and helps me sift out the good stuff.
A homepage is a curated display of the articles that its editor wants to present to visitors. An RSS feed includes everything that is published. I find it interesting to compare what comes through my feeds versus what is given promotion and prominence on the site. When you read via RSS you see all of the SEO‑driven articles that the casual web reader never sees but which drive search traffic: videogame cheats, Wordle hints, explanations of movie post‑credit scenes, how‑to‑watch‑sports guides, “What’s good to watch on Netflix this month” lists, betting odds, instructions for circumventing paywalls or age‑verification requirements, and an ever‑increasing amount of explainer content tailored for search‑engine AI summary tools.
I also encounter a lot of affiliate‑bait product reviews—“reviews” that set out a problem and then make extravagant promises about a particular device or piece of software, usually earning the publication money for promotion. Re‑packaged playlists are common too; an outlet might publish “songs of the summer” that are simply tracks lifted from an existing Spotify or Apple Music playlist rather than original editorial. These never appear prominently on a site’s landing pages; they exist solely to capture search clicks or referrals.
My favourite thing to see on the feeds, though, is evidence that humans are still generating content. Sometimes an article will have a temporary headline with “TKTKTK” captured by the aggregator before it’s updated. I also enjoy stumbling across blurry thumbnails of journalists I used to work with when Substack or other platforms add video posts to their feeds.
There’s a culture on Substack of creating “hidden open threads” for only those who know how to find them to add comments. I see all of those just by being an RSS reader.
My favourite thing of all is when people have fun with the differing perspective that RSS gives you on the web. Dave Rupert runs an RSS Club, where members pledge to publish stuff to their feeds that never appears anywhere else—a secret, just for those in the know. Many use it for personal writing, works in progress, or art they don’t want to expose to the whole internet yet. Somehow, still using RSS—a beautifully simple bit of tech from the early days of the web—makes you part of a community of like‑minded strangers. When I’ve spent hours scrolling through my never‑ending stream of text that nobody else ever sees, I feel a warm glow when I come across something written just for me.
You can support my work with a recurring contribution or a one‑off tip. I don’t make any extra content just for paying subscribers, though—everything is free to read for everyone.
This is the RSS feed for my blog, if you’d like to read it as described above.