Posts

There is a peculiar kind of exhaustion that comes from staying too informed. You sit down after a long day, open your feed reader, and instead of feeling curious or engaged, you feel tired before you have even started reading. The headlines blur together. The topics you genuinely care about get buried under a mountain of urgent but ultimately forgettable news. You scroll through dozens of articles, mark a few as unread to read later, and close the app with a sense that you have consumed information without actually learning anything. ...

There’s a specific moment of panic that many people experience at some point. You’ve spent months, maybe years, carefully curating a list of RSS feeds that you actually want to read. You’ve found the right balance between news, deep technical articles, and the occasional fun distraction. Then something happens. Your device dies, you switch apps, or you just want to share your collection with a friend who asked where you find such good content. ...

You find a blog with exactly the kind of writing you want to read regularly. The posts are thoughtful, the perspective aligns with your interests, and you know you’ll want to keep up with new articles. You look for an RSS icon, scan the header and footer, check the sidebar, and find nothing. The site doesn’t advertise a feed anywhere obvious. This happens more often than you’d expect. Many websites still offer RSS feeds, but they don’t make them easy to find. Some bury the link in an obscure corner. Others include the feed in their HTML but don’t display it visually. A growing number of sites have removed RSS entirely, forcing you to rely on their homepage or social media for updates. ...

I used to have a ritual that probably looks familiar. Wake up, grab my phone, and start tapping through the same handful of news sites. The New York Times. The Verge. Hacker News. A few tech blogs I’d bookmarked years ago. Each site demanded its own login dance, its own layout quirks, its own endless scroll of related articles designed to keep me clicking rather than reading. It felt productive at the time. I was staying informed, wasn’t I? But looking back, I spent more time navigating interfaces and resisting clickbait than actually consuming quality information. The whole experience left me scattered and oddly anxious, like I’d consumed a lot without absorbing much of anything. ...

You subscribe to a podcast about distributed systems. You add a blog from someone whose engineering posts always make you think. You throw in a few news sources because staying informed matters. A month later, you have thirty-seven feeds, and every morning you wake up to hundreds of unread items. The feed reader you installed to bring order to your consumption has become a source of stress. This happens to everyone who takes RSS seriously. The promise of control is real, yet the execution gets messy. When every source sends you interesting things, how do you decide what deserves your attention first? ...

Starting an RSS reader feels straightforward until you hit the blank slate problem. You open the app, ready to reclaim your attention from algorithmic feeds, and realize you need to actually find and add sources yourself. There’s no trending page feeding you content, no infinite scroll of suggested posts. You have to know what to subscribe to, which means having a sense of the landscape already. For indie hackers and developers, this curation challenge can be the biggest barrier to getting started with RSS. ...

When you subscribe to a blog that only offers a snippet in its RSS feed, you’re left with a choice. Click through to the website and wade through popups, newsletter modals, and cookie banners, or use full text extraction to get clean content directly in your reader. That extraction process relies on readability algorithms, and understanding how they work helps explain why they sometimes nail the content and other times miss the mark entirely. ...

RSS readers have been around for decades. The core idea hasn’t changed much: you subscribe to feeds, articles show up in chronological order, and you read them. It’s straightforward and elegant. But many people who try RSS find themselves frustrated. They feel like they’re drowning in content or that the interface feels like it was designed in 2010 and left to gather dust. The problem isn’t RSS itself. It’s that older readers didn’t account for how much we consume today or how our attention works. Modern tools address this by treating feed fatigue as a solvable design problem rather than an unavoidable side effect of following interesting sources. ...

I used to pride myself on keeping up with everything. Twitter, Reddit, Instagram, news apps, email, Slack. My day was a blur of short posts, quick headlines, and endless scrolling. I felt informed. I felt connected. I felt like I was on top of the world. Then I started noticing something odd. I could tell you what ten different people had for lunch or what minor controversy was trending at 2 PM. Ask me to explain a complex topic I’d been “following” for months, and I’d struggle to articulate anything beyond surface-level talking points. ...

I used to think I was good at staying on top of things. My phone buzzed, I checked it. An email notification popped up, I dealt with it. A news app sent me a breaking alert, I read the headline. It felt productive at the time, like I was keeping my finger on the pulse of everything that mattered. The reality was less flattering. I was drowning in micro-interruptions, each one pulling me away from whatever I was actually trying to do. The notifications themselves weren’t the problem. The problem was what they represented: an endless stream of information I felt obligated to consume, archive, or at least acknowledge. ...