Productivity

Most RSS feeds are frustratingly incomplete. You click through to see a headline that caught your eye, only to land on a page with three sentences of content followed by a “read more” link that drops you into a maze of ads, popups, and newsletter signup forms. The actual article you wanted to read is buried somewhere in there, assuming you can find it at all. This is the default state of RSS for most publishers. They give you titles and short excerpts because they want you visiting their site. Every page view is a chance to show you another ad, track another cookie, or convert you into an email subscriber. From their perspective, sending the full article through RSS is giving away the farm. ...

We’ve all been there. You’re scrolling through your Twitter feed or browsing Hacker News and stumble across an article that looks fascinating. It’s long, it’s technical, and you definitely don’t have time for it right now. No problem, you think. I’ll just save it for later. You click the bookmark button. Or you add it to Pocket. Or you send it to your email. The gesture feels productive in the moment, like you’re investing in your future self. But here’s the thing about future you: they’re overwhelmed too. ...

I’ve used RSS readers for over a decade. Through that time I’ve tried probably half a dozen different apps, both on desktop and mobile. The experience has been frustratingly consistent. These tools feel like they were designed in 2008 and never received a meaningful update since. The interfaces are cluttered. The interactions are clunky. Features that should be standard feel like afterthoughts tacked on during some forgotten sprint. This isn’t a knock on the RSS protocol itself. RSS works beautifully. It’s a simple, open standard that puts you in control of what you read. The problem lives in the apps that consume these feeds. Many of them treat RSS as a legacy technology, something to be maintained rather than improved. The design decisions reflect this mindset. Lists are presented in dense, hard-to-scan formats. There’s no thought given to how people actually consume information in 2026. ...

I used to feel guilty about my RSS feeds. Not because I was reading too much, but because I wasn’t reading enough. At some point I had accumulated well over a hundred subscriptions—tech blogs, niche newsletters, industry news sites, personal blogs from people whose writing I genuinely enjoy. The math was simple and depressing. If each feed published even one article a week, that’s over a hundred articles I’d need to process weekly. Nobody has that kind of time. ...