Rss

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. ...