RSS feeds send me more traffic than Google

From my analytics, around 85% of visits to my sites are now from bots. It's hard to say if these are oldschool bots or people just browsing the web via chatgpt now, but the reality is that very few actually visit the actual sites I have anymore.

I think blogs should have a universal comment function, I'd love to engage ith the author but many blogs don't bother providing a basic textarea.

> a lot of interesting low frequency stuff from people you follow gets buried under the non stop feed of stuff from high volume news that is actively trying to drown everyone out with many updates per day.

Every major RSS reader supports folders. Your problem is that you engage with RSS as if it were a social media feed, with it's single monolithic reverse-chronological feed.

Just don't do that. Stick all the high volume news feeds in a folder, and you can skim read the headlines & hit "mark all as read" once you're done or for whatever other reason don't want to look at the news anymore.

Stick the low volume things you care about in their own folder, and those will remain unread, in their own ordering for you to read at your own leasure.

Even for sites that don't offer granular feeds, every major feed reader offers filtering options, a lot of them offer fairly complex regex filtering.

> This is what lead to algorithm based filtering.

Feed aggregators (and most social media) exist because of discoverability, finding new stuff from new people you hadn't heard about before.

> With agent based approaches, you control the algorithm. That wasn't possible in the past. LLMs can summarize, aggregate, categorize, group, filter, etc.

You'd be spending tens of dollars of compute on something that every major RSS client was doing back in 2006 with the equivalent of less than a single penny worth of current day compute.

Send the author an e-mail.

The universal contact function is usually there, and it's email. I tried many times: it works. Authors respond. Only very few people seem to want to keep it hidden.

I'm dumbfounded by the number of times I see comments of the form "if the author is reading this ..." on a 3rd party comment side, with a link posted by somebody else, on a forum the author is likely never going to watch, followed by an actually useful comment that you could have _ensured_ the author reads by you know... just contacting him?

Forum comments are just recipe for instant spam, and have been so in the last 10+ years. If you want to make them useful, it currently needs to be actively policed (not to mention: you can be responsible for the content posted as well in several countries now). As an author, only if you're trying to create an audience around your blog, all the hassle around it might be worth it.