Ask HN: How would you make RSS feed readers better and increase adoption?

Attempting to evolve RSS readers considering the following: the overwhelming amount of content being generated constantly ; majority of content being clickbaity/noise ; advancements in machine learning, e.g. GPT-3 which could be helpful

I'm thinking of adding:

1. Prioritization based on content preferences, evolving reading interests and value delivered. The current reverse chronological ordering does not work when one feed generates too much content and it's not possible to go through all feeds individually. Basically, trying to surface the most valuable content at the top to save time.

2. I feel that having autogenerated TLDRs would also help the user in having a quick glance-able view and distinguishing valuable/interesting content from already known facts/noise.

Would be really interested in learning how do you solve this problem of filtering out noisy/not-so-valuable content currently?

Relying only on a few trusted sources helps, but I feel that leads to missing out on a lot of other sources that could've been useful. Even otherwise, for me, the list of trusted sources grows continuously.

Questions:

1. How do you solve these problems currently?

2. Would you keep the feed readers same or would want to see them evolve to counter these problems?

3. Why are feed readers not so common? Are there not enough people out there who're interested in keeping up with multiple sources?

I've discovered RSS readers very recently, so these might be newbie questions. Please let me know your thoughts. Thanks!

I’ve started using a feed reader recently. Here are some of my thoughts:

I agree on the noisy feeds. I had to unsubscribe from Rolling Stone because although they have a few good articles most are crap. You could consider a mute button for specific authors or topics if the stream includes that or keywords if it does not. I think preferences have to be learned and there’s no way to do this up front.

One of the problems with RSS readers for me is that they present you with an unread count, which like email can be stressful. I always want to get the unread to 0 even if that means just scanning the headlines and clicking read all. A format that presents a reasonably sized feed without an unread count would be a psychological improvement for me at least. A read more button could always be included.

You could look at Google Reader which had some unique ideas for RSS and a lot of people loved. I never got to use it but I believe that it had dynamic keyword based searches for articles about certain topics. This is another technique to deal with the noise.

I believe feed readers are not used today because there are several firehoses of information on the internet that are filling the void with as much content as people can consume. When feedreaders first appeared you had to actively seek out content which meant checking the home page of your favorite sites. Now that content comes to you through Twitter Facebook Reddit and email newsletters. Along the same lines there’s also the social component not offered by feed readers, which some people tend to crave. They want to engage with a story after reading it which is not a feature of most feed readers (this was possible on google reader from what I’ve heard)

I was an rss junkie back in the early internet era. I had all my feeds and didn’t worry about unread count.

Nowadays feeds are harder to come by without being prompted to sign into the service or being directed to their page to read the article.

I wish there was something like Castro or a ranking system for RSS feeds for me to look for.

I think rss is so niche in this day and age you couldn’t monetize rss curation.

I agree the social aspect is what makes Twitter appealing. Twitter combines microblogging with a feed reader.

If you’re interested in a simple RSS reader + blogging, check out https://yunaru.com/>.

It provides a minimal Twitter-like feed (no unread counts), and another view displaying only the most recent entry for each feed.

Inoreader lets you follow websites that don't provide an RSS feed. But it's a premium feature.