[lonk11]

Let me plug my hobby project: https://linklonk.com - it is a collaborative RSS reader and I did a Show HN recently for it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29445764

I think it may strike the balance you are looking for between: 1. following popular content, 2. subscribing to individual sources and 3. getting personalized algorithmic recommendations.

From the Show HN post:

"LinkLonk is a novel mechanism to subscribe to RSS feeds and discover content - upvote or submit a link to anything you liked and you will get connected to RSS feeds that posted this content. The more content you upvote from the same feed - the higher other content from that feed will show up in the For You page. This helps you see content from feeds with the highest signal-to-noise ratio first.

In addition to RSS feeds, you connect to other users who upvoted the same content as you. This way other users help highlight great content from feeds you are already connected to and discover other feeds that they are connected to.

To sum up: upvote content => connect to RSS feeds and users => discover great new content => repeat."