| Not the OP, but these days I find new things (mostly blogs) through four different mechanisms: 1 - Hacker News - If there's an interesting article linked, then I'll consider adding the site to my feed (using feedbin since the great Google Reader apocalypse). 2 - Blog referrals - Sometimes existing feed items will link to other articles sites (sourced from, similar problem, etc) and I'll sometimes add those sites. 3 - Search Results / Organic - If I'm investigating a particular problem/issue/topic and find a good blog, then I'll add it to my feed. 4 - Topic Specific Aggregators - in some cases there are people that produce topic specific post summaries (such as the .Net Morning Brew https://blog.cwa.me.uk/ or Michael Tsai https://mjtsai.com/blog/ ) that link articles - again, if the articles are good, or I notice I've visited the site before, I'll sometimes add it to my feed list. Just checking my OPML, I have around 600 sites (more than a few are likely no longer posting) in my current reader - accumulated over the last 20 years or so - that I've found specifically interesting (mostly professionally, and a few hobby based ones as well). I still get around 60 or so new items per day, and probably skim 20, read 10 in detail, and mark the rest as read. Like the linked article discusses here, it's no longer possible to easily get a feed from major social media sources - which limits the usefulness of RSS from a purely social perspective (but I've never tried to use it that way) - but if you treat it as a personally curated source of sporadic content, then it's great. In many respects Moderate post volume (quality over quantity) is something I find more useful in what I choose. On the aggregator front, I try to avoid anything that's too noisy (low signal to noise) - and I definitely minimise subscribing to news sites as the volume is just too high (I tried rss subscribing to The Verge when it was new, but there were too many articles I don't read). For example, i wouldn't use a RSS feed of Hacker News because I probably only look at 1 in 10 articles on it. RSS is still heavily used for information I find really professionally useful (IT) - but I don't know about other industries. Possibly the only bugbear I have around the RSS ecosystem these days is that some authors don't include the full content in the RSS feed - which makes offline and mobile consumption more difficult / annoying - I suspect that in some cases it's a result of default choices - and in others it's a deliberate decision as a trade off against improved analysis a site gets from a browser hit. |
The popular HN RSS feed generator linked elsewhere in this page allows for a ton of customization! You can filter by points and raise the floor until you get a reasonable number of articles per week.
> Possibly the only bugbear I have around the RSS ecosystem these days is that some authors don't include the full content in the RSS feed
My RSS reader (miniflux) has a handy feature for getting around these. It even works for naïve paywalls (like the New Yorker’s, for example). It basically cURL’s the original address of the content and allows you to specify the content with a CSS selector. It’s some trouble to configure initially, but very handy!