I use the fantastic Inoreader that is better than Google Reader was.
I follow things that post maybe once or twice a week or once a month. For things with new information every day, like Hacker News, I check the website.
A few of the things that I follow that may be a bit different for people are :
Arnold Kling - a PhD economist who worked in technology and is genuinely different.
In no particular order: 404 Media, Ars Technica, BleepingComputer, The Register, The Verge, and Tomshardware.
These usually sit in the corner of my screen through the day. Some are better than others for work purposes. The Verge could probably go, and 404 is a bit more socially-focused than the rest. In particular though, having rapid updates from BleepingComputer and El Reg is a great way for me to learn about new vulns, issues that might affect my users, etc.
I roo am trying to curate my RSS feed to be doom-scrolling free. These largely achieve that for me. You'll find a smattering of political posts in them, but that's an inevitable side effect of living in abnormal political times.
https://scrollprize.org/ - The Vesuvius Challenge: Using high intensity X-ray scans and computation to attempt to retrieve lost scrolls from Pompei; real uplifting Sci-Fi stuff! Possibly the most heartwarming thing I know of on the internet; snatching ancient knowledge from the flames of history! What could be more poetic?
https://www.science.org/blogs/pipeline - In the Pipeline: The blog of Derek Lowe (pharmaceutical chemist), (in)famous for articles like "Sand Won't Save You This Time" Always interesting, though a lot of the chemistry goes way way over my head. Some political stuff lately, unavoidably given the current secretary of health.
https://www.jeffgeerling.com - Jeff Geerling: Raspberry Pi, Arm, digital radio, and other nerdery. I enjoy his videos, but I love that he does a plaintext version (first?) that's not just a transcript.
https://fasterthanli.me - Faster than Lime: Amos's blog leaning heavily towards Rust. I'm a beginner in Rust, but I love this guy's style of writing even when the stuff he's writing about is beyond my current skill level.
Anyway, those are my go-tos at the moment. I look forward to trying a bunch of the others recommended here. Oh and I currently use Feeder under Android as my RSS reader; it's unexciting, which is what I look for in an app these days :D
A last recommendation - as part of trying to avoid doom-scrolling, I have a paper subscription to The Economist and I'm trying to train myself to read that instead of going to news sites. The lack of immediacy helps keep the emotional reaction in check (it's not as addictive of course).
Trying again to use this to avoid the algorithm from taking over. The reason is sometimes a go a few months without remembering of a specific channel then when I open that channel manually there's a bunch of new interesting content for me.
Around 20 subreddits, 10 youtube channels and 10 blogs...
Could you share some of them? Always looking for high quality authors from the home-sphere, but finding it increasingly difficult to find anything worthwhile.
No one. It psychologically makes me feel guilty if I can't keep up. I'd weirdly rather have an email and ignore or read it than pull rss and not read for ages. Funny enough the only time I used rss was when I had that cool outlook integration that made them seem like emails.
> Funny enough the only time I used rss was when I had that cool outlook integration that made them seem like emails.
I convert feeds to maildir, and read them in email clients (Thunderbird, KMail, Emacs+Gnus, Emacs+mu4e, etc.). That lets me use the same setup for emails and feeds; keeping them on a network mount makes sync trivial; etc.
404, The Gentleman Stationer, HTMLHell, call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu, Clagnut, Crooked Timber, Platypus, Tech Policy Press, Public Domain Review, Writing at Large, Coffee with a Codex (YT)
I follow too many people, so I built https://feeds.carmo.io with summaries. You might enjoy the selection there and upgrade to the original feeds as needed.
[EDIT: This was meant to be a reply to another comment in this thread but I posted it under the top-level comment by mistake. I am leaving this comment intact anyway, in case someone finds it useful.]
The web browsers don't highlight the feed URL information embedded in the HTML anymore, quite unfortunately. But if you go to a YouTube video, say, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9kaIXkImCAM> and then view or inspect the HTML source, you can find the LINK tag for the feed:
Many RSS aggregators automatically convert Youtube links to RSS. You can also do it manually: https://chuck.is/yt-rss/
I have removed Youtube apps from all mobile devices and only watch the creators whose content I'm interested in through RSS, without notifications and distractions. It's a much more pleasant experience, definitely recommend.
You can actually just paste the link to a youtube channel in your RSS reader and it should work. At least for me it works with NetNewsWire. For example, you should be able to copy and paste this directly into your RSS reader: https://www.youtube.com/@freecodecamp
I'm building a newsletter (with an RSS feed available) called Tech Talks Weekly where my subscribers get one email per week with all the latest Software Engineering conference talks and podcasts.
I use netnewswire as my client and I'm self hosting freshrss, so my subscriptions can be synced between my phone and computer.
All of my YouTube and nebula channels I follow via RSS and I think that's kind of giving me the most bang for my buck. I can just get focused on the videos that I want to subscribe to without having to even go to YouTube and get pulled into the algorithm, as well as a few sub Reddits, hacker news front page (it's how I found this post), Lobste.rs, 404 Media, some local blogs (my food co-op, biking website, other community things), some web comics, one news group, and a couple forums.
I've also contemplated Podcasts, but I still have a dedicated player for that.
This site, xkcd, liliputing, some various forums, etc. but the big problem I've started having w/ RSS is when sites set up Cloudflare and the RSS feed ends up behind the Cloudflare validation prompt - I've even emailed some sites but none have bothered to fix or exempt RSS.
Amazed this is being discussed! I’ve only consumed hacker news via rss for maybe 15 years and I guess I didn’t know there was another way to read it at this point :)
I use the fantastic Inoreader that is better than Google Reader was.
I follow things that post maybe once or twice a week or once a month. For things with new information every day, like Hacker News, I check the website.
A few of the things that I follow that may be a bit different for people are :
Arnold Kling - a PhD economist who worked in technology and is genuinely different.
https://arnoldkling.substack.com/
Noah Smith - a PhD economist who writes about economics and the world
https://www.noahpinion.blog/
Roger Pielke Jnr - a guy with a PhD who writes about climate and energy and was excommunicated by the climate priesthood.
https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/
Andrew Sullivan - a conservative, gay, HIV positive, Catholic writer who campaigned for gay marriage.
https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/
me too; Inoreader was my first/only stop after Google Reader, and is one of the only paid subscriptions I maintain.
Probably > 80% of my RSS feeds are Youtube channels.
Thanks for the plug - the compact list view did give me the fuzzy feelings in my belly ;) Moving from NetNewsWire to this for a while...
another positive vote for Inoreader , really the best none self hosted, as long as you keep your subscriptions within their free limits :)
I pay. I've found it's worth it.
Multiple high quality company engineering blogs including https://netflixtechblog.com/, https://www.uber.com/en-US/blog/engineering/, DoorDash etc.
https://techtalksweekly.io/ - new software dev conference talks and podcasts
https://ciechanow.ski/ - interactive articles about science and engineering
https://jvns.ca/ - great technical content overall
This is a great thread btw.
Great links. Was disappointed to see ciechanow.ski hasn't been updated since 2024.
I think he tends to publish only once or twice a year, so we'll probably need to stay patient.
98% of everything you follow has RSS. It’s not like a quaint, unlisted Vermont antique shop.
This includes YouTube channels, major newspapers and podcasts!
P.S. Even HN is something you should personally control. It's very useful whenever moderators flag a submission you might've liked.
In no particular order: 404 Media, Ars Technica, BleepingComputer, The Register, The Verge, and Tomshardware.
These usually sit in the corner of my screen through the day. Some are better than others for work purposes. The Verge could probably go, and 404 is a bit more socially-focused than the rest. In particular though, having rapid updates from BleepingComputer and El Reg is a great way for me to learn about new vulns, issues that might affect my users, etc.
Some I like:
https://www.writesoftwarewell.com/ - very good software posts, mostly around Ruby on Rails.
https://crankysec.com/ - Cybersecurity rants mostly, fun to read.
https://www.wheresyoured.at/ - Ed Zitron's writings. Good counterpoints to all the AI hype these days.
These come up often on HN but I'll call them out anyway:
https://jvns.ca/ - Julia Evans, good technical content all around.
https://xeiaso.net/ - Xe Iaso, good technical content all around once again
I roo am trying to curate my RSS feed to be doom-scrolling free. These largely achieve that for me. You'll find a smattering of political posts in them, but that's an inevitable side effect of living in abnormal political times.
https://scrollprize.org/ - The Vesuvius Challenge: Using high intensity X-ray scans and computation to attempt to retrieve lost scrolls from Pompei; real uplifting Sci-Fi stuff! Possibly the most heartwarming thing I know of on the internet; snatching ancient knowledge from the flames of history! What could be more poetic?
https://www.science.org/blogs/pipeline - In the Pipeline: The blog of Derek Lowe (pharmaceutical chemist), (in)famous for articles like "Sand Won't Save You This Time" Always interesting, though a lot of the chemistry goes way way over my head. Some political stuff lately, unavoidably given the current secretary of health.
https://blog.dshr.org/ - David Rostenthal: Digital preservationist.
https://www.jeffgeerling.com - Jeff Geerling: Raspberry Pi, Arm, digital radio, and other nerdery. I enjoy his videos, but I love that he does a plaintext version (first?) that's not just a transcript.
https://commandcenter.blogspot.com/ - Rob Pike: Programming luminary (Go, UTF-8, Unix, etc.)
https://fasterthanli.me - Faster than Lime: Amos's blog leaning heavily towards Rust. I'm a beginner in Rust, but I love this guy's style of writing even when the stuff he's writing about is beyond my current skill level.
Anyway, those are my go-tos at the moment. I look forward to trying a bunch of the others recommended here. Oh and I currently use Feeder under Android as my RSS reader; it's unexciting, which is what I look for in an app these days :D
A last recommendation - as part of trying to avoid doom-scrolling, I have a paper subscription to The Economist and I'm trying to train myself to read that instead of going to news sites. The lack of immediacy helps keep the emotional reaction in check (it's not as addictive of course).
https://simonwillison.net/
Stephen Toub https://devblogs.microsoft.com/pfxteam/author/toub/feed/
Raymond Chen https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/author/oldnewthin...
Cory Doctorow https://pluralistic.net/feed/
Trying again to use this to avoid the algorithm from taking over. The reason is sometimes a go a few months without remembering of a specific channel then when I open that channel manually there's a bunch of new interesting content for me.
Around 20 subreddits, 10 youtube channels and 10 blogs...
In no particular order of preference:
- Julia Evans - Daniel Stenberg - Geohot - Cloudflare and Netflix’s respective tech blogs - TorrentFreak - LWN.net - and some others in spanish -
> and some others in spanish
Could you share some of them? Always looking for high quality authors from the home-sphere, but finding it increasingly difficult to find anything worthwhile.
Julia Evans is an absolute treasure.
SwissMiss https://feeds2.feedburner.com/Swissmiss
In no particular order:
- Anton Zhiyanov
- Register Spill by Thorsten Ball
- Phil Eaton
- Mitchell Hashimoto
- Gunnar Morling
- Jack Vanlightly
- Charity Majors
- Bryan Cantrill
- Marc Brooker
- NULL BITMAP By Justin Jaffray
Another tip is you can subscribe to YouTube Channels and Podcasts via RSS as well. I wrote a little bit about my setup to help reduce doom scrolling: https://tylerhillery.com/blog/how-i-consume-the-internet/
Shameless plug, follow mine -
https://rxjourneyserver.pythonanywhere.com/rss_feed/rss/
https://www.rxjourney.net/
A few webcomics, some entertaining YouTube channels, and HN. It used to be a lot more, but nowadays, that's it.
Here’s the feeds I follow: https://www.unindented.org/follows/
(It’s my OPML file translated to HTML via Hugo.)
As to why, they generally post original and insightful stuff on topics I care about, like web dev, security, Ruby, Rust, etc.
No one. It psychologically makes me feel guilty if I can't keep up. I'd weirdly rather have an email and ignore or read it than pull rss and not read for ages. Funny enough the only time I used rss was when I had that cool outlook integration that made them seem like emails.
> Funny enough the only time I used rss was when I had that cool outlook integration that made them seem like emails.
I convert feeds to maildir, and read them in email clients (Thunderbird, KMail, Emacs+Gnus, Emacs+mu4e, etc.). That lets me use the same setup for emails and feeds; keeping them on a network mount makes sync trivial; etc.
I use http://www.chriswarbo.net/git/feed2maildir which is a fork of https://github.com/sulami/feed2maildir that rips out a bunch of unneeded complexity (config files, databases, fetching, looping, etc.)
i think thunderbird has an rss reader, though i've not tried it
404, The Gentleman Stationer, HTMLHell, call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu, Clagnut, Crooked Timber, Platypus, Tech Policy Press, Public Domain Review, Writing at Large, Coffee with a Codex (YT)
I follow too many people, so I built https://feeds.carmo.io with summaries. You might enjoy the selection there and upgrade to the original feeds as needed.
Shamelessly, I have a low volume rss feed for my static-HTML articles, but I'm also using rss for the embedded mastodon feed on my website.
https://brynet.ca/
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1i4eR_TNyy2YV17soWyJnbQeH2_r...
I actually setup my reddit home as my RSS feed and that home is populated by my subreddits
Various webcomics, Youtube channels and Github releases for several projects.
[EDIT: This was meant to be a reply to another comment in this thread but I posted it under the top-level comment by mistake. I am leaving this comment intact anyway, in case someone finds it useful.]
The web browsers don't highlight the feed URL information embedded in the HTML anymore, quite unfortunately. But if you go to a YouTube video, say, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9kaIXkImCAM> and then view or inspect the HTML source, you can find the LINK tag for the feed:
So the feed URL in this case is: <https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCi8C7TN...>.> Youtube channels
I didn't know you could follow youtube channels via RSS! Where do I find the feed link, given a youtube channel?
Many RSS aggregators automatically convert Youtube links to RSS. You can also do it manually: https://chuck.is/yt-rss/
I have removed Youtube apps from all mobile devices and only watch the creators whose content I'm interested in through RSS, without notifications and distractions. It's a much more pleasant experience, definitely recommend.
You can actually just paste the link to a youtube channel in your RSS reader and it should work. At least for me it works with NetNewsWire. For example, you should be able to copy and paste this directly into your RSS reader: https://www.youtube.com/@freecodecamp
If you view the HTML source of a YouTube video page, there is a LINK tag that contains the feed URL. I have shared an example here: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46772655#46775759>.
HackerNews - hnrss.org
HN Personal Websites[1] by @susam was popular on Hacker News a few days back.
1. https://hnpwd.github.io
Shameless plug.
https://techtalksweekly.io
I'm building a newsletter (with an RSS feed available) called Tech Talks Weekly where my subscribers get one email per week with all the latest Software Engineering conference talks and podcasts.
A few of the best reads in my Reader:
Here's a OPML of these: https://s.strco.de/f/feed-20260127.opmlI use netnewswire as my client and I'm self hosting freshrss, so my subscriptions can be synced between my phone and computer.
All of my YouTube and nebula channels I follow via RSS and I think that's kind of giving me the most bang for my buck. I can just get focused on the videos that I want to subscribe to without having to even go to YouTube and get pulled into the algorithm, as well as a few sub Reddits, hacker news front page (it's how I found this post), Lobste.rs, 404 Media, some local blogs (my food co-op, biking website, other community things), some web comics, one news group, and a couple forums.
I've also contemplated Podcasts, but I still have a dedicated player for that.
Crooked Timber
Matt Lakeman
Global China Pulse
Sinocism
Bartosz Ciechanowski
brr
Construction Physics
Jonathan Nolan's substack
On the Seams
Quanta Magazine
Matt Levine - Bloomberg Opinion Columnist
Aeon | a world of ideas
Classic Film and TV Café
Experimental History
The Marginalian
The Prism - Gurvinder
The Technium
Westenberg.
Chameth.com
Activity in the release-notes tag
All Things Distributed
An Untitled Blog
Charles Hugh Smith's Substack
Chips and Cheese
computers are bad
Dwarkesh Podcast
Francis Stokes :: Githublog
iRi
Rest of World - Latest Stories
Shtetl-Optimized
Signal Blog
マリウス
techmeme and memeorandum are 2 great firehouse rss feeds that I appreciate.
This site, xkcd, liliputing, some various forums, etc. but the big problem I've started having w/ RSS is when sites set up Cloudflare and the RSS feed ends up behind the Cloudflare validation prompt - I've even emailed some sites but none have bothered to fix or exempt RSS.
anthes.is, my favorite Unix blog
Jeff Geerling & XKCD are the two that stand out in my mind.
theonion.com
Lots of webcomics
NPR,BBC,CBC
Local news
...and THIS site!
> ...and THIS site!
Via RSS?
https://news.ycombinator.com/rss
Amazed this is being discussed! I’ve only consumed hacker news via rss for maybe 15 years and I guess I didn’t know there was another way to read it at this point :)