this post was submitted on 04 Feb 2024
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Although I still have Feedly on my phone, and open it occasionally, RSS readers are not as useful as they used to be. That is not due to the way RSS inherently works, but in the past 15 years, websites no longer make their entire articles available on the feed. What you usually get is a small excerpt with a link to the website. They do that because RSS does not allow for the same level of engagement and advertising they would have on their website. As it is, RSS readers are, technically, link aggregators. Which makes them much less convenient.
Even as a link aggregator that would be perfectly fine for me personally.
What really bugs me is that many news sites don't keep their feeds clean, so you often have duplicates and most importantly: if you have multiple sources, you'll get multiple copies of the same information packaged slightly differently - often I'm not even interested in one copy.
For example, all news outlets had some Grammy/Taylor Swift crap in their feeds. Each outlet had like three different articles, all regurgitating the same information. I would love to have something like topic clusters, so that I could discard all articles I'm not interested in in bulk.
I even tried building it myself, but wasn't very successful.
I don't see how RSS could identify, prioritize, and remove duplicates between different sources in the same category. If I understand correctly, those are not really duplicates, but rather different articles on the same subject. Unless you are talking about a more complicated system or manual curation, I don't think that is possible. I don't believe I had much trouble with duplicates within the same feed, maybe I never subscribed to many feeds that do that.
It's possible by analyzing the title and subtext (and the article snippet, if it exists). I tried to have an AI model estimate the likeness of articles. Worked relatively well, but I lack the motivation to build it out into a usable app.