I agree that most articles are meh. In fact, most “things” are meh, statistically speaking (novels included). Finding things that are good (for you) is a hard

I agree that most articles are meh. In fact, most “things” are meh, statistically speaking (novels included). Finding things that are good (for you) is a hard search problem. You can approach solving it in the same way you’ve solved finding good novels: Good authors write good novels. Good authors tend to hang out with other good authors, and give each other shout outs. Good reviewers who like your favorite author probably like other people that you would like. The analogy goes on. On the topic of quality: Novels at least have to get through a publisher. But publishers need to make money and deal flow, so some crap gets through. News has to go through an editor but they have similar issues. Sometimes there really isn’t anything worth reading that has been published in the last $period_of_time, but the paper and ink demands some words. For this reason, I think even higher quality than average “zeitgeist” news like HN or classic news sources are barely worth engaging with beyond a headline level. You can tame them with aggressive enough filtering. So that you get most of the good (for you) stuff and avoid most of the bad (for you) stuff. But eventually you aggregate the subset of sources you care about, and cut out the aggregator. There’s no other way to get a higher signal:noise ratio, than to create your own “periodical”. Finally, I think one’s relationship to the UX of the RSS reader has a big impact on how one feels about it. Some people are compulsive inbox zero types. But is the number really that important? Why is it there? For example, my podcast app doesn’t tell me how many episodes of This American Life Ive missed since 2021, it just shows me the last two, and I can scroll for more. Zero pressure or FOMO (for me). I think finding a reader interface that works for you is a critically underrated aspect of the RSS experience. So yes, totally agreed that naked RSS is in itself insufficient, but I would defend RSS as an essential primitive of any long-term-sustainable solution, IMO.