RSS: follow the web without letting an algorithm pick for you

You open your browser for one specific piece of information. Three tabs later, you are reading an article from last week, a video unrelated to anything you wanted has started on its own, and you can no longer remember what brought you here. The news site did nothing wrong. It did its job: keep you.

The problem is not that the web holds too much. It comes down to one habit: every site makes you go through its homepage, and that homepage changes every hour according to a logic that is not yours. You come looking for one story and leave with a selection someone else made for you.

RSS reverses that order. You choose the sources, then read what they publish, without passing through the storefront. It is an old technique, simpler than people think, and it fixes a part of the problem that browser settings never touch.

What an RSS feed really is

RSS is not an app. It is a format. The RSS Advisory Board, which publishes its specification, describes it as a Web content syndication format. In practice, a site publishes, alongside its pages, a file that lists its latest items: title, link, date and often a summary. An RSS reader reads that file at regular intervals and shows what is new.

What changes is the order of decisions. Without a feed, you decide where to go, then the site decides what you see: its front page, its recommendations, its ranking. With a feed, you decide what to read, and you only open the site for the article you picked. The front page no longer has a role. Neither does the ranking, unless you turn it on yourself.

A feed has no “for you” section. It shows what the source published, in the order it published it. That is why it looks dull at first, and why it is reliable. You know why an item is there: you added the source.

Why RSS disappeared from view

If RSS is so practical, why do so many people not know it? The best-known episode is the shutdown of Google Reader. Google launched it in 2005 to follow the sites people care about, then announced in March 2013 that it would retire it on July 1 of that year, because its usage had declined. The flagship reader was gone, and people had to look for an alternative.

The format itself never went away. Many sites still publish their feed, often without saying so. But you cannot count on every site: some have none, others hide theirs in the code. That is the first limit of RSS, and it is better to accept it from the start. It does not force you to give up everything. It asks you to choose your sources with that criterion in mind.

The trap: swapping one algorithm for another

The temptation is to replace an algorithmic feed with an aggregator that sorts everything for you. You keep the same delegation, with another machine at the wheel. A good reader should first show you the raw list, in publication order. Rules, filters and sorting come afterwards, once you know exactly what you want to exclude.

Take Inoreader as a concrete example, without turning it into one more recommendation. Its free plan lets you follow 150 sources, which covers a first month easily. The Pro plan goes up to 2,500 sources and adds more advanced features: following pages that have no feed, turning newsletters into feeds, applying detailed rules. It costs €6.67 a month billed annually, or €8.99 billed monthly, according to the pricing page consulted on 5 November 2026. Do not pay for a feature you will not use in the month that follows.

A simple check after a week: count the items you opened against the ones you let go. If you skip most of them, the problem is the feed, not your discipline. Remove the noisiest source first, then measure again. Two weeks of that tells you more than any review of reader features.

The same reasoning applies to newsletters. They land in your inbox, which already acts as a task list, and the sender chooses when to write to you. An RSS feed lets you go to it when you decide. If you already have newsletters, keep them if you like, but do not let them set your day.

What RSS does not do

It does not tell you what to read. A feed of three hundred unsorted sources recreates the homepage problem, with a cleaner layout. RSS makes your choice possible; it does not make it for you. That is exactly why choosing sources matters as much as the tool.

It does not cover social networks. Their main timelines are generally not published as RSS, and the tools that claim to convert them rely on workarounds that can stop overnight. If an important source only exists on a network, accept that it stays in that loop, and do not let it slip back into your reader through the side door.

Finally, it does not replace reading. An article you add to the reader and never open is a disguised tab: it weighs on your mind exactly like a tab left open. Set a limit. What stays unread for a week leaves the list, without regret.

The mechanism that brings you back

Why do tabs pile up? Because an opened, unread article is a small promise that your brain keeps as a pending task. It is the mechanism behind the attention debt of open tabs. RSS does not change that if you keep opening every link in a new tab. It changes how often you make decisions. Instead of checking five sites ten times a day for an uncertain payoff, you open one list, twice a day, with what you chose to follow.

There are fewer switches, so fewer of those small bursts of curiosity that pull you out of your work. It is the same principle as notifications: the amount of information is not the main cost, the interruption is. RSS gives you checkpoints, not a continuous stream.

Watch out for a common mistake after the first week. You add one source, then another, and the unread counter climbs. It turns into a debt: every unread item reminds you that you have not finished, and eventually you stop opening the reader. The right reflex is the opposite. When a source piles up without you opening it, unsubscribe. A source you have not read for a month will not become more useful because you keep it. You can add it back later in a few seconds.

[ANECDOTE DIANE: the news site you opened every morning out of habit, how long you stayed there without noticing, and what changed when you stopped typing its address.]

One action to take today (15 minutes)

You do not need a paid plan to start. You need a free account in an RSS reader and a list of five sites.

1. List the five sites you open most often out of habit. Not the ones you would like to read, the ones you actually open. The gap between the two lists is often instructive.
2. Look for each site’s feed. On the page, look for an RSS icon or a link labelled “feed” or “RSS”, often in the footer. If nothing shows up, try adding /feed or /rss to the site’s address. If the site has no feed, note it separately: you will check it on demand, without keeping it in your routine.
3. Add the feeds you found to your reader. About ten sources is enough to start. Beyond that, you are rebuilding a timeline.
4. Remove those five sites from your top-level bookmarks. They stay reachable, but they are no longer the first thing you type.

Then set a reading slot, for example twenty minutes after your first hour of work, and close the reader outside that slot. That rule matters most: a feed left open all the time ends up looking like a news timeline.

What this changes for you

You do not need to leave the web. You need to decide once who gets into your day. RSS does not solve attention on its own, but it removes one of the biggest time sinks: the homepage you never asked for.

Do the action above this week, then notice what happens when you open your browser the next day. If you still type the same five addresses, your reflex is stronger than the list, and that is where your browser settings need a second look. The lesson Make the web accessible sets out the full framework: clean up the browser, separate what stays visible from what stays accessible, and choose an RSS reader that keeps you in control. If Windows settings are what interrupt you most, the free guide to 10 Windows settings is the right starting point.

Sources

Figures and features checked on 5 November 2026.

See the 3 sources for this article

• Ursula Hölzle, 13 March 2013, A second spring of cleaning — Google Blog
• RSS Advisory Board, RSS 2.0 Specification (version 2.0.11, 2009)
• Inoreader, Pricing (consulted 5 November 2026)