I like RSS because I get to choose exactly what I follow. No algorithm deciding what I should care about or no feed trying to keep me scrolling. But I had a different problem.
I’d open my reader and have 100-200 unread items waiting for me. Most of them weren’t things I needed to read in full.
I mostly wanted to know: What’s new? What actually changed? And which 3 or 4 things are worth paying attention to?
So I started experimenting with a different way of consuming my feeds. I give the RSS feeds I care about to Lissin and say something like: “Every morning, catch me up on these feeds in 5 minutes. Focus on what actually changed, skip anything repetitive, and explain why the interesting stuff matters.”
Then it checks what was published since the last episode, picks what’s worth including, and turns it into a short audio briefing. The part I’ve found surprisingly useful is that it remembers what it already covered.
So if five different posts are basically talking about the same development, I don’t need to hear the same story five times. And tomorrow’s briefing doesn’t spend half its time telling me what I already heard yesterday.
I still use RSS exactly the same way underneath. The feeds are still the sources I chose.
I’ve just changed the last step from: open reader > scan everything > decide what to read to: put headphones on > get caught up > open the original post if something sounds worth going deeper on.
I’ve been doing this while walking, making breakfast, commuting, etc., and it’s made me use some of my feeds more consistently than before.
We built this into Lissin and recently launched it on iOS.
I’m curious how other RSS people think about this: Which feeds do you genuinely want to keep up with, but rarely have time to read properly?
submitted by /u/kwdinc