RSS Based Daily Newspaper

Wed, 04 Mar 2026 23:25:17 +0100

I’ve long felt that using RSS is only half the battle. Subscribing to RSS feeds generally avoids irrelevant content¹ and the attention parasitism of Big Tech recommendation engines, but there is one other issue: intermittent rewards.

Since new items can be published at any point, refreshing comes tied to a randomized reward,² and like the good ~~monkey~~ mouse that I am, I keep pulling the leaver.

There seems to be an obvious solution to this. At the cost of some immediacy of delivery, delaying items and only showing them all at once at specific times. For example, imagine if each day, at 08:00 all new items from the previous 24 hours arrive in your reader, an experience much more like reading the paper in pre-digital times.

Digital Minimalism on Algernon's Website

RSS Based Daily Newspaper