Why I Still Use an RSS Reader in the Age of Algorithms

I started using a feed reader again three years ago, after quietly noticing that the things I actually wanted to read had stopped showing up in the apps where I spent most of my time. The trigger was small: a long piece on craft brewing vanished from a social feed I had used weekly, then reappeared on a friend's blog with no fanfare. I subscribed on the spot and dug the old aggregator out of a backup archive.

This is not a manifesto against social networks. I still scroll them, still click through to long videos, still find excellent work that way. The point is narrower. When my reading life was governed by recommendations, the selection narrowed in ways I did not choose. When it was governed by feeds I built, the selection broadened in ways I did notice.

From Melbourne to Perth, the rhythm of a working day looks similar enough to Dublin or Berlin: a commute, a long block of focused work, scattered check-ins on the phone. What differs is the media diet. Australia's ABC, the Guardian's Australian edition, news.com.au, the Conversation, Crikey, The Monthly, and longform podcasts produced out of Ultimo: the list of sources worth reading is wider than any single ranking can do justice to, and a feed reader handles that width without flattening it.

What follows is a personal account of why RSS still earns the slot on my home screen, what it gives back that recommendation engines cannot, and where it sits awkwardly in 2026. I am not trying to win anyone over to a particular client. I am trying to describe a way of reading that has aged far better than I expected.

Reading Without a Curator

The honest description of any algorithmic feed is that someone, somewhere, is deciding what is next. Sometimes that someone is a friend whose taste I trust. Mostly it is a ranking model trained on engagement signals, weighted towards outrage and ambiguity because ambiguity keeps people scrolling. I noticed this gradually in Sydney morning news apps: the same handful of headlines cycled for hours, while a perfectly good opinion column from a regional outlet sat buried below something I'd already read.

A feed reader inverts that arrangement. I choose the sources. I see them in the order they arrived. If nothing has arrived, the inbox is empty, and emptiness is information. The curation is mine and gets better when I prune it, which I do about twice a year. It is closer to a paper inbox than to a video queue, and that analogy has never quite gone away.

There is a psychological benefit I did not anticipate. When the next item is not chosen for me, I read it on its own terms. I cannot tell you how many blogs and Substacks I have now followed for years that I never once saw in a recommended tab. Three of them are written by people who work at universities in Brisbane and Adelaide and publish on the same Tuesday morning, every week, like clockwork. That reliability is a feature, not a bug.

A Small Rebellion Against Engagement Metrics

The marketing industry I work in has spent the last decade measuring everything it can about how content performs. Click-through, dwell time, completion rate, save rate. Those numbers are useful, up to a point. The trouble is that optimising for them has a way of reshaping the writing itself, and not always for the better. I came to RSS partly as a way of writing and reading outside that pressure.

A reader cannot measure me. There are no charts telling me I left the page after twelve seconds. There is no leaderboard of which posts perform best. The closest I get to a stat is the count of new items, and that is a count of the world, not of me. For a working marketer, having at least one corner of the information diet that does not treat you as the product is genuinely useful.

I keep a separate archive of how I find things. The personal blog I write for, the Guinness marketing notes, gets a surprising share of its long-tail traffic from feed readers rather than search. People add the URL, the posts show up the same week, and the conversation in the comments is almost always more considered than the equivalent thread on a social platform. The medium quietly selects for a certain kind of reader.

None of this is a moral claim against the platforms. It is a description of what I have come to value in one corner of my reading life, and a guess about why that corner has stayed useful while others have flattened out.

How RSS Fits Into an Australian Working Week

The practical reality is that RSS is slightly less frictionless in Australia than in North America. The NBN has made sync reliable enough that updates appear within seconds of being published from anywhere with a steady uplink. The catch is that several publishers I rely on, including the Australian Financial Review and a few cultural magazines behind paywalls, only offer partial feeds to non-subscribers. You learn quickly which sources give you the first paragraph and which give you the whole piece.

The Australian media market itself is unusual, and RSS handles the unusualness well. There are a few dominant mastheads, a healthy indie scene, and a small but persistent group of writers who publish mainly on personal sites in cities from Hobart to Darwin. A recommendation engine has no reason to surface a niche Hobart correspondent over a shopping list from a national title. My feed reader makes no such compromise. Both appear, in chronological order, and I notice which one I actually open first.

There is also a regulator angle worth mentioning. The ACCC's ongoing interest in digital platforms, and the news media bargaining code that has reshaped how tech giants pay Australian publishers, has made platform dependence a working topic for anyone in the Australian media business. Having a reading stack that does not run through a platform at all feels quietly prudent, a small piece of operational independence that costs nothing to maintain.

On a Tuesday morning in Melbourne, waiting for a tram on Collins Street with a flat white in hand, my phone can be in offline mode and the day's feeds are already there, downloaded over the cafe wifi a few minutes earlier. That is the lived experience of the technology, in a few sentences: the content is local, the reader is local, the ranking is human, and the connection can drop without the reading stopping.

The Technology Itself Has Held Up Surprisingly Well

The fear, when I came back, was that the ecosystem would feel abandoned. The opposite is true. The two open formats at the heart of it, RSS and Atom, are simple enough that almost anything can speak them. New readers are released each year, older ones still receive updates, and self-hosted software has matured to the point where running a small reader on a home server is an afternoon's project.

Where the tooling has improved most is in the seams. Full-text search across every subscribed source, offline reading, read-later sync to other devices, smart folders based on keywords, and rules that move items between categories without manual sorting: none of these were reliable ten years ago, and all of them are now. The mobile apps in 2026 are a long way from the clumsy software that put people off the format in the first place.

There are still rough edges. Video and podcast feeds sometimes look like text items and try to play in the wrong place. Some publishers strip their feeds to the bone, presumably under legal advice from teams who should know better. Indie blogs disappear overnight and leave empty slots. None of these are fatal, and none of them are problems that an algorithmic feed solves. They are just the background noise of participating in a long-lived protocol.

What I did not expect, returning, was how social the experience turned out to be. Feeds recommend feeds. A blog post I read this morning will often link to three others I have never visited, and one of those will sit a few keystrokes away from my guinness page, and from there a small constellation of writers emerges. It feels closer to the early web than to anything that came after, which I count as the highest compliment I can pay it.

Living With Two Systems at Once

I do not pretend RSS can do everything social platforms do. There is no equivalent of a viral thread, no direct message, no edit-and-response loop, no real-time event coverage in the way a platform can muster it during a State of Origin decider or a federal press conference. For those moments the platforms remain genuinely useful, and I use them the way most Australians do: a few minutes at a time, on a schedule, with notifications off.

The deeper I have gone into the feed reader, the more I have come to think of it as a workshop tool. It is where I do slow reading, where I catch up with sources I respect, where the work of staying informed happens in a way I trust. The social feeds are where I keep up with people I know. Treating them as one system was always a category error; treating them as two systems has been quietly transformative.

Recommendation algorithms are not going anywhere. Neither, for that matter, am I. The wager of using a feed reader in 2026 is not that the algorithms will fail, but that the small act of curating your own reading stack will continue to pay back more than it costs. So far, the wager has held.

The most useful thing I did, when I came back, was small and easily reversed. I picked ten writers whose work I had admired over the previous year and spent an evening finding each one's feed, in some cases via the site, in others via a search engine. Within a week, the morning commute in Adelaide or Brisbane or Sydney had a different texture: a small inbox of items that felt chosen, with no leaderboard and no ranking. If a friend asked what the practical version of all this looked like, the answer is in a single sentence: a handful of writers, a free reader app, and a willingness to see what one week of chronological reading feels like.