I agree with the OP here. The biggest issue unsolved by RSS is customizability. You can pick what feeds you subscribe to, but that's your only level of control. HN, Reddit, Twitter, etc give you a feed of several hundreds posts per day. Most of them are irrelevant to my interests or filtering criteria. For example, I may only be interested in posts containing certain keywords, a certain amount of comment activity, or a certain number of upvotes/downvotes. Whatever it may be. The RSS protocol doesn't let you control this.
Of course, I can ignore anything I am not interested in. But the reality of the situation is that out of 30 minutes reading RSS feeds I spend 20 minutes filtering out stuff I am not interested in. Also, crucial information such as post popularity is missing because it's not available at publishing time and changes over time. "Social" is not part of the protocol.
You can argue that social media sites don't belong into RSS, but then you are removing the single biggest use case of RSS. If I can't put social media feeds into RSS it's useless to me because social media is exactly what overwhelms you with information and FOMO, which is what RSS should be solving.
Sounds like a good application for a neural model to sieve out the stuff you’re interested in.
(And that stuff actually existed for a long time, CRM-114 is an example but not the first, I was playing with this in the early 00s with stuff that could categorize emails with Bayesian filtering etc, not just spam vs not.)
Of course, I can ignore anything I am not interested in. But the reality of the situation is that out of 30 minutes reading RSS feeds I spend 20 minutes filtering out stuff I am not interested in. Also, crucial information such as post popularity is missing because it's not available at publishing time and changes over time. "Social" is not part of the protocol.
You can argue that social media sites don't belong into RSS, but then you are removing the single biggest use case of RSS. If I can't put social media feeds into RSS it's useless to me because social media is exactly what overwhelms you with information and FOMO, which is what RSS should be solving.