I Stopped Reading Newsletters. Here's What I Use Instead.

My morning used to start with four apps. RSS reader. Email. Slack. Twitter. Then I'd open a few tabs for sites that didn't have feeds. Somewhere around the 200th email and the third Slack channel, I'd realize I'd already spent an hour and still missed the one article that actually mattered.

Sound familiar?

I'm a developer. I need to track releases, security advisories, blog posts from people I respect, and industry news that affects what I build. Not as a background hobby. As part of doing my job well.

And here's what I've realized after twenty years of trying different approaches: this problem has been "solved" three times. Each solution nailed something important. And each one created a new version of the same problem.

This is the story of those three attempts. And the third one finally works.

Act 1: RSS Got the Philosophy Right

The Promise

RSS was built on a radical idea: you decide what you read. No algorithm picks content for you. No company decides what gets surfaced. You subscribe to a feed, and you get everything it publishes, in order. That's it.

It was an open protocol, which meant no single company controlled it. Your subscriptions were portable through OPML files. You could switch readers without losing anything. There were no ads injected between posts, no tracking pixels watching how long you spent on each article, no engagement metrics shaping what you saw next.

Cory Doctorow, who coined "enshittification" to describe how platforms degrade once they've locked in their users, put it bluntly: "You can single-handedly disenshittify your experience of virtually the entire web, just by switching to RSS."

He's right. And developers have always known this. On Hacker News, you'll find the same sentiment year after year: RSS keeps winning because it's one of the best consumer-first features of the open web. For many developers, RSS sits right alongside the terminal and the text editor as a fundamental tool.

The Betrayal

Then Google happened.

Google didn't kill Reader because nobody used it. A former engineer on the project said it felt like people were constantly trying to shut it down from the inside. The real reason was Google+, Google's attempt at a social network. They wanted users in their ecosystem, not reading the open web through an open protocol. Google+ died in 2019. Reader died in 2013.

But Google went further. They shut down FeedBurner's APIs. They removed the RSS button from Chrome. They stripped RSS from Google News. They never brought it back to Google Alerts. It was a systematic effort to move people away from open feeds and toward platforms Google controlled. Build something people love, lock them in, then sacrifice it for something more profitable. Doctorow would later have a word for this.

RSS didn't die, though. Feedly picked up 8 million new users in the weeks after Reader shut down. Inoreader, Miniflux, FreshRSS, NewsBlur, and dozens of others filled the gap. Feedly alone now has over 15 million registered users.

What changed was visibility. RSS went from something your mom might have used in iGoogle to something only power users knew about. The technology kept working. Most people just forgot it existed.

And it was everywhere the whole time. Podcasts? That's RSS. The entire podcasting industry, over 600 million listeners, runs on RSS feeds. Every episode you've ever downloaded was delivered through the same protocol people keep calling dead. WordPress powers 43% of all websites, and every WordPress site generates an RSS feed automatically. GitHub repos have Atom feeds for releases. Reddit generates feeds for every subreddit. YouTube has hidden RSS feeds for every channel.

RSS didn't disappear. It became invisible infrastructure.

The Fatal Flaw

But here's the problem nobody talks about when they evangelize RSS.

Follow 10 feeds and RSS is perfect. Follow 100 and you're drowning. A busy tech blog publishes 20 articles a day. A subreddit feed surfaces hundreds of posts. Stack that across all your sources and you end up staring at "1,000+ unread" in your reader, feeling the same anxiety you were trying to escape.

RSS aggregates information. It does not filter it. You traded one firehose (Twitter's algorithmic feed) for another (your unread counter climbing to four digits).

So when newsletters promised to curate that information flood for you, people rushed to subscribe.

Act 2: Newsletters Fixed Curation. Then Broke Your Inbox.

The Promise

Newsletters did something RSS never could. They added a human filter.

A good newsletter author reads hundreds of articles and picks the five that matter. They add context, explain why something is important, and save you hours of scrolling. The relationship felt direct and personal. No algorithm stood between the writer and the reader.

When Substack and Ghost made it trivially easy to start a newsletter, the floodgates opened. Suddenly every expert, every journalist, every developer with opinions had one. And for a while, subscribing to five or six great newsletters genuinely solved the information overload problem.

The Collapse

Then everyone subscribed to 40.

Over 28 billion newsletter emails were sent in 2025. More than half of subscribers now unsubscribe simply because they get too many. The inbox, which was supposed to be sacred personal space, became the new feed reader. Except with no filtering, no organization, and a constant drip of subject lines competing for your attention.

The privacy that RSS provided? Gone. Newsletters track opens with invisible pixels. They track clicks. They know exactly when you opened the email and which links you tapped. Some sell that data. Most use it to "optimize" what they send you, which means more of what gets clicks and less of what you actually need.

Gmail responded to the newsletter flood by creating the Promotions tab. Which is, in effect, an algorithm deciding which emails you see first. The very thing newsletters were supposed to avoid.

Even Substack added an algorithmic recommendation feed. The platform built on "direct relationship between writer and reader" now inserts content you didn't ask for between the posts you subscribed to.

The enshittification cycle had found a new host. The platforms people fled to when social feeds got worse were now degrading in exactly the same way.

The Structural Problem

And there's a deeper issue that no amount of inbox management can fix. You can't filter inside a newsletter. If a newsletter covers 10 topics and you care about 2, you still have to scan all 10 every time. You can't combine three newsletters into one stream and deduplicate the overlapping coverage. You can't set up alerts for specific mentions across your subscriptions.

Five newsletters are manageable. Twenty are not. And the good ones keep multiplying.

The pattern is clear. RSS gave you open sources with no filter. Newsletters gave you curated filters locked inside your inbox. Each solved one problem and created another.

What if you could keep the open sources and make the filtering automatic?

Act 3: What If the Filter Was the Product?

The Synthesis

The third wave of information tools takes the best ideas from both eras and combines them.

From RSS: open sources, user control, no tracking, portable subscriptions. The philosophy was right all along. Keep it.

From newsletters: curation matters. You can't just aggregate everything and expect humans to sort through it manually. Someone, or something, needs to filter. Keep the insight. Replace the human bottleneck.

The new ingredient is AI filtering that follows your instructions instead of an opaque algorithm. You tell it what you care about in plain language. It reads everything and surfaces only what matches. No engagement optimization. No ads. No tracking. Just your criteria applied to your sources.

And then something neither RSS readers nor newsletters ever offered: the filtered results go to wherever you already work. Your Slack. Your Discord. Your Telegram. Your email. You don't need to open another app or check another inbox.

The Tools

Here's what the landscape actually looks like in 2026.

Feedly was one of the first to add AI. Their assistant Leo can prioritize topics, deduplicate stories, and learn from your reading patterns. It's available on Pro+ plans ($8.93/month annual). The limitation is getting those results out of Feedly. If you want filtered content pushed to Slack or Teams, you need the Enterprise tier, estimated at over $1,600/month. For individual users, Leo is useful but locked inside the reader. You still have to open Feedly to benefit from it.

Inoreader takes a similar approach. At $9.99/month you get advanced rules and monitoring dashboards. Their GenAI features are a paid add-on on top of that. Like Feedly, the experience centers on opening the app and reading.

Folo is an open-source reader that recently added AI translation and summarization. Free to self-host, with cloud plans from $3.33/month. A solid choice if you want a modern reader with some AI features built in. But it's still a reader. You go to it.

FreshRSS and Miniflux are self-hosted readers that give you complete control over your data. Both run in Docker, both are free. The tradeoff: no built-in AI. You get aggregation, but filtering is still on you.

SignalHub approaches the problem differently. Instead of being a reader, it's a filter you configure with natural language rules. You describe what you want to see and what you want to skip. The AI reads each new article from your sources, evaluates it against your rules, and only forwards what passes. No keywords, no regex, no boolean queries. You write what you'd tell a smart intern, and it just works. Results arrive as notifications with AI-generated summaries in Slack, Discord, Telegram, email, or any of 10+ channels. All channels are available on every plan, including free.

SignalHub also recently added RSS output. Your filtered results become an RSS feed that any reader can subscribe to. Set up your filter rules in SignalHub, then subscribe to the cleaned-up feed in Feedly, Miniflux, or whatever you already use. It becomes an AI filter layer between your raw sources and your reading experience.

RSS Won. Just Not How Anyone Expected.

Andrew Blackman wrote: "When I use an RSS reader to navigate the web, I feel calm. How many of us can say that about being online these days?"

That calm is worth protecting. And it's finally possible at scale.

RSS won as infrastructure. Podcasts run on it. WordPress publishes through it. GitHub uses it. Reddit exposes it. The protocol is so embedded in the web that killing it would break things everyone takes for granted. But RSS is also winning in a way nobody predicted: as an output format. AI filters process the noise upstream. The results come out as clean feeds you can subscribe to, read on your schedule, and move between tools without losing anything. The open protocol that started as a way to pull information from sources now also works as a way to deliver filtered intelligence back to you.

The story of the past twenty years comes down to one tension: openness versus curation. RSS chose openness and couldn't filter. Newsletters chose curation and got enshittified like every platform before them. The third wave is the first time both can coexist. Open protocols that no single company can degrade, combined with filtering you control. Open sources in, your rules in the middle, clean results out, delivered however you want.

I stopped reading newsletters six months ago. I didn't lose any information. I just stopped letting it pile up in my inbox. The content I care about finds me now, in the channels where I already spend my time.

If you left RSS behind when Google Reader shut down, it might be time to come back. The protocol is the same. Everything around it is better.