RSS Feeds Send Me More Traffic Than Google

I've been toying with LLM based agents for staying on top of feeds lately. Staying on top of the fire hose was always the challenge with RSS readers, a lot of interesting low frequency stuff from people you follow gets buried under the non stop feed of stuff from high volume news that is actively trying to drown everyone out with many updates per day. Back in the day I solved it by simply not using RSS feeds for high volume stuff. But I was following a lot of interesting people. I miss that.

This is what lead to algorithm based filtering. Hacker News uses a simplistic algorithm but it is definitely using one and it works well enough. It's why I come here. We all collectively vote things up and what remains is nominally interesting enough to skim from the front page. With a bit of editorializing.

Social networks tried to game the algorithms for ad revenue. Which is why they are a lot less popular these days. Sites like Medium, Substack, Tumblr, etc. took over from simple blogs and immediately started raising walled gardens around them to become discovery platforms, have recommendations, etc.

But at least they support RSS. A lot of websites still do. If you run any kind of website publishing regular news or article content and you don't support a feed, you are being an idiot. It's easy, doesn't really cost anything, and you might actually get people using your feed once in a while. Your site might actually have one without you realizing. Most news papers have feeds. They are everywhere. The main issue isn't finding them but sifting through them. It always was.

With agent based approaches, you control the algorithm. That wasn't possible in the past. LLMs can summarize, aggregate, categorize, group, filter, etc.

This is probably the case for most personal websites with considerable cachet in their niche.

+ With a strong enough social network you probably don't have to care about SEO as much

You can title your post about bad customer service practices in a unique way without a second thought [0] and your more traditionally titled posts can still make the first page of a Google search with a reasonable query [1].

+ Depending on your niche your target audience is likely to already be tapped in well enough to not have to rely on search engines for content catering to their interests.

I feel like search engine practices trend along the curve shown in that meme where it's the "fool" on one end and then the "normie" in the middle and then the "Jedi" on the other end who does the same thing as the idiot. Except in this case "Jedis" only search for what's not present in their feeds (which doesn't have to be only RSS feeds) and fools can eventually cultivate their own feeds for their interests and reserve search engine use for mundane purposes that essentially fulfill the responsibility of some kind of pop culture almanac, phonebook and portal to Wikipedia.

[0]: https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2026/03/bored-of-eating-your-own-do...

[1]: https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2026/04/does-mythos-mean-you-need-t... — I Googled "mythos and open source". Interestingly, a forum discussion about this post came before it: https://itsfoss.community/t/does-mythos-mean-you-need-to-shu...

There's a ton of selection bias going on here. Terence writes mostly about open web standards and topics that would be of significant interest to folks with an RSS feed reader.

Also, RSS readers are generally automated. I know I've had them around for years pulling in articles that I never read. Like a podcast "listen" is actually just an automated download, RSS traffic does not necessarily involve anyone actually reading the article, whereas search traffic is generally high intent and is at least resulting in eyeballs on the site, if not actual readers.

Is it possible that the users who used to find us through Google are now satisfied with AI chat summaries and no longer feel the need to click through to the actual page?

Meanwhile, the long-time users who subscribed via RSS are still showing up like they always have. If this is the case, it’s a bit of a sad reality for content creators.

Ranked yesterday, although not much discussion (18 points, 2 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48022560