Ask HN: Who do you follow via RSS feed?

Hello there!

I just set up TinyTinyRSS (https://tt-rss.org/) at home and I'm looking into interesting things to read as well as people/website publishing interesting stuff.

This, among the other things, to reduce the daily (doom)scrolling and avoid the recommendation algorithms by social media.

So: who or what do you follow via RSS feed, and why?

67 points | by znpy 2 days ago

33 comments

  • binsquare 1 hour ago
    I actually setup my reddit home as my RSS feed and that home is populated by my subreddits
  • sien 2 days ago
    I use the fantastic Inoreader that is better than Google Reader was.

    I follow things that post maybe once or twice a week or once a month. For things with new information every day, like Hacker News, I check the website.

    A few of the things that I follow that may be a bit different for people are :

    Arnold Kling - a PhD economist who worked in technology and is genuinely different.

    https://arnoldkling.substack.com/

    Noah Smith - a PhD economist who writes about economics and the world

    https://www.noahpinion.blog/

    Roger Pielke Jnr - a guy with a PhD who writes about climate and energy and was excommunicated by the climate priesthood.

    https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/

    Andrew Sullivan - a conservative, gay, HIV positive, Catholic writer who campaigned for gay marriage.

    https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/

    • swah 11 hours ago
      Thanks for the plug - the compact list view did give me the fuzzy feelings in my belly ;) Moving from NetNewsWire to this for a while...
    • cagey 15 hours ago
      me too; Inoreader was my first/only stop after Google Reader, and is one of the only paid subscriptions I maintain.

      Probably > 80% of my RSS feeds are Youtube channels.

    • xela79 18 hours ago
      another positive vote for Inoreader , really the best none self hosted, as long as you keep your subscriptions within their free limits :)
      • sien 16 hours ago
        I pay. I've found it's worth it.
  • brianmz 1 day ago
    Multiple high quality company engineering blogs including https://netflixtechblog.com/, https://www.uber.com/en-US/blog/engineering/, DoorDash etc.

    https://techtalksweekly.io/ - new software dev conference talks and podcasts

    https://ciechanow.ski/ - interactive articles about science and engineering

    https://jvns.ca/ - great technical content overall

    This is a great thread btw.

    • kohbo 7 hours ago
      Great links. Was disappointed to see ciechanow.ski hasn't been updated since 2024.
  • swah 11 hours ago
    Trying again to use this to avoid the algorithm from taking over. The reason is sometimes a go a few months without remembering of a specific channel then when I open that channel manually there's a bunch of new interesting content for me.

    Around 20 subreddits, 10 youtube channels and 10 blogs...

  • browningstreet 2 days ago
    98% of everything you follow has RSS. It’s not like a quaint, unlisted Vermont antique shop.
    • abnercoimbre 2 days ago
      This includes YouTube channels, major newspapers and podcasts!

      P.S. Even HN is something you should personally control. It's very useful whenever moderators flag a submission you might've liked.

  • Mixtape 2 days ago
    In no particular order: 404 Media, Ars Technica, BleepingComputer, The Register, The Verge, and Tomshardware.

    These usually sit in the corner of my screen through the day. Some are better than others for work purposes. The Verge could probably go, and 404 is a bit more socially-focused than the rest. In particular though, having rapid updates from BleepingComputer and El Reg is a great way for me to learn about new vulns, issues that might affect my users, etc.

  • dcminter 1 day ago
    I roo am trying to curate my RSS feed to be doom-scrolling free. These largely achieve that for me. You'll find a smattering of political posts in them, but that's an inevitable side effect of living in abnormal political times.

    https://scrollprize.org/ - The Vesuvius Challenge: Using high intensity X-ray scans and computation to attempt to retrieve lost scrolls from Pompei; real uplifting Sci-Fi stuff! Possibly the most heartwarming thing I know of on the internet; snatching ancient knowledge from the flames of history! What could be more poetic?

    https://www.science.org/blogs/pipeline - In the Pipeline: The blog of Derek Lowe (pharmaceutical chemist), (in)famous for articles like "Sand Won't Save You This Time" Always interesting, though a lot of the chemistry goes way way over my head. Some political stuff lately, unavoidably given the current secretary of health.

    https://blog.dshr.org/ - David Rostenthal: Digital preservationist.

    https://www.jeffgeerling.com - Jeff Geerling: Raspberry Pi, Arm, digital radio, and other nerdery. I enjoy his videos, but I love that he does a plaintext version (first?) that's not just a transcript.

    https://commandcenter.blogspot.com/ - Rob Pike: Programming luminary (Go, UTF-8, Unix, etc.)

    https://fasterthanli.me - Faster than Lime: Amos's blog leaning heavily towards Rust. I'm a beginner in Rust, but I love this guy's style of writing even when the stuff he's writing about is beyond my current skill level.

    Anyway, those are my go-tos at the moment. I look forward to trying a bunch of the others recommended here. Oh and I currently use Feeder under Android as my RSS reader; it's unexciting, which is what I look for in an app these days :D

    A last recommendation - as part of trying to avoid doom-scrolling, I have a paper subscription to The Economist and I'm trying to train myself to read that instead of going to news sites. The lack of immediacy helps keep the emotional reaction in check (it's not as addictive of course).

  • nelsonfigueroa 2 days ago
    Some I like:

    https://www.writesoftwarewell.com/ - very good software posts, mostly around Ruby on Rails.

    https://crankysec.com/ - Cybersecurity rants mostly, fun to read.

    https://www.wheresyoured.at/ - Ed Zitron's writings. Good counterpoints to all the AI hype these days.

    These come up often on HN but I'll call them out anyway:

    https://jvns.ca/ - Julia Evans, good technical content all around.

    https://xeiaso.net/ - Xe Iaso, good technical content all around once again

  • migmaldo 2 days ago
    In no particular order of preference:

    - Julia Evans - Daniel Stenberg - Geohot - Cloudflare and Netflix’s respective tech blogs - TorrentFreak - LWN.net - and some others in spanish -

    • embedding-shape 1 day ago
      > and some others in spanish

      Could you share some of them? Always looking for high quality authors from the home-sphere, but finding it increasingly difficult to find anything worthwhile.

    • dcminter 1 day ago
      Julia Evans is an absolute treasure.
  • topherjaynes 2 days ago
  • mold_aid 1 day ago
    404, The Gentleman Stationer, HTMLHell, call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu, Clagnut, Crooked Timber, Platypus, Tech Policy Press, Public Domain Review, Writing at Large, Coffee with a Codex (YT)
  • chistev 1 day ago
  • tylerhillery 2 days ago
    In no particular order:

    - Anton Zhiyanov

    - Register Spill by Thorsten Ball

    - Phil Eaton

    - Mitchell Hashimoto

    - Gunnar Morling

    - Jack Vanlightly

    - Charity Majors

    - Bryan Cantrill

    - Marc Brooker

    - NULL BITMAP By Justin Jaffray

    Another tip is you can subscribe to YouTube Channels and Podcasts via RSS as well. I wrote a little bit about my setup to help reduce doom scrolling: https://tylerhillery.com/blog/how-i-consume-the-internet/

  • hahahahhaah 2 days ago
    No one. It psychologically makes me feel guilty if I can't keep up. I'd weirdly rather have an email and ignore or read it than pull rss and not read for ages. Funny enough the only time I used rss was when I had that cool outlook integration that made them seem like emails.
    • chriswarbo 1 day ago
      > Funny enough the only time I used rss was when I had that cool outlook integration that made them seem like emails.

      I convert feeds to maildir, and read them in email clients (Thunderbird, KMail, Emacs+Gnus, Emacs+mu4e, etc.). That lets me use the same setup for emails and feeds; keeping them on a network mount makes sync trivial; etc.

      I use http://www.chriswarbo.net/git/feed2maildir which is a fork of https://github.com/sulami/feed2maildir that rips out a bunch of unneeded complexity (config files, databases, fetching, looping, etc.)

    • steanne 1 day ago
      i think thunderbird has an rss reader, though i've not tried it
  • happytoexplain 2 days ago
    A few webcomics, some entertaining YouTube channels, and HN. It used to be a lot more, but nowadays, that's it.
  • unindented 2 days ago
    Here’s the feeds I follow: https://www.unindented.org/follows/

    (It’s my OPML file translated to HTML via Hugo.)

    As to why, they generally post original and insightful stuff on topics I care about, like web dev, security, Ruby, Rust, etc.

  • rcarmo 1 day ago
    I follow too many people, so I built https://feeds.carmo.io with summaries. You might enjoy the selection there and upgrade to the original feeds as needed.
  • brynet 1 day ago
    Shamelessly, I have a low volume rss feed for my static-HTML articles, but I'm also using rss for the embedded mastodon feed on my website.

    https://brynet.ca/

  • mainmeister 2 days ago
  • shantara 2 days ago
    Various webcomics, Youtube channels and Github releases for several projects.
    • susam 2 days ago
      [EDIT: This was meant to be a reply to another comment in this thread but I posted it under the top-level comment by mistake. I am leaving this comment intact anyway, in case someone finds it useful.]

      The web browsers don't highlight the feed URL information embedded in the HTML anymore, quite unfortunately. But if you go to a YouTube video, say, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9kaIXkImCAM> and then view or inspect the HTML source, you can find the LINK tag for the feed:

        <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS" href="https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCi8C7TNs2ohrc6hnRQ5Sn2w">
      
      So the feed URL in this case is: <https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCi8C7TN...>.
    • znpy 2 days ago
      > Youtube channels

      I didn't know you could follow youtube channels via RSS! Where do I find the feed link, given a youtube channel?

      • shantara 2 days ago
        Many RSS aggregators automatically convert Youtube links to RSS. You can also do it manually: https://chuck.is/yt-rss/

        I have removed Youtube apps from all mobile devices and only watch the creators whose content I'm interested in through RSS, without notifications and distractions. It's a much more pleasant experience, definitely recommend.

      • nelsonfigueroa 2 days ago
        You can actually just paste the link to a youtube channel in your RSS reader and it should work. At least for me it works with NetNewsWire. For example, you should be able to copy and paste this directly into your RSS reader: https://www.youtube.com/@freecodecamp
      • susam 2 days ago
        If you view the HTML source of a YouTube video page, there is a LINK tag that contains the feed URL. I have shared an example here: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46772655#46775759>.
  • empiko 1 day ago
    HackerNews - hnrss.org
  • Brajeshwar 2 days ago
    HN Personal Websites[1] by @susam was popular on Hacker News a few days back.

    1. https://hnpwd.github.io

  • techtalksweekly 1 day ago
    Shameless plug.

    https://techtalksweekly.io

    I'm building a newsletter (with an RSS feed available) called Tech Talks Weekly where my subscribers get one email per week with all the latest Software Engineering conference talks and podcasts.

  • quinncom 1 day ago
    A few of the best reads in my Reader:

      - Apricitas Economics
      - Avery Pennarun
      - Civic Texts
      - Citation Needed
      - Derek Sivers
      - Die, Workwear!
      - Electrospaces.net
      - Ethan Mollick: One Useful Thing
      - Lukasz Olejnik: Tech Letters
      - Matt Kiser: What The Fuck Just Happened Today?
      - Molly White: Citation Needed
      - Paged Out!
      - Patrick McKenzie: Bits about Money
      - Peter Steinberger
      - Peter Welch: Still Drinking
      - Sam Rose
      - Simon Willison
      - Squishy Computer
      - Sylvain Kerkour
      - Zeynep Tufekci: NYT
    
    Here's a OPML of these: https://s.strco.de/f/feed-20260127.opml
  • ajdude 2 days ago
    I use netnewswire as my client and I'm self hosting freshrss, so my subscriptions can be synced between my phone and computer.

    All of my YouTube and nebula channels I follow via RSS and I think that's kind of giving me the most bang for my buck. I can just get focused on the videos that I want to subscribe to without having to even go to YouTube and get pulled into the algorithm, as well as a few sub Reddits, hacker news front page (it's how I found this post), Lobste.rs, 404 Media, some local blogs (my food co-op, biking website, other community things), some web comics, one news group, and a couple forums.

    I've also contemplated Podcasts, but I still have a dedicated player for that.

  • navigate8310 2 days ago
    Crooked Timber

    Matt Lakeman

    Global China Pulse

    Sinocism

    Bartosz Ciechanowski

    brr

    Construction Physics

    Jonathan Nolan's substack

    On the Seams

    Quanta Magazine

    Matt Levine - Bloomberg Opinion Columnist

    Aeon | a world of ideas

    Classic Film and TV Café

    Experimental History

    The Marginalian

    The Prism - Gurvinder

    The Technium

    Westenberg.

    Chameth.com

    Activity in the release-notes tag

    All Things Distributed

    An Untitled Blog

    Charles Hugh Smith's Substack

    Chips and Cheese

    computers are bad

    Dwarkesh Podcast

    Francis Stokes :: Githublog

    iRi

    Rest of World - Latest Stories

    Shtetl-Optimized

    Signal Blog

    マリウス

  • nickthegreek 2 days ago
    techmeme and memeorandum are 2 great firehouse rss feeds that I appreciate.
  • blackfawn 2 days ago
    This site, xkcd, liliputing, some various forums, etc. but the big problem I've started having w/ RSS is when sites set up Cloudflare and the RSS feed ends up behind the Cloudflare validation prompt - I've even emailed some sites but none have bothered to fix or exempt RSS.
  • thefz 1 day ago
  • sdsd 2 days ago
    anthes.is, my favorite Unix blog
  • nhhvhy 2 days ago
    Jeff Geerling & XKCD are the two that stand out in my mind.
  • qanuta 2 days ago
    theonion.com

    Lots of webcomics

    NPR,BBC,CBC

    Local news

    ...and THIS site!