Heck yeah! I use an RSS reader to consume news every day on both my phone and laptop. It's blissfully free of extras and distraction.

My YOShINon RSS reader incorporates about 110 feeds, and, unlike the majority of RSS readers, actually treats RSS feed items as items that are stored in a database so it can present those items in various ways. Most news sources ranging from The Guardian and The Bulwark and Jacobin as well as phys.org and MDPI publishing still have RSS feeds.

It has screens to view things based on database queries, full text, and embedding similarities but the main UI looks like TikTok or Tinder for text, showing me articles it thinks I will like mixed with random articles to keep it calibrated. It spins like a top. I also have another thing called "Fraxinus" which was a cut-and-paste job from it that works as a bookmark manager and image sorter, the plan eventually is to mash them back together.

I use RSS very frequently, it is often how I get my daily news.

Most blogs, at least in the tech space, have it. As well any major news publication worth their salt will have an RSS feed still.

Using rn to access HN

Definitely! Advertisers hate it, because it's a way of basically bypassing ADs. I used to have my own RSS reader doing what the OP's doing, but I finally just started using Liferea (on Linux) which I love. There's a file format for sharing links called "opml", and here's mine for example (below). Many RSS readers can import/export your list of links to this format.

Each day there's about 150 new articles to scroll thru. What we need in the world however is some sort of OPML Sharing social media service where people can share their FAVs. It's a shame news sites are heading in the opposite direction with closed paywalls rather than openness, but I guess they're struggling to pay the bills. My apologies for posting such a big chunk of text and eating up half your screen. I only do this when I'm pretty sure it's relevant.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <opml version="1.0"> <head> <title>Liferea Feed List Export</title> </head> <body> <outline title="Example Feeds" text="Example Feeds" description="Example Feeds" type="folder"> <outline title="News" text="News" description="News" type="folder"> <outline title="Ars Technica" text="Ars Technica" description="Ars Technica" type="rss" xmlUrl="https://feeds.arstechnica.com/arstechnica/index" htmlUrl="https://arstechnica.com"/> <outline title="Reddit - World News" text="Reddit - World News" description="Reddit - World News" type="atom" xmlUrl="https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/.rss" htmlUrl="https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/"/> <outline title="NPR World" text="NPR World" description="NPR World" type="rss" xmlUrl="https://feeds.npr.org/1004/rss.xml" htmlUrl="https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1004"/> <outline title="Simon Willison's Weblog" text="Simon Willison's Weblog" description="Simon Willison's Weblog" type="atom" xmlUrl="https://simonwillison.net/atom/everything/" htmlUrl="http://simonwillison.net/"/> </outline> </outline> </outline> </body> </opml>