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Comment by robin_reala | Hacker News Reader

One thing that I did to kickstart my RSS usage again was to revisit each site I was subscribed to and:

- Remove it if it posted more than once a day. I want thoughtful voices, not other people’s aggregation.

- Remove it if it hadn’t posted in the last few years. Some people blog extremely irregularly, but the likelihood is that most blogs that are 5+ years old aren’t coming back.

- Remove it if the overall tone of the blog is too negative.

I then added a bunch of new feeds from people I’m currently actively following on other platforms who are blogging. This was a massive breath of fresh air, that has got me actively engaging with my feed reader for the first time in a few years.

(Related to my second point: I’m not the first person to note this but there’s a real sadness to watching an old and beloved blog nova itself into your feed in a burst of gambling site spam. Better to get out before that happens.)

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> - Remove it if it hadn’t posted in the last few years. Some people blog extremely irregularly, but the likelihood is that most blogs that are 5+ years old aren’t coming back.

This I don't really understand. Following inactive feeds via RSS comes effectively at no cost for you. How does removing them improve the experience?

See my follow-on note at the end of the post, but also it’s just a psychological out-with-the-old-and-in-with-the-new point that marks a change.

It would be cool if you could somehow be notified when the ownership of a domain changes so you could take that action when it makes sense instead of preemptively killing subscriptions.

It may come at a cost in some SaaS RSS readers (which may allow a limited number of feeds on the free plan, for example).

It can be preventative against spam for when old domains expire/get sold and/or old blog service passwords get hacked.

I think about doing that sort of proactive cleanup sometimes. There's nothing quite as disappointing as seeing an old friend's blog show a new post for the first time in years only for it to be some spammer that just hacked their old password or some expired domain squatter saw RSS logs and decided to sell advertising on it or a once major blog host was sold to a Russian oligarch who purged the user database so more Russians could have good usernames (LiveJournal, lol).

Good tips! I have two busy feeds (which are my country's equivalent of Reuters or AP) but I keep them in a separate folder and if I wanted, I could exclude them from the main feed. Sources that post way too often can be a burden and it feels like you can never catch up.

I have a few of these on FreshRSS, they're all set so that they don't appear on the main feed and they have "Max number of articles to keep unread" set to a non-overwhelming number.

They're basically firehoses of information where I like to tap into now and then.

Some Day I'll do a classifier system that lifts up the ones I might be interested in to the main feed. FreshRSS does have "labels", but the filtering system isn't especially powerful (or easy to use)

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