Indeed, Patreon has private feeds for patrons for exclusive content. That's a decent solution but it's platform-specific, which is both a bad thing (not easily used elsewhere) and good (backwards compatible with good old RSS).
243 karma · joined September 5, 2025
I don't necessarily agree with the statement "chronological feeds incentivises spam-posting, posters compete on quantity to get attention" - if someone spam-posts, I am very likely to unsubscribe. This would be true both for chronological and algo feeds.
>> I'm thinking of something like "algorithm as a service," which would be aligned with your interests and tuned for your personal goals.
Now that is something I would be interested in. I believe some of the RSS aggregators are trying to offer this too, but mostly the SaaS ones, not self-hostable open-source ones.
However, I see a lot of people around me who pay for LLMs from their own pocket when their employer won't foot the bill for them. And if it's their own money at stake, you can be pretty sure that they see some ROI there.
> Here’s one example. If your mental model of reading is “transmit facts into my head”, then reading an AI summary of something might seem like a more efficient way to get that task done.
Once I tried one of the services where instead of audiobooks, you listen to the books' summaries. It actually makes at least a bit of a sense for certain genres of non-fiction like productivity books, which tend to be quite padded out and the ideas can actually be effectively summarized in a much shorter frame.
But I hated it and my knowledge retention was very low. Plus, most of the books cannot be summarized in a way that does not hurt their depth. By definition, you can't go very deep with a summary.