The only problem when I used any of these RSS feed readers is that the signal to noise ratio is pretty bad. I always get notified of topics I do not really care about (Liking a particular website does not mean everything they put up will be relevant and interesting). That's when I found HN and it resonated well.
There’s an upper bound to SNR for non-algorithmic feeds. You can of course rely on human curation but then you rely on unpaid labor or you’re back with ads again. Podcasts went very much that way, for instance.
I think non-algorithmic is a great baseline, HN and certain other communities are proof that it still works. There’s also a benefit of “everyone having seen the same stuff”, leading to interesting meta-conversations. This is the same “lost shared experiences” of only having one tv channel that old timers talk about, and it’s very real.
That said, there’s nothing inherently bad or destructive with algorithmic curation. What sucks is that we have no insight or control of them. If there was an open marketplace of curation algorithms, we’d be in a pretty good place.
