How do you handle feeds that generate dozens of items daily?
I’ve been using RSS for nearly 20 years now, and I still haven’t developed a good strategy. I’m starting to think the best strategy is “don’t.” For high-volume news sites (like the Times, WaPo, CNN, etc.), just subscribe to their newsletters or visit the sites directly.
I’m wondering how other RSS users resolve this problem?
Many feeds I’ve just abandoned and decided if I need to read I will go to the site to find the information. For the ones that are still in my RSS reader, I’m deliberate about clicking only on the feed (or a folder with similar feeds) and then skimming the headlines. If there’s any I want to read, I read them, otherwise I mark the entire feed as read.
I use Reeder 5/Inoreader and do this whenever I’m bored or once a day.
Try Fraidycat, very good and open source
This has been a challenge for me too. One of the things I’m experimenting with is using Reeder’s Read Later functionality instead of reading the high-volume feed itself. So I go through the feed, sending stuff that I want to read to my Read Later queue and marking everything else as read. Then I can read stuff out of the Read Later list.
I use Newsblur’s feed trainer to exclude a lot of keywords, categories and authors. I end up with 50-150 exclusions on firehose-type feeds. It’s only worth going through that if you can’t find a more curated source that reports as quickly, of course. And I only do that for specialized news like MacRumors–for a newspaper it’s a lot faster to just scan digital headlines or broadsheet.
My approach is much the same. I avoid the ‘everything is a crisis’ sites and concentrate on feeds from New York Times, Reuters, BBC, etc. and a couple that may offer a different look at some topics like militarytimes.com. And top it off with a few favorite tech sites, and a personal interest site or two.
Then every couple of hours (I’m retired), I scan the feeds and send the ones I want to read to Instapaper. The software makes the process similar to clearing my email Inbox. The process takes about 5 minutes top.
It’s hard to avoid ending up with the same story from multiple sites so I rarely need to read everything I save.
I already save a LOT to my read-it-later app of choice, and then I find it hard to find time to review those items in the app.
I take the approach that if there’s too much to keep up with then I will remove the feed. I’m not enamoured of much “mainstream” news so most of my feeds are quite manageable. There is one industry-specific site I like that only has one firehose across all of their content which saddens me, as I see less of their content as a result. I will only see what bubbles up through other channels. It’s not worth my frustration deleting 9 out of 10 entries, especially when there are 30-40 every time I go look.
I find the sort Oldest to Newest feature, and the delete button, very useful when that happens 
Very good point, actually. I find it much easier to triage older articles. “Why did I save this?” I say to myself, and delete, delete, delete.
Devonthink works really well to read, archive, search, and otherwise curate/manage high-volume RSS feeds.
I just don’t include them on my RSS feed. I have NYTimes subscription and besides checking my RSS feed, I just check NYT app separately in the middle of the day. I’ve also personalized my For You feed on their app and only check out other section when I have more free time to read.
For one, I don’t really care how much unread article is on my feed. I don’t clear them as read and just leave them as is. Helps that I have the number count turned off on the app icon.
I don’t put these feeds in my RSS reader.
I look at the news apps once a day in the morning. Any sources that have less frequent updates are in Unread, which I check a couple of times a week.
I have a folder set up specifically for feeds like you mentioned. I only check them periodically and mark all as read every day even if I don’t skim the headlines as to not make too much backlog
I use the “don’t” method you noted for high volume sites. I cannot take drinking at the firehose on those and read from a browser or app as needed.
