Readwise is breathing new life into RSS

I’ve been using the Readwise Reader app for a few months now, and it’s quickly becoming an indispensable tool for me.

You can learn about it on their site here, but for me it really just combines two things — the “read it later” functionality from tools like Pocket, and then the traditional RSS reading from tools like Feedly. However, they way they combine those two features is very helpful, and some of the new ideas they’re bringing to RSS are simply fantastic.

RSS like TikTok

So an RSS feed is essentially just a list of articles from sites that you’ve added to your list, like I have discussed here in the past. You can subscribe and unsubscribe from sites, and you get all of the content from those that you’re subscribed to. Most RSS readers do a fine job of letting you browse your list and mark things off as you go, but Readwise is using some inspiration from TikTok to help you get through them more quickly.

With RSS, most software has to juggle the ability to “show more content” with “let people get through it quickly” and this new solution does it well, particularly on your phone. It shows each new article as a full-page on your phone (image, headline, and a few sentence of text), but then you treat it like TikTok — tap on it to read more, or flick your finger to scroll to the next…