Announcing Scour on r/RSS
Last week, I wrote up a little announcement post about Scour on the r/RSS subreddit. I'm copying that post over here for anyone else that might be interested:
Hi everyone,
A service I'm building has been mentioned a couple of times in this subreddit and it's now in a spot where I want to 'officially' tell you all about it. Feedback is very welcome!
Scour searches through noisy feeds for content matching your interests. You can sign up for free, add topics you're interested in (anything from "RSS" to "Pourover coffee brewing techniques"), and import feeds via OPML or scour the 3,200+ feeds that have already been added. You'll have a feed tailored to your interests in under a minute.
I'd love to hear what you think! You can respond to this thread with any feedback or put suggestions on the public feedback board.
Why I'm building this
News aggregators like Hacker News and Reddit can be great sources of content. HN especially, though, is so popular that tons of good posts get buried in the constant stream of new submissions.
I wanted something that would watch noisy feeds like the HN firehose and find content related to topics I'm interested in. After building a prototype, I immediately started finding lots of good posts that only had 1 or 2 upvotes on HN but were plenty interesting to me. It's been a couple of months since then, there are a few hundred users, and I'm hoping to turn it into a little solo-dev business (more on this below).
Quotes from some users
- “It's not a feed reader, it’s a serendipity machine.” - zachcp
- "It's like a grep, but smart, for my feeds." - cpt
- "Just became the fifth person to star this new JavaScript state management library on Github: https://github.com/Snowflyt/troza. For the first time since the Stumbleupon days I feel like I'm right on the pulse of things. Thanks, Scour! 🖖" - justmoon
How it works
Scour checks feeds for new content every ~15 minutes. It runs the text of each post through an embedding model, a text quality model, and language classifier. When you load your feed, Scour compares the post embedding to each of your interests to find relevant content (using Hamming Distance between binary vector embeddings, in case you're curious). Scour also reranks posts to make sure your view isn't dominated by any one story, interest, source, or feed. And, it'll try to filter out low-quality posts and content in languages that you don't understand.
Features for RSS enthusiasts
- Every user's Scour feed is available as an RSS/Atom/JSON feed so you can consume it from your existing feed reader.
- Each of the interests you add has its own feed, and you can export all of these as an OPML file to import them into your RSS reader.
- Posts are deduplicated so you won't see the same item multiple times, even if it appears in multiple feeds.
- Under each item, you can find the links to comment threads on Reddit, HN, Lobsters, Bluesky, etc, if it's been posted there.
- For each item, you can also see which feeds it appeared in, and easily subscribe to any you haven't added yet.
- When you add a feed by URL on Scour, it'll automatically search all the common paths for the feed. It can even treat some blogs that don't have feeds as if they did (for example, Anthropic's News site or MixedBread's blog).
- Scour recommends feeds to you based on which ones have content related to your interests. It also suggests other topics you might be interested in.
Monetization
Everything Scour currently does is free and I plan to keep it that way. I am working on this full time and hoping to make a small business of it, so I'll be adding some additional paid features. I'm taking inspiration from Herman from BearBlog: try to build a useful free service and offer premium features at a reasonable price that are a no-brainer for power users and can support a single developer.
Follow along!
I blog about the technical details of building Scour and write a monthly product update. You can find those on emschwartz.me and you can subscribe via RSS or add it on Scour.
Looking forward to hearing what you think!
P.S. If you read this far and need the link to sign up, it's: scour.ing/signup.