Kill the algorithm in your head: Let's set up RSS readers and get news we actually want in 2026

Time was, entire social castes would be dedicated to divining the intentions of the gods. Chicken entrails, the flight of birds, the rolling of thunder—all this and more was used by ancient peoples befuddled by the randomness of life, in an attempt to impose some order on the world, some meaning on their triumphs and their suffering.

We've outgrown all that these days. In the place of arbitrary and distant gods we have arbitrary and distant algorithms: vast lattices of code that no one really understands, whose purpose seems to be to make the entire world more insane and more racist.

Their workings are indefinable, their intentions obscure, and they probably determine a vast amount of what you watch, read, and listen to. I know they do for me. Apple News feeds me news, my YouTube home feed suggests videos, Spotify introduces me to the latest and greatest music generated by data centres the size of Idaho. I don't have to think about anything at all; it just comes to me.

It's kind of awful, really—a vast abdication of responsibility on my part. Well, no more. You and me, we're making 2026 the year of the glorious return of the RSS reader.

Keep it really simple, stupid

If you're young, the notion of an RSS (that's Really Simple Syndication, by the by) reader might essentially be Lostech to you. Let me briefly explain. Time was, we used to have the means to plug our favourite websites—you know, to pick one at random, something like PC Gamer dot com—into a little bit of software that would present you with a simple, chronological feed of content published to a website. Yes, the internet used to be good.

The end of Google Reader in 2013 was more or less the death knell for that era of internet and that style of content aggregation—save for podcasts, which still rely on RSS to make their way to most of your listening apps of choice. Google's RSS app was far from the only bit of kit you could use to sub to a site, but it was a popular one, and in the wake of its passing more than a few sites started to let their RSS feeds lie fallow, sparking a cycle of decline.

But to hell with that, I say. It might not have the strength it did in the old days, but RSS is still around, and you can use it yourself right now.

It might be pure heresy to invoke the brand on PC Gamer, but if you've got an Apple device to hand, I really can't recommend Reeder enough. There are two versions: Reeder and Reeder Classic. The first is a (very cheap: a buck a month) subscription and the latter is a $10 one-time buy. Either way, I've been using one version of Reeder or another for years and loved it—you can just plug your favourite websites in and live the chronological life.

If you don't have any Apple gubbins to hand, don't despair. It ain't perfect—there's AI guff in there you can generally ignore, the odd upsell, and you don't host it yourself—but Feedly is a perfectly cromulent service for anyone who just wants to dip their toe into RSS waters without much faff.

If you decide you like the life, you can export your feeds into an OPML file to import into something a bit more robust and a bit more hosted-on-your-own-device.

Inoreader is another service along similar lines that RSS sickos recommend a lot, but I can't vouch for it personally.

But I know you. You want only the best, most intense solutions to the modern problems of enshittification. If you can't bear to get your syndicated content off someone else's servers, I recommend giving FreshRSS a punt. You can self-host it on your own server and tweak it to your heart's content, maximising privacy and customisability for an increase in faff. That's, ah, a little more advanced though. I really would recommend starting with one of the more basic solutions before you dive in.

And when you do, please do remember to stick PC Gamer on there. I'm trying to make a living here.