TWITTER_POST

Karpathy makes a case for RSS as an antidote to engagement-driven social media.

2026-02-01 · 19:26 UTC ·karpathy ·1 min read

Brief

Karpathy makes a case for RSS as an antidote to engagement-driven social media. He argues that open feed readers offer a higher signal-to-noise ratio, avoid the incentive traps that degrade social products over time, and provide a practical alternative today through existing clients and a curated 92-feed starter pack drawn from popular 2025 Hacker News blogs.

Source evidence

title: @karpathy: Finding myself going back to RSS/Atom feeds a lot more recently. There's a lot m...
author: karpathy
contenttype: twitterpost
published: 2026-02-01T19:26:20+00:00
source_url: https://x.com/karpathy/status/2018043254986703167

word_count: 122

Tweet by @karpathy

Finding myself going back to RSS/Atom feeds a lot more recently. There's a lot more higher quality longform and a lot less slop intended to provoke. Any product that happens to look a bit different today but that has fundamentally the same incentive structures will eventually converge to the same black hole at the center of gravity well. We should bring back RSS - it's open, pervasive, hackable. Download a client, e.g. NetNewsWire (or vibe code one) Cold start: example of getting off the ground, here is a list of 92 RSS feeds of blogs that were most popular on HN in 2025: https://gist.github.com/emschwartz/e6d2bf860ccc367fe37ff953ba6de66b… Works great and you will lose a lot fewer brain cells. I don't know, something has to change.

Posted: 2026-02-01T19:26:20.000Z
Engagement: 9187 likes, 1187 retweets, 548 replies