I was sitting around over coffee this morning thinking to myself, “the current regime of blocking authors as a proxy for blocking the topics they cover is fine and all, but I don’t know if I want to be locked into Readwise forever. What’d be nice would be a way to permanently cleanse the feeds, and also fine-tune that cleansing as sites change, authors come and go, etc.

So today I sort of flipped the model from triaging incoming articles, taking an incremental approach to learning my preferences, and pattern-matching on authors to reviewing feeds and pattern-matching alternately on authors, URL characteristics, and a bit of inference around topics:

• Visit a feed I’m tracking
• List the articles
• Click an article with the option to block author, URL pattern, or click “I don’t like this”
• If I click “I don’t like this,” I can click “content type” or “topic,” or fill in a field. Then Haiku takes a pass and proposes some heuristics it can apply to articles in the feed.

That’s just a variation on what I’ve been doing anyhow, but now the tool republishes a private version of the feed that is dynamically filtered on the rules and feedback I’ve provided so I can subscribe to it from any regular old RSS reader or service instead of being locked in to Feedly, Readwise, Inkwell, etc. In Inkwell, the tool can even swap in the cleaned up feed automatically, cutting down on how much triage even has to happen.