I’ve stopped using social media and built my own news aggregator instead. AI is flooding social platforms with clickbait and low-quality content, so I used AI to build a custom news feed with no clickbait at ryanxcharles.com/news.
The irony isn’t lost on me: using AI to fight AI-generated slop. But it works.
Social media platforms are filled with attention-grabbing, clickbait content that doesn’t provide enough value to justify sorting through it. Most posts are designed purely to capture attention, not to teach anything helpful or new. The content optimizes for engagement metrics, not usefulness.
AI is making this exponentially worse. It’s now easier than ever to produce engaging content at scale. The barrier to creating attention-grabbing posts has collapsed. This means the volume of content is rapidly increasing, but the quality, usefulness, and truthfulness are actually degrading.
Consider the typical feed: advertisements disguised as posts, engagement bait, recycled takes, and AI-generated summaries of articles you could just read directly. The ratio of signal to noise keeps getting worse.
This is on top of the already suspicious behavior of tech giants, which are known to censor content and cancel people. The platforms manipulate what you see through opaque algorithms optimized for their business goals, not your information needs.
Enough already. The cost of sorting through all this noise exceeds the value extracted from finding the occasional useful post.
RSS readers were popular in the 2000s for good reason. They solved a real problem: you could curate your own sources of information instead of relying on algorithmic feeds. If you trusted certain blogs or news sites, you subscribed to their RSS feeds and read everything they published.
The model worked. You picked your sources, you controlled what you read, and no algorithm decided what you should or shouldn’t see.
But RSS readers eventually faded. Part of the reason was that they were purely consumption-focused. You read feeds in isolation. There was no social component, no way to share your curation with others, no way to publish your own aggregated view of the news that mattered.
What if instead of just consuming RSS feeds, you published your own aggregated news? What if you hand-picked sources you trust and made that curation public?
I built a news aggregator on my personal website at ryanxcharles.com/news. The concept is simple: hand-pick sources I personally trust, aggregate them into a single feed, and publish it for anyone who wants to follow along.
Right now, I’m aggregating Hacker News using their free API and several blogs I respect. Hacker News provides a good baseline of tech news that’s already been filtered by a community I generally trust. The blogs I’ve added are written by people whose judgment and expertise I value.
This is just the beginning. I plan to add more sources over time: professional news outlets, additional blogs, maybe even select individual social media accounts that consistently provide value. The key principle is that I only include sources I believe are worth my attention.
Unlike social media feeds that are optimized for engagement and ad revenue, my aggregator is optimized for one thing: providing me with news I actually want to read. No clickbait survives the curation process. No algorithm is trying to keep me scrolling. Just information from sources I chose.
The entire aggregated feed is available at ryanxcharles.com/news. Anyone can read it. It’s my personal view of what’s worth paying attention to.
Here’s the counter-intuitive part: AI is both the problem and the solution.
Yes, AI is lowering the barrier to producing engaging content, flooding social media with huge volumes of low-quality posts. But AI also makes it possible for individuals to build sophisticated news aggregators without hiring a development team.
I used Claude Code to build this system. The entire news aggregation pipeline—fetching from the Hacker News API, parsing RSS feeds from blogs, storing everything in a database, generating a unified feed, and rendering it on my website—was built with AI assistance.
This would have taken weeks or months to build manually. With AI, it took days. The technology that’s creating the content pollution problem also democratizes the tools to fight back against it.
You can do the same thing. If you can describe what sources you want to aggregate and how you want to display them, AI coding tools like Claude Code, Cursor CLI, Copilot CLI, or others can help you build it. You don’t need to be an expert programmer. You need to be clear about what you want.
Fighting fire with fire: use AI to curate against AI-generated noise.
I don’t expect thousands of people to read my aggregated news. That’s not the point.
The point is to take control of my information diet and to share that curation with anyone who might find it valuable. If even a few people benefit from following sources I’ve vetted, that’s worth it.
More importantly, I hope others adopt this idea. Build your own news aggregator. Pick sources you trust. Make your curation public. If everyone who’s fed up with algorithmic feeds did this, we’d have a network of curated information sources maintained by real humans with real judgment.
This isn’t about building an audience. It’s about building infrastructure for better information consumption. The aggregation happens on my domain, under my control, following my standards. No platform can censor it, no algorithm can manipulate it, and no ad network can pollute it.
Social media promised to connect us and inform us. Instead, it optimized for engagement and ad revenue. The result is a deluge of low-quality content that wastes time without providing proportional value.
You don’t have to accept this. Build your own news aggregator. Pick sources you trust. Use AI to help you build it. It’s easier than you think, and once you have your own curated feed, you’ll never want to go back to algorithmic feeds designed to maximize someone else’s metrics.
The infrastructure is available. The tools are accessible. The only thing stopping you is the decision to take control of your information sources.
I’ve made that decision. My news aggregator is live at ryanxcharles.com/news. What will yours look like?