The modern web contains no shortage of horrors, from ubiquitous ad trackers to all-consuming platforms to YouTube comments, generally. Unfortunately, there's no panacea for what ails this internet we've built. But anyone weary of black-box algorithms controlling what you see online at least has a respite, one that's been there all along but has often gone ignored. Tired of Twitter? Facebook fatigued? It's time to head back to RSS.

For many of you, that means finding a replacement for Digg Reader, which went the way of the ghost this month. Or maybe you haven't used RSS since five years ago, when Google Reader, the beloved firehose of news headlines got the axe. For others, it means figuring out what the heck an RSS feed is in the first place—we'll get to that in just a minute. And some of you have already moved on to the next article in your Feedly queue.

No matter what your current disposition, though, in this age of algorithmic overreach there's something deeply satisfying about finding stories beyond what your loudest Twitter follows shared, or that Facebook's News Feed optimized into your life. And lots of tools that can get you there.

Cue RSS

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication (or Rich Site Summary) and it was first stitched into the tapestry of the open web around the turn of the millennium. Its aim is straightforward: to make it easy to track updates to the content of a given website in a standardized format.

In practice, and for your purposes, that means it can give you a comprehensive, regularly updated look at all of the content your favorite sites publish throughout the day. Think of it as the ultimate aggregator; every morsel from every source you care about, fed directly to you. Or, more commonly, fed to you through an intermediary known as an RSS feed reader, software that helps you wrangle all of those disparate headlines into something remotely manageable.

'We're trying to keep things as they were.' Ben Wolf, The Old Reader

The difference between getting news from an RSS reader and getting it from Facebook or Twitter or Nuzzel or Apple News is a bit like the difference between a Vegas buffet and an a la carte menu. In either case, you decide what you actually want to consume. But the buffet gives you a whole world of options you otherwise might never have seen.

"There are multiple approaches to connecting to news. Social felt pretty interesting at first, but when you mix social and algorithmic, you can easily get into these noise bubbles, or areas where you don't necessarily feel 100 percent in control of the algorithm," says Edwin Khodabakchian, cofounder and CEO of popular RSS reader Feedly. "A tool like Feedly gives you a more transparent and controllable way to connect to the information you need."

With 14 million users, Feedly is the largest RSS reader on the market. And it's easy to see why; it's as feature-full as one could hope for, and has been around since 2008. (It also inherited a sizeable chunk of Google Reader's jilted audience.) It's far from your only option, though.

All RSS readers function within the same basic outline. You tell them what RSS feeds you'd like to follow—The New York Times, say, or WIRED—and they collect every new headline those sites churn out, offering anything from a snippet of information to the full story, depending on how much the publisher allows. Each puts a slightly different spin on the process from there.

Feedly, for instance, has for the last two years gravitated toward being a tool for research rather than passive entertainment. That's partly in response to platforms eating the open web. "If you go after entertainment, you're not competing against other reader news tools. You're really competing with Instagram and other things people do to kill time," says Khodabakchian. "On the other hand, if you think of this as an intelligence tool, or research assistant, we see a huge and increasing demand for that."