I thought like this until I started missing posts from blogs I liked. I remembered why RSS feeds are useful and got back into it after a friend recommended a reader he uses. I also picked up a good habit from him: subscribing to releases/commits of projects I want to stay up-to-date with.

> because they provide popularity scores into the links, helping me filtered out junk links.

Which you can also do—and better—with RSS.

hnrss.org allows you to get a feed with posts over N points. Example: https://hnrss.org/newest?points=300

Adding `top.rss` to a subreddit’s URL gives you a feed you can further manipulate with `t` and `limit`. Example: https://www.reddit.com/r/wallpapers/top.rss?t=month&limit=20 lists the top 20 posts from the past month in `r/wallpapers`.

RSS is like your Facebook feed, not HN or Reddit. It's a different application.

I read HN via an RSS feed over the front page. You can filter out junks just fine.