I Built the Feed That Ends, Then Couldn't Get to the Bottom of It

I hate clickbait. Hate it..

I'm sitting there one night doing what everybody does.. scrolling through headlines on Google News and Brutalist Report, weeding through clickbait and political bs, trying to find something to read. And I remember thinking, why can't I just get the news I want without all this garbage? So i started asking ChatGPT if there was a way to hide headlines based on keywords.. It came up with a clever bit of JavaScript that lived as a bookmarklet i could run on any site.. It was great and solved a lot of my issues.. I got spoiled by it, but it didn't work flawlessly on any site.. It broke often on Google and Yahoo News, causing me to have to go back to AI to fix it. SO i thought.. why not build this into my own newsfeed that does exactly what that little bookmarklet was doing? SO I started bouncing ideas off of Claude, and by the time I went to bed it existed. A dead simple page that pulled from the feeds I picked, filtered out the junk words I told it to, and that was it. I called it The Gist.

Now I'm not a programmer. I've built some websites in the past with Dreamweaver, played around a bit with PHP.. I know enough to get me by, but I haven't done anything like that in many years. That's where Claude came in.. I've dabbled in a little bit of everything over the years, but coding is not my strong point at all. So i started poking around with Codex and Claude CLI and quickly found a rhythm. This way of building came very naturally to me for some reason… I describe what I want, Claude writes the code, and I tell it when something looks wrong. That's the whole workflow. The first version of that news site was built in one evening — and honestly the session crashed halfway through and it still got done, because the notes survived and we just picked back up the next morning. I had no idea how most of it worked under the hood. Still don't.. Nor did i care.. It just worked.

But releasing this over the internet.. that made me a bit nervous. I'm paranoid about getting hacked.. I ran a bunch of WordPress sites in my life and a few of them fell victim to hackers. So I'm not naïve. I know just enough to be dangerous, and I know you've really got to harden stuff if you're gonna put it out on the internet — so that's exactly what I did. I did security audit after security audit until we were both comfortable sending it out into the wild.

It was awesome, and I was enjoying it so much that i decided to build a second app for my wife. We cloned it for her in an afternoon. And that was the moment it stopped being a toy.. if it took one afternoon to make a second one, this was a product, not a page. Four days later it had a real name — Muuted — and it's been getting daily commits ever since. Nearly a thousand of them as of this week… from a guy who doesn't write code. Two years ago i wouldn't have believed that sentence either. AI is the great equalizer.

The whole pitch of Muuted is simple: you pick the sources, you mute the noise.. No algorithm deciding what you see. The clickbait disappears.. Rage-bait — gone, nothing designed to keep your attention or make you outraged. Just pure subject matter..

And here's the honest reason it hooked me: for the first time in a long while, reading the news didn't leave me feeling like garbage. i'd skim it, i'd be done, and i'd just feel... fine. Turns out that was the whole thing i was actually chasing.

SO here's what that looks like… As of this writing, i follow 363 sources (news sites, blogs, reddits, YouTube channels), which works out to about 1,900 total hits. i've got about 170 muted words, and that filters out around 600 of them.

But here's the interesting part…. the words are just the first pass. A muted word only catches the exact word — mute "tariff" and a story that says "import taxes" slides right by. SO on top of the words i built in a couple smarter layers.

First one's the AI. Instead of matching letters, it actually reads what a story is about, so it can mute a whole subject even when your exact word never shows up in the headline. And it runs on my own machine — none of your feed gets shipped off to some third party to do it.

Second is the Junk filters — a set of filters i maintain that clear out the stuff that isn't really news at all: sponsored posts, coupon spam, engagement-bait, the usual garbage.

And the last one's my favorite: it combines duplicates. When the same story gets covered by a dozen outlets — and the big stuff always does — instead of a dozen near-identical cards, Muuted rolls them into one and lists everybody who covered it right underneath. Little bonus there too: that stack of outlets tells you how big a story is.. two of them is a shrug, twenty means something actually happened. i can even dial how aggressive it gets.

So out of that 1,900, i'm left with right around 1,150 articles.. SO the end of my feed exists the same way the horizon exists.. it's technically there, you're just never going to touch it. :) and im ok with that.

(Insert screenshot here of stats bar)

I built the feed that ends and I can't reach the end of it. Sit with that one for a minute, because I had to. :)

But here's the thing i realized digging through those numbers, and i think it's the actual story. Of those 363 sources, only about 17 are news sites. 143 are subreddits. 66 are YouTube channels. Then podcasts, Bluesky, weather, blogs.. Muuted quietly stopped being a news reader and became the inbox for everything i follow, everywhere.

And that's a different problem than the one i set out to solve. A headline takes two seconds to skim. A 40-minute video is a commitment. A podcast episode, same thing. "Caught up" can't mean the same thing for all of those, and no app i've ever used has really figured that out. i'm still working on what the end of a feed like that should look like — and i don't have the answer yet, and i'm not gonna pretend i do.

What i did do, at least for now, is give the different kinds of stuff their own lanes. Video gets its own tab, your social follows get theirs, and you can flip a switch to keep either one out of your main feed entirely — so your news stays news. It's not the whole answer.. but at least now it's organized, instead of a forty-minute video sitting shoulder to shoulder with a two-second headline.

And then there's the part that genuinely gets under my skin. The feeds that need this the most are the ones that won't let you in. Facebook and Instagram — completely sealed, no way to pull your own feed out. X killed their RSS years ago. Threads teased opening up through the fediverse, and when i actually went to use it i hit a "we'll let you know" beta screen. Reddit still technically has feeds, but they've throttled them to such a trickle that i can just barely keep my own account working — it's rationed so hard i can't reliably hand it to anybody else. You can add subreddits, but honestly, right now it's hit or miss.

Every one of those platforms locked the door, and that's by design. The endless algorithmic scroll IS their product. A feed you can calm down and finish is a threat to it. And the fact they locked the door should make you angry.. Instead, their algorithm does.

And here's the flip side, the part i actually care about: Muuted doesn't do any of that back to you. i don't track what you read, i don't build a profile on you, i'm not selling your attention to anybody — the AI that cleans up your feed even runs on my own hardware, not some cloud quietly reading over your shoulder. There's no algorithm because there's nobody to serve here but you.

So what's left is the open web.. RSS, YouTube, podcasts, Bluesky, Mastodon. That's the territory where a calm feed is even possible anymore. Which I guess means Muuted isn't really competing with the big platforms at all. It's making the case for spending your attention somewhere they don't own.

SO if any of that sounds like your feed too — the clickbait, the rage-bait, the same story twelve times, the scroll with no bottom — go take a look. It's free, it's at muuted.com, and you can have your own calm feed running in a couple minutes. No algorithm, no ads, no tracking, no catch.

Still haven't reached the bottom of my feed though. Working on it. :)