I made a new service for myself called Riverbed. It crawls 120 of my favorites sources of news, reading, and entertainment then uses my own ratings to recommend the best to me. I visit this most mornings now and I absolutely love it! You can visit it here though you'll just see a login page.

This feed may not look like much to you but for me it's great! Every two hours Riverbed recrawls the 120 sources and rebuilds the prediction / recommendation AI model from all my ratings.

Rows

There are several rows on a page:

• Today
• Recommended
• Yesterday
• 2 days ago
• 3 days ago...

"Recommended" is a special row where anything ever crawled can show up. There's a growing penalty as the item ages. Sources that don't post often age less. So my top favorite sources that post just a few times a year will stick around here a lot longer.

Ratings

I've given low ratings to items like:

• "Trump said something"
• Stories about one specific crime or criminal trial.
• Sports.
• Royal family.
• Celebrity gossip.
• Foreign municipal politics.

CBC for example occasionally has a good read but they bury it in "Trump said something" stories. I no longer see that at all.

Features

There's a toggle to show or hide AI content since I tend to rate AI high. Sometimes life isn't all about AI all the time.

I can "hide" items which has no effect on ratings. Usually I do this if my frontpage is filled with stuff I've already seen or read so that other things appear.

If I want a "morning newspaper" I can only show text content and then read those.

Motivation

The private sector hasn't figured out how to monetize the internet - except for ads.

90%+ of the revenue of Google, Facebook, and Reddit is from ads. They're all ad companies. They will never show you the internet you want.

My recent post My Media Diet in 2026 got me thinking again about how I could better follow my favorite media sources and pay less attention to other noise. Years ago I spent ten hours or so working on a web app called "notable" that did all this but I got bogged down in minor issues after trying to add a dozen or so media sources.

Since we now live in the future it took me just a couple hours to build and deploy this wonderful web app with Claude. My toxic Reddit visits are down 98% (I've been on-and-off for 17 years). I use Riverbed almost every day and it's a joy.

Roadmap

A few people have suggested I run this as a public website for anyone to use. That faces a few challenges:

1. I can crawl 120 sources from my local home internet every 2 hours no problem. But 1,200, or 12,000? That's where you start to get blocked.
2. Adding a source is usually easy. But if it's a new type of source (weird website) I need to use Claude to modify the website code itself - not just click a button inside Riverbed. This is effortless for me but I can't easily give untrusted users that kind of power.
3. Without optimizations, rebuilding a different AI model for each user every two hours means my home server can only support a few hundred users.

Still, I'm considering my options.

Thanks for reading.