A while back I posted here about RealFeedApp, a free digest that collects science and tech news, collapses the retellings into one card, ranks by significance and writes a short summary in your language. Last time it learned to explain itself: every card got three plain-language lines under the summary.
This post is about what happened since. The headline is a Telegram channel, and the most interesting thing about it is a setting: every post deletes itself after a week.
The first version was a wall of text
The idea was obvious. Search engines take months to notice a new site; a channel reaches people the day you post. So the first version did the obvious thing: once a day, the five top stories of the last 24 hours, as one message. Headline, summary, link to the original, repeat five times.
It worked, technically. I opened the first post in the channel and was disappointed.
It was a block of text. No pictures. None of the "in plain words" lines the site had just learned to write. No tags, no sense of which field a story belonged to. And every link went straight to the original source, so the site — the thing that actually does the work — was nowhere in it.
Nobody reposts a wall of text. You can't forward the one story you care about; it's glued to four others. And a reader who skims it learns nothing they couldn't have got from any aggregator.
The lesson was simple and slightly embarrassing: I had built a channel that showed less than the product it was supposed to advertise.
One story, one post, the whole card
So the channel now posts the way the site shows things. One story per message, spread through the day instead of a morning dump. Each post is the card:
- the cover image from the site;
- the headline and the summary;
- the "in plain words" block — the field as a tag, what was done, why it matters — set off from the summary the way it is on the card;
- tags you can tap through within the channel;
- a link to the story's page on the site, and from there to the original.
That last change matters most. A post is now a preview of a card, not a replacement for it. If the story is yours, you forward that one post. If you want more, you land on the site, where the rest of the feed is.
Two small rules came out of looking at real posts before they went out. A story whose translation came out broken doesn't get posted at all — a broken word in a feed is a bug; in a public post it's a broken word in front of every subscriber at once. And the channel leans towards news over dense preprints: the feed is for people who opted in to a field; the channel is for people who just followed a link.
Why the posts disappear
Here's the setting I mentioned at the top: the channel's messages auto-delete after a week.
It sounds like throwing work away. It's the opposite.
A channel that keeps everything slowly becomes the product. Scroll back far enough and it's a second, worse feed: no search, no topics, no "hide this", no memory of what you liked, and nothing that gets better the more you use it. If that archive grows forever, it starts competing with the site and the app — and it wins on convenience while losing on everything else.
So the channel is a window, not a home. It shows what's happening this week, and points at the place where the rest lives. A week-old science headline is stale anyway; anything that still matters is on the site.
What else is new
Story pages. Every story now has its own page on the site: cover, summary, the plain-words block, tags, and a clear button to the original. That's where channel posts lead.
A daily archive. Each finished day gets a page with its top stories, open to everyone, no account needed — and an archive that lists the days. If you missed a week, that's the fastest way to catch up.
Links in your language. The feed now has its own address per language (/en/, /ru/, …). Share the Russian version with a friend and they get the Russian version, regardless of what their browser says.
Keywords from a vocabulary. Your own keywords are no longer typed in free text; you pick them from the terms the feed actually uses, and the screen explains what they change. Free text looked flexible and mostly matched nothing.
A quieter, more honest daily digest in the app. The notification gives you one reason to open it instead of a list nobody can read in a notification shade; the app tells you when the next one arrives; and the last digest can be reopened from settings.
A cleaner feed. Threads and discussions no longer show up as news — nothing happens in them, someone just talks about something that did. A story is filed by what it's about, not by where it came from. And a headline that says the opposite of its own summary, or names something the article never mentions, doesn't reach the feed.
Try it
Still free.
- The site: realfeedapp.com — a preview of the feed with no account; signing in with Google opens the rest and remembers your topics.
- The channel: t.me/realfeedapp. It's in Russian for now, since that's where Telegram is strongest for me; the site and the daily archive are in English too.
Two things I'd like to hear:
- Would you forward one of these posts? That's the whole test for the new format, and I can't run it on myself.
- Is a week the right lifetime? Shorter makes the channel feel like a ticker; longer and it starts turning into the feed I was trying not to build.
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