Following sources

Scour finds posts for you automatically. You can follow specific sources to further curate your experience.

You don't need to follow specific sources.

By default, Scour searches for content matching your interests across 30,826 community-contributed sources (122 added this week).

Adding a feed that isn't on Scour yet makes it available to everyone; following one that's already here just puts it in your feed. There are no private feeds yet.

Why follow specific sources?

Following gives you more control:

• Focus your sources: See only posts from the sources you follow, while your interests still filter what you see within them.
• Prioritize specific authors: Following ensures their posts are considered for your feed.
• Get feed recommendations: Scour can recommend similar sources you might have missed.

How Scour handles multiple sources

When the same article appears in multiple feeds, Scour shows it once and combines the sources. You won't see duplicate entries cluttering your results.

Scour also balances content across sources, so a feed posting dozens of articles a day won't drown out a blog that posts monthly. See How ranking works for how.

The Sources filter

The sources dropdown above your feed controls which sources Scour searches:

• Sources you follow: Only content from feeds you follow
• All sources: Search all 30,826 sources on Scour
• Beyond your sources: Search every source on Scour except the feeds you follow, for finding writers you haven't discovered yet

Following sources from posts

When you find a post you like, click the site name under it to open the site's page, then press Follow. To follow a specific feed instead, open the post's ⋯ menu and tap "Feeds."

Here's an example. Notice the "Discussed on …" line that appears when an article has a conversation on a site like Hacker News, Reddit, or Lobsters. The card shows one venue; select the post to see the rest:

Finding and adding feeds

You can browse feeds directly:

• Popular feeds (most followers on Scour)
• Newest feeds (recently added to Scour)

The Sort menu on that tab has more ways in: Most frequent, Recently active, Name A-Z, and, when you're signed in, Followed first and Unfollowed first.

To add feeds manually, go to your Feeds page and paste URLs (RSS, Atom, JSON Feed, or website URLs). You can enter multiple URLs at once. If Scour can't read a URL as a feed and follows another feed it found, it tells you which one. For migrating from another reader, import an OPML file. See For RSS users for details. When you import an OPML file, Scour also suggests interests based on the feeds you follow.

You can follow four kinds of sources:

• Sites: everything Scour finds from one website, whether it arrives through the site's own feed or through other feeds that carry it. This is what Follow does by default.
• Sections: one part of a bigger site, like one newsletter on buttondown.com, one GitHub repo or one Medium publication.
• People: posts by one author, either on one site or on every site where Scour finds their name. Bylines come from each site, so Scour can't confirm that the same name on different sites is the same person. Press Follow beside the byline on an expanded post. Or click the byline to see what Scour has found under that name.
• Feeds: one RSS, Atom or JSON feed, exactly as published. Use this for an aggregator like Hacker News, or for a feed that carries many sites.

Feed recommendations & management

Once you have interests and followed feeds, Scour recommends the sources that most consistently match your interests, rather than the ones that simply publish the most. Mirrors and aggregators that relay other sites' posts are left out. You'll find these leading the Feeds tab of your Discover page, with new suggestions also woven into your feed as you read.

Here's an example of a popular feed:

• Follow to add it to your sources
• Not interested to improve future recommendations

Your Followed Sources page shows all the sources you follow with recent posts. A search box and a Sort menu (Newest added, Oldest added, Name A-Z) sit above the list. From there you can search, unfollow, or export as OPML. Sites and sections export as their best feed.

Bookmarklet

Drag this link to your bookmarks bar:

When you're on any page with a feed (blog, news site, podcast), click the bookmarklet to open Scour's Feeds page with the URL pre-filled.

Still have questions? Or feedback on these docs? Please let me know!