Interests

Interests are how you tell Scour what you care about. Add a few topics, and Scour finds relevant content across thousands of sources by combining two kinds of matching: what an article means and what it actually says.

What interests do

Only the interests you add determine which topics appear in your feed. Clicks and reactions tune the balance among them, never the list: see How ranking works for what they do change.

Creating interests

Start by adding 3-5 topics you genuinely want to read about. Interests can range from wide areas to narrow niches:

Type them into the What do you want to read about? box on your Interests page or on Discover. One topic works, and so does a sentence describing several: Scour splits what you wrote into separate interests and shows you each one, with its keywords and a few posts it matches right now, before anything is added. Edit or drop any of them, then add the ones you want. As you type, matching interests other readers already follow appear as chips under the box, alongside an Add “…” chip that adds exactly the words you wrote. One tap adds either, and another takes it back.

• Wide topics: "AI" will surface content about machine learning, LLMs, robotics, and more
• Narrow topics: "Rust async runtime internals" will find exactly that
• Personal topics: "Home Cooking" or "Photography" are great too. Scour isn't only for tech or work

Not sure what to add? Browse popular interests to see what others have found valuable. You can copy any interest with one click.

Feel free to add as many interests as you like. Some users have 500+. Scour automatically diversifies your feed so no single topic dominates, and a search box and a Sort menu (Newest added, Oldest added, Name A-Z) above the list keep a long one navigable.

Using keywords

Each interest has an optional "keywords" field. Use it to refine or disambiguate:

• Disambiguation: "Rust" with "programming, cargo, crates" clarifies you mean the programming language rather than oxidation
• Narrowing scope: "Cooking" with "Italian, pasta, Mediterranean" focuses your results

Keywords influence both sides of matching: they shape the lexical filters and tilt scoring toward articles that actually use that vocabulary.

Tips for good interests

• Labels must be unique — You can't have two interests with the same label. Use distinct names like "AI Research" and "AI Tools" instead of both being "AI".
• Labels appear in your feed — When a post matches your interest, the label shows up below the title. Keep them concise.
• Acronyms work — Use "LLM" as a label with "large language models, GPT, Claude" as keywords.

Specificity tiers

Each interest has a specificity setting that shifts the balance between matching on meaning (semantic) and matching on the interest's actual words (lexical). To change it, open the interest's ⋯ menu on your Interests page and pick Edit interest. The same menu holds Show matching rules, which unfolds the lexical rules Scour compiled for that interest, and Delete interest.

• Broad — Semantic matching does most of the work. Good for wide topics like "Technology" or "Culture" where relevant articles often talk around the topic rather than naming it directly.
• Normal (default) — A balanced mix of semantic and lexical matching. Articles need to be on-topic by meaning and generally use the topic's vocabulary.
• Specific — Lexical matching does most of the work. Use this for precise terms like "Rust" or "PostgreSQL" where you want articles that explicitly discuss the topic with its actual name.

Scour picks a specificity when you create an interest. If results feel too noisy or off-topic, try Specific to require the topic's actual vocabulary. If you're missing content you'd expect, try Broad to let meaning carry more weight.

For the full picture of how content gets ranked, see How ranking works.

Interest recommendations

As you use Scour (clicking articles, reacting to posts, following feeds) the system learns what topics might interest you. You'll find these suggestions leading the Interests tab of your Discover page, and woven into your feed as you read.

Here's what a recommendation looks like:

Press "Add" to keep it, or "Not interested" to teach Scour what you don't want.

Scour may also add a topic automatically when your reading consistently signals interest in it. Any auto-added interest appears on your Interests page and can be removed there or directly from the toast that appears when it is added.

Suggest interests from your feeds

If you've followed feeds or uploaded an OPML file, Scour can analyze your feeds to suggest interests automatically. This is a quick way to bootstrap your interests, especially if you're migrating from another reader.

Use the "Suggest from your feeds" link on the Interests tab of the Discover page to get suggestions based on the feeds you currently follow. OPML uploads also trigger suggestions automatically.

Add interests from an article

When you love or like a post, on its card or on the pin that greets you when you come back from reading it, Scour shows up to four suggested topic chips matched to what that story is about, plus the post's own source so you can follow it as a feed. Tap a topic to add it as an interest in a single step. Topics close to ones you already follow are left out, so some posts show fewer chips, or none. You can also open them on demand from any post: pick See related topics in its “…” menu.

For a deeper search, use Extract topics from this post: Scour reads the full article and returns a broader set of topics for you to pick from. Found an article you loved but aren't sure how to describe the topic? This is the option for that. The suggestions still come from the article itself, so they reflect what it's actually about, and you confirm the list before anything changes.

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