This appeared in my feed today and I like the idea of it.
Bubbles seems to be a “Hacker News but for non techy blogs”, that curated a bunch of RSS feeds from blogs and every post is shared, but some float to the top (the ones that have votes), and some sink down.
Nice analogy, hopefully it ends up a successful project 
So fun! Thanks for sharing this.
My own blog has appeared on their list as well, haha.
It sent me to an awesome blog post right away, and a few more once after looking around a bit. Good to see some familiar names on the front page, too. This one’s a keeper!
This was also shared in the Discord! I’m just going to copy/paste my thoughts because they haven’t really changed.
Hacker News and Lobste.rs have community voting figured out, but non-tech content gets drowned by the tech majority. Kagi Small Web curates thousands of personal sites, but has no community-driven ranking. Blog directories help you find blogs, not today’s best blog post. Social platforms own the conversation. Mastodon is decentralized and ad-free, but you only see what the people you follow share. RSS is great, but solitary. There’s no collective signal telling you what’s worth reading today.
Not sure if I agree with this 100%—I’m most certainly missing out on feeds I could enjoy, but I do easily find feeds I do. It’s fine for things to slip through the cracks. It’s fine, IMO, for people to have to do the hard part and search for stuff. It’s how you ensure that the feed really is something you’d like rather than something you’re iffy on but mindlessly follow anyways.
Also, depending on the culture/makeup of the community, community voting could easily have similar problems as an algorithm. While algorithms trend one way or another based on unseen code, their main direction—at the end of the day—is still fueled by how people interact with it. Even if some algorithms do a worse job than others at guessing what people really want lol (or if some are particularly programmed to show/not show certain content).
This does still seem intresting if nothing else but… I’m still a little weary. Especially since they seem to oversell the idea of how hard feed finding is without Bubbles, to make Bubbles more appealing, instead of just… letting it stand on its own merit.
Maybe it’s just a creator being proud of their latest project. Besides, it matters who’s doing the curation. There’s ooh.directory for example, but I never, ever found a good post through them, and stopped visiting after a while. So having choices is important.
I think this person is coming from a place of good faith and wanted to make a project for themselves that they’re also sharing for others to participate in.
I don’t think that they mean for this to be a replacement for the other ways to discover blogs, but just another option that has a similar system to Hacker News and Lobste.rs.
edit: As someone that posts a lot of life / non-tech content and browse through the bear discover feed I do appreciate seeing a similar type of feed that is geared towards non-tech things. (Though I still mainly use my own RSS feed when I follow blogs).
I guess it’s just the phrasing of “telling you what’s worth reading today” that sets me off. My critisms are not an attack on the project by any means — just a genuine concern that it’s re-introducing ideas to RSS that many of us (myself included) are explicitly trying to avoid when using RSS. I don’t like the idea of feeds becoming popularity contests, posts being tailor-made to the desires of this community (or similar ones) to make Number Go Up.
the layout reminds me of hacker news and lobste.rs also, bearblog has this thing that lets you vote on blog posts
That does seem to match what’s in the FAQ, where it says Bubbles is for “People who enjoy reading blog posts about things other than startups and JavaScript frameworks.”
Since that’s… most blogposts, this strikes me as a project that could stand to narrow its scope. I’m reminded of the times when I’ve prompted my students to identify a target audience and they simply responded “the general public.”
I share the same sentiment. If someone’s telling me they can identify “today’s best blog post” on my behalf, I want them to tell me their criteria. If their criteria involve Reddit-style popularity contests then I expect we have different priorities.
I also follow dozens of hand-picked RSS feeds. An aggregator is complementary to that. It can surface blogs and posts I would never had thought of searching for by myself.
Oh look, another good one this morning. Going to keep using this service for a while.