This is a hard problem to solve. Basically what people want is an addictive way to consume high quality text.

I have made my own RSS readers with things like filtering, creating feeds from pages (e.g. the APNews.com home page), rendering the page itself with custom CSS/Javascript, etc.

Except I don't really use my RSS feed I spent months making because the firehose of random articles just does not work. I like The Atlantic as much as everyone, but do I want to read _every_ article? No.

Why is Reddit and Hacker News addictive? Because of the social component of it. So the author is on the right track with the insight to make it more like StumbleUpon. But... why bother when you can just go read Reddit or Hacker News? RSS readers are fundamentally lonely.

The non-social solution to "addictive internet text" to me is the research part of finding information you're curious about. I frequently will read something or think of something and go down this Wikipedia rabbit hole, trying to find more information. This is way more engaging than reading a random news article. The question is how to create discovery that leads to more discovery, where the user can find the information themselves (something like how people go down the Ancestry DNA rabbit holes). This way you don't need a social hook to build something "addictive." But how to get there is something I'm still trying to figure out.