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Scour Year End Update 2025

I thought about sending out a personalized "Scour Wrapped"... until I got the 7th Wrapped from some random service. So instead, I'll just say Happy New Year and thanks for your support in 2025! 🥂

2025 By the Numbers


New Features in November and December

These were the new features added since the last update in October.

💵 Identifying Paywalled Content

Scour now identifies articles that are paywalled and indicates them with a yellow dollar sign next to the domain.

In your settings, you can opt to hide paywalled content. If you do, you can also exempt specific domains where you have a subscription so you will see their content even if it is behind the paywall.

Thank you to Johnny and Allen for requesting this feature!

For anyone interested in the technical details, I wrote a blog post about a neat SQL trick I came across while building this: Short-Circuiting Correlated Subqueries in SQLite.

🚫 Excluded Domains

You can also now block content from specific websites. The option to block a domain can be found by clicking the "..." button below each post. You can see and manage your excluded domains in your settings.

Thanks to Vahe for this suggestion!

🗞️ Feed UI and Recommendations

If you subscribe to specific feeds (as opposed to scouring all of them), Scour will now recommend other sources for you to follow right in your personalized feed. These recommendations are based on Scour looking for content that matches your interests that you aren't currently getting. You can find more recommendations on your Feeds page.

Each feed also now displays its three most recent posts below its description to make it easier to know what you'll get if you subscribe. You can click on the feed's title to see all of the posts from that feed.

Thanks to Tiago for this suggestion!

👁️ Preview Posts

By default, clicking on a link to a post will bring you to the original website where it was published. However, if you prefer to read it on Scour, you can read the Preview, which can be found in the "..." menu under each post.

Thanks to Linh for this suggestion!

The filter menu for your feed (accessible via the button next to where it says Your Top Finds) should be clearer and more mobile-friendly. You can filter by time range and toggle between seeing posts from feeds you’ve subscribed to or see posts from everyone’s feeds.

Thanks Stefan for the feedback on this!

👍 How are Likes used?

A number of people have told me that they are confused about how the love/like/dislike reactions are used on Scour. I'll work on making this clearer in the future but in the meantime, there's now a section in the FAQs about this. The answer is:

Loves and likes are saved to your Likes page, so you can use them to bookmark interesting content.

Unlike most content aggregators, Scour does not use reactions to change what shows up in your feed. Instead, reactions are used to generate Interest Recommendations for you. Scour only shows content related to topics you've explicitly chosen.

You can also subscribe to other users' Likes as feeds. Everyone's reactions contribute to the Popular Posts page.


🔖 Some of My Favorite Posts

Here were some of my favorite posts I found on Scour in November and December:


Thanks for the Shout-Outs

Thanks to everyone who wrote about Scour on their blog or website in 2025! This included:

If you write about Scour in the future, or if you already did and I didn't include you, please let me know!

Thanks for the Feedback

Thank you to everyone who provided feedback on Scour this year!

Specifically, thank you to Aaron, Alberto, Alex K, Alex W, Allen, Andrew D, Andrew M, Andy M, Andy P, Cairin, Cole, Daniel, Elyem, Hary, Imperfect, Jadi, Jeppe, Jesse, Johnny, Jon, Karit, Kilpatrj, Linh, Proudmuslim-dev, Ryan, Sarah, Stefan, Tiago, Tomáš, Tyler, and Vahe. And thank you to all of the anonymous feedback givers as well!


🎁 Post-Credits Surprise

Because you made it to the end of the post, here's a little preview of an upcoming feature for you.

Let's say you want to only see posts from small websites, like individuals' blogs. You can now try filtering your feed by how many posts each website or feed publishes per month. For example, you can use these links to see only posts from quieter domains or quieter feeds.

Or, you can try this one to only see articles from larger websites.

Let me know what you think! UI for controlling these filters is coming soon!

Happy New Year and happy Scouring!

#scour