Newsblur can do the first kind of filtering. You select “best gadgets” in the title, and all posts on that feed with that phrase in the title will be hidden from then on.

The less its posts are shared, the less its relevance is to the world. I can’t see that as a bad thing. It always baffled me how outsize Twitter’s influence was on world events/news while having 1/5th the active userbase of Facebook.

I used Feedly since Google Reader was shut down. Then 1.5 years ago, as Feedly was getting more paywalls and AI-crap, I switched to Newsblur, and have been a happy user ever since. I love its Intelligence Trainer that lets me hide posts with certain tags/authors/keywords.

Unlimited hosted-by-them Newsblur costs 36 USD / year. It has a FLOSS version and a more limited free hosted-by-them version, but the 2.5 GBP / month was worth the QoL increase for me.

• Look around in your online communities and see what publications get shared.
• Once you find some sites you like, search the web/communities for alternatives with the same topic/vibe.
• If you find journalists you like, see where else they publish their works, or what publications they used to work at. For bloggers / content creators, see who they collaborate with.