Even this is too much, I don't want a feed, I just want a daily digest about the cognitive equivalent of the daily newspaper.

Your newspaper idea meshes with what I've been thinking. But there's a problem. Newspapers did have images, ads, and headlines, but they were more than just that and a few one-line editorials.

In the early days, people posted rather lengthy articles/editorials about what they were doing, thinking, feeling, who they were, etc. On Livejournal, then on blogs, even in the early days of Facebook. But those are mostly gone now, reduced to tweet-sized chunks and making up only a fraction of the feed. Instead, people mostly just reshare, reblog, retweet, copy memes, add links, sometimes photos, checkin somewhere, etc. A newsletter with all of that filtered out, and only the actual content posts would usually be empty.

But if someone could start something like that and start a trend of people actually communicating on a large scale, and making it as digest/newspaper style, that could be pretty interesting.

Can you be more specific about "communicating on a large scale" ? You mean public discussion on social issues / news ?

I was picturing larger scale as in more like journal entries or blog posts than tweets and shares and one-line statuses. Not necessarily lengthy, but enough to give some context and some idea of the writer's feelings/thoughts around whatever they're writing about, yet still within the realm of social. That could include their thoughts on social issues or news (rather than just a link, meme, or one-line opinion), or just their thoughts about life and philosophy and what's going on their lives.

Shameless plug: We created https://contentgems.com for this exact purpose. The ability to filter articles in a bunch of RSS feeds, and any articles shared on Twitter based on keywords I specify. It's not trying to be smart, it just gives you what you're asking for. It's a mashup of Feedly, Google Alerts, Buffer, and IFTTT/Zapier.