(1) Remember which stories I’ve seen, and don’t show them to me again.

(2) Show me only the top 3 stories (this number is user-adjustable) and let me zoom in for more detail as desired. If I tap Next (which I’ll do only if I have time for more), show me the next 3. I’ll keep tapping Next only as long as I have spare time available and find the stories interesting (they’ll get less interesting as the highest stories get used up).

(3) Determine what is “top” based on several factors: how new it is, how important it appears to be according to signals from the Internet (including what Summify looks at), and my own preferences. Most people don’t state preferences, so this includes implicit preferences, e.g. which stories I’ve historically zoomed in on is a good clue. If I do want to state preferences, those should be respected, e.g. I don’t like sports but still want to see important stuff, so on the Settings page I move the Sports slider most of the way to the left but not all the way, resulting in a long-term average of 5% sports stories — I’ll rarely see sports but I’ll still find out who won the World Series — and the other sliders automatically move proportionately to the right.

(4) Unless the news reader is being used with a single source (a newspaper might want to distribute such a reader for use with only its own content), stories are aggregated across sources so that I only see a story once, with the version chosen according to my preferences (e.g. I like NYT and I dislike Fox News, as indicated implicitly and/or explicitly).

I’d use this reader whenever I had some time available; even just a few minutes waiting for the bus or whatever would be fine. It would be available on all my devices, and if I’d read a story on one device then no device would repeat it. If I didn’t use the reader for a week, I wouldn’t miss anything important, as any big stories that came out during my time away would be shown: they’d have enough points to counteract the loss of points due to age.