I was thinking that perhaps changing the UI to where it was like tinder, so that a user could swipe articles that they wanted to read later in one direction and ones they knew they wanted to skip in the other would be at least a faster way of going through things. Either that, or making it like Inbox by Google, where someone could snooze an article for later. Information could be collected based on that and sent to the publisher so they would know which content was popular and what was not (along with which articles were shared from the app, etc). A third option would be to use a messenger UI where a user delete/archive links or favorite them, and reply to messages with their thoughts and comments for things that they find useful. I currently have a setup similar to this, but it's not very elegant.

There could be a new feed given to the user, based on that, if they feel overwhelmed with their unfiltered one, but always switch over to the regular view/feed as needed. It could be even more granular, where some feeds are algorithmically sorted or ignored based on certain keywords set by the user and others are not.