[HN Gopher] Goodbye, Feedly
___________________________________________________________________
Goodbye, Feedly
Author : erikgahner
Score : 179 points
Date : 2022-07-02 08:00 UTC (15 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (erikgahner.dk)
(TXT) w3m dump (erikgahner.dk)
| Semaphor wrote:
| > I started using it because of its simplicity and minimalism.
|
| That is so weird to me. I tried pretty much everything there was
| back then (eventually settled on Newsblur only to switch to self-
| hosted TT-RSS after they raised prices when I already barely got
| any use out of their features) and Feedly always seemed like one
| of the most bloated/featureful (pick your choice here :D) options
| there was.
| htk wrote:
| For those in the Apple ecosystem I recommend NetNewsWire. It can
| sync with iCloud without needing any extra services. I use it on
| my Macs, iPads and iPhone.
|
| (I'm not affiliated with them, just a happy user)
| butz wrote:
| Miniflux works great for me. Took a few months to get used to
| minimal layout, but it has everything that I need to read RSS
| feeds. I'm using paid hosted version, but there is an open source
| version which can be self-hosted.
| Rudism wrote:
| Second this. I've been self-hosting Miniflux for years and love
| it. It's dead simple to run (a single executable daemon or
| docker container that you can run behind a reverse proxy) and
| it sounds like exactly what the author of this article is
| looking for--no frills RSS reader with a very minimalist
| interface.
| PaulKeeble wrote:
| FreshRSS (https://freshrss.org/) is self hosted and its what I
| have been using for years. There are a variety of RSS web readers
| you can deploy to a home server or NAS or even just a raspberry
| pi stuck in the corner they aren't very resource intensive as
| programs and the docker images make them really easy to deploy.
| Macha wrote:
| Been using freshrss and mostly happy with it. The UI is a
| little clunky but the biggest wishlist item is if they let me
| use article dates from feeds rather than fetch dates everywhere
| r2222 wrote:
| I've been very happy with https://feedbin.com
|
| It's a paid RSS syncing service and web app too, costs $5 per
| month, I use it with Reeder (and NetNewsWire etc). It doesn't
| have any social cruft or AI assistants or ML companions.
|
| I was also a Feedly user when I decided to try Feedbin, and I
| immediately noticed how much faster fetching the feeds was on
| Feedbin. I also like to have my email newsletters in same place
| (forward them to a Feedbin-provided email address), and I can
| have filters to mark things like sponsored posts and podcast show
| notes as read automatically, basically like mute filters.
|
| Feedly premium tier costs pretty much the same, and I wonder how
| well it would stack against Feedbin. There's also Inoreader which
| I think offers pretty similar feature set for a pretty similar
| price.
|
| Feedly free tier is excellent, and you can work around many of
| its shortcomings by using an RSS reader app. For example, Feedly
| free doesn't offer full text articles, but I can extract the full
| text with Reeder/NetNewsWire/etc on the client-side. If you
| really don't care about speed, mute filters, or reading
| newsletters in your RSS reader, then Feedly free tier is already
| more than enough.
| phlyingpenguin wrote:
| I've been using feedbin since Reader closed, so I guess 9
| years. Still grandfathered in a $20/yr plan, even. The best
| thing about it for me is that I mostly don't think about it
| other than a visit to see my feeds. It does what I want and
| isn't awful to look at. Most of the RSS apps I've ever used
| have integration too. It's a lovely service.
| Semiapies wrote:
| Feedbin is pretty great. I was particularly glad it was paid,
| early on, because that made it more likely to actually _stay
| around_.
| Derbasti wrote:
| I've been using Feedbin ever since Google Reader died. It has
| been awesome!
|
| I use it to subscribe to YouTube channels, Twitter,
| newsletters, Subreddits, HN, and, yes, RSS feeds. I frequently
| use its sharing feature to pinboard.
|
| I think I still pay the original $2 a month. But even at $5, it
| is one of my favorite services of all time. Truly a gem.
|
| Readably is a good reader for feedbin on Android.
| jacurtis wrote:
| I switched from Feedly to FeedBin recently for all the same
| reasons and noticed all the same things you highlighted here. I
| don't mind the nominal fee of $5/mo since it is a delightful
| experience that is powerful, fast, and clean. They have added
| features that I think we need, without the Bloat. Ironically
| Feedly is only $1 more per month, but I was never enticed to
| upgrade because the experience was really just awful. FeedBin
| also gives access to a solid API for you to manage your feeds
| and supports all the open standards as well to easily
| import/export them.
|
| I think the takeaway for product owners is that sometimes you
| need to really zoom out and look at your product. I used Feedly
| for 8-9 years as a free user and never wanted to upgrade. I was
| willing to for the right product, but never did. Once I found a
| simpler product (FeedBin) that met my needs, I immediately
| paid.
|
| Feedly has shoved ads and half-assed new features into their
| product for almost a decade trying to get their influx of
| Google Reader subscribers to upgrade. But no one was compelled
| to. It eventually pissed off free users enough that they switch
| to other paid alternatives. That's pretty sad honestly.
| protonbob wrote:
| Is there an easy to use self hosted solution for this?
| hairofadog wrote:
| If you're on a Mac or iOS you can use Reeder, which syncs to
| iCloud and eliminates the need for any other cloud service. I
| think other RSS apps may do the same.
| astrostl wrote:
| Reeder (et al.) + iCloud sync was a game-changer for me too.
| frenkel wrote:
| Feedbin is what the author wants. It is even open source.
| edvinasbartkus wrote:
| second that! and NetNewsWire is a great companion to Feedbin
| when you want native experience on iPad/iPhone/Mac.
| ismaildonmez wrote:
| https://theoldreader.com/ is still the best thing after Google
| Reader.
| martini333 wrote:
| Ugly UI.
| ismaildonmez wrote:
| So was Google Reader, and it worked fine. That's the whole
| point.
| Gualdrapo wrote:
| Google Reader's UI wasn't that bad imho.
| vanderZwan wrote:
| I tried it when they started, it was a sluggish mess that also
| did not use the browser cache correctly. Maybe I noticed
| because I had thousands of RSS feeds, I dunno. Granted, that
| was a decade ago so I hope they improved it since.
|
| I stick to https://newsblur.com/. It has it's quirks but is
| way, way faster (two days ago a redesign came out that makes it
| so fast I feel like I'm using the old Google Reader again)
| stereoradonc wrote:
| I read about their redesign today. I was with them for about
| 5+ years but then eventually shifted to Inoreader.
| vmoore wrote:
| Or if you want to self host: https://miniflux.app/
| mikechalmers wrote:
| Agreed - I've been using it since Google Reader ended and have
| used it practically daily since. While they've implemented some
| limitations and premium options, the interface has stayed
| basically the same with some unobtrusive elements.
|
| I did have to cull some inactive blogs at one point, to stay
| within my tier limit, but was happy to do so. Incredible that
| it's been 9 years with barely any UI changes - I think this
| demonstrates how effective it is.
| radiosnob wrote:
| I rarely ever pay for services on the web. But I will pay for
| theoldreader. My mind is getting foggy with age, but I think it
| does everything that Google Reader did, and not much more. The
| perfect drop-in replacement.
| voisin wrote:
| My biggest pet peeve with Feedly is that it doesn't allow for
| filtering by keyword (which could be done on-device to save
| server resources if that's a concern) without a monthly
| subscription that includes tons of things I don't care about,
| like this AI thing and whatnot. I'd even pay a one time fee for
| this right. But forcing users to pay for something so simple in
| perpetuity seems ridiculous.
| boboche wrote:
| Same path here, google, feedly, ragequit feedly due to
| bloat/jirafication, now inoreader. Up to 150 feeds supported,
| works awesome on ipad and web.
| madsbuch wrote:
| Growth vs. value, development vs. maintenance, innovation vs.
| operations.
|
| It really seems like a lot of projects should embrace the the
| path of becoming a stable product: Charging 10 USD a year,
| assigning a single person to a comfy job of maintaining the app
| without adding new features. Just maintaining infrastructure,
| updating packages, and doing the occasional exchange of stack
| when old technologies are deprecated...
|
| Why doesn't that happen more?
| Semiapies wrote:
| Most people don't actually want to pay for things.
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| Investors looking for returns
|
| What you're describing is a kind of anti growth public service.
| Sounds nice!
| dafi70 wrote:
| I agree with you about useless PRO features.
|
| I loved the 'Mute filters' feature, but they ruined it forcing to
| use Leo, expressions like "title:HackerNews" are no longer
| available and LEO is less useful than a simple search by keyword
|
| but... there is a "but", I use Feedly APIs and I love them, I
| developed apps for myself to aggregate and quickly find
| informations starting from the feeds, using Feedly is so easy, so
| I continue to pay for a really small subset of features only to
| be able to extract info from my RSS feeds
| chazeon wrote:
| Feedly is not serious RSS. They don't have the right taste for
| the RSS guys of right mind. Switched off after a few months years
| ago, then become a user for Feedbin. I recently switched to self
| hosted Miniflux due to their customizable full text scraper and
| had never been happier.
| smitty1e wrote:
| I'm torn between the love of Free Stuff and the understanding
| that even Free Stuff costs money.
| lbriner wrote:
| It's not even a choice between free and not-free, sometimes you
| would be happy to pay but then the tool becomes bloatware. As
| the OP said, why do you need two vertical menus for an RSS
| reader? Why not hide the advanced stuff under an advanced menu
| or allow customising what is and isn't visible?
|
| Plenty of apps/sites become popular on a strong core USP which
| people want and then add a tonne of cruft as they pretend they
| are adding value, when in many cases it is just noise that only
| a few people want/use but everyone else has to suffer the UX
| changes along the way.
| livelace wrote:
| Cannot stay away, because I'm a guy who used Google Reader and
| moved all my RSS stuff 1-2 years before Google Reader was finally
| closed. I tried to use Feedly and other tools, but at that time I
| decided to use rss2email. Right now I have my own tool
| (https://github.com/livelace/gosquito) for data gathering from
| different sources. One way to use it - just put news into mail
| system (I'm Zimbra user -
| https://paste.pics/7f48e9ca655de96f2160ecbff474bbca, and I use
| internal search engine heavily).
|
| I don't depend on external services and can process data as I
| want.
| karolist wrote:
| For many years I'm using ReadKit for Mac and couldn't be happier.
| Paid once in like 2014 and the app is still getting updates plus
| I get to my content without third parties. Why use a web service
| for something that doesn't need a backend to function?
| hestefisk wrote:
| NetNewsWire user here. It's very good. Would love one running on
| Linux natively.
| thombles wrote:
| The closest equivalents I've found on other platforms are
| Akregator (Linux/KDE) and QuiteRSS (Win).
| [deleted]
| shimmeringleaf wrote:
| Seconded, it would be lovely to have cross platform. Simple and
| just works without fuss. Now, if only more websites would have
| RSS feeds these days.. it's been a steady decline.
| timbit42 wrote:
| QuiteRSS. It even runs on OS/2.
| Cupertino95014 wrote:
| I use free Feedly multiple times a day, since the demise of
| Reader. I'm scanning the comments for another free alternative
| that doesn't suck, but so far I haven't found one.
|
| The prompts for "give us money" are infrequent enough that they
| don't bother me, much. What do you want for nothing, a
| rrrrrrrubber biscuit? [1]
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jYyBZE0kBtE
| nickthegreek wrote:
| Inoreader
| applefangirl wrote:
| I've got a couple recommendations. I currently use Net News
| Wire and News Explorer on the Mac. News Explorer has excelent
| YouTube integration. If you're into web apps Feedbin is IMO
| well worth the price.
| stiltzkin wrote:
| For free solutions there are better alternatives out there not
| sure the benefits of using free Feedly.
|
| As a Pro Feedly user since Google Reader brigade I got to agree
| to some sentiments about what Feedly offers for pro users, seems
| the Feedly team has the typical startup problem which is run by
| marketing people with out of dated ideas.
|
| The only feature I have to give props is building your own RSS
| reader from any website which has worked great on many site I
| could not work with.
|
| But for the price you pay so many features are so really niche
| that i dont need.
| andyjohnson0 wrote:
| I dont understqnd this attitude. I use feedly and like the author
| of tfa I don't pay them any money, so I ignore the junk. This is
| the price you have to pay when you get something for free. I have
| a lot of sympathy for feedly: it seems like a really hard thing
| to get people to pay for. What does the author think feedly
| should do with its free tier?
|
| Before feedly I self hosted TinyTinyRss for a while (kind of
| slow) and before that Google Reader. And before that Newsblur. I
| never paid for any of them and now I have more than enough paid
| subscriptions for stuff. Reading rss feeds just doesn't make it
| over the line of things I'd be willing to pay for.
|
| Edit: I pay PS10/month for Adobe Creative Cloud and get
| Photoshop, Lightroom, XD, Illustrator, etc. I pay ~PS8/month for
| Office 365 and get Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc. All massively
| rich and powerful tools. Why does feedly imagine I would want to
| pay PS5/month to read rss feeds?
| criddell wrote:
| > What does the author think feedly should do with its free
| tier?
|
| Not the author, but I think they should restrict the free tier
| to a small number of feeds rather than nag. Asking users to pay
| to get more is positive whereas asking users to pay to reduce
| nagging is negative.
| rammy1234 wrote:
| Absolutely 100%, myself and my friend were discussing the
| same about products. An upgrade should be about getting the
| same benefits but more. 10X speed upgrade does make product
| look bad. Instead reducing number of feeds you can have or
| grouping etc but a bad product is not a free tier. It is
| nuisance to deal with in our busy lives.
| tribby wrote:
| > I ignore the junk. This is the price you have to pay when you
| get something for free.
|
| clearly it isn't, or the author wouldn't have been able to move
| to a free alternative without any junk to ignore.
| andyjohnson0 wrote:
| I probably didn't express myself sufficiently clearly. I'm
| pleased that the author has moved from a Web app to local,
| open source apps. Definitely a good move, particularly on
| mobile. What I don't get is going to the effort of writing a
| blog post about the annoyance of using the free tier of a
| service provided by a commercial business. That tier is there
| to let people try the service. It's not surprising that the
| experience isn't friction-free: it's not meant to be.
| Adraghast wrote:
| > It's not surprising that the experience isn't friction-
| free: it's not meant to be.
|
| This is an argument for the intentional creation of bad
| software.
| Semiapies wrote:
| Or for not having free tiers.
| spidersouris wrote:
| > Edit: I pay PS10/month for Adobe Creative Cloud and get
| Photoshop, Lightroom, XD, Illustrator, etc. I pay ~PS8/month
| for Office 365 and get Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc. All
| massively rich and powerful tools. Why does feedly imagine I
| would want to pay PS5/month to read rss feeds?
|
| Because Freedly doesn't have Microsoft or Adobe's budget and
| needs to have its costs covered?
| mtlynch wrote:
| > _Why does feedly imagine I would want to pay PS5 /month to
| read rss feeds?_
|
| Microsoft and Adobe need massive scale to charge prices that
| low. They're each probably 10,000x-100,000x larger than Feedly
| in terms of end-user licenses.
|
| For a service I find useful enough to choose over a free
| alternative, I'm happy to pay $5-30/month to fund development
| and maintenance. I don't want all my software coming from the
| Microsofts and Adobes of the world.
| keithnz wrote:
| I find feedly works really great. I'm on the free tier, my UI is
| relatively uncluttered, they introduce new things from time to
| time, but mostly it's the same as when I first started when
| google reader shutdown.
|
| I get this author doesn't like it, but it all seems a bit overly
| dramatic for a few feeds.
| kken wrote:
| NewsBlur is pretty good and does exactly what it is intended for.
| scarface74 wrote:
| I deleted Feedly from my phone a long time ago for some reason. I
| can't remember why. It wasn't because I didn't like it.
|
| I redownloaded it a few weeks ago and it was a shit show. I
| looked for other alternatives and I found NetNewsWire.
|
| It has a long history of first being a commercial product by an
| indy Mac dev. He sold it to another company, reacquired the
| rights, updated it and now it's free and open source for the Mac
| and iOS. It's clean and does the basics.
| browningstreet wrote:
| I pay for Feedly, and have since the beginning, but I don't love
| it. Their search function has severe usability issues, which I've
| emailed them, and their enhanced features are stupid and useless.
|
| I don't like Feedly, and use Unread on the iPhone to read the
| feeds. They are like the Evernote of today. Every year I think
| I'll dump them and probably will. It's just been laziness so far.
|
| I pay, they feed my RSS feeds, so in that regard, it works. But
| yeah, I feel OP.
| JackFr wrote:
| OP is using a free service. Free service introduces changes which
| irritate OP. OP stops using service and looks for alternatives.
|
| All good.
|
| What I (and seemingly many other commenters) take issue with is
| the tone of the piece. That the OP has been disappointed, that
| they know better than Feedly management about what features to
| include and how to market them, that they are owed some sort of a
| user experience.
|
| I suppose the OP is offering this post as guidance and
| explanation for Feedly management but I can't imagine that this
| moves the needle.
| pipeline_peak wrote:
| Like the author and plenty of commenters have posted, even
| something as simple as an RSS feed is expensive when hosted among
| tens of thousands of users.
|
| > One of the features is that I will get "new articles up to 10x
| faster". What's that supposed to mean? That I have not been
| getting new articles straight away when I visit Feedly?
|
| This is a perfect example of what we take for granted, multi
| users RSS feeds have to poll missing pub dates, they don't just
| fetch the latest posts on a users request. This game where they
| pull the curtain and you realize how bottle necked you are as a
| free user, that's the sad game of running a business on these
| types of services.
|
| I've had an idea for an RSS reader for quite some time. One with
| a layout like HackerNews or early Reddit where all users have
| their own RSS feed, they can look at and follow other users feed
| items. there's a main page with posts ranked by number of
| followers and comments on each post. then of course a personal
| feed.
|
| But considering how much feature creep these services suffer, I
| don't see how I'd be able to keep it running without some premium
| payment system, certainly donations can't serve enough.
| t6jvcereio wrote:
| If you like simplistic, why not newsboat? I bet you it's faster
| than any POS web app
|
| https://newsboat.org/
| naugtur wrote:
| If you liked it before all the monetization strategies, maybe
| should have paid for it to keep it sustainable that way?
| jacurtis wrote:
| I'm am a huge proponent for paying for good software to support
| developers and creators.
|
| HOWEVER, I think you sentiment is wrong here. You _should_
| support creators that are doing things you like so that they
| keep doing those things you like. But it doesn't make sense to
| pay creators that are doing think you don't like. The fact that
| you start paying them is taken as confirmation that you are
| enjoying the product.
|
| Imagine if we all hated Feedly's product but banded together to
| have everyone subscribe to Feedly to support them. They would
| see that userbase as confirmation to keep doing what they are
| doing, building shitty software. They aren't going to about
| face their product strategy because you are paying them $6 a
| month now.
|
| So instead what we should all do is find creators that are
| doing RSS readers justice and support THOSE creators. For
| example, I switched from Feedly to Feedbin. I was a free user
| at Feedly and never wanted to upgrade because, like the author
| of the article said, it was bloated and unejoyable and the
| premium features weren't things I needed. So instead I found a
| tool that is everything I wanted, which happened to be FeedBin.
| I supported them and am paying them $5 per month for them to
| continue their efforts because they are building the software
| the way I want RSS Readers to be. So I would like to see them
| survive and thats what my paid subscription provides.
|
| Let's encourage good products. No reason to throw good money at
| bad products. Find the good ones and support those.
| prepend wrote:
| I don't think so. It would just be nagging for other things. I
| think this is a design philosophy by Feedly and paying just
| pushes the problem down the road.
|
| I pay for creative cloud and there's so many ads and pitches
| for new products. I long for the days where I pirated ps6 and
| never had any ads (or paid for it too).
| jefftk wrote:
| _> One of the features is that I will get "new articles up to 10x
| faster". What's that supposed to mean? That I have not been
| getting new articles straight away when I visit Feedly?_
|
| One of the features of Pro is that they'll pull the feeds you're
| subscribed to at a higher frequency. I think this is an example
| of doing freemium well!
| Gualdrapo wrote:
| Was going to mention this. For example, I see HN posts via
| Feedly. But after each fetch for "new" articles, the most
| recent ones it shows me from HN are from an hour ago at least.
| For some other websites it pulls their "most recent" content
| from the previous day.
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| I don't pay Feedly any money now because many years they were
| raising funds to buy new servers, and offered a premium service
| in perpetuity to anyone paying $100, which I did on the spot. It
| is a solid service that has grown to be a bit bigger than I'd
| love, but it does what it needs to. And if you don't like the
| 'marketing cruft' you can just block it with your adblocker of
| choice, not a rocket science.
| dwighttk wrote:
| Huh. I use Feedly but access it through Reeder and don't seem to
| have many troubles.
|
| Every once in a while I think of unsubscribing to a feed and it
| _is_ a bit of an adventure, but that is my only complaint.
| b-lee wrote:
| BTW I didn't understand the need for connecting Feedly to
| reader. Why didn't you simply import the OPML from Feedly to
| Reeder?
| dwighttk wrote:
| I set it up 9 years ago and OPML import was not made obvious
| to me.
|
| Or possibly: I think I was using NetNewsWire on desktop or
| something when I set it up, so maybe it was obvious but I
| wanted read-syncing between different platforms.
| UrgentOpinion wrote:
| One of the most useful features of Feedly for me was that you
| could export full articles with highlights as PDFs. Yet to find
| another RSS reader that can do this - am currently using
| Inoreader's highlighting features.
| sascha_sl wrote:
| Feedly has put a lot more effort into being a research tool,
| probably mostly for marketing in the past, well, years.
|
| Of course it clashes with being a simple RSS reader for the
| author. This is just mismatched expectations, not Feedly getting
| worse.
| almog wrote:
| After going through Google Reader, Feedly, Newsblur and QuiteRSS,
| I've finally settled on Newsboat, as I can really customize it to
| my needs, debug it and even integrate custom html to rss
| generators.
|
| For example, ebay has recently recently stopped supporting RSS
| through search results (an '_rss=1' query string was supported
| for over 10 years), and while there are some workaround such as
| using different search endpoint where the RSS has not been
| deprecated yet, with Newsboat, I was able to write a custom
| filter to extract RSS with just few lines of code:
| https://github.com/almog/newsboat-ebay2rss-filter
| cogitoergo_some wrote:
| I've been using Feeder on Android, and it's been quite simple and
| responsive -
|
| https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.nononsense...
|
| If there are any other recommendations for apps on Android, those
| would be welcome too.
| sweston4 wrote:
| I don't have any of these issues at all? I've a folder called
| 'main blogs' which is just every feed I follow. Any link I have
| to Feedly is a link to my 'main blogs' folder which provides a
| pretty clean interface. I have 0 adds on my 'main blogs' page
| currently. Perhaps a similar setup would work for others.
| longrod wrote:
| Going through the article I realized this attitude is what
| eventually kills some really good software. If a software does
| what you expect it to do and does it well but includes a few
| prompts here and there for marketing purposes...is that really so
| bad?
|
| Live and let live, I say. Not everyone is running a charity and
| Feedly is nowhere even near the top of the list of software
| ripping off their users or selling their data to make money.
|
| What the author labels as "cluttered" is really not that
| cluttered at all. It looks much better than an completely empty
| list in the alternative they prefer. But that's just UI.
|
| I am not saying don't move to another alternative. I am just
| saying that the reasons the author is calling Feedly out for are
| unjustified and don't really make sense.
| pllbnk wrote:
| Furthermore, if the author was so interested in uncluttered UI,
| they shouldn't say they've "done everything they could" because
| there's more you can do, such as customize the HTML, CSS or
| even JS. Clearly, they chose to spend this time writing an
| empty rant and advertising a tool for Mac. Since majority of
| users are not on Mac anyway, it's not even a viable alternative
| because from that point of view, Feedly is much more accessible
| and user friendly than the advertised product.
|
| I am a Feedly user as well and I have noticed the feature creep
| but it was easy to ignore, so I hope to be able to keep using
| it as successfully as I have for the past 9 (!) years.
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| The author makes sense to me, and I think it is justified. Any
| extra prompts beyond what I expect the software to do for my
| purposes is extra cognitive load -- inputs which I have to deal
| with using my very limited senses and processing abilities. At
| some point, it becomes more trouble than it's worth, and that's
| when I quit and move on.
|
| It's one of the reasons I no longer acknowledge or interact
| with cookie prompts, newsletter dialogs, notifications, or
| anything else interferes with my use of a Web page. If anything
| at all like that happens, I just close the page and move on.
| (Sometimes I just ignore the cookie prompts and read around
| them.)
|
| As a long-term strategy, this has paid off by not only saving
| me time and grief, but also made me realize that poorly
| designed usability correlates strongly with poor quality
| content, which I also save time by avoiding.
|
| I think you are speaking from a point of view of having
| cognitive ability to spare, as opposed to struggling to keep up
| with cognitive load which is too much to handle.
| sys_64738 wrote:
| > If a software does what you expect it to do and does it well
| but includes a few prompts here and there for marketing
| purposes...is that really so bad?
|
| Don't change things. It's not hard. Leave things alone. Be
| consistent.
|
| Marketing? If you pay for it already that's all the marketing
| needed. Don't go trying to suck data from elsewhere with
| creeper policies to sell the data to creeper brokers.
| DSMan195276 wrote:
| > Marketing? If you pay for it already that's all the
| marketing needed.
|
| I mean, based on what the author said, they're not paying for
| it. In fact they're annoyed there is a button asking them to
| pay for it :D
| bayindirh wrote:
| > is that really so bad?
|
| In case of Feedly, yes. I feel like a hamster being tried to be
| converted. Feedly's free tier doesn't feel like free. It feels
| like a getaway drug which tries to make you pay for other
| features.
|
| I have used for a week, then SDF announced availability of
| their TTRSS instance. As a paying member, I moved there. I am
| much more happier now.
|
| TTRSS is free and open source. I'm just supporting SDF so they
| can continue to exist.
| WastingMyTime89 wrote:
| > In case of Feedly, yes. I feel like a hamster being tried
| to be converted.
|
| You are a hamster trying to be converted. That's the point of
| the free tier. You could just pay for it and the nagging
| would stop. You are now paying for TTRSS and have the
| experience of a paying customer.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Hard to say.
|
| Part of the appeal of advertising in _Cosmpolitan_ or the
| _New York Times_ is that the readers have qualified
| themselves by paying for a subscription.
|
| Netflix is playing a dangerous game by letting people pay
| to turn on ads because the kind of person who values their
| attention so little to save a few dollars isn't going to
| buy anything. The really desirable people to advertise to
| are the ones who have more money to spend.
|
| My guess is that a person who subscribes to the entry level
| of a product is more likely to be upsold to something else
| than a free user is going to even think about paying. (e.g.
| try watching TV during the daytime and it is depressing to
| see ads for prescription drugs and Medicare scams and
| personal injury lawyers, the one thing you might rarely see
| that people spend their own money on is car dealerships and
| I guess they need those because I'd nobody bought a car you
| could never get hit by a car and call William Mattar.)
| WastingMyTime89 wrote:
| > The really desirable people to advertise to are the
| ones who have more money to spend.
|
| The people you want to advertise to are not necessarily
| people who have money. It's people who will buy your
| product. That's the supposed value of online advertising:
| better targeting. There is still plenty of money to be
| made outside of the most affluent segments.
|
| > My guess is that a person who subscribes to the entry
| level of a product is more likely to be upsold to
| something else than a free user is going to even think
| about paying.
|
| That's true. But you still need a way to onboard people
| on the first paying tier at some point.
|
| > try watching TV during the daytime and it is depressing
| to see ads for prescription drugs and Medicare scams and
| personal injury lawyers
|
| That's because of the demographic who watch TV during
| daytime: mostly retired people or unemployed people
| amongst which disabilities must be above average. Forty
| years ago you will have bombarded with ads for soap.
| Semiapies wrote:
| _My guess is that a person who subscribes to the entry
| level of a product is more likely to be upsold to
| something else than a free user is going to even think
| about paying._
|
| I think this is the crucial thing. If you offer a service
| with what you might call a "livable" or "comfortable"
| free tier, it will end up used as heavily as you allow by
| people who will cost you resources indefinitely, but who
| are far more likely to switch to another free service
| than to ever pay you a cent. For instance, as terrible as
| this blogger claims to have found Feedly, he used it for
| nearly a decade!
|
| Skip the temptation to try to eke out a little money from
| the free tier (because you probably won't) and think of
| it strictly as a trial option. Either give a time-limited
| free trial of the service or a heavily-limited version of
| the service that shows how it works, but that absolutely
| nobody would want to use at that level forever.
|
| (And in that latter case, then you'll _still_ find one or
| two users who are willing to subsist on your free tier,
| whether that 's a 3-feed RSS reader or whatever. Shrug
| and reflect that those weirdos aren't costing you much.)
| bayindirh wrote:
| I don't agree that having a comfortable free tier
| inhibits upward movement in the subscription structure of
| a service.
|
| I've started all the services I pay from their free
| tiers. Most notable examples are Evernote, Trello,
| Dropbox and Pocket. As I continued using these tools,
| I've overgrown them, and the features they offer on
| subscription tiers started to make sense.
|
| As a result, I've directly bought the highest tier of
| service which both makes sense and I can afford.
|
| Feedly is different in that regard. They provide a free
| service, nag me, insert ads into the stream, all at the
| same time.
|
| Turn down nagging, keep the ads, that's OK. Add a time
| trial, don't sell ads, that's OK too. But they bombard
| you, and it comes down to "pay us or go away", and I went
| away. Not in a decade, but in a week.
|
| I'm a fan of "small web". Simple services which do one
| thing, and do it well. Simplymail, Source Hut, Mataroa,
| Smol.pub, etc. They're also paid services, and I also pay
| for some of them. It's a simple transaction. $X for a
| year, no tracking, no funny data business, for these
| services. This is beyond elegant.
|
| I found out that I have got enough of the modern web,
| with sites overloading my senses and doing all kinds of
| funny business with my information even if I pay them.
|
| Feedly is a business, they want to earn money and provide
| services, that's fair. They can operate the way they
| want, and I'm not entitled to tell them how to operate,
| or force them. On the other hand, they're not entitled to
| my money or continued patronage because I opened an
| account on their service and gave a test drive.
| FBISurveillance wrote:
| A happy paying Feedly user ever since Google Reader shut
| down. I find it great.
|
| I'm also a paying Dropbox customer and they keep nagging
| about Dropbox for Business and _that_ I find annoying.
| bayindirh wrote:
| I'm not paying for TTRSS. I'm _donating to_ SDF[0], which
| is free, but I 'm paying to keep them sustainable. They
| added TTRSS to the services they offer, so I moved there. I
| can clone and install TTRSS[1] to a VPS of mine in 20
| minutes, but I'm lazy.
|
| > You are a hamster trying to be converted. That's the
| point of the free tier.
|
| I don't think so. Trello's free tier is usable. GitLab and
| GitHub's free tiers are usable, Pocket's free tier is
| usable. I'm paying to many services which I can use freely
| and get things done, and I pay for the highest tier I can
| make use of and fits my budget, but Feedly's take is esp.
| bad about their paid tier and nagging.
|
| The problem is not presence of paid tier. It's how it's
| presented to you. I can pay for feedly, but I don't need
| the features me, and they were so pushy that it put me off.
|
| [0]: https://www.sdf.org
|
| [1]: https://tt-rss.org/
| Deletionk wrote:
| Your sentiment is frustrating to read as a software
| engineer.either do it yourself or accept that those people
| also want to have a great job, good salary etc.
|
| And as stated on another comment: no it's not that bad. I use
| it free since Google shut down theirs
| bayindirh wrote:
| Your sentiment is also frustrating to read as a software
| engineer. As I stated before, I pay for a lot of services,
| and pay for their highest tier plans because I feel that
| they deserve my money.
|
| However, Feedly feels like they want my money first instead
| of giving me more or better service, and I don't feel like
| they deserve my money, so I don't pay them.
| PainfullyNormal wrote:
| > but includes a few prompts here and there for marketing
| purposes...is that really so bad?
|
| If you have two viable options where one is a profound
| annoyance to you and one isn't, why wouldn't you choose the
| second option?
| applefangirl wrote:
| True, and in the case of the Mac you've got a lot of good
| options with different design choices.
| jka wrote:
| > If a software does what you expect it to do and does it well
| but includes a few prompts here and there for marketing
| purposes...is that really so bad?
|
| As the article mentions, the problem generally isn't any one
| individual change - the concern is about the sense of direction
| for the overall project. The typical direction is from "simple
| software that helps people to achieve some goals" towards
| "product with features designed to increase revenue, data
| gathering, and stickiness" -- like the login-required anti-
| feature mentioned.
|
| If those changes are gradual then users may not really notice
| the small differences as they introduced, and if anyone does
| complain, it becomes easy for supporters of the project to
| deflect complaints (as, arguably, you may be here -- not
| ostensibly trying to keep the author with the product, but
| trying to reduce their credibility and persuade others that
| there is no problem).
|
| In many cases, free and open source software can help avoid a
| project falling into dark patterns because it's possible for
| people who disagree to fork it and maintain/promote their own
| alternative -- and then for other people to compare the
| original and the fork on their merits (which are transparent).
| blacklight wrote:
| RSS is basically impossible to monetize. It's a protocol to
| access content. Monetizing RSS is like trying to monetize HTTP.
|
| The problem is that companies try to monetize RSS, and the only
| way of doing so is to provide features that RSS can't offer.
| AI-curated feeds, integrations with X or Y, nudges to let go of
| RSS entirely for some applications and instead use whatever
| integration they've come up with...
|
| Some people may be happy with this. Some people may only care
| about the information they eventually get, not HOW they get it.
| But I'm not among those people, and many other people are not.
|
| I personally felt very annoyed by Feedly nagging me on a daily
| basis to upgrade in order to get features that I didn't need
| and never asked for.
|
| I feel like being approached every day by a dude who wants to
| sell me a vaccum cleaner that I don't want. And of course I
| understand that they also need to make money, but they should
| also respect those who simply want an RSS reader and are
| insensitive to all these campaigns.
|
| Thats the reason why I moved from Feedly to a self-hosted
| Miniflux instance (and Nextcloud News before it). If I host it
| myself, then I don't have to pay anyone for hosting my feeds,
| and I'm not supposed to be targeted by marketing campaigns to
| pull money out of my wallet on a daily basis.
| moralestapia wrote:
| >RSS is basically impossible to monetize.
|
| It may also be illegal (or at least on shaky grounds) if you
| happen to make money out of content that is not yours.
| Deletionk wrote:
| I'm using the Feedly app not paid since Google shut down
| theirs.
|
| I have no clue what you mean.
|
| Where do they show this daily?
|
| And don't get me wrong, you traided self management against a
| nag pop up? It's your choice but Feedly still does it with a
| reasonable offering.
|
| And I actually thinking about going pro to remove all the
| rumor news shit I don't care and the cve feature sounds nice
| as well.
| meanmrmustard92 wrote:
| I pay for Inoreader and really like it. Somewhat ironically,
| its killer feature for my use case is the ability to ingest
| emailed content will make emailed content look like any other
| RSS feed, since lots of scientific journals / sites have
| stopped using RSS.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| > _The problem is that companies try to monetize RSS, and the
| only way of doing so is to provide features that RSS can 't
| offer._
|
| I don't know if I agree; I pay Newsblur a yearly fee because
| it's worth it to me having a centralized web-app that I don't
| have to self-host (and consequently, don't have to worry
| about paying for, or hitting rate limits, etc.) with a nice
| UI and a few features like sorting by folder.
|
| Granted, I have no idea how much it costs to run Newsblur; I
| certainly hope they're at least breaking even. I also don't
| know if I'm a typical-enough user.
| deanmoriarty wrote:
| When I read threads like these I feel I must be terribly
| unsophisticated/"un"-picky compared to the average HN users. I
| have been using Feedly since when Google Reader went down, and
| I follow ~100 feeds (including HN! I never browse articles
| through the front page, I let articles with enough upvotes like
| this come to me via Feedly) in 5-10 reading sessions a day from
| browser and iOS apps, so I'd say I'm a very active user.
|
| I am on the free tier and nothing ever bothers me, it continues
| being a wonderful service every day. The ads are fine, I
| totally understand it. -\\_(tsu)_/-
|
| The same is largely true of free products from which I get
| massive value but HN constantly complains about: Google Search,
| Reddit, ...
| xtracto wrote:
| I actually have been a Feedly subscriber for years (since
| Google reader closed). However I seldom use it anymore. At
| some point it gave me anxiety bc of the amount of unread
| articles. I pay for it yearly... I actually think I should
| unsubscribe
| hamdouni wrote:
| > that the reasons the author is calling Feedly out for are
| unjustified and don't really make sense.
|
| Well, at least it is justified and make sense for the author.
| prepend wrote:
| > is that really so bad?
|
| I think in many situations, yes. I grew up with shareware and
| so I know that prompts are necessary to drive income.
|
| What the prompts in this article are so bad at is that they are
| perpetual. Is it really necessary to nag a user over and over
| for something they don't want and declined? That is probably
| not going to work in the long run as people associate a bad
| experience with the product.
|
| Figure out a better way to get income that doesn't involve
| perpetually wasting a user's time and frustrating them.
| ianai wrote:
| They could just have an "ad" screen like the about screen.
| Encourage users to check it out or leave it open for a time
| as a source of support for the product.
|
| I'm guessing the most innocuous is just a banner ad of
| reasonable size that doesn't detract too much from usable
| space.
|
| Or, you know, people could pay for their software.
| prepend wrote:
| I think I bought a ton of shareware that had innocuous
| purchase ads (eg, id's commander keen). The idea isn't that
| ads are bad, but that having continuous ads over and over
| is annoying and unlikely to result in me buying.
| Semiapies wrote:
| Not giving out a service for free is probably the best
| option.
| rammy1234 wrote:
| It does makes sense to me. RSS feeds were supposed to get you
| to the articles quick enough. With all these pop ups and ads
| and whatever, we lose the essence of RSS.
| blendergeek wrote:
| > If a software does what you expect it to do and does it well
| but includes a few prompts here and there for marketing
| purposes...is that really so bad?
|
| According to the article, Feedly no longer upholds the basic
| promise of an RSS feed reader: to allow the user to curate a
| list of RSS feeds and follow them.
|
| From the article:
|
| > For example, I recently wanted to add an RSS feed for a
| Reddit user, but it was not possible in Feedly. In order to do
| so, I had to connect to Reddit with my Reddit user, i.e., allow
| Feedly to access my data. No way, no thanks.
|
| If an RSS feed reader makes it "not possible" to import certain
| RSS feeds because the app instead wants to use proprietary APIs
| for those feeds, than the RSS feed reader no longer "does what
| you expect it do and does it well".
|
| At this point the app is fundamentally broken by design and I
| too would migrate away from such an app.
| slightwinder wrote:
| I tried this out myself just now, and it turned out to be not
| entirely true. It's more a case of poor UX. When entering a
| reddit-url, be it a user-profile or feed, there is a auto-
| popup with possible actions, one named "feed". Naturally you
| would click it and then it demands a reddit-connections. I
| guess, they will use the reddit-API in this case, as it needs
| a Login, and maybe offers some benefit? But the thing, is you
| can also just press enter to let feedly discover targets
| under the entered url, and then it presents you rss-feed it
| discoverd, which you can follow without a login.
|
| So it's still doing it's job, but in certain cases acts
| pretty poorly.
| tomjen3 wrote:
| > it well but includes a few prompts here and there for
| marketing purposes...is that really so bad?
|
| If they are done well, no. Problem is they often aren't. An
| example of this is when I downloaded some app like headspace
| and they had this sort of relax and be ready to fall a sleep
| feature. It was relaxing and well done and turned the screen
| down nicely. Then, as soon as it was over, the screen was set
| to bright and it asked if wanted to rate it on the store.
|
| Other apps will show marketing over what you are trying to do,
| or in a distracting manor.
|
| So after a while people will start to associate it with scummy
| and bad behavior.
| Gualdrapo wrote:
| The second, widest menu can be hidden (and keeps hidden) just
| with a single click.
| applefangirl wrote:
| I guess it's a matter of opinion because Feedly's interface
| looks cluttered to me. It's not a bad offender for a webapp but
| compared to other feed readers its interface is IMO busy.
|
| Also a matter of opinion but app developers IMO shouldn't use
| their apps to market. I've already got an email app and a Feed
| reader. If I want to keep up with you I'll subscribe to your
| mailing list or follow your feed.
|
| I disable auto-update because I get annoyed when apps tell me
| about new versions (and I have privacy concerns.) I wont
| consider using an app that doesn't let me disable auto update.
| I already have a strategy to keep my software up-to-date that
| works on my schedule.
|
| I recognize I'm sensitive to these things but that doesn't mean
| they aren't justified or don't make sense. They just don't make
| sense * to you *.
| bornfreddy wrote:
| Tangential: if updates bother you, you might want to give
| NetGuard a try (not affiliated). FOSS, though the pro version
| license costs $5 iirc. It is a great way to make apps behave
| nicely - even Firefox is too chatty (telemetry & co.) for my
| taste. Since updates are often from a different domain, you
| can just block them. How it works is that all the traffic on
| the phone is routed through a local (just an app on your
| phone!) VPN where it can be logged and filtered. Brilliant
| idea.
|
| As a bonus, it is also very satisfying watching apps try to
| connect to various ad networks and spy agencies^W^W Google
| unsuccessfully.
| applefangirl wrote:
| I use a similiar app on my Mac. It helps me catch poorly
| behaving apps so I can remove them.
| oliwarner wrote:
| Yeah, no sympathy with Erik here. Feedly is --for free-- polling
| RSS feeds for you and giving you centralised, platform agnostic
| access.
|
| They _want_ you to pay for it, and features like an increased
| polling rate are the soft features they use to tempt you up to a
| paid platform. Adverts catch some of the users that don 't want
| to pay. I assume you still use Google et al? Why is a search
| engine or Amazon janking up their SERPs with inline ads better
| than the odd ad on Feedly? You still use them? I think you're
| holding Feedly to an unfair standard.
|
| Don't get me wrong, a desktop client is great _iff that 's all
| you need_. Feedly is providing one more feature: network
| centralisation. I check Feedly from my desktop, my laptop and my
| phone. I could host something myself but for free (or pennies a
| day), Feedly keeps everything in sync.
| m-p-3 wrote:
| IMO the lowest ad-free tier for Feedly was too expensive for what
| I'm doing (~6.00$/month) which is basically agregating news from
| multiple websites for my own personal use, so I migrated to
| Inoreader and use the Supporter plan (~1.67$/month), which is
| enough features for me while remaining ad-free.
|
| At that price, I'm okay not having to self-host it to handle the
| synchronization of articles I've read, liked, etc.
| lf-non wrote:
| I use a self-hosted yarr [1] instance for rss. It is really
| minimal and very easy to run (self contained native binary).
|
| [1] https://github.com/nkanaev/yarr
| t6jvcereio wrote:
| Is it known why Google killed reader? Certainly it wasn't lack of
| traction.
| timbit42 wrote:
| They're a business. I would presume they weren't able to make
| enough, or perhaps any, profit off of it.
| pretdl wrote:
| jollins wrote:
| This writer is really entitled. It is a free tier for a service
| that costs money to host and maintain. Of course there are
| upgrade prompts.
|
| I use Feedly (free) as a hosting service, and Reeder or one of
| the other many great RSS client apps as the frontend to it, so I
| don't have to see the feedly interface.But the Feedly API I use
| constantly and it is extremely solid.
|
| That's part of the greatness of RSS services. If the service's UI
| bothers you, you don't have to use it.
| andrelaszlo wrote:
| I see where you come from but I didn't read it that way. They
| point out why the product no longer fits their needs, and why
| the paid version is not appealing . The conclusion is the
| opposite of entitled: I'll use something else.
| DSMan195276 wrote:
| I think the entitled part is where they wrote a whole rant
| that basically amounts to "they want me to pay for it" and
| posted it here.
| prepend wrote:
| > This writer is really entitled
|
| Yes, but no. They are entitled like you and I, and everyone, is
| entitled to good products and not being angry when using them.
| They aren't especially entitled to the point to use the word as
| an insult.
|
| Feedly sells ads. So it's free, but they include ads. They
| aren't a charity benevolently putting out the app and everyone
| should suck it up and be thankful.
|
| Obviously, people can choose not to use it. And they do. Feedly
| seems to be in a bit of a doom spiral with being worse and
| worse and driving away more and more users.
|
| It seems to me that they have some expensive to develop but not
| very useful (eg, AI to detect stuff in feeds) that users don't
| find worth $6 but the costs need covering. So their approach is
| to keep pushing it on users more and more.
| Semiapies wrote:
| _They are entitled like you and I, and everyone, is entitled
| to good products and not being angry when using them._
|
| Sure, if you're paying for it. If not, prepare for all the
| ways a company is going to try to make the service
| profitable, starting with ads and come-ons to paid tiers.
|
| Don't want that? Pay, or self-host something. It's
| _absolutely_ entitled to make an indignant post about why you
| 're changing away from a service you've used for nine years
| that amounts to _the bastards want to make money off me_.
| Adraghast wrote:
| I don't think it's entitled at all to expect things to _not
| suck_ regardless of whether they're free or require
| payment. Truly good products make you want to pay to
| receive a carrot, bad ones to avoid a stick. The only
| carrots Feedly has to offer are all moldy and gross, so
| they've resorted to more and more sticks.
|
| The author also did exactly what you want by switching to
| NetNewsWire, so I don't know what you're complaining about
| other than that they made a blog post explaining that
| decision.
| Semiapies wrote:
| _Truly good products make you want to pay to receive a
| carrot, bad ones to avoid a stick._
|
| Except not getting the carrot free _is_ the stick to
| plenty of people.
|
| _so I don't know what you're complaining about_
|
| Given I explicitly said what I was complaining about, you
| _should_ know.
| prepend wrote:
| It is ad supported, not free. So there's a commercial
| quality expectation. Am I "entitled" if I don't like a tv
| show on broadcast tv even though it has ads?
|
| Also, even truly free/oss software has an expectation of
| quality. And saying "I don't like it and won't use it"
| isn't being entitled. It's just a normal human response.
|
| If I'm in a museum and look at a painting and remark to my
| friends "I don't like that painting and I won't buy a
| print. In fact there are so many paintings in this museum,
| I don't think I'll return." Am I being entitled?
|
| I think it's pretty authoritarian to call out people
| expressing reasonable opinions as if they are "entitled."
|
| As a reader I'm happy to know that feedly's free product
| sucks. That's very helpful to me. I'm glad OP shared their
| idea and I hope that people gatekeeping won't stop OP and
| others like them from sharing more useful ideas.
| Ferret7446 wrote:
| Entitled? Kind of? The thing is, RSS reader clients are pretty
| much a solved problem, and they aren't particularly resource
| intensive. You can run your own FreshRSS instance for example
| for free (https://www.felesatra.moe/blog/2022/06/25/easy-
| freshrss, you do need a domain name though if you want HTTPS,
| or just run it on your local machine).
| Kye wrote:
| A lot of the service they provide is figuring out how to load
| out of spec or outright broken feeds. They had some blog
| posts on this back in the early post-Google Reader days. A
| self-hosted option will eventually fail to load a feed, and
| there's not much you can do unless you're a developer.
| lbriner wrote:
| I think that is a bit unfair. Many of us have used something
| that was originally a certain way and worked and we have let it
| get embedded and useful at which point it becomes more and more
| complicated, maybe the upgrade prompts become much more
| prominent and we feel let down by something that doesn't
| actually solve the problem any more.
|
| I don't know Feedly's history and whether it was originally
| Open Source or not but plenty of people decide their popular
| FOSS tool could be paid-for, at which point it is common to
| disenfranchise the people who made it popular in the first-
| place.
| jzb wrote:
| If you have a problem solved by software, pay for it. They're
| not a charity. If you're just using without giving back you
| have zero standing to feel let down. Feedly is a SaaS, not a
| foss project. They have bills to pay.
| hamdouni wrote:
| Foss project also have bills to pay.
| Semiapies wrote:
| People regularly act like asses to them without
| contributing a cent, either.
| otsaloma wrote:
| The author complains he couldn't add a Reddit RSS feed. I once
| looked into this. It was already a few years ago, but I guess it
| hasn't changed. The problem is that updating all Reddit feeds of
| all Feedly users goes way above Reddit's API call rate limits.
| So, it's probably simply not possible in a centralized free
| service. The problem isn't so much Feedly, but the various sites'
| (not only Reddit) ignorance or hostility towards RSS that results
| in these kinds of implementations.
| Uupis wrote:
| reddit provides RSS feeds: https://www.reddit.com/wiki/rss
| Macha wrote:
| The parent poster even acknowledged this.
|
| The point is the feed is rate limited.
|
| And you need one call per unique subreddit.
|
| And Feedly's users collectively have more unique subreddits
| than the Reddit rate limit.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| Strange; I can subscribe to user rss feeds in Newsblur.
|
| I'm guessing Newsblur somehow rotates through all the
| users' collective RSS feeds in some manner to not trip the
| rate limit, which might explain why new posts don't show up
| immediately.
|
| (Which is fine for me as a user; most of the reddit RSS
| feeds I subscribe to, I don't need to see immediately!)
| Uupis wrote:
| Ah, my bad. The reference to API made me think they're
| replicating RSS via the reddit API. I was not aware that
| RSS feeds are so rate-limited, too.
|
| More on the subject, for anyone curious: https://www.reddit
| .com/r/help/comments/4u9tj8/rss_feeds_upda...
| gaul wrote:
| https://tt-rss.org/ is a free software, self-hosted alternative
| and https://ttrss.info/ is a paid hosted offering.
| pHollda wrote:
| daggersandscars wrote:
| If you're looking for a cross-Apple-ecosystem reader, News
| Explorer provides MacOS, iOS, and iPadOS apps and uses iCloud to
| sync. No affiliation, just like using it.
|
| If you're only following feeds on MacOS, NetNewsWire is also
| great.
| kenada wrote:
| NetNewsWire has had an iOS version for a while now.
| uallo wrote:
| I've been a non-paying Feedly user since Google Reader shut down.
| I think their nagging is tolerable. I currently see no point in
| an upgrade as I don't miss any feature.
|
| I've also been a long-time user of Pocket. I would really like
| them to add feed functionality to their service. It would make it
| very easy to find new things to read while also having a list of
| things to read later. That would be a very good value proposition
| in my opinion, and a reason to pay them.
| divan wrote:
| To contrast other opinions - I think it's a valuable feedback for
| the company.
|
| I also stopped using Feedly when realized that it has become
| something else than "nice minimalistic rss-reader". I settled
| with NetNewsWire and super happy with it, really incredible piece
| of software. I wouldn't mind paying some bucks per month for
| extra features like proxying sites-without-rss or similar stuff
| (I need to use third-party solutions to add some important sites
| to rss reader).
|
| So if Feedly wants to build a business around RSS (I couldn't
| find their vision on the website, so it's a guess), then maybe
| they just need to listen to those who actually use RSS. I think
| most of us love RSS for its simplicity, for decentralized nature,
| for respect to our attention and non-invasiveness into our
| information consuming patterns. Not much of a business
| proposition here maybe, but business should be built on top of
| the real value for users, not the other way around.
| pndy wrote:
| I've left Feedly at the first sight of premium options few years
| ago - I wanted to try something new and it worked for a while.
| But RSS reader in bookmarks (livemarks as Mozilla once called
| these) is and tbh always was enough for me.
|
| Foxish live RSS does job nicely in Vivaldi.
| cosmiccatnap wrote:
| Have we really fallen this low? How are there so many people in
| this comment section defending feedly while berating the author
| for what I would consider a level headed and fair assessment of
| the state of it.
|
| As someone hunting constantly for a reader as simple as Google
| reader and feedly use to be it all makes perfect sense and is
| equally frustrating to me.
|
| It's an RSS reader that no longer accepts many RSS feeds, that is
| a more than valid criticism and we should be allowed to be picky
| about that without being berated by our fellow HN readers.
| Macha wrote:
| HN readers generally put themselves into the vendor's shoes and
| therefore have a hard time accepting criticism of something the
| vendor does at their own interest at the expense of the user's.
| stereoradonc wrote:
| Try Inoreader. Besides a bevy of rich feature set, Inoreader has
| sales ONLY on Black Friday, and they usually extend the service
| by an additional 6 months if you pay yearly. It lacks Feedly's
| stupid UI. It's functional, fast, and I can zip through hundreds
| of feeds in no time. My favourite is the IFTTT and Readwise
| integration baked in. Alternatively, you can have the complete
| experience in Vivaldi itself. It comes with the RSS reader and a
| mail client. Absolute DOPE! Inoreader allows you to keep track of
| specific keywords and automatically follow the RSS feeds. I am
| waiting for a better UI around Vivaldi's RSS reader, and will
| reevaluate my RSS reader needs close to the end of the
| subscription period.
| roldie wrote:
| Another shoutout for Inoreader. Been using it for years. The
| free tier is great, but the paid tier is seriously one of the
| best investments I've ever made
| 369548684892826 wrote:
| And the ad-free tier is much better value than Feedly, like one
| quarter of the price even if you don't do the Black Friday
| thing.
| educaysean wrote:
| This article is music to my ears. As a Feedly user of 6+ years,
| it's everything that I've felt and more. Thanks for putting into
| words the frustration that's been building up inside me for a
| while.
| thrdbndndn wrote:
| I've tried all the free services listed in this thread, and
| feedly is the best for me. I'd admit I never really like it's UI,
| but it's usable. And it didn't change much all these years.
|
| Nowadays, I meanly just use the extension "Feedly Notifier" [1]
| to read (or open directly) articles in my browser, so I barely
| open feedly.com anymore. I highly recommend it.
|
| [1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/feedly-
| notifier/eg...
| stanislavb wrote:
| Have you tried lenns.io? I have a feeling it will meet your
| needs.
| simonebrunozzi wrote:
| Do you think there's an opportunity for a new RSS reader to
| emerge? And be financially successful, without the BS of ads,
| etc?
| criddell wrote:
| No.
| cosmiccatnap wrote:
| An open source RSS reader could easily be someone's weekend
| project...
| Semiapies wrote:
| And probably has been many times, given how many there are.
| PascLeRasc wrote:
| Off topic but while all the RSS people are here - does anyone
| know of a client or feed that can extract articles from websites
| that try to stop you from using RSS? Bikepacking.com is an
| example of this.
| elcapitan wrote:
| I left Feedly for the same reason a while ago. I think there is a
| trend of "editorialization" of all kinds of apps that tries to
| sell new features and "experiences" to users instead of focusing
| on the core ideas, which I find really annoying. Plus the Feedly
| UI itself is annoying and doesn't give me a simple mailbox-like
| view like normal RSS readers.
|
| The solution I went with is native RSS readers (like the author),
| but backed by an Open Reader server (The Old Reader in my case,
| but there are others) for syncing between devices. On the Mac,
| Vienna as a client is quite nice.
| elyseum wrote:
| So you liked Feedly for almost 10 years, but never bothered to
| support them financially. And now you complain that they go the
| extra mile trying to earn money?
| motoxpro wrote:
| Exactly. It's so comical. You were never going to support them
| making their software, never going to upgrade, never going to
| provide any value to them in anyway even though they provided
| value to you for 10 years. Seems like this is a good thing for
| feedly.
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| for apparently nonsense features. this isn't a patronage
| model, it's a product (and the free tier is not what's being
| sold)
| aflag wrote:
| The author acknowledged that though. He seemed to even had
| considered buying it, but thought it was not worth it. He
| eventually settled on something simple and free. It doesn't
| surprise me that running a simple RSS feed tool is not
| profitable.
| simonw wrote:
| There is very little simple about running an RSS
| aggregator, especially at scale.
| aflag wrote:
| The user doesn't really care about the scale, though.
| There are chrome plugins, local apps, etc. With dropbox
| and other similar tools, you can sync across devices and
| keep configuration stored in the cloud without much
| hassle.
|
| I'm not saying that what feedly was doing was trivial.
| I'm sure it was expensive and required many developers,
| designers, etc. However, that doesn't mean that all the
| effort is necessarily important for the end user.
| [deleted]
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| I run one at scale, it doesn't need to be done in a
| complicated way
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| What I'm saying is by running so many heavy services in
| the backend, relying on a series of API integrations to
| provide service and taking custody of swaths of sometimes
| sensitive user data, they make their own problems
| poisonborz wrote:
| You can use Feedly simply as a cloud service to store your RSS
| subscriptions. There's a number of good clients that use it and
| display a simple feed that you want. For Android, there is
| FeedMe.
| rryan wrote:
| "I could go pro, but nah" -- I read this and closed the tab. What
| a whingefest from a free tier user.
|
| The Reddit crawling problem is because Reddit rate limits their
| crawling so they have to prioritize the most popular feeds.
| What's the problem with linking your account, or making a
| dedicated feedly throwaway for crawling?
|
| Been a pro user since the beginning because I want the service to
| stick around. It works just as well as it always has and I don't
| mind that they're adding new features even if they aren't for me.
|
| Sheesh.
| benrapscallion wrote:
| I pay for NewsBlur and have been doing so for years. It is an
| underappreciated, excellent, fully-featured, indie RSS feed
| reader with support for twitter and youtube etc. It can extract
| full text from feeds. It can both receive emails (newsletters)
| and send emails (when a feed updates). They have an excellent
| free tier.
|
| I have tried every other competitor and no one comes close.
| cnxsoft wrote:
| Daunk wrote:
| RSS is something I really want to use, but so far I've not been
| able to find a single piece of software that handles RSS that
| doesn't suck. I want to add a bunch of RSS feeds, and then have
| the software notify me - or at least highlight - when related
| "tags" or words are used, as well as be able to see "everything".
| But I guess RSS is about to die out anyways, as more and more
| news sites only allow you to read the first few lines of an
| article before having to visit their site.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| I started using liferea a few months ago, primarily to track YT
| channels without YT (so to speak). It can do some version of
| everything you've mentioned, though is weak on the automatic
| tag notification thing (though for the feeds I follow, that
| makes sense, since they are mostly video).
| Daunk wrote:
| Cheers, I'll give it a go.
| sys_64738 wrote:
| I moved to InoReader after the Google Reader cull and must say
| it's been pretty consistent in quality. I usually pick up a good
| deal around Thanksgiving.
| nXqd wrote:
| Reading through the article, Feedly might just have a classic,
| fast version without any new features and charge users for it.
|
| And those who wants new fancy things can enjoy the fancy version.
| And I believe, there are many users who just want fast and simple
| software these days, and early version of feedly was a great
| example.
| microflash wrote:
| After several years of using Feedly, I stopped using it right
| when they started showing ads in the feed. My biggest complaint
| with their Pro offering was that it was extremely unbalanced for
| the personal use (it still is).
|
| As a Pro user, I wanted to cut down the amount of noise I was
| getting in the feed. But that feature was in Pro+ subscription. I
| wanted to subscribe to a few Twitter searches; again a Pro+
| feature. I wanted to get rid of duplicate posts and it was, you
| guessed it, a Pro+ feature. Meanwhile, the Pro offering was
| flooded with things that never mattered to me.
|
| In the end, Pro was simply not a good value for me and Pro+ was
| just too expensive.
| lawgimenez wrote:
| I have been using Reeder for years now, I use it also for read it
| later integrated with Pocket. I love the latest update because I
| get to set the fonts to San Francisco Rounded which is one of my
| favorite fonts.
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