Ask HN: Why do RSS Readers (mostly) suck?
I've had a long love/hate relationship with RSS. For something with 'simple' as part of its name, I feel like it really hasn't lived to its each potential.
I've used Google Reader (horrible) and NetNewsWire and a plethora of mobile RSS-readers. I read a lot of news from a lot of sources (68 total sources in my NNW?) and as much as I do want to go in and read EVERY single article some days, other days I'm just tired by the 2500+ articles that pop up.
Pulse seems to be on the right track to do something. Anything else going down that path?
What's wrong with RSS Readers today? Why do they suck?
Is the solution to a better RSS Reader something more visually appealing (ie: Pulse) or something that simply filters the news (diggv4 or HN)?
78 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 138 ms ] threadSo our readers need to do a better job of helping us figure out which stories are relevant/interesting to us, give us ways to skim and summarize without reading the whole article, filter out "dupes", etc.
Which right now works best for me. If I use Google Reader directly, it's set up to use the re-reader style, at home I use NetNewsWire with the subscription list hidden. So to browse through it, I can mostly use keyboard shortcuts, so skipping something is easy. Reading is comfortable enough, but if the article is too long, I either open it in a background browser window or send it to Instapaper.
Works well enough for me, although if I had more newspaper-style story listings in there, that just contain the headlines and link to the main story, filtering and adding to the queue might be more difficult.
And alternative would be some kind of social filtering, but that's close enough to HN or Reddit or just listing the links you've got on your twitter inline (c.f. http://news.peepcode.com/)
http://www.postrank.com/main - their index page is baffling.
I think filtering is probably the way to go in this case. Instead of detecting duplicates the reader should allow you to filter out all stories tagged "iPhone4".
http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/
It shows the original site, allows you to read as you normally would, but keeps track of the stories you're scrolling past.
It also allows you to filter stories based on what you like and dislike about them: words/phrases in the title, tags and categories, authors, and the publisher themselves. There is a slider that allows you to show/hide stories based on this filter. It's very fast, too.
I am writing an iPhone app so you can use NewsBlur everywhere. It's just a hobby project, and people have so far been impressed. But I would love for NewsBlur to become a useful tool that people choose to use.
I wrote it because I was also dissatisfied with readers, especially Google Reader. I also knew Python (Django!), JavaScript, and wanted to put them together to test my abilities.
Only major problem so far is that I can't delete a feed (the link isn't working) or edit details.
Other than that, awesome job.
But there are few tiny details I hope will be fixed soon: The "Original" tab is the default one - which slows down the whole thing if I open some content-heavy site, and the reason why I use feed readers in first place is not to have to watch those horrible sites at all, so it would be nice if we could change the default view.
The other thing is that there is no way to change the folder to which certain feed belongs. As well as someone before me commented, you can't delete feeds either.
Drag and drop moving feeds is coming sometime this Summer, but you can delete a feed right now. There is a "manage" button at the bottom of the feed bar.
Well worth the one-time fee and setting it up on my Linode box.
The feed index is designed very similarly to the iPad Photos app: you can either pinch open a folder to view the feeds within it separately, or you can tap it to view all of the articles in a combined view; similarly, you can pinch open a individual feed to preview of the articles within it.
Additionally, Reeder caches articles and images for offline reading; and the top-level feed organization is pretty sensible, too... it's separated into 3 sections: read, unread, and starred. It's also extremely fast, having been rewritten to use SQLite instead of CoreData.
First, because RSS by design is meant to just be metadata, and because it's really hard to render HTML (especially those that are not well-formed) the readers typically have to jump through so many hoops to get things just working.
Second, I think it's also because the RSS readers are typically developed by non-designers. Although Google Reader keeps it simple, it's utilitarian and mostly not very pleasant to look at. I've tried others (which are also free) but typically it doesn't come close to making it enticing to read.
Maybe someday someone will do a feed reader that renders articles in a sane and readable way.
I have a similar strategy, but instead of trying to manage the "supplementals" in my RSS reader, I try to a) identify them, and b) banish them back to the browser where they belong. Identifying them can be tricky, at least for me, because I tend to think that feeds I've been reading for a long time are essential, when often they're not. Removing a lot of politics blogs from my reader I swear has made me less stressed, and I don't feel any less informed.
I think the higher volume of content means we have to become better at selection — not only in choosing what we read, but also in identifying and not reading what is noisy and lacking in substance, even when tempting (ahem, HuffPo). Edit: and I'm not sure algorithms are the solution; I think it's something our generation will have to learn — to be our own conscious curators.
I also like that it aims to help the user make sense and filter their news sources. But you completely lost me when you were explaining in the video how you edited the settings to see Comics. I'm confident I myself could figure it out with time and effort, but it goes over the heads of the common man, which I believe is who we're talking about now.
"Fresh" ones I either read on the spot, or mark-all-as-read. These are the ones I usually check frequently, and very quickly. And I don't have to feel bad about marking all as read :-)
"Evergreens" are ones I like to read entirely, but not necessarily now.
I'm using Google Reader, but these days mostly through the splendid Reeder on the iPhone (http://reederapp.com/).
Personally I ditched NetNewsWire after Reeder for the iPad came out. I have Reeder on my both my iPhone/iPad and just use Google Reader for those times I check feeds on my notebook. The user experience (note that I didn't say user interface) it provides is astounding. Navigating feeds, marking read/favorite, and the article typesetting/layouts are all the best I've seen in an RSS client to date. Combine something like Reeder with a carefully curated feed list and I don't really see there being much of a problem.
So far it's worked very well. I still seem to find out about everything I'd care about, but have a post volume on Google Reader of around 60 posts a day. I star anything longer I'm interested in for later reading on iPad/iPhone (either through Reeder or Instapaper).
I probably sort through several times more tweets, but that's something I'm far more likely to do when I have 30-60 seconds - so it's spread out throughout the day, and anything longer winds up in Instapaper for me to do at a later date.
In short: Try social filtering. Find people who share interests and blog/Tweet/etc. about them, and let them be your filter.
Reeder and Feedly both rock, but the key is eliminating low signal to noise sources.
Two things will emerge from that exercise: 1. there probably is in fact a reader out there that meets it, you just haven't found it yet or 2. your requirements require solving the AI-complete problem of perfectly determining what you are interested in.
Generally I find most people slot into #2. I am not kidding. I've been listening to this complaint for about 8 years now and every time I've worked with someone, it's one of the two above, and usually #2.
A third possibility is that you are just trying to read too much, period, if even an AI-complete filter would still leave you with too much. The suck may not lie with the software, it may in the requirements.
It only involves matching patterns to key-words. It might not be easy and the results might not be perfect but it seems possible. Using data from friends and finding the best correlates could help too. You could use the Netflix algorithm or other magic.
I suspect that's why today's readers don't satisfy - they aren't there yet and it's easy to imagine they could be.
"It only involves matching patterns to key-words." False. Recommendation might be far trickier.
Nonetheless, if you can do recommendation perfectly, it still doesn't mean that you can solve NLP, machine vision, control (robotics), planning, or any of the other major AI tasks.
But the point is that we have many examples of recommendation systems that do work reasonably well and working reasonably well is what I suspect would satisfy most users.
Further, a reader which could learn reasonably well from passive observation would give users the base do explicit tagging and rating.
Good luck.
Pricing is the only problem, but after getting feedback he plans on trying to address that promptly (like $5/yr or something, for a non-free version)
Most RSS readers try to be something they're not: "it's like reading email", "it's like reading a magazine" etc. Feedingo is a web app with an interface that makes reading RSS as easy as possible.
It's true that the current pricing that I launched with needs to be changed, but sign up for the free version and try it out while im working on that.
For the desktop, you could try http://www.mcsquare.me , it should be fine as well.
Personally, I like Google Reader, but I don't use that to read my RSS (just manage it). Instead, I use Google/ig. I have several different categories setup and I don't necessarily read everything. One of the categories I have setup is mRead (short for mark as read) and I don't really read those articles (often), but I still subscribe incase I see a headline that screams my name, or if I want to use Google Reader to do a search within my subscriptions for something specific.
If you have too much noise in your RSS versus signal, than you may want to double check what you've subscribed to and cut back, or add a "mRead" category of your own.
P.S. - http://goodnoows.com did look promising. Found on HN recently.
A handful of feeds I insist on reading everything, which means I hit J-J-J-J to get through them all. But most I merely skim the unread titles for things that look interesting, and when I'm done I hit Mark As Read to clean up the rest.
I like how I can do this at feed-level, category-level, or with all unread items at once.
And if I'm mobile and I want to see something from my desktop, I star it.
Admittedly, the last time I considered using a thick-client reader was way, way back in 2004 when I was still Windows-only, and I wasn't happy with anything I saw. I've used Google Reader since it was released in 2005, and I've had no reason to use anything else.
I do monitor some high-volume feeds (HN among them) and I skim the feed then share the good stuff that I think my contacts will like. I star things that I want to revisit and permanently bookmark stuff that's highly relevant to my work or hobbies, genuinely awesome or fascinating.
It has excellent mutt-esque key bindings, amazing customizability, etc.