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.
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.
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)
IFTTT integration was the biggest draw. Newsblur appeared to slow down and I needed something shiny (and different) then. This isn't to say that NewsBlur is bad (it got the IFTTT integration, too) but I prefer Inoreader now. I am used to their interface.
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.
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
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.
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?
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.
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 £10/month for Adobe Creative Cloud and get Photoshop, Lightroom, XD, Illustrator, etc. I pay ~£8/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 £5/month to read rss feeds?
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.
> 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.
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.
>Why does feedly imagine I would want to pay £5/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.
> Edit: I pay £10/month for Adobe Creative Cloud and get Photoshop, Lightroom, XD, Illustrator, etc. I pay ~£8/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 £5/month to read rss feeds?
Because Freedly doesn't have Microsoft or Adobe's budget and needs to have its costs covered?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 *.
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.
NetGuard is on-device, can't get much more 'self-hosted' than that.
Can PiHole filter per-app though? I wouldn't have thought so. NG can and it's the main reason I use it.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.)
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.)
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.
> 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.
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.
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
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.
> 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).
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.
Your user account may be old enough to be grandfathered into a lower obnoxiousness setting.
When migrating from Android to iOS 1.5 years ago, I decided to set up a fresh Feedly account linked to the Apple identity instead of the Google identity. My original Feedly account is from circa 2013. As it turned out, I could not set up my feeds in the same way as on the old account because the free tier now caps out at 3 categories (or sections or whatever, the things where you group feeds into). On my old setup, I have 5 or 6 categories, also on the free tier. So I think there's some amount of grandfathering going on.
> 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.
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.
That's why the revival of NetNewsWire is a great thing. They don't offer enough settings, but outside of that they're at parity with all the paying services and they're free and open-source.
> 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.
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. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The same is largely true of free products from which I get massive value but HN constantly complains about: Google Search, Reddit, ...
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
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Am I “entitled” if I don’t like a tv show on broadcast tv even though it has ads?
Did you watch it for nearly ten years, then make an indignant post ranting about all its flaws because you were tired of ads for the blu-trays or whatever?
I think it’s pretty authoritarian to call out people expressing reasonable opinions as if they are “entitled.”
You've picked a bad time in history to be so badly confused on what "authoritarian" means.
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).
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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
I've recommended Inoreader multiple times on this site before, but unfortunately the service has gotten worse over the years by a couple of metrics.
Most of the worthwhile features are now gated behind the most expensive plan, rather than being properly staggered. I subscribe to so few feeds I could literally use the free (ad-supported) plan, and I use none of the advanced features at all except filters. If you want to filter a single feed, you have to buy the most expensive plan they sell. That's crazy!
Regardless, I have happily supported them for years. I'm not the sort of user that others are complaining about in this thread that wants everything for free. That's about to change too though. Since the site began, the plan I've been on has cost $30 a year, which is acceptable for the value I get out of it. I was able to extend the plan for multiple years at $18/yr thanks to Black Friday and Christmas sales. Now, however, they're changing things around, and want me to resubscribe to keep the features I use at $90/yr (or $120 if you pay monthly). I'm not a software engineer making six figures. I can't afford to throw $100 at every service I use like this. A $30 -> $90 price increase is just enormous.
Again, I want to pay for the features I use, but because they've failed to provide any kind of pricing ramp, they'll soon get nothing from me.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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...
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 284 ms ] threadFoxish live RSS does job nicely in Vivaldi.
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)
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.
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
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.
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 £10/month for Adobe Creative Cloud and get Photoshop, Lightroom, XD, Illustrator, etc. I pay ~£8/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 £5/month to read rss feeds?
clearly it isn’t, or the author wouldn’t have been able to move to a free alternative without any junk to ignore.
This is an argument for the intentional creation of bad software.
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.
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.
Because Freedly doesn't have Microsoft or Adobe's budget and needs to have its costs covered?
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.
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?
Well, at least it is justified and make sense for the author.
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.
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.
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 *.
As a bonus, it is also very satisfying watching apps try to connect to various ad networks and spy agencies^W^W Google unsuccessfully.
I've been using Feedly since Google Reader shut down and I've visited their site like once every six months.
I use Newsify on iOS and ReadKit on my Mac.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.)
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.)
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.
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.
I'm also a paying Dropbox customer and they keep nagging about Dropbox for Business and _that_ I find annoying.
> 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/
And as stated on another comment: no it's not that bad. I use it free since Google shut down theirs
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.
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).
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.
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.
When migrating from Android to iOS 1.5 years ago, I decided to set up a fresh Feedly account linked to the Apple identity instead of the Google identity. My original Feedly account is from circa 2013. As it turned out, I could not set up my feeds in the same way as on the old account because the free tier now caps out at 3 categories (or sections or whatever, the things where you group feeds into). On my old setup, I have 5 or 6 categories, also on the free tier. So I think there's some amount of grandfathering going on.
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.
It may also be illegal (or at least on shaky grounds) if you happen to make money out of content that is not yours.
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.
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. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The same is largely true of free products from which I get massive value but HN constantly complains about: Google Search, Reddit, ...
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.
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.
So it's still doing it's job, but in certain cases acts pretty poorly.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Did you watch it for nearly ten years, then make an indignant post ranting about all its flaws because you were tired of ads for the blu-trays or whatever?
I think it’s pretty authoritarian to call out people expressing reasonable opinions as if they are “entitled.”
You've picked a bad time in history to be so badly confused on what "authoritarian" means.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
[1] https://github.com/nkanaev/yarr
Most of the worthwhile features are now gated behind the most expensive plan, rather than being properly staggered. I subscribe to so few feeds I could literally use the free (ad-supported) plan, and I use none of the advanced features at all except filters. If you want to filter a single feed, you have to buy the most expensive plan they sell. That's crazy!
Regardless, I have happily supported them for years. I'm not the sort of user that others are complaining about in this thread that wants everything for free. That's about to change too though. Since the site began, the plan I've been on has cost $30 a year, which is acceptable for the value I get out of it. I was able to extend the plan for multiple years at $18/yr thanks to Black Friday and Christmas sales. Now, however, they're changing things around, and want me to resubscribe to keep the features I use at $90/yr (or $120 if you pay monthly). I'm not a software engineer making six figures. I can't afford to throw $100 at every service I use like this. A $30 -> $90 price increase is just enormous.
Again, I want to pay for the features I use, but because they've failed to provide any kind of pricing ramp, they'll soon get nothing from me.
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?
What you’re describing is a kind of anti growth public service. Sounds nice!