O Reader My Reader – Remembering Google Reader | Hacker News Reader

O Reader My Reader – Remembering Google Reader

theawl.com

262 pointsingve179 comments

There are decent readers out there. Liferea or Thunderbird will do in a pinch, and much as I hate to admit it, Netvibes is actually superb.

The tragedy isn't some Google tool being retired, the tragedy is the way feeds are slowly disappearing. It's a slow and creeping death, but it's a death. More and more sites are dropping their feeds and replacing them with some twitterish Facebook nonsense.

[edit: typo]

Agreed. Every time I see a feed disappear in favor of a Facebook/Twitter feed, my confidence in the future of the Internet drops a little bit..

And I open individual twitter accounts [1] from time to time and find all kind of interesting content - and a more pleasurable way to consume it.

[1] That I also follow but will miss from the timeline, of course.

I usually don't visit websites that don't have RSS and tell that to the website owners. You should do the same. How else will they know that people care about feeds?

Believe me, I do. Also believe me, they don't care.

Unfortunately, people who come to a website via RSS almost universally have ad blockers turned on and usually are not site sticky. Maybe not the best group to attract to your site?

A discerning, technologically literate audience who never heard the term 'site sticky' before? No, you're right, no use for those.

A "discerning, technologically literate audience" is exactly who you don't want at your site -- for most non-technical sites. The person you want is some who really believes bud light tastes different than coors light. You want the person who will believe that a particular body spray is the only thing preventing them from meeting more men/women. These are the folks who pay the bills on the non-technical sites.

I think you're assuming everyone who runs a website is running it as a business. I don't have ads on my website or even analytics.

You are correct, I was making that assumption and should not. I tend to think money on HN posts but not as much on, for example, r/programming posts. I suppose I'm more susceptible to indirect marketing than I like to believe. Damn.

RSS users don't need ad blockers because obnoxious ads can't come through in a (full-content) feed, but this means that feed users have all the downsides for the site as if they did have ad blockers.

And feed subscribers are much stickier than most web visitors - you can't generally use a feed without subscribing to it, so anyone who uses a feed will see it again. The problem is that stickiness per se is not actually that valuable (especially when it's difficult to quantify). Feed users are so sticky that they will read everything you post but never leave the site by clicking an ad.

Twitter used to provide an RSS feed, that's gone too.

I have no idea why you're being downvoted but what you say is true. And having to find workarounds to get twitter pushed to me at my laptop is very annoying.

If you google "twitter rss" you will discover four sites that will do that for you as a free service and a node program that will do the conversion for you as well... on the first page of results, anyway.

I switched from Reader to TT-RSS. Now there's no fear that anyone will start analyzing my subscription list, send me personalized ads or suddenly stop serving me.

I think there is a qualitative difference between a company officially supporting an open standard, vs the availability of third party tools that translate from whatever the company chooses to produce to the open standard.

Would it be better if Twitter produced RSS feeds? Yes.

In the meantime, don't let the best be the enemy of the good.

The best is also the enemy of the worst. I basically have no use for twitter minus an RSS feed. Why would I bother trying a 3rd part application when twitter pulled the rug out from under me?

I would go one step further and say that, especially for twitter, I prefer the 3rd party methods. If you depend on twitter to provide the RSS feed then when they withdraw it you're screwed. But if you're already using a non-TOS-compliant workaround, twitter has to go out of their way to break it and when they do people who care enough will find another way to get the content they want. Information wants to be free.

Twitter could shut down those four sites at any time. I also switched to TinyTinyRSS and also self-host a simple Twitter to RSS parser. Anyone savvy enough to set up TT-RSS can manage getting a Twitter API key and configuring this.

https://github.com/jdelamater99/Twitter-RSS-Parser

I tried that recently and discovered that Twitter now require a mobile number to obtain API access even for read-only, which was an immediate hard-stop.

Except syndication is explicitly forbidden by Twitter developer agreement and they can get shut down at any time.

>suddenly stop serving me. Those four sites are explicitly breaking Twitter API TOS, so I think you should have at least a little fear that they will suddenly disappear :)

> The tragedy isn't some Google tool being retired, the tragedy is the way feeds are slowly disappearing

Can't it be both? They probably contribute to each other too.

Yeah, the Reader retirement probably did a lot of damage. But nothing fundamental, I believe. Feeds are dying from lack of interest. The proverbial 'general public' never could be bothered to spend those ten extra minutes getting to understand that orange icon with the stripes. Go out there and ask. Say "feed" to everybody. 99 percent of them will give you a blank stare in return. "What's the problem? We got Facebook".

> The proverbial 'general public' never could be bothered to spend those ten extra minutes getting to understand that orange icon with the stripes

Eh, the general public didn't care about smartphones for awhile either (email on blackberry? who needs it?)

The same can be said for VR right now, I think

RSS never got its chance. Google Reader seemed to have growth until it was killed

Google could win a little bit of confidence back from the dev community if they brought it back. I wonder how much it would cost them.

Admitting your mistakes is nothing to be ashamed of. When big companies do it and provide what their most passionate users (computer/tech addicts) want, it shows strength, not weakness.

What's facebook got to do with anything? I have never used an RSS feed and never felt the lack (though I have only a vague idea what it is).

My not using RSS has precisely nothing to do with my facebook account - and your attempt to diminish others usage of t'internet by saying "ugh it's those fucking drones just using facebook" is pretty arrogant.

> I have never used an RSS feed and never felt the lack (though I have only a vague idea what it is).

RSS is just another form of a customized news feed. You decide what blogs or blog categories you enjoy, and in one location, you see all the new posts about things you've followed. This allows you to customize your view of information in a different way than HN, Reddit, subreddits, Facebook, etc. and you don't need to give out your email address, receive e-mailed newsletters, or set up any accounts that have auto-subscribed mailing lists.

> What's facebook got to do with anything?

In some countries, such as Cambodia, Facebook is an important source of news reports. So far, media there remains uncensored, and Facebook is the easiest way for news to get legs, even moreso than the US I would say. Cambodia uses Facebook like the US uses Reddit and HN. There's some semblance of voting and comment threads, so it provides more features on top of the reputable newspaper websites.

However, Facebook is not really the best way to get discussion going. Threads are difficult to navigate and the loading is slow. I tried to show a few people Reddit while I was there, but for many reasons, that is a hard sell.

Anyway, I think some Americans use Facebook in the same way. They get a lot of their news from friends there and don't feel the need to seek out much else. It's too bad because yeah, you'll probably find more relevant information for you if you seek it out yourself, but at the same time I get why people use Facebook. You have your group of trusted friends and presumably there's some overlap in your interests. It's easy to look at news they've already vetted.

thankfully most blogs are wordpress based and RSS comes enabled by default.

You meant:

More and more sites are dropping their feeds and replacing them with their stupid 'sign up via email to receive updates' nonsense.

Sounds like you should be able to make an adaptor for these?

That would be a nice service. You get an email address, which you use to sign up to news, and the service converts the most promising links in the emails into rss.

Good idea, but requires a lot of manual work. Because I suspect that you don't only receive updates, but also some salesy stuff. Might be easier to write a crawler for blogs or websites that don't offer RSS.

Feedbin does this! (Though not with as much cleverness as your suggestion.)

https://feedbin.com/blog/2016/02/03/subscribe-to-email-newsl...

"You can now receive email newsletters in Feedbin."

Or worse, "Follow us on Facebook"

I've been using Facebook to subscribe to websites mainly because I know I'll check Facebook more often. I keep forgetting to check my Feedly account.

However I've discovered that after liking a few pages and joining a few groups the quality of information in my Facebook news feed is getting watered down. I'm missing more of my friends updates.

Currently my Facebook feed has a duel personality which makes it a bit useless.

> a duel personality

One of these insightful typos :)

use the interest lists feature, make different lists for different topics, and bookmark them

Google Reader had a very important social aspect as well

People keep forgetting this. Google Reader was the best social network for academically minded people that I have ever been part of. As one blogger after it's shutdown said: it was a social network for people who don't want to talk about themselves

One usecase of RSS is, ahem, porn (yes that's part of life, especially Tumblr). That's a non-trivial usecase which is the reason why I donated to TheOldReader but refuse to pay a subscription; and RSS readers stubbornly trying to share my RSS reading on a social network was a risk for me.

That's a perfect way of phrasing why I think reader is the best social network Google ever made. Thank you.

What features were those?

The sharing of RSS feeds, and arguably even better: the bookmarklet to share any page on the internet

RSS feeds were just never easy enough for most people to bother. And not just the proverbial grandma, most techies don't use RSS either. Sites will run analytics and see that nobody is clicking the feed button.

RSS certainly solves a real problem, so I think there is an opportunity for reinventing RSS with better UX. Don't ask me how though.

I don't know how you could improve the UX, considering most sites had an icon that directly linked to google reader. For a while, feed readers where also the app store category where all the innovation happened.

I don't want to live in the same internet as people who can't copy & paste an URL.

> Sites will run analytics and see that nobody is clicking the feed button.

I barely ever click on any RSS buttons. Partially because sites nowadays don't even bother putting one in there, partially because TinyTinyRSS extracts the feed from the site's <head> automatically.

So running analytics on that button would be very misleading, especially for users like me ;-)

> RSS feeds were just never easy enough for most people to bother

Set up a wordpress site, you have RSS built in. Set up a drupal site, you have RSS built in. Set up on Squarespace and you have RSS built in.

Pretty much every off-the-shelf CMS has RSS with zero effort, you have to actively turn it off. It is only the people who put a bunch of work into building a site without a CMS that don't easily have RSS.

That was part of the problem the real number of RSS readers were hidden and silly analytics like this led sites to make bad decisions.

How do you get better UX than clicking an RSS link and it adding itself to your feed reader?

It isn't the protocol, it is that there is no profit in an open standard like that. Google killed their Reader because they wanted everyone forced into G+, rather than consuming content from around the Internet.

It is the same thing with messaging and VOIP. Nobody wants to use an open standard like XMPP or more recently Matrix because there is no money in using standards when you can lock users in to a walled garden.

> How do you get better UX than clicking an RSS link and it adding itself to your feed reader?

Well, you need to have a feed reader set up.

You need to signup for Facebook / Twitter as well. And there are browser based feed readers. The only downside is the lack of availability of web-based feed reader support in browsers.

That might be partially on the onus of the reader, but it would require you to at least install an extension to add their site as your default feed processor. That can be a UX loss.

By having your articles directly on your site, linked to via a "feed reader" that everyone already uses - twitter, facebook, reddit, etc.

I remember trying to get into RSS feeds a few years back. I passed them by - it was easier to just hit news.google.com or my multireddit or twitterfeed for news I was interested in. Sure, I didn't "get it," and yea fine I'm not the smartest guy ever, but I'm probably a good representation of the average net user - interested in efficient means at getting the news such as RSS, but also tremendously lazy. Why bother? I already have a twitter/reddit/gnews account.

Twitter is transitory, Facebook isn't chronological, Reddit puts you at the whims of other people.

They are not the same. With Google Reader you had a virtually infinity history of the feed while with feed clients you only receive articles from the current and past feed files seen. An article about this topic: http://blog.databigbang.com/tag/google-reader/

> The tragedy isn't some Google tool being retired, the tragedy is the way feeds are slowly disappearing. It's a slow and creeping death, but it's a death. More and more sites are dropping their feeds and replacing them with some twitterish Facebook nonsense.

It's certainly painful, made all the more painful by the death of Yahoo! Pipes which was helpful in turning these (once rare) non-RSS sites into something usable.

The closing of Reader signalled this change (which is why so many of us lamented it so much; not for the product itself, but for what it meant for the web). If you fight hard enough, you can still turn all of this garbage into RSS and toss it into your feed reader (I like tt-rss), but RSS as a mainstream tool is already dead (outside of a few niches, like podcasts, which are also slowly moving into walled gardens of their own).

Really? I've yet to find a single blog of interest that's lacking an RSS feed (though it might be implicit instead of explicit — Feedbin usually finds the link if I drop in the URL).

I've been paying for newsblur (http://www.newsblur.com/) ever since google reader bit the dust. It's pretty much a direct replacement. Interface has come a long way since day one and is sufficiently slick now (UI, keyboard shortcuts, etc) that I don't really notice it.

Highly recommended by a (former) hardcore google reader user. If I recall correctly, got quite a good bit of press here on HN at the time.

I'm also a happy newsblur user. The free tier is more than enough for my needs, but I was so happy with the service I decided to pay the annual subscription

Another happy NewsBlur customer here. It's by far the best replacement I've found.

Sorry, I don't agree: heavy Google Reader user and now a NewsBlur one. While I appreciate the NewsBlur existence it is very very very slow while Google Reader was extremely fast. I don't know if NewsBlur only retrieves my feeds when I start a request or if it constantly retrieves them on the backend.

Disclosure: I have 2350 feeds in NewsBlur.

Is that... normal? 2350 feeds seems like an astronomical amount of news feeds. Can I ask how much of that do you read?

Agreed, very curious how much of that actually gets even glanced over.

I thought I was information overload with ~150 sites. I hope OP uses the 'focus' features so they can get a modicum of information from those 2350 feeds.

It's possible that many of those could be discarded without being read. As an example, I'm subscribed to the Best Of Metafilter RSS feed, but if I'm on vacation for a week and come back to over a hundred posts, I just mark 'em all as read.

But is your intention really to read every post by every site you're subscribed to? Someone subscribed to over 1000 sites isn't trying to avoid missed posts - they're just dipping into the stream of sites they're interested in at any given moment.

Read every post, no. But at least get a general idea of the posts for the sites I subscribe to. There are a couple of sites that I let over lapse, HN is a good example, but for the most part, I atleast read the headlines / tags of posts for sites.

One nice feature of newsblur, which I don't use often and not sure if it is available in other readers, but the intelligence trainer would probably help in instances where you have a lot of sites and don't necessarily bother reviewing all posts.

Maybe I just use RSS readers differently. But if I were just going to periodically review what a site has, I would probably go to the site periodically rather than clutter up my list of feeds.

I am in the same boat and I simply quickly go through the 50-100 posts of the sites per day. I actually open maybe 10% in the browser. Following small sites and blogs about your interests gives you the best quality of the web in my opinion.

> I thought I was information overload with ~150 sites.

It mainly depends of the feed volume, not how many feeds are you subscribed to. I cherry picked a lot of personal blogs that are not updated often.

That was my perception, a lot of personal blogs, thank you for clarifying.

Somewhat unrelated, but it would be neat if there was some kind of lost and found for RSS as I have sites from the early 00s that I followed which are no longer updated but I imagine the author just changed their site, etc.

Yes, I think this is one of the issues related to Internet archeology. Not equal but similar to the recovery of Usenet discussions.

NewsBlur has an organizer that provides this exact info. Just sort of last update (or even stories per month) and mass delete. It's somewhat new but it makes a world of a difference. The organizer is on web and just launched on iOS. See http://blog.newsblur.com.

You can add a lot of low-volume sites without having them pile up too much, also I break out my feeds in groups and that makes them a lot easier to go through.

I have around 1500. Most are not active, though.

And I wouldn't take the claim seriously that Google Reader was fast with that many feeds; I found that GR struggled with that feeds: http://the-digital-reader.com/2012/11/01/i-broke-google-read...

I think this is a good discussion to have. One thing is to be subscribed to thousands of feeds from major media sites where you receive a huge amount of articles every day and another to be subscribed to specific blogs with sporadic articles. I have more of the later.

Only from VCs I have more than 200.

Downvotes to this are very suspicious since it is a fact that goes in the opposite direction of other comments in the thread.

I suspect your disclosure (2300 feeds!) overly negated what would have been valid criticism of the tool...

No, how many e-mails do you have in GMail? Had this downvotes asked how do I use these feeds?

Maybe try bazqux. Super fast, written in haskell https://bazqux.com/faq

I have about 1100 feeds and have found that newsblur is pretty good as long as I'm not (a) on safari and (b) leaving the tab open for a long time. (that is, it's fine on chrome, and it's fine on safari if I close the tab after a while).

I'm a newsblur user but it is in no way a placement for reader. For one newsblur will only track the last 30 days of posts (or is it 30 news posts).

So for example in reader I might add site like Unity's blog. Reader would show the entire history as unread. I could then slowly go through all the old tutorials since they're all there. Newsblur I can't do that. It won't pull in stuff past a certain date/count.

That also means I can't just put some feeds on "low burn" mode where I keep them but only check them very seldom because the unread stuff will slide off of newsblur's limited post queue

When I look at a feed with the 'All / Newest' setting, it is showing me stuff that is over 3 years old. Maybe just the view you are using?

Here's the specific issue

https://getsatisfaction.com/newsblur/topics/unread_items_are...

Maybe the feeds you're loading still include posts from 3 years ago? So the posts are still being loaded recently.

I have never understood why RSS, in addition to being a document format, doesn't include a specification for a really simple API that supports requesting the full archives for a feed. Every feed could be responsible for providing its own canonical archive. It would be a trivial addition to the implementation of blogging software, and would be immensely useful.

This is a brilliant idea. First I've heard of it, and I run NewsBlur. Where were you when the RSS spec was being worked on!

TBF, Newsblur doesn't enjoy the craploads of infrastructure that Google has.

Thank you for posting about NewsBlur. I'd like to remind everybody that one of its most important features is that it is entirely open source

http://github.com/samuelclay

This means that if I were to ever invoke the bus factor you would still be able to use the same reader you use today. It negates the Google Reader problem and gives you confidence that I'm not selling your data or doing anything nefarious.

Plus it means you can contribute your own pet feature. About sixty people have done that so far, for web, iOS, and android. Open sourcing has paid off in spades and I'm planning to do the same for my next secret project, of which I'm in China for right now.

> my next secret project

> I am also working on a new hardware device called the Turn Touch Mac Remote. It controls custom built apps on your Mac.

lol. good luck!

I like to leave little hints for those who try. But you also don't know what it looks like yet. That's going to be quite the reveal.

I had no idea newsblur is open source! I can't believe you don't mention it at all on the newsblur.com landing page!

I've been getting fed up with feedly missing critical features. Knowing that newsblur is a service that I could potentially improve is enough to go through the pain of migrating my feeds to do a solid evaluation.

Same here, I stuck with Reader till its final week and then switched to newsblur. Haven't regretted paying for it yet!

I just want to second that, it's working perfectly.

I've been using Feedbin very happily, myself. Contra a lot of people here, I almost never can't find a feed when I want one.

Reader's neglect and eventual shutdown were annoying, but hardly heartbreaking. I miss the massive search history, but that's all.

Same. It's the only reader that has intuitive keyboard shortcuts to navigate the selection between the feed, article list, and the actual article. And it looks nice. Well worth $3/mo.

I've found FeedHQ[1] paired with Reeder[2] to be even better than Google Reader for my purposes (checking hundreds of feeds daily, archiving interesting posts locally, and syncing read posts with iOS).

[1] https://feedhq.org "Import and export your data as OPML, use the API to back it up or build amazing apps on top of FeedHQ. You can even run your own FeedHQ instance or help improving it, it's open-source!"

[2] http://reederapp.com/mac/ "A news reader for Feedbin, Feedly, Feed Wrangler, FeedHQ, NewsBlur, The Old Reader, Inoreader, Minimal Reader, BazQux Reader, Fever, Readability and Instapaper."

I tried to like Newsblur (in fact, I paid for 3 years), but couldn't - it's just way too "over the top" for me. I ended up signing up (and paying too) for Yoleo Reader. I guess, functionality-wise it's no match Newsblur's, but it's much easier to use too.

RSS was and still is great for following a few blogs that were relatively infrequently updated. If I follow Rands, DF or Marco, it works quite well. I receive timely, relevant content at a pace I can cope with and digest.

The problem with RSS is that it scales incredibly badly for large, content heavy sites. I don't really want to see everything that Gizmodo publishes. I certainly don't want to see everything that HuffPo, Buzzfeed or any of the other content mills publish. Sure, you can choose granularity - a 'US Politics' RSS feed for example, but that puts too much of the onus on me and I'll end up missing some stuff I'd like to see.

For those large content mills, Facebook actually does a quite good job of bubbling stuff up through my network that I care about. Twitter served that function for a while before it became more about noise and snark.

The death of Google Reader probably had a role in the decline of the small independent publisher (how many new sites have appeared on that scene recently?), but it's probably not to blame for the rise of BuzzFeed et al, which RSS was never really suited to handle anyway.

That was always my policy: reader for those feeds I want to read every post of, visiting the websites for anything like the NYTimes.

Google Reader had social too, and served your purpose very well. Plus you didn't have to filter out your uncle's political rants or your cousin posting her new baby's every action.

Yahoo had a very good approach to the problem of scalability with Yahoo Pipes, that allowed nearly anyone to filter and mix different RSS feeds (say, for instance, get from Wired only those articles wrtten by a given author and containing a certain keyword), but it got axed very recently.

rss had two major hurdles that made it difficult for people to pick up.

1) there was no collaborative space for teams to work together to create feed mixes. No service I know of became popular that allowed team of 7 people to moderate the member feeds of a metafeed. This harmed discovery.

2) Deduplication was usually a human task. Techmeme really spoiled me. It was impossible to see what other people had already marked as duplicate "aggregations" of an original story.

these two together basically meant that EVERY person who used rss reinvented the wheel. You couldnt latch on to other peoples work like you can subscribe to a subreddit. Twitter has a similar problem, it lacks collaboratively maintained lists. It kind of blows my mind how neglected the idea of a "run your own slashdot/techmeme with friends" is.

i probably sound like a shill by now, but redef.com seems to be moving in the right direction.

RSS had the concept of OPML, which could have been used for that purpose, but I only saw it used in very isolated cases.

The curation angle does feel like a space that the likes of Skimm, NextDraft et al have picked up.

I'm not in love with the idea of another daily email newsletter, and Redef often feels like a long list of pieces that I "ought" to read rather than stuff I get genuine pleasure from, but it's the best we've had in a while.

OPML was an export of lists, it didnt let you and me edit a list together. maybe opml+github+humandeduplicationofstoriesliketechmeme

the thing that makes techmeme great is that they CHOOSE the best story, and then link to the duplicates. It might be the first, or it might be the most researched source, and they may change the link if a better one appears. Hackernews does similar, but I cant easily click "other sites with variants of this story"

as an aside, I quite dislike the email newsletters, it seems very antiweb. nextdraft not having a website is infuriating.

Google Reader's public labels had the capability to create a group-edited metafeed, but this advanced use case was never advertised. The one use that I know of for it was on the sidebar of the Google Reader blog: Each team member had a public label, and there was one person who had a label which subscribed to each of the others. Any feed that any team member subscribed to with their public label would show up on the sidebar of the blog; people would do this for their own blogs or their shared items.

I guess my vision of a metafeed is something that autoingests rss feeds, presents them to editors as "pending stories" and the upvoted ones become visible to non-logged-in-users/subscribers after a certain threshold. Maybe editors/moderators/curators (whatever we call them this week) would have some kind of superupvote to use sparingly if an important article was justified.

I imagine this place being like reddit, where I can view a giant list of rooms, and see how each room and its members are mixing content. it should also be easy to clone/fork (github/yahoopipes) a configuration if your team wants to start where another team began.

I also like how counterparties had a list of rejected stories, stories they acknowledged but refused to follow.

really I am describing a piece of technology that lets any group of people maintain their own techmeme plus a reddit like index of all the different rooms, that allows you to subscribe to multiple rooms and see them in one feed.

If RSS scales badly for sites like Gizmodo, don't use it for sites like Gizmodo. RSS is great for small-scale personal publishing; in fact some sort of aggregator is practically a necessity for such a thing to work (this is why blogging has drifted to tumblr, facebook, and twitter: publishing integrated with aggregated consumption is a powerful thing).

This leads to a chicken and egg problem: when someone is first introduced to RSS, the only sources they know about are ones that don't work well with RSS. It's hard to cultivate the kind of network that makes RSS valuable to you until you've already bought in to the concept.

Personally, at my peak I was subscribed to about 400 feeds, but they only published about 100 items a day.

The other issue is that a lot of these sites gate the content fed through RSS to make you visit the site for the whole thing (plus, you know, ad impressions).

RSS works best when the content can be fully digestible in the reader. If you can read most of it there, great--you get a preview. What I hated was when I'd get like a line or two, or couldn't even see an image load in an image-only post without visiting a sloth of a site.

Oddly enough, my Reddit homepage is pretty decent now due to pruning subscriptions and using RES.

I feel like we cold solve this with better feed threading. Take every article with certain URLs in common and present them in a threaded view.

This way the massive content mils would get written down to a single chain.

I've tried a variety of RSS readers recently for keeping track of academic publications (arxiv and journal feeds etc). I've settled on inoreader [1] as this: (i) includes a search feature in the free tier, (ii) has keyword highlighting (useful for trawling through long lists of papers), (iii) has a reliable Android app.

[1] http://www.inoreader.com

I also use Inoreader and after using it for quite a while, I decided to pay for it to support the developers.

My preference is to use the mobile web interface [1] in a web browser for most of my RSS reading on a tablet or phone, rather than use the app. I find it gives me greater control over my reading experience.

For example, I've disabled image loading in feeds. And since I'm still in a web browser, I can open multiple tab views (each one displaying a separate category of RSS feeds) at once, letting me rapidly scan feed headings without the need to go back and forth between categories in the app; they just load in the background while I reading the headings in one tab.

[1] https://www.inoreader.com/m/

also (iv) has a good chrome extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/inoreader-companio...

Agree, Inoreader has a lot of power user features.

The iOS apps are good too.

Another happy paid customer of Inoreader here. The chrome is small and out of the way, keyboard shortcuts work well, it syncs read/unread status well between the website and the mobile app, and I like using the Star feature as a way of marking items I'd like to revisit later.

I too miss Google Reader.

Feedly does OK, but is expensive. Of all I tried, however, it consistently was the least worst.

Most of the replacements suffer from bad apps on at least one mobile platform I use, poor web experience, lack of speed (esp. search), and even lack of features (esp. search)...

...and all suffer from lack of leveraging modern text analytics. If I have overlapping stories in my feed, perhaps a winning service would merge duplicates or cluster similar stories? Akin to threading, but more implicit. This is esp. a problem in my "apple" feeds, where any mention of anything from apple shows up verbatim in every feed. A Techmeme style (pick one, nest the rest) would be really interesting.

Why are you paying for feedly? If it's altruism, great, but what else?

I paid becuase I want it to succeed. I was skeptical at first, but i really like it.

As to pro features that I may be enjoying: - faster feed polling - IFTTT action to save links to pinboard when i save in feedly - search

Edit: I bought the lifetime membership when they started. Just looked at today's pricing. I would not pay $7/mo

Interesting, thank you.

have you looked into theoldreader.com ? its essentially google reader.

I've been using http://theoldreader.com ever since. As the name implies, it does a pretty good job of mimicking Google Reader.

https://digg.com/reader does the job for me. It's probably even better than Google Reader was.

http://www.inoreader.com/ works for me as it gives a minimalist list view and also has a decent android app.

I second this. Inoreader's UI is much better than Google reader ever was. Being a free user, I am still unable to explore much of the functionality they offer, but I hope to be a subscriber soon.

This. Inoreader's UI reminds me a lot of goold old Bloglines!

Same for me. Digg reader is now so good, that I can no more say if Google Reader was better or not. Even if google relaunches Google Reader, I will not use it. After they killed Reader I've realized how important is not to bet all on one company and nowadays I prefered diversification (dropbox, digg, spotify) rather then all in one.

Digg Reader is good, but it has issues showing the correct list of unread items.

I wrote my own reader after giving feedly a brief try https://github.com/urandom/readeef Though it only fits my needs

Just read the features of the pro version: "1 year of post storage, up to 1000 posts per feed"

I totally forgot Google Reader would store feeds forever, so you could search back in time. That was actually an amazing feature.

Feature which is still available to those who self host :) My TinyTinyRSS database has 359533 posts stored, taking a whooping 559MB. I frankly don't get why they have such low limits to paying customers. Storing a whole 1GB on S3 would cost them just 3¢ of the monthly $3. Unless they also scrape images from posts...?

"1 year/1000 posts" refers only to unread posts, which makes sense to me. If you have thousands of unread posts, chances are you don't care that much about them.

I'm not sure what their policy on read posts is. I'm a premium user and a quick search shows up a (read, but not liked or shared) post from 2011. It says here that liked and shared posts are stored forever:

https://theoldreader.uservoice.com/knowledgebase/articles/14...

Since this seems to be the thread for alternatives...

Someone at the time of Reader's demise recommended Selfoss, and I've been running it ever since. It's not quite as good, but it does what I wanted from Reader.

I also use Selfoss, it does what I need it to. Although the author's decision to override the Space key is odd. I comment that part of the JS and let the aggregated js regenerate to return that behavior to the browser.

+1 for the old reader - works well for me too.

I really like the privacy features of TheOldReader.com -- especially their commitment so far to have no tracking (with cookies etc.) or user data harvesting to serve ads. They do have some select sponsored ads for the free-tier, but done without any such tracking [1].

[1] http://blog.theoldreader.com/post/113273709664/sponsor-the-o...

With all the alternatives we have these days, I don't see any reason to mourn a product its parent company obviously didn't want to support any longer. It was my impression back then that countless other services continued right where Google Reader left off the day it was shut down.

Personally, I migrated to Feedbin. Importing my subscriptions and replacing the accounts in my feed reader of choice (Reeder) didn't require more than a few minutes of my time.

I often think that Google Reader was the worst thing to happen to RSS. It became the standard everyone used, but never implemented feed authentication, forever preventing the idea of premium subscription feeds from succeeding.

With all the complaints about page weight, tracking, and overzealous advertising, the idea that I could just pay to subscribe to an RSS feed has more appeal than ever.

What shall I say. Not a day has passed since that awful day they pulled the plug when I haven't missed the great reader. I have shared this great tragedy of many friends of mine but the pain was shared only by people who had experienced it, loved it. The look we share with each other in remembrance says it all. Its a massive hole in my life which an incompetent little Feedly tries to fill but the heart still yearns for the great reader.

Today, I got some solace from the fact that there are others like me, only if Google can bring it back can I truly be healed.

People are suggesting replacements for Reader, but none of them capture the ux that Reader found perfection at. Newer readers have been trying to outcompete each other with nice convenience features, but it muddies the strength of what Reader was: simple.

I'm still smarting over the loss of Reader, and I don't think I'll ever forgive Google for its shuttering.

I am obligated to post a link to BazQux[0], which completely nails the RSS reading experience that Google Reader once had. It's absolutely worth the $20/yr subscription.

I am still amazed that it doesn't seem to get any discussion or attention whenever these "favorite RSS reader" threads come up.

[0]: https://bazqux.com

And it's made with Ur/Web, which deserves to be used a lot more.

Google might be backpedalling on Google+, but we'll never see Google Reader again. It's like admitting you were wrong. Way too hard for some people.

Yes, its that Google+ which is responsible for the death of the great reader. I am sure total engagement minutes in Google reader today would have beaten Google+ engagement minutes. Such a shame Google.

I really like tt-rss (http://tt-rss.org), self-hosted. It doesn't have the social aspect that Google Reader had, but you could use pinboard or something for that. The tt-rss web app is pretty good, and the Android client is excellent.

> Not one of those alternatives is good enough, because they’re just not the same.

So what is the problem exactly? Is it really that hard to make a good reader?

Personally I don't really care. My Reader list was so bloated I never had time to go through anything. Just speculating but could it be that many people were like me, using Reader out of habit? So when it disappeared it didn't really matter much because algorithms and aggregators had already replaced it. That could explain why none of the alternatives really took off but I don't know.

I think the thing that bothers me most about Feedly is paid-search. Sure, I don't mind if you limit advanced searches to paid users, but when I'm trying to do a simple search for something I know exists in the same feed (and saw like last week), why is that so ridiculous?

RSS really simplifies reading news. Having multiple sources in a single place and compact lists are obvious benefits, but even if you only subscribe to 1 site, you'd save a ton of time simply by not having to rescan over stuff you've already read or decided not to read. Over the past month I've logged out of and stopped going directly to media sites and replaced them with RSS feeds. That's including YouTube, which was a pain to do but I only subscribed to about 15 channels. I do fear Google will kill the feed urls at some point.

I've been searching for a cross-platform desktop RSS reader. Thunderbird is what I use for now and I would stop looking if I could just filter URLs but the filtering only seems to be built for email, which works if the URL is in the "body" of the feed item, but not all feeds are structured like that (e.g. HN). RSSOwl looks real promising but doesn't run for me on Windows 10 and hasn't been updated in 2 years. I'd prefer a standalone RSS reader, not a email client with RSS tacked on. I looked at everything in the comments so far but they all fall a little short.

From my experience, a self-hosted web aggregator is the most convenient option. I initially wrote my own (very clunky) in PHP when I realized Thunderbird would not do.

I am currently using FreshRSS [1]. MiniFlux [2] and TinyTinyRSS [3] are pretty good to.

[1] FreshRSS http://freshrss.org/

[2] MiniFlux https://miniflux.net/

[3] TinyTinyRSS https://tt-rss.org/gitlab/fox/tt-rss/wikis/home

If any of these will work with Reeder I think I just found my weekend project.

I know that both Miniflux (previously used) and TinyTinyRSS (currently using) work with Reeder (via the Fever API). It's a bit annoying that the Fever API doesn't provide any way to add feeds though, so you'll need to do that in-browser.

I'm working on an Ruby on Rails based open source reader, if your interested checkout https://github.com/aleks/HappyFeed

Looks good, thanks!

Now you'll remember what RMS has been saying. Mwahahaha, oh, mwahahaha

Losing the Google reader was a big deal for me, and I managed to write a Chrome extension that re-used most of Google Reader's UI and hijacked browser's XHR to redirect requests to browser background page.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/local-rss-reader/c...

The code is not pretty, if I wrote this extension today, the code would be much more readable and robust.

It worked out okay, but I moved to tiny-tiny RSS a few years ago, so this little project of mine is mostly abandoned.

I use tiny tiny RSS and can whole heartedly recommended it. One concern is that their user forum is extremely hostile and the moderators thinks it is somehow entertaining to make fun of others.

I used tt-rss for a while as well and can highly recommend it. The forums are certainly hostile, but if you have a genuinely good question that hasn't been asked / answered before and thick skin, you'll likely get a semi-reasonable response.

https://github.com/swanson/stringer

As a pretty heavy RSS user, I too miss Google Reader, but what I really miss is Bloglines. They had a very fast, responsive UI that I really liked. I always felt GR was clunky and slow compared to it.

After GR shut down I bounced around with self-hosted solutions for a while (tt-rss, Fever) until landing on Newsblur, which has served my needs admirably.

Why lamenting about one specific product, even demanding from the specific company to make exactly the same again? One company isn't the "internet." The comments here (by janvdberg and xaduha) show there are alternatives.

They had the only copy of a ton of defunct blogs and they just deleted them. That's not replaceable.

OK, bad, but that content isn't coming back even if the product would be reintroduced?

Well I'm still hoping they just made it inaccessible and they still have a copy around.

The old Opera browser was the best local client because you could open RSS links in the same app, as a new tab, in a real browser. There is no comparable local RSS reader that comes close. I've since switched to Inoreader.

Happy newsbeuter[1] user here.

I try to avoid web-based apps as much as possible, so net got in to Google Reader, and never missed it when it died.

[1] - http://www.newsbeuter.org

feedly.com works ok for me as a replacement.

If only it had sort by magic the great reader had

I am maintaining an open source simple aggregator: https://github.com/JARR/JARR and using it since more than 5 years. It has evolved a lot since...

It is possible to test it here: https://jarr.herokuapp.com This instance is limited in resources... It is deployable quite easily (a vagrant configuration file is also provided).

Screen shot: https://jarr.github.io

I've been using Thunderbird for both my emails and RSS.

Inb4 You need to read your news on 20 different devices at the same time.

Very interesting post. I'm fully with the author except for one point: whether Google Reader comes back matters no more. The freedom of Internet and the choices for the people lies in the freedom software, not proprietary service.

Liferea and newsblur(https://github.com/samuelclay/NewsBlur) are some good open source alternatives.

I have never used Google Reader, but I think that Pocket started going on its path, with public recommendations and the suggested tab. I've never used RSS for the news, I'm using it for the small unknown blogs that don't post 20 articles per day. As for the RSS readers, my only recommendation today is that they have a nice integration with Pocket.

TheOldReader.com is a great free replacement - I found it after the shut down and it's been good so far.

Talking about RSS reader, I was becoming (almost!) fan of digg reader until they updated their iPad app and then links to sites won't open! How crazy is that! Uninstalled immediately, deleted digg account and I am a happy feedly user since then. No regrets so far.

You can delete your digg account? I've been trying to do that for ages and still can't figure out how.

I always thought that it would have been smarter to roll Google Reader into Google Plus. By that, I mean use the RSS feeds as automated profiles for those blogs.

been using feedly and greader pro on android ever since

And you can share the same feeds among Feedly and gReader Pro?

I'm asking, because Feedly the web app is okay, but I don't like their Android version

yeah basically greader uses Feedly as a source.

I agree about the feedly for android, i prefer the more text-y view of greader (which looks more like the old google reader).

greader also lets you view feeds in a list with the most recently updated first.

p.s. you don't need the Pro version for any of the above, the regular version is ad supported but otherwise free to use.

I find tinytinyrss on top of sandstorm.io ideal for my RSS reading needs.

too soon man, too soon.

Though I've been "mostly" happy with feedly...

The Reader workflow never really worked for me. I just ended up with a big bold "unread" number counting all the posts I'd never get round to reading.

In the end I rolled my own thing (http://www.mailfeed.io) which checks feeds once a day and emails me a list of all new posts. Really simple, and nothing to make me feel guilty about not keeping up.

I kinda did exactly the same. Rolled my own: http://www.weegeeks.com

It doesn't keep a history of feeds, just what's in the feed right now. That way I don't get backlogged.

I don't recommend anyone use it though, it's very tailored to my lightweight requirements. It's actually got about 200+ registered users, but only one of those (other than me) is active...

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