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Comment by solipsism | Hacker News Reader

It wasn't user-friendly for non-tech folks. It was confusing. There were no readers that appealed to regular folks. The open-source world dropped the ball here. This is why it died.

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The free software world created Liferea, which looks good,[1] works very well, is easy to use, and was created 13 years ago. People just don't know about it, because they look for web services that they don't control instead of applications running on their own computers.

RSS is not dead, it is still supported by everything on the web except the large social networks that have corporate interests in not supporting it. This is in large part because all the content management systems support it.

[1]: See for yourself: https://clbin.com/B0v1yt.png.

He's talking about there not being any applications that appeal to normal non-tech users and your example is a linux desktop app that looks like a windows 95 application. I don't think you two agree on what "non-tech" and "appealing" mean.

That being said I'm sure it is very usable in a utilitarian sense.

Liferea is quite buggy on many systems, if you use GNOME and/or it's stable on your system then good for you. QuiteRSS is good, the only problem is that it comes with built in browser and I'm not sure if the browser code is updated properly.

I don't disagree. I didn't mean RSS was user-friendly in the UX sense, although the poor UX of RSS readers in general was also indirectly a result the lack of interest from profit-driven companies, but rather in the sense that it offered users freedom from lock-in and the ability to aggregate content they're interested in and decouple it from the often ad-ridden platforms it was served on.

Flipboard has a ton of users, many of whom are reading rss feeds without knowing it.

I agree that overall, usability is still a huge problem for rss.

I know a few relatives that used RSS integration in Firefox even though they do know nothing about tech. You just had to click the orange icon to subscribe and you would get the list of news on a dropdown in the bookmarks bar.

That is one of the awesome features in Firefox, its too simple for power users but for the regular user its great. I only wish there was some better interface around it, even if something html based or what not, like Bamboo Feed Reader maybe.

Has the open source world EVER produced a UX that was user friendly for non-tech folks? I'm really drawing a blank here.

As a mostly non-tech folk, nope.

VLC Media Player. It's not pretty, but it has a play button and a scrollbar. Its 3629394 power user features are nicely stashed away where they belong: in a menu that most people never even bother to check out.

But the core feature for a video player is that it plays the damn video. That's core UX, and most other players of the last 15 years have dropped plenty balls there. You can have so many skins and library features and preview screenshots but if the movie doesn't play without your nerd cousin first breaking your OS with sleazy half-broken codec packs, the UX is shit.

The most difficult part for non-tech people using VLC is understanding Finder or Explorer to double-click the movie they just torrented.

Firefox?

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