Ask HN: Does the world need another RSS aggregator? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Does the world need another RSS aggregator?

5 pointsburtonator10 comments

I spent a lot of time on HN and a lot of you seem to miss the fact that there aren't very many quality RSS/feed aggregators in the world.

There are a few out there but there still seems to be a gap in the market.

I'm on of the original inventors of RSS. I now run a company named Datastreamer which indexes about a petabyte of social media data.

As a side project I'm working on Polar which is a document manager based on Electron which supports PDF and capturing web pages.

Many of our users have asked for RSS but I'm worried that it might be feature creep.

Would love to hear your thoughts!

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> "there aren't very many quality RSS/feed aggregators in the world"

All I need is one, so I don't really care that there aren't very many of them. The one I've been using since Google Reader disappeared is NewsBlur.com, which works very well for me. (I'm a paying customer.)

What features would you put in an RSS aggregator that would make it better than NewsBlur?

I'm still not sure.. I think mainly the features around Polar plus RSS support.

Still torn up about this so that's why I posted for feedback. I hadn't heard of NewsBlur before so thanks.

NewsBlur looks like it has one heck of a leaning curve. Way too much going on.

It's mostly about UX/UI rather than anything else. Feedly is becoming worse and worse and other readers (except maybe Reeder which lacks Windows / Android support) are just plain ugly or bloated with junk social / discovery features.

Also, here is the link to Polar:

https://getpolarized.io/

Here's the original HN thread when we announced Polar:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18219960

It's come a long way since our original launch!

One of the key features is that it supports capturing web pages and handles HTML very well which is why it would lend itself to RSS indexing.

I definitely think this would fall under the category of feature creep.

I use Feedly for RSS. It works well. Easy to add new things to the feed, and doesn't take a lot of clicks to either read or remove stuff from the feed. They also have a phone app which is essential for something like that imo. If you think you can make something that is easier to use than Feedly, and for Android(and other phones) I would say go for it.

The world doesn't need another RSS aggregator. The world might need another RSS aggregator that is fundamentally different than the others. For instance, one that gives me an alert if one of my selected keywords appears in one of my feeds or one that uses AI to predict which of the unread articles is most likely to be of interest to me, and makes a list of them.

>one that gives me an alert if one of my selected keywords appears in one of my feeds

Inoreader does this, although it requires a paid subscription.

https://blog.inoreader.com/2015/03/inoreader-how-to-save-tim...

well I haven't found an RSS reader that meets all my criteria yet. Some come close but not quite, and most just don't.

No. It needs a good client.

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