Hacker News Reader

Comment by sanderjd | Hacker News Reader

Why? There are tons of perfectly good rss feed readers. I've never understood this one. I was a heavy Reader user, seamlessly switched to Feedly like the day after it was spun down, and never thought about it again.

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Do you mostly consume text, or images/rich media? Something about Reader just worked for me. It was partly some blogs I followed and wanted to keep up with reading, but the meat of it for me was just scrolling endless pictures from various design blogs, that i'd sometimes star or label. Or some webcomic that I'd share with my handful of friends that were on there. Or I'd catch up whatever BMX or ski edits that came out. The interface was just clean for seamless and endless scrolling of all that media, (without titles and sources and headings taking up too much space), and the organization was clutch. Nothing else has caught my eye since. I've tried Feedly, old reader, and a few others, but none of them have me coming back for more, I just never got in the habit with them like i did for Reader.

Looking back, I guess it served as a kind of instagram/facebook feed, but for the internet that I wanted to see (which would differ from time to time, sometimes i want webcomics, sometimes I want ffffound <- this is largly something social media has yet to pick up on, the ebb and flow of what our attention wants). But no social media has captured my attention like Reader did...

Isn't Feedly exactly for people like you? I never liked it because I mainly want text, but it always struck me as a reader for people who want pictures.

Reader worked really well for me, too. And killing Reader seemed to send a signal to a lot of people that rss was 'done', whether rightly or wrongly - all that matters is that people believe it. I saw a lot less rss around subsequently. I switched to a few other services but ultimately just faded out on rss in general, which is a shame, as it was nice to have a non-algorithmic-curation feed of stuff I liked.

Good news for you! Every site that publishes a feed of articles still has an rss feed! You can go back whenever you want, nothing has changed.

The really killer feature, to me and a lot of others, is that it let you discover, and communicate with, people that also liked the same feed entries. I had, entirely without planning, accumulated a nice little group of people with which I shared anything and everything I read via RSS.

I use Feedly now too but I still miss my Reader band.

Ok I didn't know it did that. I never used that, but it does sound neat.

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