Ask HN: What do you dislike about your RSS reader? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What do you dislike about your RSS reader?

6 pointsjkeuhlen6 comments

I'm currently working on an RSS reader as a replacement for Google News for myself. I'm curious what kinds of things other people who use content aggregators like or dislike about the ones they use.

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After Google Reader I haven't been able to use an RSS reader ever since. IMHO the competition often tries far too hard to make the UI pretty.

I don't need minimalism, over-complicated UIs, personalized reccomandations and so on. I don't need social sharing (on the desktop at the least).

I need a fast, easy to follow, predictable UI. An easy way to categorize feeds. I would like to be able to read and save my OPML in the cloud (a github gist, a Google Drive document, etc) and possibly use on another device with the same app or possibly even with another. On the mobile side, it would be great if the reader was a progressive webapp rather than an android/iphone application.

Until 2 weeks ago, I would have answered: that I can’t use the same app/site to read RSS as I can to read documents that I manually saved, so I have 2 apps and queues (Feedbin and Instapaper) for 1 resource (my casual/quick reading time).

But… the service I use, Feedbin, just implemented that: https://feedbin.com/blog/2019/08/20/save-webpages-to-read-la.... The saved pages could use better categorization (tags/folders), but Feedbin has those for RSS feeds so I suspect they’ll exist eventually. If/when I can categorize saved pages and stop using Instapaper, I can’t think of anything else about Feedbin I’d change.

Interesting, thanks! I hadn't thought about that kind of a use case before.

I used to use Newsblur and the only feature I wish it had (which maybe it did and I just didn't know about it) is to see trending articles like Feedly does, just so I could get a feel for what was going to be a hot conversational topic. RSS really needs a renaissance though.

To be honest, I'm agnostic to the particular RSS reader I use as long as it gets the basics right - read later, save webpages in read later, basic organization and a decent search. My current poison of choice has been Feedly but I've had a great time with Inoreader as well.

I use other sites to curate content for me. Mostly HN and the people I follow on Twitter. I try to stay on a news diet.

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