Hacker News Reader

Comment by newscracker | Hacker News Reader

Apple News was already flakey and unreliable in the sources (websites) it would allow to be added. With its highly limited geographical availability (years after launching) and its problematic focus on News+, I switched back to a plain RSS Reader to follow specific sites.

Apple News seems like a niche product with hardly any technical effort put into it. In comparison, Google News, with its ads, generally looks like a more comprehensive choice for news. Not to mention it’s also “free” (of course, it never allowed, AFAIK, adding RSS feeds from any site).

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I was under the impression that Google News didn't have ads. At least I can't recall ever seeing ads on the news.google.com site (the Google Feed on Android is another story, that thing is riddled with ads now).

There are no ads on Google News and I think it would be hard for Google to monetize other news organizations' content in their own news app without being sued for it.

It hasn’t been around too long. In a few years it’ll probably be pretty competent at what it does.

I don’t use it but that was certainly the trend with Apple Maps which was pretty crummy when it first came out.

Apple Maps is still pretty far behind Google Maps.

I don't have high hopes for News, given how much it keeps pushing features that are either user-unfriendly (giant ads in the middle of articles) or designed solely to push you to News+

I used to be a regular (many times a day) user and their changes have led me to stop using it entirely.

> Apple Maps is still pretty far behind Google Maps.

Depends where you are, the Apple version of street view is far superior to Google’s.

Anywhere other than a few major cities?

No bicycle navigation; a “walking route” will send you the wrong way up one-way streets, “auto route” onto unsafe highways.

I wouldn’t care except their API for directions to AirPods or Apple Watch isn’t public. This is grounds for an antitrust suit imho...

> Apple Maps is still pretty far behind Google Maps.

Both fall well short of OSM for topics other than finding local businesses. OSM gives me incredible detail, even telling me where water fountains and benches are in the local park. Meanwhile Google Maps doesn't even recognize the restricted access road running through the park, let alone any of the walking trails, let alone any water fountains, benches, etc.

If you can't drive a car on it or through it or to it, Google thinks it may as well not exist.

> If you can't drive a car on it or through it or to it, Google thinks it may as well not exist.

That may seem to be true some places, but I've seen many places (including around my house) where Google has great coverage of nameless walking and biking trails that aren't open to cars.

Have you compared Google's and OSM's maps of those locations side by side? I wager OSM has much more detail. This is the case even for public parks located in the middle of major American west coast cities (where I would expect Google to have good coverage, if they had it anywhere.)

Consider for instance this city park in Seattle:

https://www.google.com/maps/@47.6397466,-122.2948284,18.95z

https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=19/47.63987/-122.29488&la...

Google has gotten better in recent years, it now has a few of the walking trails, but compared to OSM it's still absolutely pitiful. Even in high profile locations like Yellowstone National Park, Google Maps is pitiful compared to OSM:

https://www.google.com/maps/@44.3925569,-110.5541906,18z

https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=18/44.39273/-110.55472&la...

Apple Maps seems to have comparable detail to OSM for that location ... https://maps.apple.com/?ll=44.39273,-110.55472&spn=0.003043,...

Or what do you see that the rest of us don't? :-)

If you can't drive a car on it or through it or to it, Google thinks it may as well not exist.

Given what Google uses to build its maps, that's not surprising:

https://d.newsweek.com/en/full/259216/google-street-view.jpg

Try it again. Apple Maps is pretty good.

The love/hate thing is that it picks a more normal route vs optimized. I personally like it because I don’t find that a Google Maps optimizations help in urban settings.

It's been around since 2015. It shouldn't take 6+ years for a news aggregator app to become pretty competent. With its current model, it's already lost a lot of momentum (I don't know anyone that uses it) and will just continue to lose it, especially since its not a "necessary" utility or has as little competition as a maps/navigation app. In my opinion, it's more likely to be abandoned or maybe even transitioned into something else as Newsstand did when it became News than for it to become successful, especially since Apple is moving more and more to services.

Remember iTunes/Music? I have little hope that it’ll get better.

doesn't matter if it is half done or not as feature complete as other sites, it just is the default on an iPad so people like my parents end up using it because Apple makes sure to highlight it being added.

so for those who did not consider looking for a source of news and one just appears it pretty much is a lock. the local newspaper (AJC) has their own app but its not great and worse when sending links they don't format to the device opening it; comics are the worst as half the frames are missing

Which RSS reader do you use?

Not the OP, but https://bazqux.com/ is very nice.

Is there a self-hosted RSS reader that does feed de-summarization, like BazQux seems to do?

The only one I know is: https://fivefilters.org/content-only/

It works for all the major sites but it is paid but with self-hosting option.

I think Newsblur [0] can do it but self hosting it is pretty involved.

[0]: https://github.com/samuelclay/NewsBlur

I use a terminal RSS reader called newsboat[1][2], which is an actively developed fork of newsbeuter.

It's pretty feature rich, fast, keyboard-oriented (supporting vi movement keys), and works great in the terminal.

Another great thing about it is that it runs completely on my own machine, so I don't have to give away information about my reading preferences to any third party, as would be the case for any hosted RSS service.

I love RSS because it gives me lean, fast, ad-free, bloat-free information. I hope it never dies.

[1] - https://newsboat.org/

[2] - https://github.com/newsboat/newsboat

I love newsbeuter, it's how I get all latest news about the death of RSS :)

Feels like there has been a bit of a resurgence lately, not that I have any hard data to back that up. The major players ie google and now apple have dumped it, but most blogs and news sites still have rss feeds.

RSS has always been the best way to follow multiple webcomics. I'm not sure why it seems so little-known in that world.

Definitely. If a comic doesn't have an RSS feed, I won't keep up with it. It isn't worth keeping track of the different update schedules and platforms.

It has always been a "people's choice" sort of thing, a least for a certain slice of "people".

Large media outfits tend to hate RSS because it puts curation in the hands of users, and that curation function is what a lot of people will pay a lot of money to influence.

Smaller media outfits like it, because they can find readers without paying money to influence the large gatekeepers.

As blogging has "matured", the big shops are feeling more confident that they can lock folks back in to their curation.

Ironically its the large media outlets that usually have categorical and comprehensive rss feeds, presumably by virtue of being around during the peak google reader years when rss was expected and not bothering with purging the functionality.

It's the upstart outlets that I notice not having RSS at all, with a twitter handle in its place. Pass for me.

Google News still has RSS feeds.

Search for what you want, click "News", scroll to the bottom of the page and create an alert.

Then you can select "RSS feed" to get a custom feed for your search terms or news topic.

https://imgur.com/dn4OQCX

When I follow a site via RSS, I go out of my way to reach out to the owner and let them know I am enjoying their content via RSS.

If I site I want to follow doesn't have RSS, I reach out and let the owner know I can't follow their site via RSS. A few people implemented RSS on their blogs because of it :)

Thank you. That makes a lot of sense!

In terms of most blogs still having RSS, I suspect that's primarily due to default software settings.

Big fan of newsboat. I still run freshrss on a pi just for use on mobile and starting certain article s.

I'm ... mostly ... a fan.

Though I'd very much prefer a linebreak between index listings as a bit of contextual segregation / clausterphobia breaking.

I also find search ... nonintuitive.

Though on balance, it's pretty slick.

By the original newsbeuter author, rsstail and multitail are also damned slick. I've got an rsstail script (with a lot of pretification / scrubbing of the feed streams) that runs as an xrootconsole window on my desktop, alternating amongst various feeds.

Newsblur

I have a script run rsstail via cron to catch updates and email it to Gmail for reading/review

Email is HTML formatted how I want, and Gmail will probably not be deprecated any time soon.

https://github.com/flok99/rsstail

Not the OP, but I've never found anything faster than the Livemarks plugin for quickly scanning headlines from all of your favorite sites with a quick mouseover in your browser's bookmark toolbar.

Livemarks (or the Chrome/Vivaldi equivalent 'Foxish live RSS') was released after Firefox killed off their Live Bookmarks feature a year or so ago.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/livemarks/

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/foxish-live-rss/jp...

I use Feedly. I subscribe (paid) to Apple News +. I wish I could read thru Feedly.

I recommend News Explorer. It has seamless sync between the Mac and iOS version via iCloud.

Inoreader is my choice. If you pay for it, you can also feed email newsletters/press releases into it, and follow Twitter/Facebook pages

Been using inoreader since Google Reader died. Great service which I found this page from :)

Fresh RSS is my favorite. It is self hosted and has apps for mobile.

https://github.com/wking/rss2email

Just sends the latest articles to an IMAP folder. I can use any device that syncs to my email (currently using the built in ActiveSync client on Android), and can access it from webmail, and via Thunderbird on Linux.

Just going to pimp https://theoldreader.com/ which mimics the old Google Reader UI down to the shortcuts. I don't think I could live without it and gladly pay my yearly membership for the premium version even if I don't actually need it.

https://feedly.com/ is the best web-based reader today. Mobile app also works great.

Since this seems to be the thread where everyone mentions the RSS feed reader they use/write, I'll share Brook. It's a very minimal feed reader that gives you what you need and gets out of the way.

You can use it in Firefox right now, and if anyone is interested, I'll port it to Chrome. Honestly I wrote it because my old favorite feed reader Sage wasn't supported after Firefox switched to the web extensions standards.

Give it a peek if you either want to see how it works, or you just want a simple way to browse your favorite sites in your browser.

Source: https://github.com/adamsanderson/brook

Plugin: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/brook-feed-re...

(Okay, now let's get back to the regularly scheduled outrage around the decline of RSS and maybe mention how Google doesn't support its products anymore ;) )

I use Reeder 3 on iOS and NetNewsWire on Mac. NetNewsWire is a free and open source RSS reader. An iOS version (also free) is coming in the first quarter of 2020.

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