Hacker News Reader

Comment by acdha | Hacker News Reader

Newsblur: it has a clean UI, mobile apps, open source, has a viable business model and has gotten past the first round of scaling to handle the Reader diaspora.

A number of the people I used to follow on Reader have joined and the social side is flourishing with most of the voices which Google+ snuffed out.

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I like the idea of it, but this is disheartening:

> There are 1192 people in front of you, all patiently waiting on their free accounts on NewsBlur. By going premium you can get full and immediate access to NewsBlur.

I get that they're trying to be able to handle the load, but it concerns me that they can't simply 'scale' their service like most modern web applications.

On the contrary, I'm happy with that. I'd rather they try to be profitable from the beginning than do the whole get users then figure out monetization model. I want a stable long term rss reader, not a service that tries to get acquired.

I've never heard about any web application that can just "scale" without some growing pains. Sure it's possible to pay for some elastic IAAS or PAAS, but that really does not solve any scaling problems. You still use as much resources per user. To increase the effectivity of the application, one has to either grow it over time or built right from the start. To get it right from the start can be a huge sub-optimization if you miss something and must do it over anyways. That is why most start "quick and dirty".

That's a selling point for me: there's an actual business model which can pay for the cost of operations. Very few modern web applications scale instantly and automatically, particularly not those which are a) non-trivial and b) run by small startups. I prefer the service staying zippy rather than getting overloaded and turning off a bunch of people.

As far as I know, it's just one guy at NewsBlur.

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