Hacker News Reader

Comment by levosmetalo | Hacker News Reader

I haven't switched yet. What I would like to have is the reader that is basically the same as the old good Google Reader:

  - be web based
  - be cross platform (so I can use it on phone and desktop)
  - be light on network and fast to load
  - have simple design
  - should have folders
  - sort by oldest
  - mark all as read (in the folder)
  - be optimized for text, not pictures

and that's pretty much all. What it shouldn't have is:

  - fancy design
  - too much pictures
  - ads
  - unused empty space
  - feed discovery and any "social" features

Of course, it should also be free.

In the end, I might just as well backup my feed list for the reference, but try to live without RSS reader for a month or two, just to check do I really want to switch to another one.

In the end, I might even consider some lightweight self hosted variant.

EDIT: Thanks for the suggestions.

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"What it shouldn't have is: ... - ads ... Of course, it should also be free."

Those two things are mutually exclusive though, unless it's being run by someone with enough money not to care or it's self hosted.

"Of course, it should be free."

Alternatively, "Of course, I should pay a small amount of money so I have to worry considerably less about the possibility of someone pulling the plug on it leaving me in the same situation again."

Your mileage might vary but once a service is established as important to me I'm almost keen to pay money to support it.

I agree with you on this, but I said in the comment that one of the alternatives I consider is not using any reader, so it should be pretty obvious that I don't consider out critical enough to warrant even a small payment.

You're describing The Old Reader. It's literally based on "the old good Google Reader".

There are some weird behaviour differences unfortunately. The most annoying one for me is that scrolling past an unread story marks it as read automatically... but overall, yes. It's basically closer to the original GR than anything else I've seen.

You can disable that in the settings. Besides, it's default GR behaviour nowadays.

Interesting. It seems they keep the old behaviour for people with older accounts. I never had to turn it off in the original GR and never got the behaviour either.

What is their monetization strategy ?

Donation. It's not a business, so much as a group of geeks who wanted to bring back the heyday of GR. You can Flattr or bitcoin I think, and they've managed to keep a steady influx of donations thus far. By definition, it's easy to maintain since the goal of the project is "no additional features". So, the main cost is server load, which these days is easy enough to manage.

I was hoping that was the case for me, but their mobile version is nearly useless to me. I want a compact view of titles that I can expand to read what I want, since I really only want to read about 50% of the posts in my feeds.

With The Old Reader, I get to either choose between having everything expended or a list view that only shows the first 3 or 4 words of the title on my phone.

No offense meant to The Old Reader folks, they're not obliged to please me... I'm just venting... and hoping what I want actually exists :)

I've tried quite a few and am now on NewsBlur. It's not perfect but it's the closest I've seen to your list (which was also my list of priorities too).

I've been working on this solution and am currently in a closed beta. Will be opening up this/next week over time. http://hivereader.com I meet all your requirements but the cross platform. Once the web API's are locked (aka near the 1st) I am going to start cranking on the mobile app ASAP as well as a public facing api. I also have social but you don't need to use it. (no really, it's barely there).

Check out InoReader. I'm quite satisfied and I think it meets the majority of your preferences.

check out http://nuesbyte.com/ as web/light/fast as you can, free, and all the features you want.

Why do you want it to be web-based?

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