Hacker News Reader

Comment by drharris | Hacker News Reader

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

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 :)

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.

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