Show HN: kouio, the Reader you've always wanted
kouio.com
kouio.com
Also right now due to the HN rush our worker queue's a little backed up, but it'll catch up soon enough.
Your job would quickly make me crazy. I shudder to imagine my getting so up close and personal with the Great Firehose. Take care of yourself!
You've made a great product, but so has everyone else. Why is kouio unique, and why does it warrant $5 per month?
Meanwhile RSS readers have done little, if anything, to figure out how not to waste my time "nexting" through stuff I have no time or interest in.
The entry point for any software in this field should be "how much time per day do you have to spend on reading feeds?"
For example medium.com has a brilliant little feature - labelling articles with the time it takes to read them e.g. "2 min read". Yes! More like this please.
There have been many attempts at trying to figure out what you'll like. They either try to recommend stuff that they think you'll like ("Oh, you like computers? Check out this cat at a computer that 2308234 people have reshared!" Ugh.) or filter out the stuff they think you won't like. That's not how I (or the majority of people that I have talked to about RSS) use RSS though! We want every single update, no matter how unpopular they were.
As for length, it's trivial to see a giant wall of text and either click next or mark as unread to return to it later. I've tried Google Reader's "magic" sorting, among other ways of sorting articles, but I always end up on "oldest first" or "newest first", depending on the content.
1) Either the content author posts it, or someone who follows the blog/website/whatever posts it.
2) Those who spend time reading /newest actually upvote posts enough to get them to the front page.
If you enjoy the front page of HN, that's great! But the process of getting there isn't exactly automatic -- it depends on those who dig through unfiltered content.
This is a crowd sourced, human curated list, different from a feed reader, where the crowd consists mostly of humans competent in the field.
The problem of course is such crowds do not exist for so many other fields, but I would pay for good human curated content.
Alas, none of that is in any feedreader...
As a sidenote: I think it's quite ironic that your blog doesn't have an RSS feed. I noticed the same thing for some of the other alternatives we've listed.
I guess it's a little embarrassing, but it's not actually a proper blog - just a static page. We've just been too focused on polishing the app itself to worry about that :-)
Would it be possible to add the title of the blog an item is from in lighter text?
2) No but that's a great idea, we'll definitely try and work that in shortly, thanks!
3) We're charging $5 a month - we talk about it in much more detail in our initial blog post and FAQ.
4) Not yet, that's our next "big ticket" item, but it's absolutely coming.
Edit: Ah, good luck with your reader though!
Google reader quits and now everybody runs to make some sort of RSS reader. The times they are a changin', get over it.