Hacker News Reader

Maybe, but not having to synchronize your feeds between different devices and platforms is a good incentive to give up that control.

You can use a self-hosted web reader, like Tiny Tiny RSS. Best of both worlds, in my opinion.

Then you need to pay for hosting, or do some geek-gymnastics with Dropbox or similar (and at that point, your data is again on somebody else's server)... A lot of bother for non-geeks.

Sure, but I've never met a non-geek who used RSS anyway.

You can say the same thing about software. I used to use the built in reader to Opera but all that was dropped recently when Opera dropped their codebase and turned into Chrome.

What's your client?

Mostly the browser integrated RSS readers, I just follow a restricted set of sites.