Live and let live, I say. Not everyone is running a charity and Feedly is nowhere even near the top of the list of software ripping off their users or selling their data to make money.
What the author labels as "cluttered" is really not that cluttered at all. It looks much better than an completely empty list in the alternative they prefer. But that's just UI.
I am not saying don't move to another alternative. I am just saying that the reasons the author is calling Feedly out for are unjustified and don't really make sense.
The problem is that companies try to monetize RSS, and the only way of doing so is to provide features that RSS can't offer. AI-curated feeds, integrations with X or Y, nudges to let go of RSS entirely for some applications and instead use whatever integration they've come up with...
Some people may be happy with this. Some people may only care about the information they eventually get, not HOW they get it. But I'm not among those people, and many other people are not.
I personally felt very annoyed by Feedly nagging me on a daily basis to upgrade in order to get features that I didn't need and never asked for.
I feel like being approached every day by a dude who wants to sell me a vaccum cleaner that I don't want. And of course I understand that they also need to make money, but they should also respect those who simply want an RSS reader and are insensitive to all these campaigns.
Thats the reason why I moved from Feedly to a self-hosted Miniflux instance (and Nextcloud News before it). If I host it myself, then I don't have to pay anyone for hosting my feeds, and I'm not supposed to be targeted by marketing campaigns to pull money out of my wallet on a daily basis.
I don't know if I agree; I pay Newsblur a yearly fee because it's worth it to me having a centralized web-app that I don't have to self-host (and consequently, don't have to worry about paying for, or hitting rate limits, etc.) with a nice UI and a few features like sorting by folder.
Granted, I have no idea how much it costs to run Newsblur; I certainly hope they're at least breaking even. I also don't know if I'm a typical-enough user.
I have no clue what you mean.
Where do they show this daily?
And don't get me wrong, you traided self management against a nag pop up? It's your choice but Feedly still does it with a reasonable offering.
And I actually thinking about going pro to remove all the rumor news shit I don't care and the cve feature sounds nice as well.
It may also be illegal (or at least on shaky grounds) if you happen to make money out of content that is not yours.
I am on the free tier and nothing ever bothers me, it continues being a wonderful service every day. The ads are fine, I totally understand it. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The same is largely true of free products from which I get massive value but HN constantly complains about: Google Search, Reddit, ...
Also a matter of opinion but app developers IMO shouldn't use their apps to market. I've already got an email app and a Feed reader. If I want to keep up with you I'll subscribe to your mailing list or follow your feed.
I disable auto-update because I get annoyed when apps tell me about new versions (and I have privacy concerns.) I wont consider using an app that doesn't let me disable auto update. I already have a strategy to keep my software up-to-date that works on my schedule.
I recognize I'm sensitive to these things but that doesn't mean they aren't justified or don't make sense. They just don't make sense * to you *.
As a bonus, it is also very satisfying watching apps try to connect to various ad networks and spy agencies^W^W Google unsuccessfully.
I've been using Feedly since Google Reader shut down and I've visited their site like once every six months.
I use Newsify on iOS and ReadKit on my Mac.
I think in many situations, yes. I grew up with shareware and so I know that prompts are necessary to drive income.
What the prompts in this article are so bad at is that they are perpetual. Is it really necessary to nag a user over and over for something they don’t want and declined? That is probably not going to work in the long run as people associate a bad experience with the product.
Figure out a better way to get income that doesn’t involve perpetually wasting a user’s time and frustrating them.
I’m guessing the most innocuous is just a banner ad of reasonable size that doesn’t detract too much from usable space.
Or, you know, people could pay for their software.
Don’t change things. It’s not hard. Leave things alone. Be consistent.
Marketing? If you pay for it already that’s all the marketing needed. Don’t go trying to suck data from elsewhere with creeper policies to sell the data to creeper brokers.
I mean, based on what the author said, they're not paying for it. In fact they're annoyed there is a button asking them to pay for it :D
In case of Feedly, yes. I feel like a hamster being tried to be converted. Feedly's free tier doesn't feel like free. It feels like a getaway drug which tries to make you pay for other features.
I have used for a week, then SDF announced availability of their TTRSS instance. As a paying member, I moved there. I am much more happier now.
TTRSS is free and open source. I'm just supporting SDF so they can continue to exist.
You are a hamster trying to be converted. That’s the point of the free tier. You could just pay for it and the nagging would stop. You are now paying for TTRSS and have the experience of a paying customer.
And as stated on another comment: no it's not that bad. I use it free since Google shut down theirs
If you have two viable options where one is a profound annoyance to you and one isn't, why wouldn't you choose the second option?
According to the article, Feedly no longer upholds the basic promise of an RSS feed reader: to allow the user to curate a list of RSS feeds and follow them.
From the article:
> For example, I recently wanted to add an RSS feed for a Reddit user, but it was not possible in Feedly. In order to do so, I had to connect to Reddit with my Reddit user, i.e., allow Feedly to access my data. No way, no thanks.
If an RSS feed reader makes it "not possible" to import certain RSS feeds because the app instead wants to use proprietary APIs for those feeds, than the RSS feed reader no longer "does what you expect it do and does it well".
At this point the app is fundamentally broken by design and I too would migrate away from such an app.
So it's still doing it's job, but in certain cases acts pretty poorly.
I am a Feedly user as well and I have noticed the feature creep but it was easy to ignore, so I hope to be able to keep using it as successfully as I have for the past 9 (!) years.
As the article mentions, the problem generally isn't any one individual change - the concern is about the sense of direction for the overall project. The typical direction is from "simple software that helps people to achieve some goals" towards "product with features designed to increase revenue, data gathering, and stickiness" -- like the login-required anti-feature mentioned.
If those changes are gradual then users may not really notice the small differences as they introduced, and if anyone does complain, it becomes easy for supporters of the project to deflect complaints (as, arguably, you may be here -- not ostensibly trying to keep the author with the product, but trying to reduce their credibility and persuade others that there is no problem).
In many cases, free and open source software can help avoid a project falling into dark patterns because it's possible for people who disagree to fork it and maintain/promote their own alternative -- and then for other people to compare the original and the fork on their merits (which are transparent).
It's one of the reasons I no longer acknowledge or interact with cookie prompts, newsletter dialogs, notifications, or anything else interferes with my use of a Web page. If anything at all like that happens, I just close the page and move on. (Sometimes I just ignore the cookie prompts and read around them.)
As a long-term strategy, this has paid off by not only saving me time and grief, but also made me realize that poorly designed usability correlates strongly with poor quality content, which I also save time by avoiding.
I think you are speaking from a point of view of having cognitive ability to spare, as opposed to struggling to keep up with cognitive load which is too much to handle.
If they are done well, no. Problem is they often aren't. An example of this is when I downloaded some app like headspace and they had this sort of relax and be ready to fall a sleep feature. It was relaxing and well done and turned the screen down nicely. Then, as soon as it was over, the screen was set to bright and it asked if wanted to rate it on the store.
Other apps will show marketing over what you are trying to do, or in a distracting manor.
So after a while people will start to associate it with scummy and bad behavior.
Well, at least it is justified and make sense for the author.
Before feedly I self hosted TinyTinyRss for a while (kind of slow) and before that Google Reader. And before that Newsblur. I never paid for any of them and now I have more than enough paid subscriptions for stuff. Reading rss feeds just doesn't make it over the line of things I'd be willing to pay for.
Edit: I pay £10/month for Adobe Creative Cloud and get Photoshop, Lightroom, XD, Illustrator, etc. I pay ~£8/month for Office 365 and get Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc. All massively rich and powerful tools. Why does feedly imagine I would want to pay £5/month to read rss feeds?
Microsoft and Adobe need massive scale to charge prices that low. They're each probably 10,000x-100,000x larger than Feedly in terms of end-user licenses.
For a service I find useful enough to choose over a free alternative, I'm happy to pay $5-30/month to fund development and maintenance. I don't want all my software coming from the Microsofts and Adobes of the world.
Not the author, but I think they should restrict the free tier to a small number of feeds rather than nag. Asking users to pay to get more is positive whereas asking users to pay to reduce nagging is negative.
clearly it isn’t, or the author wouldn’t have been able to move to a free alternative without any junk to ignore.
Because Freedly doesn't have Microsoft or Adobe's budget and needs to have its costs covered?
I use Feedly (free) as a hosting service, and Reeder or one of the other many great RSS client apps as the frontend to it, so I don’t have to see the feedly interface.But the Feedly API I use constantly and it is extremely solid.
That’s part of the greatness of RSS services. If the service’s UI bothers you, you don’t have to use it.
Yes, but no. They are entitled like you and I, and everyone, is entitled to good products and not being angry when using them. They aren’t especially entitled to the point to use the word as an insult.
Feedly sells ads. So it’s free, but they include ads. They aren’t a charity benevolently putting out the app and everyone should suck it up and be thankful.
Obviously, people can choose not to use it. And they do. Feedly seems to be in a bit of a doom spiral with being worse and worse and driving away more and more users.
It seems to me that they have some expensive to develop but not very useful (eg, AI to detect stuff in feeds) that users don’t find worth $6 but the costs need covering. So their approach is to keep pushing it on users more and more.
Sure, if you're paying for it. If not, prepare for all the ways a company is going to try to make the service profitable, starting with ads and come-ons to paid tiers.
Don't want that? Pay, or self-host something. It's absolutely entitled to make an indignant post about why you're changing away from a service you've used for nine years that amounts to the bastards want to make money off me.
I don't know Feedly's history and whether it was originally Open Source or not but plenty of people decide their popular FOSS tool could be paid-for, at which point it is common to disenfranchise the people who made it popular in the first-place.
Most of the worthwhile features are now gated behind the most expensive plan, rather than being properly staggered. I subscribe to so few feeds I could literally use the free (ad-supported) plan, and I use none of the advanced features at all except filters. If you want to filter a single feed, you have to buy the most expensive plan they sell. That's crazy!
Regardless, I have happily supported them for years. I'm not the sort of user that others are complaining about in this thread that wants everything for free. That's about to change too though. Since the site began, the plan I've been on has cost $30 a year, which is acceptable for the value I get out of it. I was able to extend the plan for multiple years at $18/yr thanks to Black Friday and Christmas sales. Now, however, they're changing things around, and want me to resubscribe to keep the features I use at $90/yr (or $120 if you pay monthly). I'm not a software engineer making six figures. I can't afford to throw $100 at every service I use like this. A $30 -> $90 price increase is just enormous.
Again, I want to pay for the features I use, but because they've failed to provide any kind of pricing ramp, they'll soon get nothing from me.
All good.
What I (and seemingly many other commenters) take issue with is the tone of the piece. That the OP has been disappointed, that they know better than Feedly management about what features to include and how to market them, that they are owed some sort of a user experience.
I suppose the OP is offering this post as guidance and explanation for Feedly management but I can’t imagine that this moves the needle.
It’s a paid RSS syncing service and web app too, costs $5 per month, I use it with Reeder (and NetNewsWire etc). It doesn’t have any social cruft or AI assistants or ML companions.
I was also a Feedly user when I decided to try Feedbin, and I immediately noticed how much faster fetching the feeds was on Feedbin. I also like to have my email newsletters in same place (forward them to a Feedbin-provided email address), and I can have filters to mark things like sponsored posts and podcast show notes as read automatically, basically like mute filters.
Feedly premium tier costs pretty much the same, and I wonder how well it would stack against Feedbin. There’s also Inoreader which I think offers pretty similar feature set for a pretty similar price.
Feedly free tier is excellent, and you can work around many of its shortcomings by using an RSS reader app. For example, Feedly free doesn’t offer full text articles, but I can extract the full text with Reeder/NetNewsWire/etc on the client-side. If you really don’t care about speed, mute filters, or reading newsletters in your RSS reader, then Feedly free tier is already more than enough.
I think the takeaway for product owners is that sometimes you need to really zoom out and look at your product. I used Feedly for 8-9 years as a free user and never wanted to upgrade. I was willing to for the right product, but never did. Once I found a simpler product (FeedBin) that met my needs, I immediately paid.
Feedly has shoved ads and half-assed new features into their product for almost a decade trying to get their influx of Google Reader subscribers to upgrade. But no one was compelled to. It eventually pissed off free users enough that they switch to other paid alternatives. That's pretty sad honestly.
Yes but not for Feedly, for those users.
I use it to subscribe to YouTube channels, Twitter, newsletters, Subreddits, HN, and, yes, RSS feeds. I frequently use its sharing feature to pinboard.
I think I still pay the original $2 a month. But even at $5, it is one of my favorite services of all time. Truly a gem.
Readably is a good reader for feedbin on Android.
The solution I went with is native RSS readers (like the author), but backed by an Open Reader server (The Old Reader in my case, but there are others) for syncing between devices. On the Mac, Vienna as a client is quite nice.
They want you to pay for it, and features like an increased polling rate are the soft features they use to tempt you up to a paid platform. Adverts catch some of the users that don't want to pay. I assume you still use Google et al? Why is a search engine or Amazon janking up their SERPs with inline ads better than the odd ad on Feedly? You still use them? I think you're holding Feedly to an unfair standard.
Don't get me wrong, a desktop client is great iff that's all you need. Feedly is providing one more feature: network centralisation. I check Feedly from my desktop, my laptop and my phone. I could host something myself but for free (or pennies a day), Feedly keeps everything in sync.
I have tried every other competitor and no one comes close.
One of the features of Pro is that they'll pull the feeds you're subscribed to at a higher frequency. I think this is an example of doing freemium well!
Nowadays, I meanly just use the extension "Feedly Notifier" [1] to read (or open directly) articles in my browser, so I barely open feedly.com anymore. I highly recommend it.
[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/feedly-notifier/eg...
I don’t like Feedly, and use Unread on the iPhone to read the feeds. They are like the Evernote of today. Every year I think I’ll dump them and probably will. It’s just been laziness so far.
I pay, they feed my RSS feeds, so in that regard, it works. But yeah, I feel OP.
It really seems like a lot of projects should embrace the the path of becoming a stable product: Charging 10 USD a year, assigning a single person to a comfy job of maintaining the app without adding new features. Just maintaining infrastructure, updating packages, and doing the occasional exchange of stack when old technologies are deprecated...
Why doesn't that happen more?
What you’re describing is a kind of anti growth public service. Sounds nice!
As someone hunting constantly for a reader as simple as Google reader and feedly use to be it all makes perfect sense and is equally frustrating to me.
It's an RSS reader that no longer accepts many RSS feeds, that is a more than valid criticism and we should be allowed to be picky about that without being berated by our fellow HN readers.
(I'm not affiliated with them, just a happy user)
I stick to https://newsblur.com/. It has it's quirks but is way, way faster (two days ago a redesign came out that makes it so fast I feel like I'm using the old Google Reader again)
I did have to cull some inactive blogs at one point, to stay within my tier limit, but was happy to do so. Incredible that it's been 9 years with barely any UI changes - I think this demonstrates how effective it is.
I also stopped using Feedly when realized that it has become something else than "nice minimalistic rss-reader". I settled with NetNewsWire and super happy with it, really incredible piece of software. I wouldn't mind paying some bucks per month for extra features like proxying sites-without-rss or similar stuff (I need to use third-party solutions to add some important sites to rss reader).
So if Feedly wants to build a business around RSS (I couldn't find their vision on the website, so it's a guess), then maybe they just need to listen to those who actually use RSS. I think most of us love RSS for its simplicity, for decentralized nature, for respect to our attention and non-invasiveness into our information consuming patterns. Not much of a business proposition here maybe, but business should be built on top of the real value for users, not the other way around.
Just use an app. It's great.
And those who wants new fancy things can enjoy the fancy version. And I believe, there are many users who just want fast and simple software these days, and early version of feedly was a great example.
I get this author doesn't like it, but it all seems a bit overly dramatic for a few feeds.
For example, ebay has recently recently stopped supporting RSS through search results (an '_rss=1' query string was supported for over 10 years), and while there are some workaround such as using different search endpoint where the RSS has not been deprecated yet, with Newsboat, I was able to write a custom filter to extract RSS with just few lines of code: https://github.com/almog/newsboat-ebay2rss-filter
As a Pro user, I wanted to cut down the amount of noise I was getting in the feed. But that feature was in Pro+ subscription. I wanted to subscribe to a few Twitter searches; again a Pro+ feature. I wanted to get rid of duplicate posts and it was, you guessed it, a Pro+ feature. Meanwhile, the Pro offering was flooded with things that never mattered to me.
In the end, Pro was simply not a good value for me and Pro+ was just too expensive.
>I have done everything I could to turn off features that I do not need, but this is still relatively cluttered. I do not need to access Leo, Feedly’s AI engine. I do not need to UPGRADE to ‘Pro’. I do not need two separate vertical menus.
This makes it sounds like he "did" turn off many features to make it what it shows in the screenshot. But in fact he didn't. Those were default. And when you look at "Leo", and "Upgrade Pro", one being a simple link the other being a top banner that disappear once you scroll down a little. Arguably speaking the only "constant" clutter that is there is the thin vertical menus. That is it!
>Recently, Feedly also started showing me pop-ups in case I want to track ’emerging exploits across the Web with Feedly’s AI Engine’ and to ‘research critical vulnerabilities with the new CVE Intelligence Card’, whatever that is.
You know, those pop up aren't even Ads. They are new feature notifications. Which means it rarely happens. But the author made it as if it was a daily annoyance.
The new generation of programmers who believes everything should be free and open source, preferably AGPL 3.0 to stop companies using GPL 2.0 loopholes, or worse licenses like MIT or BSD which are now considered as "harmful" because they help "evil for profit making companies". All while asking for $200K as a new developers joining right out of college.
I loved the 'Mute filters' feature, but they ruined it forcing to use Leo, expressions like "title:HackerNews" are no longer available and LEO is less useful than a simple search by keyword
but... there is a "but", I use Feedly APIs and I love them, I developed apps for myself to aggregate and quickly find informations starting from the feeds, using Feedly is so easy, so I continue to pay for a really small subset of features only to be able to extract info from my RSS feeds
The point is the feed is rate limited.
And you need one call per unique subreddit.
And Feedly's users collectively have more unique subreddits than the Reddit rate limit.
> One of the features is that I will get “new articles up to 10x faster”. What’s that supposed to mean? That I have not been getting new articles straight away when I visit Feedly?
This is a perfect example of what we take for granted, multi users RSS feeds have to poll missing pub dates, they don't just fetch the latest posts on a users request. This game where they pull the curtain and you realize how bottle necked you are as a free user, that's the sad game of running a business on these types of services.
I've had an idea for an RSS reader for quite some time. One with a layout like HackerNews or early Reddit where all users have their own RSS feed, they can look at and follow other users feed items. there's a main page with posts ranked by number of followers and comments on each post. then of course a personal feed.
But considering how much feature creep these services suffer, I don't see how I'd be able to keep it running without some premium payment system, certainly donations can't serve enough.
I redownloaded it a few weeks ago and it was a shit show. I looked for other alternatives and I found NetNewsWire.
It has a long history of first being a commercial product by an indy Mac dev. He sold it to another company, reacquired the rights, updated it and now it’s free and open source for the Mac and iOS. It’s clean and does the basics.
I would subscribe to Feedly except their desktop Firefox and Chrome extensions for saving a page for later are both broken! On mobile it works except ~10% of articles it says it cannot parse. Just put a link in my feed then!
Anyone have another option that supports RSS, save-for-later, and email?
Edit: Wallabag does RSS and save-for-later but not email newsletters
Instapaper can send articles to your Kindle which is intriguing
Figured out how to configure Zapier, it's not too cumbersome, so much better than IFTT.
That is so weird to me. I tried pretty much everything there was back then (eventually settled on Newsblur only to switch to self-hosted TT-RSS after they raised prices when I already barely got any use out of their features) and Feedly always seemed like one of the most bloated/featureful (pick your choice here :D) options there was.
HOWEVER, I think you sentiment is wrong here. You _should_ support creators that are doing things you like so that they keep doing those things you like. But it doesn't make sense to pay creators that are doing think you don't like. The fact that you start paying them is taken as confirmation that you are enjoying the product.
Imagine if we all hated Feedly's product but banded together to have everyone subscribe to Feedly to support them. They would see that userbase as confirmation to keep doing what they are doing, building shitty software. They aren't going to about face their product strategy because you are paying them $6 a month now.
So instead what we should all do is find creators that are doing RSS readers justice and support THOSE creators. For example, I switched from Feedly to Feedbin. I was a free user at Feedly and never wanted to upgrade because, like the author of the article said, it was bloated and unejoyable and the premium features weren't things I needed. So instead I found a tool that is everything I wanted, which happened to be FeedBin. I supported them and am paying them $5 per month for them to continue their efforts because they are building the software the way I want RSS Readers to be. So I would like to see them survive and thats what my paid subscription provides.
Let's encourage good products. No reason to throw good money at bad products. Find the good ones and support those.
I pay for creative cloud and there’s so many ads and pitches for new products. I long for the days where I pirated ps6 and never had any ads (or paid for it too).
I don't depend on external services and can process data as I want.
Plenty of apps/sites become popular on a strong core USP which people want and then add a tonne of cruft as they pretend they are adding value, when in many cases it is just noise that only a few people want/use but everyone else has to suffer the UX changes along the way.
Foxish live RSS does job nicely in Vivaldi.
Of course it clashes with being a simple RSS reader for the author. This is just mismatched expectations, not Feedly getting worse.
If you're only following feeds on MacOS, NetNewsWire is also great.
As a Pro Feedly user since Google Reader brigade I got to agree to some sentiments about what Feedly offers for pro users, seems the Feedly team has the typical startup problem which is run by marketing people with out of dated ideas.
The only feature I have to give props is building your own RSS reader from any website which has worked great on many site I could not work with.
But for the price you pay so many features are so really niche that i dont need.
I've also been a long-time user of Pocket. I would really like them to add feed functionality to their service. It would make it very easy to find new things to read while also having a list of things to read later. That would be a very good value proposition in my opinion, and a reason to pay them.
The prompts for "give us money" are infrequent enough that they don't bother me, much. What do you want for nothing, a rrrrrrrubber biscuit? [1]
At that price, I'm okay not having to self-host it to handle the synchronization of articles I've read, liked, etc.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.nononsense...
If there are any other recommendations for apps on Android, those would be welcome too.
Every once in a while I think of unsubscribing to a feed and it is a bit of an adventure, but that is my only complaint.
Or possibly: I think I was using NetNewsWire on desktop or something when I set it up, so maybe it was obvious but I wanted read-syncing between different platforms.
The Reddit crawling problem is because Reddit rate limits their crawling so they have to prioritize the most popular feeds. What's the problem with linking your account, or making a dedicated feedly throwaway for crawling?
Been a pro user since the beginning because I want the service to stick around. It works just as well as it always has and I don't mind that they're adding new features even if they aren't for me.
Sheesh.
