Ask HN: Why do RSS Readers (mostly) suck?

I've had a long love/hate relationship with RSS. For something with 'simple' as part of its name, I feel like it really hasn't lived to its each potential.

I've used Google Reader (horrible) and NetNewsWire and a plethora of mobile RSS-readers. I read a lot of news from a lot of sources (68 total sources in my NNW?) and as much as I do want to go in and read EVERY single article some days, other days I'm just tired by the 2500+ articles that pop up.

Pulse seems to be on the right track to do something. Anything else going down that path?

What's wrong with RSS Readers today? Why do they suck?

Is the solution to a better RSS Reader something more visually appealing (ie: Pulse) or something that simply filters the news (diggv4 or HN)?

Check out Yahoo Pipes. This under-appreciated tool can help you be more selective in the news you actually look at.

http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/

I think I created a very nice feed reading experience with NewsBlur: http://www.newsblur.com.

It shows the original site, allows you to read as you normally would, but keeps track of the stories you're scrolling past.

It also allows you to filter stories based on what you like and dislike about them: words/phrases in the title, tags and categories, authors, and the publisher themselves. There is a slider that allows you to show/hide stories based on this filter. It's very fast, too.

I am writing an iPhone app so you can use NewsBlur everywhere. It's just a hobby project, and people have so far been impressed. But I would love for NewsBlur to become a useful tool that people choose to use.

I wrote it because I was also dissatisfied with readers, especially Google Reader. I also knew Python (Django!), JavaScript, and wanted to put them together to test my abilities.

The problem is that unless that filtering works magically in the background, it just adds interface debris. And it's easy to reach a threshold there, where just scanning for the stuff to filter (hidden amongst the UI elements) and you might as well be better off doing your filtering yourself.

Which right now works best for me. If I use Google Reader directly, it's set up to use the re-reader style, at home I use NetNewsWire with the subscription list hidden. So to browse through it, I can mostly use keyboard shortcuts, so skipping something is easy. Reading is comfortable enough, but if the article is too long, I either open it in a background browser window or send it to Instapaper.

Works well enough for me, although if I had more newspaper-style story listings in there, that just contain the headlines and link to the main story, filtering and adding to the queue might be more difficult.

And alternative would be some kind of social filtering, but that's close enough to HN or Reddit or just listing the links you've got on your twitter inline (c.f. http://news.peepcode.com/)