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O Reader My Reader – Remembering Google Reader

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Re: O Reader My Reader – Remembering Google Reader

#71

Post by xrstf »

TorKlingberg wrote: post #51
interfixus wrote: post #11

There are decent readers out there. Liferea or Thunderbird will do in a pinch, and much as I hate to admit it, Netvibes is actually superb. The tragedy isn't some Google tool being retired, the tragedy is the way feeds are slowly disappearing. It's a slow and creeping death, but it's a death. More and more sites are dropping their feeds and replacing them with some twitterish Facebook nonsense. [edit: typo]

RSS feeds were just never easy enough for most people to bother. And not just the proverbial grandma, most techies don't use RSS either. Sites will run analytics and see that nobody is clicking the feed button. RSS certainly solves a real problem, so I think there is an opportunity for reinventing RSS with better UX. Don't ask me how though.

> Sites will run analytics and see that nobody is clicking the feed button.

I barely ever click on any RSS buttons. Partially because sites nowadays don't even bother putting one in there, partially because TinyTinyRSS extracts the feed from the site's automatically.

So running analytics on that button would be very misleading, especially for users like me ;-)

Re: O Reader My Reader – Remembering Google Reader

#73

Post by commentzorro »

Touche wrote: post #66
commentzorro wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, people who come to a website via RSS almost universally have ad blockers turned on and usually are not site sticky. Maybe not the best group to attract to your site?

I think you're assuming everyone who runs a website is running it as a business. I don't have ads on my website or even analytics.

You are correct, I was making that assumption and should not. I tend to think money on HN posts but not as much on, for example, r/programming posts. I suppose I'm more susceptible to indirect marketing than I like to believe. Damn.

Re: O Reader My Reader – Remembering Google Reader

#74

Post by Ntrails »

interfixus wrote: post #30
studentrob wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The tragedy isn't some Google tool being retired, the tragedy is the way feeds are slowly disappearing Can't it be both? They probably contribute to each other too.

Yeah, the Reader retirement probably did a lot of damage. But nothing fundamental, I believe. Feeds are dying from lack of interest. The proverbial 'general public' never could be bothered to spend those ten extra minutes getting to understand that orange icon with the stripes. Go out there and ask. Say "feed" to everybody. 99 percent of them will give you a blank stare in return. "What's the problem? We got Facebook…

What's facebook got to do with anything? I have never used an RSS feed and never felt the lack (though I have only a vague idea what it is).

My not using RSS has precisely nothing to do with my facebook account - and your attempt to diminish others usage of t'internet by saying "ugh it's those fucking drones just using facebook" is pretty arrogant.

Re: O Reader My Reader – Remembering Google Reader

#75

Post by extra88 »

dsr_ wrote: post #43
adrianN wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twitter used to provide an RSS feed, that's gone too.

If you google "twitter rss" you will discover four sites that will do that for you as a free service and a node program that will do the conversion for you as well... on the first page of results, anyway. I switched from Reader to TT-RSS. Now there's no fear that anyone will start analyzing my subscription list, send me personalized ads or suddenly stop serving me.

Twitter could shut down those four sites at any time. I also switched to TinyTinyRSS and also self-host a simple Twitter to RSS parser. Anyone savvy enough to set up TT-RSS can manage getting a Twitter API key and configuring this.

https://github.com/jdelamater99/Twitter-RSS-Parser

Re: O Reader My Reader – Remembering Google Reader

#76

Post by finchisko »

xaduha wrote: post #4
janvdberg wrote: post #3

I've been using http://theoldreader.com ever since. As the name implies, it does a pretty good job of mimicking Google Reader.

https://digg.com/reader does the job for me. It's probably even better than Google Reader was.

Same for me. Digg reader is now so good, that I can no more say if Google Reader was better or not. Even if google relaunches Google Reader, I will not use it. After they killed Reader I've realized how important is not to bet all on one company and nowadays I prefered diversification (dropbox, digg, spotify) rather then all in one.

Re: O Reader My Reader – Remembering Google Reader

#77

Post by basch »

steve_w wrote: post #33
interfixus wrote: post #11

There are decent readers out there. Liferea or Thunderbird will do in a pinch, and much as I hate to admit it, Netvibes is actually superb. The tragedy isn't some Google tool being retired, the tragedy is the way feeds are slowly disappearing. It's a slow and creeping death, but it's a death. More and more sites are dropping their feeds and replacing them with some twitterish Facebook nonsense. [edit: typo]

I've been using Facebook to subscribe to websites mainly because I know I'll check Facebook more often. I keep forgetting to check my Feedly account. However I've discovered that after liking a few pages and joining a few groups the quality of information in my Facebook news feed is getting watered down. I'm missing more of my friends updates. Currently my Facebook feed has a duel personality which makes it a bit use…

use the interest lists feature, make different lists for different topics, and bookmark them

Re: O Reader My Reader – Remembering Google Reader

#78

Post by bdarnell »

commentzorro wrote: post #41
James_Owens_7 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I usually don't visit websites that don't have RSS and tell that to the website owners. You should do the same. How else will they know that people care about feeds?

Unfortunately, people who come to a website via RSS almost universally have ad blockers turned on and usually are not site sticky. Maybe not the best group to attract to your site?

RSS users don't need ad blockers because obnoxious ads can't come through in a (full-content) feed, but this means that feed users have all the downsides for the site as if they did have ad blockers.

And feed subscribers are much stickier than most web visitors - you can't generally use a feed without subscribing to it, so anyone who uses a feed will see it again. The problem is that stickiness per se is not actually that valuable (especially when it's difficult to quantify). Feed users are so sticky that they will read everything you post but never leave the site by clicking an ad.

Re: O Reader My Reader – Remembering Google Reader

#79

Post by basch »

kristianc wrote: post #60

RSS was and still is great for following a few blogs that were relatively infrequently updated. If I follow Rands, DF or Marco, it works quite well. I receive timely, relevant content at a pace I can cope with and digest. The problem with RSS is that it scales incredibly badly for large, content heavy sites. I don't really want to see everything that Gizmodo publishes. I certainly don't want to see everything that Hu…

rss had two major hurdles that made it difficult for people to pick up.

1) there was no collaborative space for teams to work together to create feed mixes. No service I know of became popular that allowed team of 7 people to moderate the member feeds of a metafeed. This harmed discovery.

2) Deduplication was usually a human task. Techmeme really spoiled me. It was impossible to see what other people had already marked as duplicate "aggregations" of an original story.

these two together basically meant that EVERY person who used rss reinvented the wheel. You couldnt latch on to other peoples work like you can subscribe to a subreddit. Twitter has a similar problem, it lacks collaboratively maintained lists. It kind of blows my mind how neglected the idea of a "run your own slashdot/techmeme with friends" is.

i probably sound like a shill by now, but redef.com seems to be moving in the right direction.

Re: O Reader My Reader – Remembering Google Reader

#80

Post by kristianc »

basch wrote: post #79
kristianc wrote: post #60

RSS was and still is great for following a few blogs that were relatively infrequently updated. If I follow Rands, DF or Marco, it works quite well. I receive timely, relevant content at a pace I can cope with and digest. The problem with RSS is that it scales incredibly badly for large, content heavy sites. I don't really want to see everything that Gizmodo publishes. I certainly don't want to see everything that Hu…

rss had two major hurdles that made it difficult for people to pick up. 1) there was no collaborative space for teams to work together to create feed mixes. No service I know of became popular that allowed team of 7 people to moderate the member feeds of a metafeed. This harmed discovery. 2) Deduplication was usually a human task. Techmeme really spoiled me. It was impossible to see what other people had already mark…

RSS had the concept of OPML, which could have been used for that purpose, but I only saw it used in very isolated cases.

The curation angle does feel like a space that the likes of Skimm, NextDraft et al have picked up.

I'm not in love with the idea of another daily email newsletter, and Redef often feels like a long list of pieces that I "ought" to read rather than stuff I get genuine pleasure from, but it's the best we've had in a while.

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