Reeder on the iPad is spectacularly good.
Ask HN: Why do RSS Readers (mostly) suck?
11–20 of 79 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why do RSS Readers (mostly) suck?
#12The most obvious thing is that they don't do enough to help you filter the wheat from the chaff. The sheer volume of news that's available is too much for anybody to consume... it is almost literally like trying to drink from a firehose. So our readers need to do a better job of helping us figure out which stories are relevant/interesting to us, give us ways to skim and summarize without reading the whole article, fi…
I use Postrank (formally AideRSS) for this reason - BoingBoing have far too many posts for me to read, so I run their feed through Postrank, and get only the most interesting posts.
http://www.postrank.com/main - their index page is baffling.
Re: Ask HN: Why do RSS Readers (mostly) suck?
#13I would say it's a combination of a number of reasons, some -- if not all -- relate to the technologies encapsulated in RSS.
First, because RSS by design is meant to just be metadata, and because it's really hard to render HTML (especially those that are not well-formed) the readers typically have to jump through so many hoops to get things just working.
Second, I think it's also because the RSS readers are typically developed by non-designers. Although Google Reader keeps it simple, it's utilitarian and mostly not very pleasant to look at. I've tried others (which are also free) but typically it doesn't come close to making it enticing to read.
Maybe someday someone will do a feed reader that renders articles in a sane and readable way.
Re: Ask HN: Why do RSS Readers (mostly) suck?
#14I haven't tested it, but I'm intrigued by Shuan Inman's Fever reader (http://feedafever.com/). Basically the idea is that you separate your feeds into two distinct types: essential feeds that you read completely, and supplemental, high-volume feeds (aggregator-type blogs, like Engadget). Then the essentials are cross-referenced with the supplementals to see what you're likely to be interested in.
I have a similar strategy, but instead of trying to manage the "supplementals" in my RSS reader, I try to a) identify them, and b) banish them back to the browser where they belong. Identifying them can be tricky, at least for me, because I tend to think that feeds I've been reading for a long time are essential, when often they're not. Removing a lot of politics blogs from my reader I swear has made me less stressed, and I don't feel any less informed.
I think the higher volume of content means we have to become better at selection — not only in choosing what we read, but also in identifying and not reading what is noisy and lacking in substance, even when tempting (ahem, HuffPo). Edit: and I'm not sure algorithms are the solution; I think it's something our generation will have to learn — to be our own conscious curators.
Re: Ask HN: Why do RSS Readers (mostly) suck?
#15Try Fever: http://feedafever.com/
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Re: Ask HN: Why do RSS Readers (mostly) suck?
#16I haven't tested it, but I'm intrigued by Shuan Inman's Fever reader ( http://feedafever.com/ ). Basically the idea is that you separate your feeds into two distinct types: essential feeds that you read completely, and supplemental, high-volume feeds (aggregator-type blogs, like Engadget). Then the essentials are cross-referenced with the supplementals to see what you're likely to be interested in. I have a similar s…
Great UI, et al.
I also like that it aims to help the user make sense and filter their news sources. But you completely lost me when you were explaining in the video how you edited the settings to see Comics. I'm confident I myself could figure it out with time and effort, but it goes over the heads of the common man, which I believe is who we're talking about now.
Re: Ask HN: Why do RSS Readers (mostly) suck?
#17I wondered this myself until I hit upon the simple solution of deleting feeds with too low a signal to noise ratio (for my personal tastes). Expecting RSS readers to tease out relevance means having to give them an idea of what's relevant to you. This seems to be a self-inflicted problem on the part of people who use feed readers. I've tended to think I "needed" to follow more than I could possibly consume and retain. Pruning my feed list not only helped with overall comprehension of feeds I'm interested in, but eased a somewhat bothersome feeling that I was falling behind on a keeping up to date.
Personally I ditched NetNewsWire after Reeder for the iPad came out. I have Reeder on my both my iPhone/iPad and just use Google Reader for those times I check feeds on my notebook. The user experience (note that I didn't say user interface) it provides is astounding. Navigating feeds, marking read/favorite, and the article typesetting/layouts are all the best I've seen in an RSS client to date. Combine something like Reeder with a carefully curated feed list and I don't really see there being much of a problem.
Re: Ask HN: Why do RSS Readers (mostly) suck?
#18Reeder on the iPad is spectacularly good.
Perhaps you could give some reasons why?
Re: Ask HN: Why do RSS Readers (mostly) suck?
#19I have a quite good experience with feedly. It's a firefox extension which integrates with google reader. The integration seems to have some bugs with new "shared items", other than that it's perfect.
Re: Ask HN: Why do RSS Readers (mostly) suck?
#20Because they are (mostly) web apps.