Goodbye, Feedly • Hacker News Board

Re: Goodbye, Feedly

#171

Post by Uupis » Sat, Jul 02, 2022, 7:20 PM UTC

Macha wrote: post #99

Uupis wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

reddit provides RSS feeds: https://www.reddit.com/wiki/rss

The parent poster even acknowledged this. 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.

Ah, my bad. The reference to API made me think they're replicating RSS via the reddit API. I was not aware that RSS feeds are so rate-limited, too.

More on the subject, for anyone curious: https://www.reddit.com/r/help/comments/4u9tj8/rss_feeds_upda...

Re: Goodbye, Feedly

#172

Post by stiltzkin » Sat, Jul 02, 2022, 7:32 PM UTC

For free solutions there are better alternatives out there not sure the benefits of using free Feedly.

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.

Re: Goodbye, Feedly

#173

Post by oliwarner » Sat, Jul 02, 2022, 7:39 PM UTC

Yeah, no sympathy with Erik here. Feedly is —for free— polling RSS feeds for you and giving you centralised, platform agnostic access.

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.

Re: Goodbye, Feedly

#174

Post by nickthegreek » Sat, Jul 02, 2022, 7:39 PM UTC

Cupertino95014 wrote: post #148

I use free Feedly multiple times a day, since the demise of Reader. I'm scanning the comments for another free alternative that doesn't suck, but so far I haven't found one. 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] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jYyBZE0kBtE

Inoreader

Re: Goodbye, Feedly

#175

Post by microflash » Sat, Jul 02, 2022, 8:34 PM UTC

After several years of using Feedly, I stopped using it right when they started showing ads in the feed. My biggest complaint with their Pro offering was that it was extremely unbalanced for the personal use (it still is).

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.

Re: Goodbye, Feedly

#176

Post by pllbnk » Sat, Jul 02, 2022, 9:01 PM UTC

longrod wrote: post #12

Going through the article I realized this attitude is what eventually kills some really good software. If a software does what you expect it to do and does it well but includes a few prompts here and there for marketing purposes...is that really so bad? 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 d…

Furthermore, if the author was so interested in uncluttered UI, they shouldn't say they've "done everything they could" because there's more you can do, such as customize the HTML, CSS or even JS. Clearly, they chose to spend this time writing an empty rant and advertising a tool for Mac. Since majority of users are not on Mac anyway, it's not even a viable alternative because from that point of view, Feedly is much more accessible and user friendly than the advertised product.

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.

Re: Goodbye, Feedly

#177

Post by xtracto » Sat, Jul 02, 2022, 9:22 PM UTC

deanmoriarty wrote: post #145

longrod wrote: post #12

Going through the article I realized this attitude is what eventually kills some really good software. If a software does what you expect it to do and does it well but includes a few prompts here and there for marketing purposes...is that really so bad? 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 d…

When I read threads like these I feel I must be terribly unsophisticated/"un"-picky compared to the average HN users. I have been using Feedly since when Google Reader went down, and I follow ~100 feeds (including HN! I never browse articles through the front page, I let articles with enough upvotes like this come to me via Feedly) in 5-10 reading sessions a day from browser and iOS apps, so I'd say I'm a very active…

I actually have been a Feedly subscriber for years (since Google reader closed). However I seldom use it anymore. At some point it gave me anxiety bc of the amount of unread articles. I pay for it yearly... I actually think I should unsubscribe

Re: Goodbye, Feedly

#178

Post by m-p-3 » Sat, Jul 02, 2022, 9:42 PM UTC

IMO the lowest ad-free tier for Feedly was too expensive for what I'm doing (~6.00$/month) which is basically agregating news from multiple websites for my own personal use, so I migrated to Inoreader and use the Supporter plan (~1.67$/month), which is enough features for me while remaining ad-free.

At that price, I'm okay not having to self-host it to handle the synchronization of articles I've read, liked, etc.

Re: Goodbye, Feedly

#179

Post by prepend » Sat, Jul 02, 2022, 9:53 PM UTC

Semiapies wrote: post #111

prepend wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This writer is really entitled 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…

They are entitled like you and I, and everyone, is entitled to good products and not being angry when using them. 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 ser…

It is ad supported, not free. So there’s a commercial quality expectation. Am I “entitled” if I don’t like a tv show on broadcast tv even though it has ads?

Also, even truly free/oss software has an expectation of quality. And saying “I don’t like it and won’t use it” isn’t being entitled. It’s just a normal human response.

If I’m in a museum and look at a painting and remark to my friends “I don’t like that painting and I won’t buy a print. In fact there are so many paintings in this museum, I don’t think I’ll return.” Am I being entitled?

I think it’s pretty authoritarian to call out people expressing reasonable opinions as if they are “entitled.”

As a reader I’m happy to know that feedly’s free product sucks. That’s very helpful to me. I’m glad OP shared their idea and I hope that people gatekeeping won’t stop OP and others like them from sharing more useful ideas.

Re: Goodbye, Feedly

#180

Post by prepend » Sat, Jul 02, 2022, 9:59 PM UTC

ianai wrote: post #41

prepend wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> is that really so bad? 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. Fig…

They could just have an “ad” screen like the about screen. Encourage users to check it out or leave it open for a time as a source of support for the product. 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.

I think I bought a ton of shareware that had innocuous purchase ads (eg, id’s commander keen). The idea isn’t that ads are bad, but that having continuous ads over and over is annoying and unlikely to result in me buying.