
O Reader My Reader – Remembering Google Reader - ingve
http://www.theawl.com/2016/04/o-reader-my-reader
======
interfixus
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]

~~~
TorKlingberg
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.

~~~
zanny
How do you get better UX than clicking an RSS link and it adding itself to
your feed reader?

It isn't the protocol, it is that there is no profit in an open standard like
that. Google killed their Reader because they wanted everyone forced into G+,
rather than consuming content from around the Internet.

It is the same thing with messaging and VOIP. Nobody _wants_ to use an open
standard like XMPP or more recently Matrix because there is no money in using
standards when you can lock users in to a walled garden.

~~~
komali2
By having your articles directly on your site, linked to via a "feed reader"
that everyone already uses - twitter, facebook, reddit, etc.

I remember trying to get into RSS feeds a few years back. I passed them by -
it was easier to just hit news.google.com or my multireddit or twitterfeed for
news I was interested in. Sure, I didn't "get it," and yea fine I'm not the
smartest guy ever, but I'm probably a good representation of the average net
user - interested in efficient means at getting the news such as RSS, but also
tremendously lazy. Why bother? I already have a twitter/reddit/gnews account.

~~~
thescribe
Twitter is transitory, Facebook isn't chronological, Reddit puts you at the
whims of other people.

------
robocaptain
I've been paying for newsblur
([http://www.newsblur.com/](http://www.newsblur.com/)) ever since google
reader bit the dust. It's pretty much a direct replacement. Interface has come
a long way since day one and is sufficiently slick now (UI, keyboard
shortcuts, etc) that I don't really notice it.

Highly recommended by a (former) hardcore google reader user. If I recall
correctly, got quite a good bit of press here on HN at the time.

~~~
wslh
Sorry, I don't agree: heavy Google Reader user and now a NewsBlur one. While I
appreciate the NewsBlur existence it is very very very slow while Google
Reader was extremely fast. I don't know if NewsBlur only retrieves my feeds
when I start a request or if it constantly retrieves them on the backend.

Disclosure: I have 2350 feeds in NewsBlur.

~~~
fourneau
Is that... normal? 2350 feeds seems like an astronomical amount of news feeds.
Can I ask how much of that do you read?

~~~
disposition2
Agreed, very curious how much of that actually gets even glanced over.

I thought I was information overload with ~150 sites. I hope OP uses the
'focus' features so they can get a modicum of information from those 2350
feeds.

~~~
platz
But is your intention really to read every post by every site you're
subscribed to? Someone subscribed to over 1000 sites isn't trying to avoid
missed posts - they're just dipping into the stream of sites they're
interested in at any given moment.

~~~
disposition2
Read every post, no. But at least get a general idea of the posts for the
sites I subscribe to. There are a couple of sites that I let over lapse, HN is
a good example, but for the most part, I atleast read the headlines / tags of
posts for sites.

One nice feature of newsblur, which I don't use often and not sure if it is
available in other readers, but the intelligence trainer would probably help
in instances where you have a lot of sites and don't necessarily bother
reviewing all posts.

Maybe I just use RSS readers differently. But if I were just going to
periodically review what a site has, I would probably go to the site
periodically rather than clutter up my list of feeds.

------
kristianc
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 HuffPo, Buzzfeed or any of the
other content mills publish. Sure, you can choose granularity - a 'US
Politics' RSS feed for example, but that puts too much of the onus on me and
I'll end up missing some stuff I'd like to see.

For those large content mills, Facebook actually does a quite good job of
bubbling stuff up through my network that I care about. Twitter served that
function for a while before it became more about noise and snark.

The death of Google Reader probably had a role in the decline of the small
independent publisher (how many new sites have appeared on that scene
recently?), but it's probably not to blame for the rise of BuzzFeed et al,
which RSS was never really suited to handle anyway.

~~~
basch
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.

~~~
bdarnell
Google Reader's public labels had the capability to create a group-edited
metafeed, but this advanced use case was never advertised. The one use that I
know of for it was on the sidebar of the Google Reader blog: Each team member
had a public label, and there was one person who had a label which subscribed
to each of the others. Any feed that any team member subscribed to with their
public label would show up on the sidebar of the blog; people would do this
for their own blogs or their shared items.

~~~
basch
I guess my vision of a metafeed is something that autoingests rss feeds,
presents them to editors as "pending stories" and the upvoted ones become
visible to non-logged-in-users/subscribers after a certain threshold. Maybe
editors/moderators/curators (whatever we call them this week) would have some
kind of superupvote to use sparingly if an important article was justified.

I imagine this place being like reddit, where I can view a giant list of
rooms, and see how each room and its members are mixing content. it should
also be easy to clone/fork (github/yahoopipes) a configuration if your team
wants to start where another team began.

I also like how counterparties had a list of rejected stories, stories they
acknowledged but refused to follow.

really I am describing a piece of technology that lets any group of people
maintain their own techmeme plus a reddit like index of all the different
rooms, that allows you to subscribe to multiple rooms and see them in one
feed.

------
hemmer
I've tried a variety of RSS readers recently for keeping track of academic
publications (arxiv and journal feeds etc). I've settled on inoreader [1] as
this: (i) includes a search feature in the free tier, (ii) has keyword
highlighting (useful for trawling through long lists of papers), (iii) has a
reliable Android app.

[1] [http://www.inoreader.com](http://www.inoreader.com)

~~~
sohkamyung
I also use Inoreader and after using it for quite a while, I decided to pay
for it to support the developers.

My preference is to use the mobile web interface [1] in a web browser for most
of my RSS reading on a tablet or phone, rather than use the app. I find it
gives me greater control over my reading experience.

For example, I've disabled image loading in feeds. And since I'm still in a
web browser, I can open multiple tab views (each one displaying a separate
category of RSS feeds) at once, letting me rapidly scan feed headings without
the need to go back and forth between categories in the app; they just load in
the background while I reading the headings in one tab.

[1] [https://www.inoreader.com/m/](https://www.inoreader.com/m/)

------
mwexler
I too miss Google Reader.

Feedly does OK, but is expensive. Of all I tried, however, it consistently was
the least worst.

Most of the replacements suffer from bad apps on at least one mobile platform
I use, poor web experience, lack of speed (esp. search), and even lack of
features (esp. search)...

...and all suffer from lack of leveraging modern text analytics. If I have
overlapping stories in my feed, perhaps a winning service would merge
duplicates or cluster similar stories? Akin to threading, but more implicit.
This is esp. a problem in my "apple" feeds, where any mention of anything from
apple shows up verbatim in every feed. A Techmeme style (pick one, nest the
rest) would be really interesting.

~~~
branchless
Why are you paying for feedly? If it's altruism, great, but what else?

~~~
AjithAntony
I paid becuase I want it to succeed. I was skeptical at first, but i really
like it.

As to pro features that I may be enjoying: \- faster feed polling \- IFTTT
action to save links to pinboard when i save in feedly \- search

Edit: I bought the lifetime membership when they started. Just looked at
today's pricing. I would not pay $7/mo

~~~
branchless
Interesting, thank you.

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

~~~
xaduha
[https://digg.com/reader](https://digg.com/reader) does the job for me. It's
probably even better than Google Reader was.

~~~
vardhanw
[http://www.inoreader.com/](http://www.inoreader.com/) works for me as it
gives a minimalist list view and also has a decent android app.

~~~
mih
I second this. Inoreader's UI is much better than Google reader ever was.
Being a free user, I am still unable to explore much of the functionality they
offer, but I hope to be a subscriber soon.

------
thirdsun
With all the alternatives we have these days, I don't see any reason to mourn
a product its parent company obviously didn't want to support any longer. It
was my impression back then that countless other services continued right
where Google Reader left off the day it was shut down.

Personally, I migrated to Feedbin. Importing my subscriptions and replacing
the accounts in my feed reader of choice (Reeder) didn't require more than a
few minutes of my time.

------
Trillinon
I often think that Google Reader was the worst thing to happen to RSS. It
became the standard everyone used, but never implemented feed authentication,
forever preventing the idea of premium subscription feeds from succeeding.

With all the complaints about page weight, tracking, and overzealous
advertising, the idea that I could just pay to subscribe to an RSS feed has
more appeal than ever.

------
rahuldracula
What shall I say. Not a day has passed since that awful day they pulled the
plug when I haven't missed the great reader. I have shared this great tragedy
of many friends of mine but the pain was shared only by people who had
experienced it, loved it. The look we share with each other in remembrance
says it all. Its a massive hole in my life which an incompetent little Feedly
tries to fill but the heart still yearns for the great reader.

Today, I got some solace from the fact that there are others like me, only if
Google can bring it back can I truly be healed.

------
mmanfrin
People are suggesting replacements for Reader, but none of them capture the ux
that Reader found _perfection_ at. Newer readers have been trying to
outcompete each other with nice convenience features, but it muddies the
strength of what Reader was: simple.

I'm still smarting over the loss of Reader, and I don't think I'll ever
forgive Google for its shuttering.

------
acemarke
I am obligated to post a link to BazQux[0], which completely nails the RSS
reading experience that Google Reader once had. It's absolutely worth the
$20/yr subscription.

I am still amazed that it doesn't seem to get any discussion or attention
whenever these "favorite RSS reader" threads come up.

[0]: [https://bazqux.com](https://bazqux.com)

~~~
cm3
And it's made with Ur/Web, which deserves to be used a lot more.

------
spiderfarmer
Google might be backpedalling on Google+, but we'll never see Google Reader
again. It's like admitting you were wrong. Way too hard for some people.

~~~
rahuldracula
Yes, its that Google+ which is responsible for the death of the great reader.
I am sure total engagement minutes in Google reader today would have beaten
Google+ engagement minutes. Such a shame Google.

------
NoGravitas
I really like tt-rss ([http://tt-rss.org](http://tt-rss.org)), self-hosted. It
doesn't have the social aspect that Google Reader had, but you could use
pinboard or something for that. The tt-rss web app is pretty good, and the
Android client is excellent.

------
Kiro
> Not one of those alternatives is good enough, because they’re just not the
> same.

So what is the problem exactly? Is it really that hard to make a good reader?

Personally I don't really care. My Reader list was so bloated I never had time
to go through anything. Just speculating but could it be that many people were
like me, using Reader out of habit? So when it disappeared it didn't really
matter much because algorithms and aggregators had already replaced it. That
could explain why none of the alternatives really took off but I don't know.

------
gsam
I think the thing that bothers me most about Feedly is paid-search. Sure, I
don't mind if you limit advanced searches to paid users, but when I'm trying
to do a simple search for something I know exists in the same feed (and saw
like last week), why is that so ridiculous?

------
jasonkostempski
RSS really simplifies reading news. Having multiple sources in a single place
and compact lists are obvious benefits, but even if you only subscribe to 1
site, you'd save a ton of time simply by not having to rescan over stuff
you've already read or decided not to read. Over the past month I've logged
out of and stopped going directly to media sites and replaced them with RSS
feeds. That's including YouTube, which was a pain to do but I only subscribed
to about 15 channels. I do fear Google will kill the feed urls at some point.

I've been searching for a cross-platform desktop RSS reader. Thunderbird is
what I use for now and I would stop looking if I could just filter URLs but
the filtering only seems to be built for email, which works if the URL is in
the "body" of the feed item, but not all feeds are structured like that (e.g.
HN). RSSOwl looks real promising but doesn't run for me on Windows 10 and
hasn't been updated in 2 years. I'd prefer a standalone RSS reader, not a
email client with RSS tacked on. I looked at everything in the comments so far
but they all fall a little short.

~~~
yoha
From my experience, a self-hosted web aggregator is the most convenient
option. I initially wrote my own (very clunky) in PHP when I realized
Thunderbird would not do.

I am currently using FreshRSS [1]. MiniFlux [2] and TinyTinyRSS [3] are pretty
good to.

[1] FreshRSS [http://freshrss.org/](http://freshrss.org/)

[2] MiniFlux [https://miniflux.net/](https://miniflux.net/)

[3] TinyTinyRSS [https://tt-rss.org/gitlab/fox/tt-rss/wikis/home](https://tt-
rss.org/gitlab/fox/tt-rss/wikis/home)

~~~
thescribe
If any of these will work with Reeder I think I just found my weekend project.

~~~
angus-g
I know that both Miniflux (previously used) and TinyTinyRSS (currently using)
work with Reeder (via the Fever API). It's a bit annoying that the Fever API
doesn't provide any way to add feeds though, so you'll need to do that in-
browser.

------
axx
I'm working on an Ruby on Rails based open source reader, if your interested
checkout
[https://github.com/aleks/HappyFeed](https://github.com/aleks/HappyFeed)

~~~
lucaspiller
Looks good, thanks!

------
vk77de
Now you'll remember what RMS has been saying. Mwahahaha, oh, mwahahaha

------
m1el
Losing the Google reader was a big deal for me, and I managed to write a
Chrome extension that re-used most of Google Reader's UI and hijacked
browser's XHR to redirect requests to browser background page.

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/local-rss-
reader/c...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/local-rss-
reader/cemddjmmnfebpkpkonmbkdmakilpkcid?hl=en)

The code is not pretty, if I wrote this extension today, the code would be
much more readable and robust.

It worked out okay, but I moved to tiny-tiny RSS a few years ago, so this
little project of mine is mostly abandoned.

------
educar
I use tiny tiny RSS and can whole heartedly recommended it. One concern is
that their user forum is extremely hostile and the moderators thinks it is
somehow entertaining to make fun of others.

~~~
sk8ingdom
I used tt-rss for a while as well and can highly recommend it. The forums are
certainly hostile, but if you have a genuinely good question that hasn't been
asked / answered before and thick skin, you'll likely get a semi-reasonable
response.

------
snvzz
[https://github.com/swanson/stringer](https://github.com/swanson/stringer)

------
jcurbo
As a pretty heavy RSS user, I too miss Google Reader, but what I really miss
is Bloglines. They had a very fast, responsive UI that I really liked. I
always felt GR was clunky and slow compared to it.

After GR shut down I bounced around with self-hosted solutions for a while
(tt-rss, Fever) until landing on Newsblur, which has served my needs
admirably.

------
acqq
Why lamenting about one specific product, even demanding from the specific
company to make exactly the same again? One company isn't the "internet." The
comments here (by janvdberg and xaduha) show there are alternatives.

~~~
sp332
They had the only copy of a ton of defunct blogs and they just deleted them.
That's not replaceable.

~~~
acqq
OK, bad, but that content isn't coming back even if the product would be
reintroduced?

~~~
sp332
Well I'm still hoping they just made it inaccessible and they still have a
copy around.

------
cm3
The old Opera browser was the best local client because you could open RSS
links in the same app, as a new tab, in a real browser. There is no comparable
local RSS reader that comes close. I've since switched to Inoreader.

------
pmoriarty
Happy newsbeuter[1] user here.

I try to avoid web-based apps as much as possible, so net got in to Google
Reader, and never missed it when it died.

[1] - [http://www.newsbeuter.org](http://www.newsbeuter.org)

------
elcapitan
feedly.com works ok for me as a replacement.

~~~
rahuldracula
If only it had sort by magic the great reader had

------
cedricbonhomme
I am maintaining an open source simple aggregator:
[https://github.com/JARR/JARR](https://github.com/JARR/JARR) and using it
since more than 5 years. It has evolved a lot since...

It is possible to test it here:
[https://jarr.herokuapp.com](https://jarr.herokuapp.com) This instance is
limited in resources... It is deployable quite easily (a vagrant configuration
file is also provided).

~~~
cedricbonhomme
Screen shot: [https://jarr.github.io](https://jarr.github.io)

------
James_Owens_7
I've been using Thunderbird for both my emails and RSS.

~~~
James_Owens_7
Inb4 You need to read your news on 20 different devices at the same time.

------
oldgun
Very interesting post. I'm fully with the author except for one point: whether
Google Reader comes back matters no more. The freedom of Internet and the
choices for the people lies in the freedom software, not proprietary service.

Liferea and
newsblur([https://github.com/samuelclay/NewsBlur](https://github.com/samuelclay/NewsBlur))
are some good open source alternatives.

------
r3bl
I have never used Google Reader, but I think that Pocket started going on its
path, with public recommendations and the suggested tab. I've never used RSS
for the news, I'm using it for the small unknown blogs that don't post 20
articles per day. As for the RSS readers, my only recommendation today is that
they have a nice integration with Pocket.

------
redorb
TheOldReader.com is a great free replacement - I found it after the shut down
and it's been good so far.

------
sean_the_geek
Talking about RSS reader, I was becoming (almost!) fan of digg reader until
they updated their iPad app and then links to sites won't open! How crazy is
that! Uninstalled immediately, deleted digg account and I am a happy feedly
user since then. No regrets so far.

~~~
thescriptkiddie
You can delete your digg account? I've been trying to do that for ages and
still can't figure out how.

------
Notre1
I always thought that it would have been smarter to roll Google Reader into
Google Plus. By that, I mean use the RSS feeds as automated profiles for those
blogs.

------
kyriakos
been using feedly and greader pro on android ever since

~~~
V-2
And you can share the same feeds among Feedly and gReader Pro?

I'm asking, because Feedly the web app is okay, but I don't like their Android
version

~~~
kyriakos
yeah basically greader uses Feedly as a source.

I agree about the feedly for android, i prefer the more text-y view of greader
(which looks more like the old google reader).

greader also lets you view feeds in a list with the most recently updated
first.

p.s. you don't need the Pro version for any of the above, the regular version
is ad supported but otherwise free to use.

------
nemoniac
I find tinytinyrss on top of sandstorm.io ideal for my RSS reading needs.

------
senectus1
too soon man, too soon.

Though I've been "mostly" happy with feedly...

------
alnorth
The Reader workflow never really worked for me. I just ended up with a big
bold "unread" number counting all the posts I'd never get round to reading.

In the end I rolled my own thing
([http://www.mailfeed.io](http://www.mailfeed.io)) which checks feeds once a
day and emails me a list of all new posts. Really simple, and nothing to make
me feel guilty about not keeping up.

~~~
Jaruzel
I kinda did exactly the same. Rolled my own:
[http://www.weegeeks.com](http://www.weegeeks.com)

It doesn't keep a history of feeds, just what's in the feed right now. That
way I don't get backlogged.

I don't recommend anyone use it though, it's very tailored to my lightweight
requirements. It's actually got about 200+ registered users, but only one of
those (other than me) is active...

