
Google Reader Apocalypse Extremely Fucking Nigh - chrismealy
http://www.jwz.org/blog/2013/06/google-reader-apocalypse-extremely-fucking-nigh/
======
snogglethorpe
I don't really share most of jwz's specific complaints, but I've been trying
to use feedly, and boy .... it's really hard to believe so many people are
recommending this as a general Google reader replacement.

Besides its somewhat quirky UI, the main problem I have with feedly is that it
seems predicated on the assumption that you will more or less read through all
articles, one by one, in order, and finish them.

That's not how I use reader at all. I leave _thousands_ of things left unread,
and yet google reader makes it quite easy to keep up to date with whatever I
feel like reading at the moment, without getting bogged down by all the stuff
I _don 't_ want to read. It lets me categorize stuff hierarchically, and then
drill down to what I want to look at, and maintains unread counts for each
level, easily visible all at once. It's easy to see what
categories/subcategories have new stuff. It's easy to mark stuff as
read/unread, one by one, or in bulk by category. Yadayada.

Feedly basically flattens and linearizes everything, and doesn't give any
summary information, so I constantly feel unsure what's available without
looking, and once I look, I quickly get lost in the undifferentiated flow of
articles.

Of course Google reader _also_ allows a more "feedly-style" one-big-stream
mode of operation via its summary feeds. Except that it does a better job of
it by allowing multiple different views, and provides summary information for
all of them too.

And despite all that flexibility and power, Google reader's interface seems
far _simpler_ than feedly's... it's really just a tree-list-view thingy like
we're all used to from a zillion apps, and everything just sort of works like
you expect it.

It does all that, and because it's web-based, everything's always in sync no
matter where you read. It doesn't have dedicated mobile apps, but it works
pretty well on smartphone browsers (and even on dumbphone browsers, although
it started to flake out during authentication a few months ago, presumably
because Google wasn't keeping it updated).

So basically reader's about a zillion times better, with one glaring
exception: it's going away... TT

[The closest free replacement I've found so far is "yoleoreader", which kinda
gets the vibe right, although it's a bit rough in places...]

~~~
anu_gupta
The closest replacement is The Old Reader - unfortunately they seem to having
problems with feed update speed (probably due to load)

~~~
Semaphor
My favorite, Newsblur, has pretty much everything GReader had. And by now he
even managed to do away with the performance problems.

~~~
eli
You don't find it buggy? For example, right now it claims several of my feeds
are 404 and it won't let me fix them -- I have to delete and re-add them.

~~~
zeckalpha
I find exactly which feeds are 404 varies, so I believe it is an upstream
issue in the feed itself.

~~~
eli
The "fix a misbehaving feed" dialog claims _every_ URL I give it is 404. And
now it has helpfully renamed all my broken feeds to "[Untitled]" so I can't
tell them apart in the list.

~~~
zeckalpha
File a bug report:
[https://github.com/samuelclay/NewsBlur/issues](https://github.com/samuelclay/NewsBlur/issues)

------
jacoblyles
Feedly is an example of an app that is extremely over-designed in a
counterintuitive way. It is a remarkable case of form over function.

"There's a list of articles, one per line, stacked vertically on the screen.
After you've scanned your eyes to the bottom of the screen, how do you see
more? You scroll it up, right? Ha ha ha. No. You swipe right. Madness."

Oh. THAT'S how you do it. I thought it was impossible to scroll down a list of
articles. When you swipe down on an article list, feedly alternates between
showing you a single article and a portion of the article list. I have no idea
what the intended function is.

And do the different width bars on the homescreen mean anything?

I switched to newsblur which looks like it's from 2003 and has a terrible home
page. But at least it doesn't surprise me.

~~~
davidjohnstone
I definitely agree.

Once made to show full items by default, Feedly became acceptable for how I
use a feed reader. However, this option only appears to be available on the
desktop site, and not on the Android app, and all the other options feel too
weird; the cards and magazine layouts look pretty, but are completely unusable
("I just want to read my feeds!).

Yoleo almost does it for me, except I sorely miss the ability to scroll
through a list of unread items (it forces us to hit J or click on the next
entry in the third column to make the next item visible).

I find the NewsBlur UI awfully clunky, and I will admit that I can't bring
myself to actually using it as the replacement. However, it exposes an API,
and I built a much simpler UI for it:
[http://www.altfeedreader.com/](http://www.altfeedreader.com/) — it doesn't do
everything that NewsBlur can, but it does 99% of what I want in a feed reader.

In the end, I haven't settled on what I will use, and there's still Digg
Reader (to be released tomorrow) and AOL Reader (released, but buggy enough to
prevent me from adding anything when I tried it).

~~~
jamiebikies
I'm working on a "headline mode" that's going to let you scroll through your
articles.

~~~
anu_gupta
Hopefully with the option of showing the full article content from the feed.

------
veidr

        > I have no interest in reading my feeds through 
        > a web site (no more than I would tolerate reading 
        > my email that way, like an *animal*).
    

I haven't laughed that hard at something I read in a blog post so far this
year. And I agree wholeheartedly.

Who gives a shit about Google Reader the website? (Apparently, a whole lot of
people... but not me.) I only care about the syncing.

Like Zawinski, I want a fast, awesome, native RSS reader on all my platforms
that stays in sync across them. That's it.

I would love to get that for free, but aftern thinking on it a moment, I don't
see why anybody would provide that to me for free. Thinking on it a moment
more, I realized I would pay some reasonable fee for it.

However, non-free means 99% of people won't use it, and this in turn means
that there is much less incentive for the makers of said fast, awesome, native
newsreaders to support such a service in their app.

Except that an RSS newsreader that cannot sync is kind of like a dog turd in a
bowtie.

An enterprising newsreader maker could bite the bullet and make sync a feature
of their app -- but I don't think any of the good newsreader apps cover all
the important platforms (for me, Mac, iOS, and Android, but for others Windows
and Linux are probably in the mix, too).

So I don't know what the solution is.

~~~
anon1385
A proper standard for syncing rss? So that, like email, you just have to point
your various clients at the address of the sync server you are using. That can
be one you run yourself or one from some third party provider. If your
provider closes you can just point your clients at the new service, without
each client needing to implement a new custom API. You are also free to use
whatever client(s) you want. It seems to me like this should have been part of
RSS since the beginning.

The web community seems disinterested in developing standards other than
presentational ones (HTML/CSS), I guess largely for commercial reasons: the
creators of services want to lock you into their specific (magic hip RESTful
JSON) API.

 _Five years ago, if you wanted to show content from one site or app on your
own site or app, you could use a simple, documented format to do so, without
requiring a business-development deal or contractual agreement between the
sites. Thus, user experiences weren’t subject to the vagaries of the political
battles between different companies, but instead were consistently based on
the extensible architecture of the web itself._ \-- Anil Dash [1]

[1] [http://adactio.com/journal/6291/](http://adactio.com/journal/6291/)

~~~
zeckalpha
What about something as simple as reusing IMAP for RSS?

~~~
StavrosK
That... actually sounds like a fantastic idea. One folder per feed, you could
read your feeds with your email client. Interesting...

~~~
Concours
Stavros, that's exactly what we do at
[http://www.feedsapi.org](http://www.feedsapi.org) , we make it simple for our
users to read their full text rss feeds from the comfort or ANY email client
and we also delivr those in realtime (under 60 seconds).

~~~
StavrosK
Oh man, your site is pretty but the initial summary is _waaaay_ too intense:

> Yes, Others May Offer “Real time” RSS To Email or RSS Readers for Free. But
> They Do NOT Fetch The Full Articles Content. They Do NOT Send Full Content
> but Only The Titles with Ads. They Do Not Fetch The Content in Real Time,
> They Call 15-minutes Real Time. We Check Your Sources Every 30 Seconds. That
> IS Real Time. They Do NOT Turn Shortened RSS Feeds Into Full Text RSS Feeds.
> They Do NOT Support other RSS Reader , We Support ALL RSS Reader Clients And
> You Do NOT Need Yet Another RSS Reader When Using Our RSS to Email Feature.
> You Do Not Need to Signin To Yet Another RSS Reader to Read Your Favourite
> News Articles, Feeds And Blogs, We Bring Them To You.

Real-time isn't something I'm really worried about, RSS feeds aren't something
I read in real-time, they're something I let accumulate until I have some
downtime.

That said, your service is pretty useful, but not for my usage. I prefer
something that doesn't clutter my inbox and just sits there with tens of
unread items until I get to it. I would love it if you provided an actual IMAP
mailbox I could connect to and read RSS with my email client.

~~~
Concours
>I would love it if you provided an actual IMAP mailbox I could connect to and
read RSS with my email client.

You can actually do that, all you need to do is set a filter+label in your
email client or server. Works really well is you use Gmail but also works very
good with the other email servers.

------
FilterJoe
While I share the author's frustration that Google Reader is going away, I
don't get all the hostility toward Feedly. In just a few months' time, they've
replicated by far the most important aspect of Google - serving as a backend
for any front end reader that choose to use their API.

I too tried the Feedly iOS app and found it didn't suit my workflow and
stylistic preferences. But I didn't need it. My favorite way of consuming news
over the past couple years has been with Newsify, with Google Reader as back
end. Now my favorite way continues to be Newsify, but with Feedly as back end.
The transition was seamless.

My only 2 complaints are:

1) I was only able to import 1000 starred items into Feedly.

2) No search - but that's coming.

So - I wish I hadn't had to spend a dozen or two hours over the past few
months evaluating alternatives to Google Reader. But I'm quite happy that
Feedly stepped up to take Google Reader's place.

~~~
fpgeek
Exactly. Pretty much from the beginning of the Readerpocalypse, I'd decided to
go with whatever the developers of my apps did.

Both Press and gReader decided to support Feedly, so that was simple enough.
There were a few hiccups in the transition (initial bugs, creating my Feedly
account in-app was confusing), but now everything is working as smoothing as
it did with Google Reader. I can even directly compare that, since I've
switched to Feedly on my phone but not on my tablet (yet).

------
ivank
If you want the cached feed data from Reader preserved, ArchiveTeam is still
collecting OPMLs:

[http://allyourfeed.ludios.org:8080/](http://allyourfeed.ludios.org:8080/)

[http://archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Google_Reader](http://archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Google_Reader)

We've saved about 30M feeds (6TB gzip'ed text) so far, and ~44K unique feeds
from a few hundred uploaded OPMLs that we didn't find in the billion of URLs
we've crawled.

We're also looking for

(1) massive URL lists we can grep, in case you have access to one

(2) query lists of just about anything that we can use to search for feeds
using Reader's Feed Directory.

(3) some assistance in writing a few crawlers to discover more URLs on
specific sites

(I'll try this submit this to the homepage tomorrow as well.)

~~~
cbr
By "OPML" they mean the subscriptions.xml file in your Reader takeout .zip

It's a list of the feeds you follow.

------
seldo
I appreciate his position but I have trouble taking advice on UI from somebody
whose blog is eye-burning neon green text on a black background and has been
since 1995. We _know_ you're l33t, Jamie, you are a living legend. Can I get a
readable color scheme already?

~~~
Sami_Lehtinen
I think you got just a very bad monitor, if it doesn't have a green / amber
switch. Simply go and buy a better one. Btw. Blog is completely missing the
lovely slow phosphor trailing effect, it could be added with js. I was great
that you were able to read text from monitor about 5 seconds after powering it
off. - After quick Googling, I couldn't find pre-existing javascript to do it.
It would be nice to make one.

~~~
DanBC
It might be nice to replicate the 8 x 8 pixels (on a 640 x 200 screen) of the
CGA 80 x 25 characters text mode.

~~~
205guy
I was thinking the same thing. The text is way too sharp, so it's rather
anachronistic to see the right color scheme with modern fonts. There has to be
a slightly pixelated font out there, based on the pixel pattern of the green
CRTs. Of course, it wouldn't be practical on the blog, but it would look cool
on his home page (jwz.org).

Just for the record, all the people complaining about jwz's green text have no
idea what they're talking about. It might be old-fashioned and out of style,
but it's totally readable. There are way worse websites, even among designers
who should know better. What's funny is that it never fails that someone
criticizes the green color, and says something about not taking the content
seriously, every time jwz's posts get hackernewsed.

------
sage_joch
Google doesn't seem to realize that one of their most valuable assets is
trust. And that trust has eroded a great deal in recent months.

~~~
melling
It really is time to grow up.

They have a product where they can't make money and can't fit it into their
corporate direction. Good companies eventually cancel projects like this. Yes,
we had a great product for free for a long time. Now it's time for someone
else to fill the vacuum.

~~~
acdha
Your apologia is begs the question of whether Google could make money or find
a fit for it when they never even allowed the team to try:

“‘There was so much data we had and so much information about the affinity
readers had with certain content that we always felt there was monetization
opportunity,’ he said. Dick Costolo (currently CEO of Twitter), who worked for
Google at the time (having sold Google his company, Feedburner), came up with
many monetization ideas but they fell on deaf ears.”

[http://gigaom.com/2013/03/13/chris-wetherll-google-
reader/](http://gigaom.com/2013/03/13/chris-wetherll-google-reader/)

Had there been interest, revenues were easy to find: a college student trying
their first project would at least have slapped some Google text ads on there.
Given Google's other projects, they could have just made Reader a service with
a $5/year charge, bundled it with Google Drive subscriptions, etc. The Google+
integration was a hopeless botch full of obvious opportunities to make both
services more valuable but they simply did not try and succeeded only in
making a strong, active, influential community use their services less and
distrust their executives‘ vision and competency.

------
rachelbythebay
Not many people seem that interested in my approach to solving the feed
reading problem. I run my own backend and frontend and just let it fetch
things for me. Then I periodically check in and flip through to see what's
new. If I wind up on some new platform on which the web frontend doesn't make
sense, I'll write a native one which speaks the same simple "POST in, AJAX
out" language. No big thing.

I set up a Kickstarter to turn it into open source and release everything I've
written and then some, but it seems the momentum just isn't there yet.

~~~
dmbass
Have you heard of Newsblur? Sounds exactly like what you're describing.

API: [http://www.newsblur.com/api](http://www.newsblur.com/api)

Open Source:
[https://github.com/samuelclay/NewsBlur](https://github.com/samuelclay/NewsBlur)

Also, cheers for not including a link to your Kickstarter.

~~~
rachelbythebay
I saw Newsblur quite some time back, maybe in 2011 when I decided to move
myself off Reader. It didn't look like anything I wanted: so many frames!

Reader itself had a whole bunch of stuff which got in the way. One time I
tried mocking it up with most of that stuff gone and I liked what I found.
That's the sort of ideal I went for with my own thing: enough of a bar so
people know it's a feed reader and not some scuzzy content thievery site
(since they arrive when they see it in their referrer logs), and a way to flip
through the posts.

The Kickstarter was an attempt to try something really "out there" for me and
see if it would work. It looks like it will not.

~~~
davidjohnstone
The nice thing about NewsBlur is that it exposes the API so that, if you want,
you can make a completely new front end for it. This is what I did:
[http://www.altfeedreader.com/](http://www.altfeedreader.com/)

------
cloudmaster
Interestingly, the guy who wrote NetNewsWire says Dropbox and RSS readers
can't work together:
[http://inessential.com/2011/10/25/why_just_store_the_app_dat...](http://inessential.com/2011/10/25/why_just_store_the_app_data_on_dropbo)

~~~
jobigoud
It might not work for all scenarios, but it can work.

At some point I used RSSBandit (Open source desktop RSS reader for Windows),
and I set up its %appdata% directory to be a subdirectory in the Dropbox
folder. This can be done by modifying one of the config.xml files in the
program's files. It worked. The whole state of the application was shared
between computers.

Desktop app, synchronization between home and work, that was all I needed.

------
abalone
Syncing feeds is a little bit harder of a problem than the author lets on.
It's not just about storing a state file in dropbox. It's also about
efficiently pushing the delta of what's new. A central service is vastly more
efficient at that than millions of clients pulling their own feeds.

But I 100% agree that Reeder is (was) the awesomest client and all I need to
be happy is a backend replacement that just Makes Reeder Work. I don't have to
care about Feedly's UI if it's just a backend.

There was a press release at the beginning of the month about Feedy & Reeder
collaborating.. what's the ETA? We're really down to the wire here.
[http://www.macstories.net/news/reeder-to-add-support-for-
fee...](http://www.macstories.net/news/reeder-to-add-support-for-feedly-and-
feed-wrangler/)

Oh, and F U Google. Thanks for the 4 months heads up, dick.

------
nikcub
We learned a lesson that you can't rely on free services like Reader because
they likely will eventually be shut down.

Reeder is now asking for $5 per month so that is can be sustainable, so isn't
the solution just to pay the $5 per month rather than asking one of the free
products to imitate what you get from a paid product?

You will just be at square one again anyway since even if Feedly does
implement all of these changes, you still have a free product that at some
point will need to compromise itself through advertising, become a paid
product, or shutdown.

I really thought the punchline to this post would be 'and this is why its
worth paying $5 per month for Reeder.

Ranting at Feedly to fix their free product seems to miss the point of why we
are all in this situation with the Reader shutdown in the first place.

~~~
amirmc
Does anyone know for sure that $5 is actually sustainable? Just because it's
non-zero doesn't automatically mean it'll be around for the long run.

~~~
ryanklee
Does anybody know for sure that anything is actually sustainable at any price
point for any number of users?

Buying into a service, either through time or money means risk on the part of
a user, no matter free or paid.

Something remains open or something closes. Who knows.

I hate to sound like a god damned schmuck, but there are no guarantees in
life, not the least of which when it comes to such frivolities as rss feeds.

------
notatoad
One thing the google reader apocalypse seems to have taught us is that
everybody's sense of entitlement is way too damn high.

Feedly is documented. Type "feedly keyboard shortcuts" or "feedly tutorial"
into google and you'll get all kinds of good (and concise) information. The
fact that you didn't try to find any documentation doesn't mean it doesn't
exist.

~~~
voltagex_
I installed the feedly extension and it proceeded to trash every page I viewed
by inserting itself at the bottom. Even in plain Javascript files I was
viewing

~~~
mehrzad
Yeah it's a weird default that is quickly disabled but the point is moot now
that we have a full web client of Feedly.

~~~
ernesth
Unfortunately, if you get disconnected from feedly (like you do not use it for
two weeks or you are in incognito mode), it no longer respects your
preference. So the default should definitely be the other way around

------
tonetheman
What is really missed is the larger picture.

People who used/use Reader digest information. A lot of information and
quickly (at least if you are using it correctly).

They are often the hubs in social/meme networks. I find cool stories all the
time and propagate those stories out. It is hard to value that, if there is
value there at all.

When the demise of Reader had been announced, bluntly feedly sucked. It looked
like Pintrest (is that bad?) It was missing the key feature in a reader... the
reading part. Pictures are nice and layout is ok, but seriously I just want to
read really quick.

Feedly has gotten better or maybe I just have figured out the correct way to
use it? Hard to say.

What I have really learned from google closing reader is that you cannot trust
someone you are not paying with your data. And maybe you cannot even trust
someone you are paying... how depressing.

~~~
fpgeek
No maybe about it. You can't trust someone you're paying either. See:

\- Sparrow and all the other companies who were acquired and saw products
killed

\- the countless other companies that just went out of business

\- the problems you run into when hiring people to develop custom software

\- and so on

There is no substitute for individually (and regularly) assessing the risks
and benefits associated with all the software and services you use. And even
then, you will make mistakes.

------
Yhippa
I've tried just about all of them and as July 1 approaches I'm definitely
getting anxious that I haven't found an RSS aggregator "home" just yet. I set
up Tiny Tiny RSS on a Red Hat Openshift gear and it actually seems to work
quite well. My main problem with it is that it doesn't seem to work in
anything other than Safari.

The mobile options for Tiny Tiny RSS looks like it's going to take some
legwork to set up so that will be interesting.

It's such a waste since Google already has a decent app that hooks into their
API (on Android at least). All of this work by them that makes me very happy
only to be ended. Such a shame. I'm really going to miss it.

~~~
tmzt
I would like to see an argument for not releasing the Google Reader Android
app source code, I can't imagine what in there exposes a critical Google
service. If that was the concern they could leave that component out. (I'm
talking about the internal Android component that provides the Reader login
facility and sync option.)

------
anotherevan
I don't particularly like the way Feedly does things either, but I can
maintain that opinion without a lot of vitriol.

While it's great that all these new projects have been springing up, I didn't
want to entrust my feed reading so something that has been written at the
eleventh hour, so have only been looking at options that have been around for
a while. (Also, ruling out ones without an Android app, which may or may not
be a consideration for others.)

Tried TinyRSS which was okay. If I had a better server to run it on it
probably would have done the job for me (long story that is probably not
germane.)

I ended up going with Newsblur. It has an interface similar in behaviour to
Reader which is what I like, and although it does have some rough edges it's
getting the job done and is established. I figured I'd spring the $24 for a
year, and then see what the landscape looks like then.

------
fpgeek
jwz is just a bit behind because he's on iOS.

As of this writing, only one iOS app (Newsify) is ready while two Android apps
(Press and gReader) and a widget (Pure News) are. See:
[http://blog.feedly.com/2013/06/19/feedly-
cloud/](http://blog.feedly.com/2013/06/19/feedly-cloud/)

This will presumably be sorted out soon. Perhaps the combination of Feedly's
late deployment and Apple's approval process have complicated things for some
developers. I did notice that both Press and gReader had to bugfix their
initial Feedly support. I can certainly imagine an iOS developer having a
harder time dealing with a late-breaking issue like that.

------
tterrace
Swipe to navigate is a terrible design antipattern. I can always tell when I'm
reading a blog on blogspot because it'll dump me to the adjacent article when
I'm scrolling or trying to zoom in on an image. I dumped chrome on ios because
they didn't get it right either.

~~~
metafunctor
Hear hear. Although, I don't remember needing to swipe with chrome on iOS.

~~~
tterrace
IIRC it's the way to switch between tabs

------
lobster_johnson
I'm fine with Reeder switching to Feedbin, but why couldn't the author update
the desktop all at the same time as the iOS client? This means there is a gap
where Reeder on the desktop just won't work correctly.

~~~
easyfrag
The iPad version of Reeder also doesn't have Feedbin support yet.

------
woodylondon
Check out [https://www.inoreader.com/](https://www.inoreader.com/) \- tried
the usual suspects like Feedly, OldReader etc and did not like them. I have
not found anything bad yet about inoreader and about as close to the Google
reader as I could get.

No iOS app yet :-( but I hear they are coming.

NetNewsWire might have have a new version soon so keep an eye on that as well.

------
halcyondaze
Who knows, the demise of Google Reader seems to be spawning a lot of cool
projects and Show HN's. I don't think it's the end of the world...seems to be
driving forward innovation.

~~~
icelancer
I've tried most. Not a single one has 80% of the usability of Google Reader.

~~~
firlefans
By usability you surely mean something other than the traditional sense of the
word. Exactly what was usable about the Reader interface?

~~~
zanny
Folders, drag and drop feeds between them, the caching of entries Google did,
and the Android app was ok, and it didn't install some browser crushing plugin
to work, it was a website.

------
zobzu
I liked reading that. More people need to voice their true opinion, unhidden
being politically correct sentences.

Else we end up with various shitty software that we end up thinking are the
gold standard.

------
jackowayed
I was considering various things, with a strong desire for something simple
and likely to stay around for awhile. I thought about emacs gnus, Thunderbird,
and some of the new entrants.

I realized that I would be as happy with something that just sent me a
filterable email for every entry in all of my fields, since I already have
good interfaces for reading and culling mail on all of my platforms.

So I found one. [http://blogtrottr.com/](http://blogtrottr.com/) It seemed
nice and had an easy import. If something happens to it, I'm sure I can find
another.

For now I'm filtering it all into its own folder, though I try to keep my
feeds pretty low-volume, so it wouldn't even be a huge deal if they all landed
in my already-pretty-noisy inbox.

I just did that this weekend, but so far I'm quite happy

------
brownbat
jwz hates web interfaces, wants an app.

No web version was a dealbreaker for me (until they fixed it).
[http://www.cnn.com/2013/06/19/tech/web/feedly-google-
reader](http://www.cnn.com/2013/06/19/tech/web/feedly-google-reader)

I don't want an app of your website. I don't want to give you permission to
access every I/O and stored file on my phone. I don't want to help you track
me as I drive around town, not using your app, because you're curious why I'm
not using it more often. I don't want your program to break if I have to use
another machine or borrow a device from a friend (not that you ever should). I
don't want your program to break if some company invents a better way to do
computing than anything we've ever seen before, but your developers didn't
anticipate the architecture, so they won't have an app out the door until that
thing is killed off by the next wave. I don't want your program to break
because my devices are different than the name brand most people use. I don't
want to feed the illusion that a launcher in front of a webapp somehow makes
it different, as if it's 1999 and applications are fast and stuff on the
internet is slow.

Mostly, I don't want your fucking app:
[http://idontwantyourfuckingapp.tumblr.com/](http://idontwantyourfuckingapp.tumblr.com/)

------
bhdz
Since I am leading my efforts into a reading/translating/communicating toolkit
I find this very interesting, and personally useful (I need people to share
their opinions like that):

* There is no documentation

My code is not documented, then again I am using the principle idea behind
__doc__: Code IS documentation, and I've decided to blend the difference
between code, document, and even data.

* There is no desktop version

My road-map includes a core frame, which has Presentations for Terminal, GUI
desktop, and webby version of it (html, css, js, ...)... um yeah...
Presentations, Control, Model (model slice, inner model slice, perspectives,
view-points): PCM (Present, Control, Model)

* There is no Next button!

The main web reader I plan to provide, has a Letterbox layout, with next:
(chapter, page, etc.) prev: (...), bookmark-tags (alabala bla bla [: some name
for the BM])

* + Sequential Layout-ing:

Instead of even touching the buttons or mouse, you let the "AI" helper (Wordy)
to blurt it out on the terminal paragraph, by paragraph, sentence by sentence,
word by word, with tempo and optional "accenting"... Just like a kid listening
to his father telling stories. You have the option of speeding up the tempo,
or simply push it forward

* +Convo-trees

Trees of Conversations (Documents outputed and printed)

This is highly wondorous tool which I still conceptualize with the following
scenario: You are a Weed Farmer with A blog, mail, etc. You want to
communicate with your prospective buyers, but you don't want cops in your
clientele. Therefore, you decided to place a mail on the site, and only after
an interview, you decide whether the seeker is a sincere buyer or a cop (or
interviewer) under cover.

So you have those repetitive tedious interviews with common answers and such,
and you WANT to automagicate the process a bit.

What if you put Wordy behind the mail-server and make it redirect things it
can't respond to, to your advanced intellect? Nice? may be. Depends on Wordy.

... The rest of the arguments OP presents are technical hiccups rather than
poor user interface design mal-techniques (choice of paradigms)

------
chaz
Well, the good news for jwz is that these all seem pretty fixable. It's come a
long way since the version I first saw after the Reader announcement. It took
me a long time to warm up to Google Reader, and for it to have enough features
for me. I was a Bloglines user for quite some time. Change is hard.

[http://blog.feedly.com/2013/06/21/summary-of-the-
last-100-da...](http://blog.feedly.com/2013/06/21/summary-of-the-
last-100-days/)

------
lifeisstillgood
But he is right - the Internet was designed to be used in a certain way. One
website to rule them all is not the natural state of the web and this is an
example

------
Nican
I am surprised nobody mentioned CommaFeed yet; How are people using CommaFeed
holding out?

~~~
raamdev
+1 for CommaFeed. I had been in denial about Google Reader shutting down
simply because all the alternatives were painful in comparison. Thankfully, I
discovered CommaFeed a few days ago and now I'm not dreading July 1st.

CommaFeed almost seems too good to be true: it's free; the code is open-
source; you can run a self-hosted version. I made a $10 donation to the
developer a few days ago and I've stopped looking for my Google Reader
replacement.

------
hawkharris
Many startups are trying to consolidate news and social media posts — to
become, basically, a one-stop shop for users.

I understand that this offers greater convenience, but it also overlooks
something people enjoy about the Internet. People like having different
websites and services to check, with notifications unique to each one.

It's kind of like spreading out your Christmas presents instead of tearing
them open all at once.

~~~
jsherer
I agree. This is my approach for [http://mnmlrdr.com/](http://mnmlrdr.com/) —
no social integration because a lot of people are only interested in reading
their feeds, not talking about it in their reader app.

~~~
hawkharris
That's a cool. I like the simple, elegant interface.

------
whyenot
After waiting and waiting for Reeder to update their Mac version, I decided to
go back to an old friend, NetNewsWire. It does not sync between devices, but
that's ok for me. In fact, I kind of feel good about the fact that now there
is no online entity keeping track of what feeds I subscribe to and what
articles I read. ... well, if not none, at least one less entity keeping
track.

------
BitMastro
I switched to tt-rss last Sunday. I have a cheap VPS that I paid 15$ a year,
set up a minimal debian, install nginx and postgresql, let tt-rss import
google reader feeds and starred posts and install the mobile app as well. A
good looking skin and now I have a nice replacement. Not so difficult

------
Digit-Al
When I first hear about the pending shutoff I first tried Bloglines /
Netvibes. It seemed alright, but there was a weird bug that caused a big panel
to take up the bottom third of the screen a lot of the time. I then tried
Feedly, but (like some commenters below) just hated the interface. I think I
tried another online reader as well, but can't remember what now.

I ended up going back to bloglines. I did find a way of getting rid of the
massive menu bar that kept appearing at the bottom of the screen, but the
problem seems to be fixed now.

Getting your feeds into Bloglines is not quite so easy as Feedly, but once you
have everything set up it seems to work really well. Still not as good as
Google, but the closest I have managed to find so far.

------
kylec
I'm a Reeder user myself, though 99% of my reading is done on the Mac version.
So far, ReadKit ($4.99, MAS) is the closest thing I've found to a replacement.
I'd still prefer Reeder, but I can comfortably live with ReadKit if need be.

~~~
elithrar
I use Reeder (iOS) w/ Feedbin ([https://feedbin.me/](https://feedbin.me/)),
and the Feedbin web UI on the desktop.

Reeder for OS X is scheduled to get Feedbin support in the near future.

~~~
lucian1900
iPad and OS X versions of Reeder have been scheduled to get support for more
services for quite a while now. I'll believe it when I see it :)

------
ababab
FWIW, I started a vague attempt to round up the alternatives:

[https://github.com/smithbr/rss-readers-list](https://github.com/smithbr/rss-
readers-list)

~~~
nicholasalias
Great list. You missed a few. Feeder.co (my preferred alternative), Stringer,
and probably a few more. Check out Russell Beattie's blog post here:
[http://www.russellbeattie.com/blog/readerpocalypse-the-
alter...](http://www.russellbeattie.com/blog/readerpocalypse-the-alternatives)

------
mtgx
Is it me or has Feedly made it _harder_ to switch the interface to _titles
only_ recently?

I change to that, but it seems to change back after a while. It's very
annoying.

------
nollidge
I feel like I'm the only RSS reader that never used Google Reader. I used
iGoogle (formerly Google Personalized), and then switched to Netvibes a few
years ago because of some complaint I can't even remember now.

Personally, I prefer to read RSS items on the author's website, and Netvibes
suits that. Plus they have a Twitter widget that works even though my work
proxy blocks twitter.com.

------
danielandrews
At the risk of being that ass who self promotes, you should check out the
service myself and a friend launched yesterday:

[http://bulletin.io](http://bulletin.io) is a fast, easy to use RSS reading
service that has an open Google Reader lookalike API as well as our own OAuth
implementation. Open to feedback from everyone.

------
seanp2k2
It's hilarious when these days, Google is the one sticking to their guns
despite public outcry (Reader) and Microsoft is listening to their users in
some regard (Xbox One DRM). I really feel like Google is missing the forest
for the very intricately engineered trees.

------
jwr
jwz is right. His criticism is remarkably close to my observations regarding
both Reeder and Feedly. I am also worried that I won't be able to use Reeder
anymore, and try as I might, I can't force myself to use Feedly for any
extended period of time.

------
stevewillows
I was hoping someone would work with EasyRSS (the android app, not the torrent
goodness) so it would use the NewsBlur api or something similar. It's sad that
the dev is letting the project go with reader.

------
ilolu
I need a Reader replacement that lets me export the feeds data later if I want
to. I could not find that in Feedly. I don't want to get locked in a service
for the same reason. Any suggestions ?

~~~
stefantalpalaru
Tiny Tiny RSS [1] but you need to host it yourself.

[1] [http://tt-rss.org/redmine/projects/tt-rss/wiki](http://tt-
rss.org/redmine/projects/tt-rss/wiki)

------
pbreit
I agree with most of the sentiments but definitely not that feed reading
should be in an app. I have always found web-based feed readers to feel much
more proper (including on mobile).

------
coherentpony
Wasn't the Google Reader apocalypse the week following the announcement from
Google? You know, when every post on the front page of Hacker News was a
Google Reader alternative.

------
whytaka
I wish Pocket would adopt Feedly's UED and discovery engine, or that Feedly
would pick up on Pocket's browser extension and archiving ability. That would
be almost perfect.

~~~
Yhippa
I never thought of that. I really like Pocket's simplicity and ubiquity. If
they could somehow pull it off I would be so pleased. That would be quite the
pivot for them though.

------
philthesong
I don't understand the hate with the decision of Google shutting down the
Reader. Apparently, the Reader users aren't worth that much.

~~~
epistasis
When Google makes the decision that I'm not worth much, I'm tempted to
reciprocate.

DuckDuckGo is already becoming habit, and I'm pretty close to convincing
others in my company that we need to switch off of Google Apps, because Google
hides important messages from me and doesn't provide support [1]. What else
does Google do? Drive? Dropbox is better. Plus? Haha. Google is putting all
their effort behind things they're only mediocre at, chasing after the
fashionable new kids on the block, and dropping the ball on their core
competencies. Maps will keep me around for a while though. However, a maps app
that cared about my privacy would win me over...

Every giant sees their peak and gradual decline. Google's just came very
quickly. I hope they see a renaissance.

[1]
[http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/gmail/aU4UUye3...](http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/gmail/aU4UUye3dbs)

~~~
achompas
You can't hand-wave away the fact that Gmail, Docs, and Maps are best-in-
class.

~~~
epistasis
Of course I can, particularly if they are best-in-class in a class that is not
relevant to me. I'm not going to use web apps for email or for office
documents, except for edge cases. And that is the case for most people in the
world, web apps are a nicety, but not the primary use case.

Maps, as I said, are different.

~~~
achompas
I think you're extrapolating your opinion to "most" people. Gmail is extremely
popular, and while Docs is no Gmail, it has no serious competition for cloud-
based editing.

Even if you're not using Gmail's webapp, it's an entire email infrastructure
serving as the backend for Mail.app or Mailbox or whatever you use. At this
point, if someone doesn't have their own mail server, they're probably using
Gmail.

------
jsilence
Please jwz, write a really nifty and usabe console or desktop RSS reader that
syncs easily. (this post ist sans irony or zynism)

~~~
groundCode
there's the rub - once all the kvetching is done, coders who care _enough_ can
just dust off their editors and put something together.

------
mathattack
All this hype on Google Reader makes me miss not using it to begin with!

------
sauce71
I'm still in denial.

------
wslh
Occupy Google Reader?

------
crorella
QQ

------
rocky1138
"All I want is a version of Reeder that stores my .newsrc on Dropbox."

Get coding. This sort of angst is the inspiration behind a ton of open source
projects.

~~~
jobigoud
For your interest :
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie_Zawinski](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie_Zawinski)

~~~
darkarmani
What have you done for me lately?

------
tomovo
It is not easy to take any criticism of the Feedly UI seriously from someone
whose website is green-on-black.

On the other hand, it is true that they have gone a little crazy with
"innovations". But as long as they have an API, who cares.

~~~
Void_
He's criticizing user experience, not the color scheme.

User experience on his website is just fine.

