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 data to make money.
What the author labels as "cluttered" is really not that cluttered at all. It looks much better than an completely empty list in the alternative they prefer. But that's just UI.
I am not saying don't move to another alternative. I am just saying that the reasons the author is calling Feedly out for are unjustified and don't really make sense.
RSS is basically impossible to monetize. It's a protocol to access content. Monetizing RSS is like trying to monetize HTTP.
The problem is that companies try to monetize RSS, and the only way of doing so is to provide features that RSS can't offer. AI-curated feeds, integrations with X or Y, nudges to let go of RSS entirely for some applications and instead use whatever integration they've come up with...
Some people may be happy with this. Some people may only care about the information they eventually get, not HOW they get it. But I'm not among those people, and many other people are not.
I personally felt very annoyed by Feedly nagging me on a daily basis to upgrade in order to get features that I didn't need and never asked for.
I feel like being approached every day by a dude who wants to sell me a vaccum cleaner that I don't want. And of course I understand that they also need to make money, but they should also respect those who simply want an RSS reader and are insensitive to all these campaigns.
Thats the reason why I moved from Feedly to a self-hosted Miniflux instance (and Nextcloud News before it). If I host it myself, then I don't have to pay anyone for hosting my feeds, and I'm not supposed to be targeted by marketing campaigns to pull money out of my wallet on a daily basis.
> The problem is that companies try to monetize RSS, and the only way of doing so is to provide features that RSS can't offer.
I don't know if I agree; I pay Newsblur a yearly fee because it's worth it to me having a centralized web-app that I don't have to self-host (and consequently, don't have to worry about paying for, or hitting rate limits, etc.) with a nice UI and a few features like sorting by folder.
Granted, I have no idea how much it costs to run Newsblur; I certainly hope they're at least breaking even. I also don't know if I'm a typical-enough user.
I pay for Inoreader and really like it.
Somewhat ironically, its killer feature for my use case is the ability to ingest emailed content will make emailed content look like any other RSS feed, since lots of scientific journals / sites have stopped using RSS.
That's why the revival of NetNewsWire is a great thing. They don't offer enough settings, but outside of that they're at parity with all the paying services and they're free and open-source.
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 user.
I am on the free tier and nothing ever bothers me, it continues being a wonderful service every day. The ads are fine, I totally understand it. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The same is largely true of free products from which I get massive value but HN constantly complains about: Google Search, Reddit, ...
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
I guess it's a matter of opinion because Feedly's interface looks cluttered to me. It's not a bad offender for a webapp but compared to other feed readers its interface is IMO busy.
Also a matter of opinion but app developers IMO shouldn't use their apps to market. I've already got an email app and a Feed reader. If I want to keep up with you I'll subscribe to your mailing list or follow your feed.
I disable auto-update because I get annoyed when apps tell me about new versions (and I have privacy concerns.) I wont consider using an app that doesn't let me disable auto update. I already have a strategy to keep my software up-to-date that works on my schedule.
I recognize I'm sensitive to these things but that doesn't mean they aren't justified or don't make sense. They just don't make sense * to you *.
Tangential: if updates bother you, you might want to give NetGuard a try (not affiliated). FOSS, though the pro version license costs $5 iirc. It is a great way to make apps behave nicely - even Firefox is too chatty (telemetry & co.) for my taste. Since updates are often from a different domain, you can just block them. How it works is that all the traffic on the phone is routed through a local (just an app on your phone!) VPN where it can be logged and filtered. Brilliant idea.
As a bonus, it is also very satisfying watching apps try to connect to various ad networks and spy agencies^W^W Google unsuccessfully.
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.
Figure out a better way to get income that doesn’t involve perpetually wasting a user’s time and frustrating them.
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.
> 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?
Don’t change things. It’s not hard. Leave things alone. Be consistent.
Marketing? If you pay for it already that’s all the marketing needed. Don’t go trying to suck data from elsewhere with creeper policies to sell the data to creeper brokers.
In case of Feedly, yes. I feel like a hamster being tried to be converted. Feedly's free tier doesn't feel like free. It feels like a getaway drug which tries to make you pay for other features.
I have used for a week, then SDF announced availability of their TTRSS instance. As a paying member, I moved there. I am much more happier now.
TTRSS is free and open source. I'm just supporting SDF so they can continue to exist.
> In case of Feedly, yes. I feel like a hamster being tried to be converted.
You are a hamster trying to be converted. That’s the point of the free tier. You could just pay for it and the nagging would stop. You are now paying for TTRSS and have the experience of a paying customer.
Your sentiment is frustrating to read as a software engineer.either do it yourself or accept that those people also want to have a great job, good salary etc.
And as stated on another comment: no it's not that bad. I use it free since Google shut down theirs
It does makes sense to me. RSS feeds were supposed to get you to the articles quick enough. With all these pop ups and ads and whatever, we lose the essence of RSS.
> 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?
According to the article, Feedly no longer upholds the basic promise of an RSS feed reader: to allow the user to curate a list of RSS feeds and follow them.
From the article:
> For example, I recently wanted to add an RSS feed for a Reddit user, but it was not possible in Feedly. In order to do so, I had to connect to Reddit with my Reddit user, i.e., allow Feedly to access my data. No way, no thanks.
If an RSS feed reader makes it "not possible" to import certain RSS feeds because the app instead wants to use proprietary APIs for those feeds, than the RSS feed reader no longer "does what you expect it do and does it well".
At this point the app is fundamentally broken by design and I too would migrate away from such an app.
I tried this out myself just now, and it turned out to be not entirely true. It's more a case of poor UX. When entering a reddit-url, be it a user-profile or feed, there is a auto-popup with possible actions, one named "feed". Naturally you would click it and then it demands a reddit-connections. I guess, they will use the reddit-API in this case, as it needs a Login, and maybe offers some benefit? But the thing, is you can also just press enter to let feedly discover targets under the entered url, and then it presents you rss-feed it discoverd, which you can follow without a login.
So it's still doing it's job, but in certain cases acts pretty poorly.
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.
> 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?
As the article mentions, the problem generally isn't any one individual change - the concern is about the sense of direction for the overall project. The typical direction is from "simple software that helps people to achieve some goals" towards "product with features designed to increase revenue, data gathering, and stickiness" -- like the login-required anti-feature mentioned.
If those changes are gradual then users may not really notice the small differences as they introduced, and if anyone does complain, it becomes easy for supporters of the project to deflect complaints (as, arguably, you may be here -- not ostensibly trying to keep the author with the product, but trying to reduce their credibility and persuade others that there is no problem).
In many cases, free and open source software can help avoid a project falling into dark patterns because it's possible for people who disagree to fork it and maintain/promote their own alternative -- and then for other people to compare the original and the fork on their merits (which are transparent).
The author makes sense to me, and I think it is justified. Any extra prompts beyond what I expect the software to do for my purposes is extra cognitive load -- inputs which I have to deal with using my very limited senses and processing abilities. At some point, it becomes more trouble than it's worth, and that's when I quit and move on.
It's one of the reasons I no longer acknowledge or interact with cookie prompts, newsletter dialogs, notifications, or anything else interferes with my use of a Web page. If anything at all like that happens, I just close the page and move on. (Sometimes I just ignore the cookie prompts and read around them.)
As a long-term strategy, this has paid off by not only saving me time and grief, but also made me realize that poorly designed usability correlates strongly with poor quality content, which I also save time by avoiding.
I think you are speaking from a point of view of having cognitive ability to spare, as opposed to struggling to keep up with cognitive load which is too much to handle.
> it well but includes a few prompts here and there for marketing purposes...is that really so bad?
If they are done well, no. Problem is they often aren't. An example of this is when I downloaded some app like headspace and they had this sort of relax and be ready to fall a sleep feature. It was relaxing and well done and turned the screen down nicely. Then, as soon as it was over, the screen was set to bright and it asked if wanted to rate it on the store.
Other apps will show marketing over what you are trying to do, or in a distracting manor.
So after a while people will start to associate it with scummy and bad behavior.
I dont understqnd this attitude. I use feedly and like the author of tfa I don't pay them any money, so I ignore the junk. This is the price you have to pay when you get something for free. I have a lot of sympathy for feedly: it seems like a really hard thing to get people to pay for. What does the author think feedly should do with its free tier?
Before feedly I self hosted TinyTinyRss for a while (kind of slow) and before that Google Reader. And before that Newsblur. I never paid for any of them and now I have more than enough paid subscriptions for stuff. Reading rss feeds just doesn't make it over the line of things I'd be willing to pay for.
Edit: I pay £10/month for Adobe Creative Cloud and get Photoshop, Lightroom, XD, Illustrator, etc. I pay ~£8/month for Office 365 and get Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc. All massively rich and powerful tools. Why does feedly imagine I would want to pay £5/month to read rss feeds?
>Why does feedly imagine I would want to pay £5/month to read rss feeds?
Microsoft and Adobe need massive scale to charge prices that low. They're each probably 10,000x-100,000x larger than Feedly in terms of end-user licenses.
For a service I find useful enough to choose over a free alternative, I'm happy to pay $5-30/month to fund development and maintenance. I don't want all my software coming from the Microsofts and Adobes of the world.
> What does the author think feedly should do with its free tier?
Not the author, but I think they should restrict the free tier to a small number of feeds rather than nag. Asking users to pay to get more is positive whereas asking users to pay to reduce nagging is negative.
Absolutely 100%, myself and my friend were discussing the same about products. An upgrade should be about getting the same benefits but more. 10X speed upgrade does make product look bad. Instead reducing number of feeds you can have or grouping etc but a bad product is not a free tier. It is nuisance to deal with in our busy lives.
I probably didn't express myself sufficiently clearly. I'm pleased that the author has moved from a Web app to local, open source apps. Definitely a good move, particularly on mobile. What I don't get is going to the effort of writing a blog post about the annoyance of using the free tier of a service provided by a commercial business. That tier is there to let people try the service. It's not surprising that the experience isn't friction-free: it's not meant to be.
> Edit: I pay £10/month for Adobe Creative Cloud and get Photoshop, Lightroom, XD, Illustrator, etc. I pay ~£8/month for Office 365 and get Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc. All massively rich and powerful tools. Why does feedly imagine I would want to pay £5/month to read rss feeds?
Because Freedly doesn't have Microsoft or Adobe's budget and needs to have its costs covered?
This writer is really entitled. It is a free tier for a service that costs money to host and maintain. Of course there are upgrade prompts.
I use Feedly (free) as a hosting service, and Reeder or one of the other many great RSS client apps as the frontend to it, so I don’t have to see the feedly interface.But the Feedly API I use constantly and it is extremely solid.
That’s part of the greatness of RSS services. If the service’s UI bothers you, you don’t have to use it.
I see where you come from but I didn't read it that way. They point out why the product no longer fits their needs, and why the paid version is not appealing . The conclusion is the opposite of entitled: I'll use something else.
Entitled? Kind of? The thing is, RSS reader clients are pretty much a solved problem, and they aren't particularly resource intensive. You can run your own FreshRSS instance for example for free (https://www.felesatra.moe/blog/2022/06/25/easy-freshrss, you do need a domain name though if you want HTTPS, or just run it on your local machine).
A lot of the service they provide is figuring out how to load out of spec or outright broken feeds. They had some blog posts on this back in the early post-Google Reader days. A self-hosted option will eventually fail to load a feed, and there's not much you can do unless you're a developer.
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 not to use it. And they do. Feedly seems to be in a bit of a doom spiral with being worse and worse and driving away more and more users.
It seems to me that they have some expensive to develop but not very useful (eg, AI to detect stuff in feeds) that users don’t find worth $6 but the costs need covering. So their approach is to keep pushing it on users more and more.
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 service you've used for nine years that amounts to the bastards want to make money off me.
I think that is a bit unfair. Many of us have used something that was originally a certain way and worked and we have let it get embedded and useful at which point it becomes more and more complicated, maybe the upgrade prompts become much more prominent and we feel let down by something that doesn't actually solve the problem any more.
I don't know Feedly's history and whether it was originally Open Source or not but plenty of people decide their popular FOSS tool could be paid-for, at which point it is common to disenfranchise the people who made it popular in the first-place.
If you have a problem solved by software, pay for it. They’re not a charity. If you’re just using without giving back you have zero standing to feel let down. Feedly is a SaaS, not a foss project. They have bills to pay.
Try Inoreader.
Besides a bevy of rich feature set, Inoreader has sales ONLY on Black Friday, and they usually extend the service by an additional 6 months if you pay yearly. It lacks Feedly's stupid UI. It's functional, fast, and I can zip through hundreds of feeds in no time. My favourite is the IFTTT and Readwise integration baked in.
Alternatively, you can have the complete experience in Vivaldi itself. It comes with the RSS reader and a mail client. Absolute DOPE!
Inoreader allows you to keep track of specific keywords and automatically follow the RSS feeds. I am waiting for a better UI around Vivaldi's RSS reader, and will reevaluate my RSS reader needs close to the end of the subscription period.
I've recommended Inoreader multiple times on this site before, but unfortunately the service has gotten worse over the years by a couple of metrics.
Most of the worthwhile features are now gated behind the most expensive plan, rather than being properly staggered. I subscribe to so few feeds I could literally use the free (ad-supported) plan, and I use none of the advanced features at all except filters. If you want to filter a single feed, you have to buy the most expensive plan they sell. That's crazy!
Regardless, I have happily supported them for years. I'm not the sort of user that others are complaining about in this thread that wants everything for free. That's about to change too though. Since the site began, the plan I've been on has cost $30 a year, which is acceptable for the value I get out of it. I was able to extend the plan for multiple years at $18/yr thanks to Black Friday and Christmas sales. Now, however, they're changing things around, and want me to resubscribe to keep the features I use at $90/yr (or $120 if you pay monthly). I'm not a software engineer making six figures. I can't afford to throw $100 at every service I use like this. A $30 -> $90 price increase is just enormous.
Again, I want to pay for the features I use, but because they've failed to provide any kind of pricing ramp, they'll soon get nothing from me.
Another shoutout for Inoreader. Been using it for years. The free tier is great, but the paid tier is seriously one of the best investments I've ever made
So you liked Feedly for almost 10 years, but never bothered to support them financially. And now you complain that they go the extra mile trying to earn money?
Exactly. It's so comical. You were never going to support them making their software, never going to upgrade, never going to provide any value to them in anyway even though they provided value to you for 10 years. Seems like this is a good thing for feedly.
The author acknowledged that though. He seemed to even had considered buying it, but thought it was not worth it. He eventually settled on something simple and free. It doesn't surprise me that running a simple RSS feed tool is not profitable.
OP is using a free service. Free service introduces changes which irritate OP. OP stops using service and looks for alternatives.
All good.
What I (and seemingly many other commenters) take issue with is the tone of the piece. That the OP has been disappointed, that they know better than Feedly management about what features to include and how to market them, that they are owed some sort of a user experience.
I suppose the OP is offering this post as guidance and explanation for Feedly management but I can’t imagine that this moves the needle.
It’s a paid RSS syncing service and web app too, costs $5 per month, I use it with Reeder (and NetNewsWire etc). It doesn’t have any social cruft or AI assistants or ML companions.
I was also a Feedly user when I decided to try Feedbin, and I immediately noticed how much faster fetching the feeds was on Feedbin. I also like to have my email newsletters in same place (forward them to a Feedbin-provided email address), and I can have filters to mark things like sponsored posts and podcast show notes as read automatically, basically like mute filters.
Feedly premium tier costs pretty much the same, and I wonder how well it would stack against Feedbin. There’s also Inoreader which I think offers pretty similar feature set for a pretty similar price.
Feedly free tier is excellent, and you can work around many of its shortcomings by using an RSS reader app. For example, Feedly free doesn’t offer full text articles, but I can extract the full text with Reeder/NetNewsWire/etc on the client-side. If you really don’t care about speed, mute filters, or reading newsletters in your RSS reader, then Feedly free tier is already more than enough.
I switched from Feedly to FeedBin recently for all the same reasons and noticed all the same things you highlighted here. I don't mind the nominal fee of $5/mo since it is a delightful experience that is powerful, fast, and clean. They have added features that I think we need, without the Bloat. Ironically Feedly is only $1 more per month, but I was never enticed to upgrade because the experience was really just awful. FeedBin also gives access to a solid API for you to manage your feeds and supports all the open standards as well to easily import/export them.
I think the takeaway for product owners is that sometimes you need to really zoom out and look at your product. I used Feedly for 8-9 years as a free user and never wanted to upgrade. I was willing to for the right product, but never did. Once I found a simpler product (FeedBin) that met my needs, I immediately paid.
Feedly has shoved ads and half-assed new features into their product for almost a decade trying to get their influx of Google Reader subscribers to upgrade. But no one was compelled to. It eventually pissed off free users enough that they switch to other paid alternatives. That's pretty sad honestly.
I've been using feedbin since Reader closed, so I guess 9 years. Still grandfathered in a $20/yr plan, even. The best thing about it for me is that I mostly don't think about it other than a visit to see my feeds. It does what I want and isn't awful to look at. Most of the RSS apps I've ever used have integration too. It's a lovely service.
I've been using Feedbin ever since Google Reader died. It has been awesome!
I use it to subscribe to YouTube channels, Twitter, newsletters, Subreddits, HN, and, yes, RSS feeds. I frequently use its sharing feature to pinboard.
I think I still pay the original $2 a month. But even at $5, it is one of my favorite services of all time. Truly a gem.
I left Feedly for the same reason a while ago. I think there is a trend of "editorialization" of all kinds of apps that tries to sell new features and "experiences" to users instead of focusing on the core ideas, which I find really annoying. Plus the Feedly UI itself is annoying and doesn't give me a simple mailbox-like view like normal RSS readers.
The solution I went with is native RSS readers (like the author), but backed by an Open Reader server (The Old Reader in my case, but there are others) for syncing between devices. On the Mac, Vienna as a client is quite nice.
Readit News
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 data to make money.
What the author labels as "cluttered" is really not that cluttered at all. It looks much better than an completely empty list in the alternative they prefer. But that's just UI.
I am not saying don't move to another alternative. I am just saying that the reasons the author is calling Feedly out for are unjustified and don't really make sense.
The problem is that companies try to monetize RSS, and the only way of doing so is to provide features that RSS can't offer. AI-curated feeds, integrations with X or Y, nudges to let go of RSS entirely for some applications and instead use whatever integration they've come up with...
Some people may be happy with this. Some people may only care about the information they eventually get, not HOW they get it. But I'm not among those people, and many other people are not.
I personally felt very annoyed by Feedly nagging me on a daily basis to upgrade in order to get features that I didn't need and never asked for.
I feel like being approached every day by a dude who wants to sell me a vaccum cleaner that I don't want. And of course I understand that they also need to make money, but they should also respect those who simply want an RSS reader and are insensitive to all these campaigns.
Thats the reason why I moved from Feedly to a self-hosted Miniflux instance (and Nextcloud News before it). If I host it myself, then I don't have to pay anyone for hosting my feeds, and I'm not supposed to be targeted by marketing campaigns to pull money out of my wallet on a daily basis.
I don't know if I agree; I pay Newsblur a yearly fee because it's worth it to me having a centralized web-app that I don't have to self-host (and consequently, don't have to worry about paying for, or hitting rate limits, etc.) with a nice UI and a few features like sorting by folder.
Granted, I have no idea how much it costs to run Newsblur; I certainly hope they're at least breaking even. I also don't know if I'm a typical-enough user.
I have no clue what you mean.
Where do they show this daily?
And don't get me wrong, you traided self management against a nag pop up? It's your choice but Feedly still does it with a reasonable offering.
And I actually thinking about going pro to remove all the rumor news shit I don't care and the cve feature sounds nice as well.
It may also be illegal (or at least on shaky grounds) if you happen to make money out of content that is not yours.
I am on the free tier and nothing ever bothers me, it continues being a wonderful service every day. The ads are fine, I totally understand it. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The same is largely true of free products from which I get massive value but HN constantly complains about: Google Search, Reddit, ...
Also a matter of opinion but app developers IMO shouldn't use their apps to market. I've already got an email app and a Feed reader. If I want to keep up with you I'll subscribe to your mailing list or follow your feed.
I disable auto-update because I get annoyed when apps tell me about new versions (and I have privacy concerns.) I wont consider using an app that doesn't let me disable auto update. I already have a strategy to keep my software up-to-date that works on my schedule.
I recognize I'm sensitive to these things but that doesn't mean they aren't justified or don't make sense. They just don't make sense * to you *.
As a bonus, it is also very satisfying watching apps try to connect to various ad networks and spy agencies^W^W Google unsuccessfully.
I've been using Feedly since Google Reader shut down and I've visited their site like once every six months.
I use Newsify on iOS and ReadKit on my Mac.
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.
Figure out a better way to get income that doesn’t involve perpetually wasting a user’s time and frustrating them.
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.
Don’t change things. It’s not hard. Leave things alone. Be consistent.
Marketing? If you pay for it already that’s all the marketing needed. Don’t go trying to suck data from elsewhere with creeper policies to sell the data to creeper brokers.
I mean, based on what the author said, they're not paying for it. In fact they're annoyed there is a button asking them to pay for it :D
In case of Feedly, yes. I feel like a hamster being tried to be converted. Feedly's free tier doesn't feel like free. It feels like a getaway drug which tries to make you pay for other features.
I have used for a week, then SDF announced availability of their TTRSS instance. As a paying member, I moved there. I am much more happier now.
TTRSS is free and open source. I'm just supporting SDF so they can continue to exist.
You are a hamster trying to be converted. That’s the point of the free tier. You could just pay for it and the nagging would stop. You are now paying for TTRSS and have the experience of a paying customer.
And as stated on another comment: no it's not that bad. I use it free since Google shut down theirs
If you have two viable options where one is a profound annoyance to you and one isn't, why wouldn't you choose the second option?
According to the article, Feedly no longer upholds the basic promise of an RSS feed reader: to allow the user to curate a list of RSS feeds and follow them.
From the article:
> For example, I recently wanted to add an RSS feed for a Reddit user, but it was not possible in Feedly. In order to do so, I had to connect to Reddit with my Reddit user, i.e., allow Feedly to access my data. No way, no thanks.
If an RSS feed reader makes it "not possible" to import certain RSS feeds because the app instead wants to use proprietary APIs for those feeds, than the RSS feed reader no longer "does what you expect it do and does it well".
At this point the app is fundamentally broken by design and I too would migrate away from such an app.
So it's still doing it's job, but in certain cases acts pretty poorly.
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.
As the article mentions, the problem generally isn't any one individual change - the concern is about the sense of direction for the overall project. The typical direction is from "simple software that helps people to achieve some goals" towards "product with features designed to increase revenue, data gathering, and stickiness" -- like the login-required anti-feature mentioned.
If those changes are gradual then users may not really notice the small differences as they introduced, and if anyone does complain, it becomes easy for supporters of the project to deflect complaints (as, arguably, you may be here -- not ostensibly trying to keep the author with the product, but trying to reduce their credibility and persuade others that there is no problem).
In many cases, free and open source software can help avoid a project falling into dark patterns because it's possible for people who disagree to fork it and maintain/promote their own alternative -- and then for other people to compare the original and the fork on their merits (which are transparent).
It's one of the reasons I no longer acknowledge or interact with cookie prompts, newsletter dialogs, notifications, or anything else interferes with my use of a Web page. If anything at all like that happens, I just close the page and move on. (Sometimes I just ignore the cookie prompts and read around them.)
As a long-term strategy, this has paid off by not only saving me time and grief, but also made me realize that poorly designed usability correlates strongly with poor quality content, which I also save time by avoiding.
I think you are speaking from a point of view of having cognitive ability to spare, as opposed to struggling to keep up with cognitive load which is too much to handle.
If they are done well, no. Problem is they often aren't. An example of this is when I downloaded some app like headspace and they had this sort of relax and be ready to fall a sleep feature. It was relaxing and well done and turned the screen down nicely. Then, as soon as it was over, the screen was set to bright and it asked if wanted to rate it on the store.
Other apps will show marketing over what you are trying to do, or in a distracting manor.
So after a while people will start to associate it with scummy and bad behavior.
Well, at least it is justified and make sense for the author.
Before feedly I self hosted TinyTinyRss for a while (kind of slow) and before that Google Reader. And before that Newsblur. I never paid for any of them and now I have more than enough paid subscriptions for stuff. Reading rss feeds just doesn't make it over the line of things I'd be willing to pay for.
Edit: I pay £10/month for Adobe Creative Cloud and get Photoshop, Lightroom, XD, Illustrator, etc. I pay ~£8/month for Office 365 and get Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc. All massively rich and powerful tools. Why does feedly imagine I would want to pay £5/month to read rss feeds?
Microsoft and Adobe need massive scale to charge prices that low. They're each probably 10,000x-100,000x larger than Feedly in terms of end-user licenses.
For a service I find useful enough to choose over a free alternative, I'm happy to pay $5-30/month to fund development and maintenance. I don't want all my software coming from the Microsofts and Adobes of the world.
Not the author, but I think they should restrict the free tier to a small number of feeds rather than nag. Asking users to pay to get more is positive whereas asking users to pay to reduce nagging is negative.
clearly it isn’t, or the author wouldn’t have been able to move to a free alternative without any junk to ignore.
Because Freedly doesn't have Microsoft or Adobe's budget and needs to have its costs covered?
I use Feedly (free) as a hosting service, and Reeder or one of the other many great RSS client apps as the frontend to it, so I don’t have to see the feedly interface.But the Feedly API I use constantly and it is extremely solid.
That’s part of the greatness of RSS services. If the service’s UI bothers you, you don’t have to use it.
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 not to use it. And they do. Feedly seems to be in a bit of a doom spiral with being worse and worse and driving away more and more users.
It seems to me that they have some expensive to develop but not very useful (eg, AI to detect stuff in feeds) that users don’t find worth $6 but the costs need covering. So their approach is to keep pushing it on users more and more.
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 service you've used for nine years that amounts to the bastards want to make money off me.
I don't know Feedly's history and whether it was originally Open Source or not but plenty of people decide their popular FOSS tool could be paid-for, at which point it is common to disenfranchise the people who made it popular in the first-place.
Most of the worthwhile features are now gated behind the most expensive plan, rather than being properly staggered. I subscribe to so few feeds I could literally use the free (ad-supported) plan, and I use none of the advanced features at all except filters. If you want to filter a single feed, you have to buy the most expensive plan they sell. That's crazy!
Regardless, I have happily supported them for years. I'm not the sort of user that others are complaining about in this thread that wants everything for free. That's about to change too though. Since the site began, the plan I've been on has cost $30 a year, which is acceptable for the value I get out of it. I was able to extend the plan for multiple years at $18/yr thanks to Black Friday and Christmas sales. Now, however, they're changing things around, and want me to resubscribe to keep the features I use at $90/yr (or $120 if you pay monthly). I'm not a software engineer making six figures. I can't afford to throw $100 at every service I use like this. A $30 -> $90 price increase is just enormous.
Again, I want to pay for the features I use, but because they've failed to provide any kind of pricing ramp, they'll soon get nothing from me.
All good.
What I (and seemingly many other commenters) take issue with is the tone of the piece. That the OP has been disappointed, that they know better than Feedly management about what features to include and how to market them, that they are owed some sort of a user experience.
I suppose the OP is offering this post as guidance and explanation for Feedly management but I can’t imagine that this moves the needle.
It’s a paid RSS syncing service and web app too, costs $5 per month, I use it with Reeder (and NetNewsWire etc). It doesn’t have any social cruft or AI assistants or ML companions.
I was also a Feedly user when I decided to try Feedbin, and I immediately noticed how much faster fetching the feeds was on Feedbin. I also like to have my email newsletters in same place (forward them to a Feedbin-provided email address), and I can have filters to mark things like sponsored posts and podcast show notes as read automatically, basically like mute filters.
Feedly premium tier costs pretty much the same, and I wonder how well it would stack against Feedbin. There’s also Inoreader which I think offers pretty similar feature set for a pretty similar price.
Feedly free tier is excellent, and you can work around many of its shortcomings by using an RSS reader app. For example, Feedly free doesn’t offer full text articles, but I can extract the full text with Reeder/NetNewsWire/etc on the client-side. If you really don’t care about speed, mute filters, or reading newsletters in your RSS reader, then Feedly free tier is already more than enough.
I think the takeaway for product owners is that sometimes you need to really zoom out and look at your product. I used Feedly for 8-9 years as a free user and never wanted to upgrade. I was willing to for the right product, but never did. Once I found a simpler product (FeedBin) that met my needs, I immediately paid.
Feedly has shoved ads and half-assed new features into their product for almost a decade trying to get their influx of Google Reader subscribers to upgrade. But no one was compelled to. It eventually pissed off free users enough that they switch to other paid alternatives. That's pretty sad honestly.
Yes but not for Feedly, for those users.
I use it to subscribe to YouTube channels, Twitter, newsletters, Subreddits, HN, and, yes, RSS feeds. I frequently use its sharing feature to pinboard.
I think I still pay the original $2 a month. But even at $5, it is one of my favorite services of all time. Truly a gem.
Readably is a good reader for feedbin on Android.
The solution I went with is native RSS readers (like the author), but backed by an Open Reader server (The Old Reader in my case, but there are others) for syncing between devices. On the Mac, Vienna as a client is quite nice.