Comment by brandnewlow | Hacker News Reader

Comment by brandnewlow | Hacker News Reader

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RSS readers suck. I've signed up for a abandoned Google Reader at least three times. Here's why:

1. I have maybe 20 or so sites I like to follow. 2. Adding all these into Google reader takes me 20-25 minutes or so. It's annoying. 3. Once I add them in, Google reader starts filling itself up with all their posts. 4. Suddenly I'm faced with two things:

   a. A rapidly growing number of unread posts I'm supposed to deal with.
   b. A generic, plain, boring interface in which Gizmodo articles, Slate articles, NYTimes articles....all look exactly the same, as if they'd been published by...Google.

I hate both of these things. I don't need another guilt box nagging me to do stuff all the time. And I don't know why I'd want to reduce all the lovely web sites I enjoy reading into a single, generic, designed-by-Google design. Variety is the spice of life. I'd rather just click on my bookmarks, actually go to the sites when I want to read stuff from them, and let the publishers get some ad views in the process.

I can't stand RSS readers.

Hm. I guess that's why you and I differ. I carefully trim my RSS feed so that I have, at most, 100 items a day to read. Any more than that and it feels like too much of a chore to slog through all of them. However, with only 100 items I feel like its a manageable level of content for the day. I also tend to keep my rss feeds limited to low-frequency feeds. I find it especially nice for feeds that update once a day. I then don't have to keep checking back at the site to see if it's updated yet. Sites like Ars Technica that have high volume, I still prefer to read from the site itself. Then I can avoid the pain of having my feeds filled with hundreds of unnecessary articles.

However, the most important reason why I like using rss is for blogs that I stumble across that I like, but that I don't have the memory to keep all the urls in my head, or the time to spend flipping through all of them to see if they've updated. Let me give you an example: I subscribed a few months ago to a blog that was effectively dead. The author hadn't posted for about a year. Just yesterday in my blog feed, I saw that he had made a new post. I would have completely missed his post if not for the fact that I had his feed in my rss reader.

I completely understand your point about google stripping the formatting out of posts, and it annoys me sometimes too, but for the most part I tend to value content over nice css.

EDIT: I'd like to head off any comments I get about the "memorizing urls" comment I made. I find myself on a lot of different computers, and "bookmarking" a site through adding its rss feed to google reader is a lot easier for me than it is to deal with syncing bookmarks. Not to mention that my bookmarks have become an untamed jungle over time. I only venture into them when I am not looking for anything in particular. For most everything I use the autocompletion on the url bar.

I share this sentiment towards RSS readers to some extent. I've done a similar signup-giveup dance with Google Reader several times. It is all the work it adds to my day that I dislike. I've tried desktop RSS readers too, with the same result. It gets harder to go back after a while too - I can almost feel the stress increase when I am trying to use an RSS reader again.

I've often felt that something like the "River of News"[1] notion that Dave Winer likes to talk about would work really well, I wonder if there are any public services that behave in that manner.

The basic idea is:

1) No read/unread counts. 2) No bold-ing/un-bolding of stuff I have or have not read. 3) No emphasis on grouping by site - should work out of the box as a single stream of posts to any of the sites I am interested in. 4) Subscribe via single-click bookmarklet, ala Instapaper's Read Later bookmarklet.

1: http://www.reallysimplesyndication.com/riverOfNews

I do admit, having high unread counts ticks me off. I wouldn't mind seeing that go. but I try to keep my feeds small so I only get a small stream of content that is all important to me, instead of a firehose of worthless stuff.

Beyond "RSS readers suck", basically reading on a computer sucks. I can't do it for more than about 10 minutes without needing to rest my eyes. On the other hand I can sit and peruse the Sunday paper for an hour or more and not have any such feeling. I can get absorbed in a novel and read without a break for half the day. That's NEVER happened looking at a computer display.

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