[longrod]

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.

[blacklight]

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.

[pavel_lishin]

> 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.

[Deletionk]

I'm using the Feedly app not paid since Google shut down theirs.

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.

[majewsky]

Your user account may be old enough to be grandfathered into a lower obnoxiousness setting.

When migrating from Android to iOS 1.5 years ago, I decided to set up a fresh Feedly account linked to the Apple identity instead of the Google identity. My original Feedly account is from circa 2013. As it turned out, I could not set up my feeds in the same way as on the old account because the free tier now caps out at 3 categories (or sections or whatever, the things where you group feeds into). On my old setup, I have 5 or 6 categories, also on the free tier. So I think there's some amount of grandfathering going on.

[meanmrmustard92]

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.

[philistine]

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.

[moralestapia]

>RSS is basically impossible to monetize.

It may also be illegal (or at least on shaky grounds) if you happen to make money out of content that is not yours.

[deanmoriarty]

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, ...

[xtracto]

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

[applefangirl]

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 *.

[bornfreddy]

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.

[applefangirl]

I use a similiar app on my Mac. It helps me catch poorly behaving apps so I can remove them.

[j5155]

PiHole is similar to this but self-hosted (and also blocks ads)

[reitanuki]

NetGuard is on-device, can't get much more 'self-hosted' than that. Can PiHole filter per-app though? I wouldn't have thought so. NG can and it's the main reason I use it.

[pinkano]

What does look cluttered to you in Feedly?

[apple4ever]

Just don't use the web app?

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.

[prepend]

> is that really so bad?

I think in many situations, yes. I grew up with shareware and so I know that prompts are necessary to drive income.

What the prompts in this article are so bad at is that they are perpetual. Is it really necessary to nag a user over and over for something they don’t want and declined? That is probably not going to work in the long run as people associate a bad experience with the product.

Figure out a better way to get income that doesn’t involve perpetually wasting a user’s time and frustrating them.

[ianai]

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.

[prepend]

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

[Semiapies]

Not giving out a service for free is probably the best option.

[sys_64738]

> 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.

[DSMan195276]

> Marketing? If you pay for it already that’s all the marketing needed.

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

[bayindirh]

> is that really so bad?

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.

[WastingMyTime89]

> 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.

[PaulHoule]

Hard to say.

Part of the appeal of advertising in Cosmpolitan or the New York Times is that the readers have qualified themselves by paying for a subscription.

Netflix is playing a dangerous game by letting people pay to turn on ads because the kind of person who values their attention so little to save a few dollars isn’t going to buy anything. The really desirable people to advertise to are the ones who have more money to spend.

My guess is that a person who subscribes to the entry level of a product is more likely to be upsold to something else than a free user is going to even think about paying. (e.g. try watching TV during the daytime and it is depressing to see ads for prescription drugs and Medicare scams and personal injury lawyers, the one thing you might rarely see that people spend their own money on is car dealerships and I guess they need those because I’d nobody bought a car you could never get hit by a car and call William Mattar.)

[Semiapies]

My guess is that a person who subscribes to the entry level of a product is more likely to be upsold to something else than a free user is going to even think about paying.

I think this is the crucial thing. If you offer a service with what you might call a "livable" or "comfortable" free tier, it will end up used as heavily as you allow by people who will cost you resources indefinitely, but who are far more likely to switch to another free service than to ever pay you a cent. For instance, as terrible as this blogger claims to have found Feedly, he used it for nearly a decade!

Skip the temptation to try to eke out a little money from the free tier (because you probably won't) and think of it strictly as a trial option. Either give a time-limited free trial of the service or a heavily-limited version of the service that shows how it works, but that absolutely nobody would want to use at that level forever.

(And in that latter case, then you'll still find one or two users who are willing to subsist on your free tier, whether that's a 3-feed RSS reader or whatever. Shrug and reflect that those weirdos aren't costing you much.)

[bayindirh]

I don't agree that having a comfortable free tier inhibits upward movement in the subscription structure of a service.

I've started all the services I pay from their free tiers. Most notable examples are Evernote, Trello, Dropbox and Pocket. As I continued using these tools, I've overgrown them, and the features they offer on subscription tiers started to make sense.

As a result, I've directly bought the highest tier of service which both makes sense and I can afford.

Feedly is different in that regard. They provide a free service, nag me, insert ads into the stream, all at the same time.

Turn down nagging, keep the ads, that's OK. Add a time trial, don't sell ads, that's OK too. But they bombard you, and it comes down to "pay us or go away", and I went away. Not in a decade, but in a week.

I'm a fan of "small web". Simple services which do one thing, and do it well. Simplymail, Source Hut, Mataroa, Smol.pub, etc. They're also paid services, and I also pay for some of them. It's a simple transaction. $X for a year, no tracking, no funny data business, for these services. This is beyond elegant.

I found out that I have got enough of the modern web, with sites overloading my senses and doing all kinds of funny business with my information even if I pay them.

Feedly is a business, they want to earn money and provide services, that's fair. They can operate the way they want, and I'm not entitled to tell them how to operate, or force them. On the other hand, they're not entitled to my money or continued patronage because I opened an account on their service and gave a test drive.

[WastingMyTime89]

> The really desirable people to advertise to are the ones who have more money to spend.

The people you want to advertise to are not necessarily people who have money. It’s people who will buy your product. That’s the supposed value of online advertising: better targeting. There is still plenty of money to be made outside of the most affluent segments.

> My guess is that a person who subscribes to the entry level of a product is more likely to be upsold to something else than a free user is going to even think about paying.

That’s true. But you still need a way to onboard people on the first paying tier at some point.

> try watching TV during the daytime and it is depressing to see ads for prescription drugs and Medicare scams and personal injury lawyers

That’s because of the demographic who watch TV during daytime: mostly retired people or unemployed people amongst which disabilities must be above average. Forty years ago you will have bombarded with ads for soap.

[FBISurveillance]

A happy paying Feedly user ever since Google Reader shut down. I find it great.

I'm also a paying Dropbox customer and they keep nagging about Dropbox for Business and _that_ I find annoying.

[bayindirh]

I'm not paying for TTRSS. I'm donating to SDF[0], which is free, but I'm paying to keep them sustainable. They added TTRSS to the services they offer, so I moved there. I can clone and install TTRSS[1] to a VPS of mine in 20 minutes, but I'm lazy.

> You are a hamster trying to be converted. That’s the point of the free tier.

I don't think so. Trello's free tier is usable. GitLab and GitHub's free tiers are usable, Pocket's free tier is usable. I'm paying to many services which I can use freely and get things done, and I pay for the highest tier I can make use of and fits my budget, but Feedly's take is esp. bad about their paid tier and nagging.

The problem is not presence of paid tier. It's how it's presented to you. I can pay for feedly, but I don't need the features me, and they were so pushy that it put me off.

[0]: https://www.sdf.org

[1]: https://tt-rss.org/

[Deletionk]

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

[bayindirh]

Your sentiment is also frustrating to read as a software engineer. As I stated before, I pay for a lot of services, and pay for their highest tier plans because I feel that they deserve my money.

However, Feedly feels like they want my money first instead of giving me more or better service, and I don’t feel like they deserve my money, so I don’t pay them.

[rammy1234]

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.

[PainfullyNormal]

> but includes a few prompts here and there for marketing purposes...is that really so bad?

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?

[applefangirl]

True, and in the case of the Mac you've got a lot of good options with different design choices.

[blendergeek]

> 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.

[slightwinder]

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.

[apple4ever]

That's because Reddit greatly limits RSS access. It's not Feedly's issue, but Reddit.

[pllbnk]

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.

[jka]

> 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).

[forgotmypw17]

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.

[Gualdrapo]

The second, widest menu can be hidden (and keeps hidden) just with a single click.

[tomjen3]

> 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.

[hamdouni]

> that the reasons the author is calling Feedly out for are unjustified and don't really make sense.

Well, at least it is justified and make sense for the author.