[jollins]

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.

[andrelaszlo]

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.

[DSMan195276]

I think the entitled part is where they wrote a whole rant that basically amounts to "they want me to pay for it" and posted it here.

[Ferret7446]

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).

[Kye]

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.

[prepend]

> This writer is really entitled

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.

[Semiapies]

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.

[prepend]

It is ad supported, not free. So there’s a commercial quality expectation. Am I “entitled” if I don’t like a tv show on broadcast tv even though it has ads?

Also, even truly free/oss software has an expectation of quality. And saying “I don’t like it and won’t use it” isn’t being entitled. It’s just a normal human response.

If I’m in a museum and look at a painting and remark to my friends “I don’t like that painting and I won’t buy a print. In fact there are so many paintings in this museum, I don’t think I’ll return.” Am I being entitled?

I think it’s pretty authoritarian to call out people expressing reasonable opinions as if they are “entitled.”

As a reader I’m happy to know that feedly’s free product sucks. That’s very helpful to me. I’m glad OP shared their idea and I hope that people gatekeeping won’t stop OP and others like them from sharing more useful ideas.

[Semiapies]

Am I “entitled” if I don’t like a tv show on broadcast tv even though it has ads?

Did you watch it for nearly ten years, then make an indignant post ranting about all its flaws because you were tired of ads for the blu-trays or whatever?

I think it’s pretty authoritarian to call out people expressing reasonable opinions as if they are “entitled.”

You've picked a bad time in history to be so badly confused on what "authoritarian" means.

[Adraghast]

I don’t think it’s entitled at all to expect things to not suck regardless of whether they’re free or require payment. Truly good products make you want to pay to receive a carrot, bad ones to avoid a stick. The only carrots Feedly has to offer are all moldy and gross, so they’ve resorted to more and more sticks.

The author also did exactly what you want by switching to NetNewsWire, so I don’t know what you’re complaining about other than that they made a blog post explaining that decision.

[Semiapies]

Truly good products make you want to pay to receive a carrot, bad ones to avoid a stick.

Except not getting the carrot free is the stick to plenty of people.

so I don’t know what you’re complaining about

Given I explicitly said what I was complaining about, you should know.

[lbriner]

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.

[jzb]

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.

[hamdouni]

Foss project also have bills to pay.

[Semiapies]

People regularly act like asses to them without contributing a cent, either.