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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 w

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.

PainfullyNormal 4y ago
> 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 4y ago
  True, and in the case of the Mac you've got a lot of good options with different design choices.
hamdouni 4y ago
> 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.
prepend 4y ago
> 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 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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 4y ago
  Not giving out a service for free is probably the best option.
applefangirl 4y ago
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 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    I use a similiar app on my Mac. It helps me catch poorly behaving apps so I can remove them.
  - j5155 4y ago
    PiHole is similar to this but self-hosted (and also blocks ads)
    - reitanuki 4y ago
      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.
rammy1234 4y ago
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.
Gualdrapo 4y ago
The second, widest menu can be hidden (and keeps hidden) just with a single click.
sys_64738 4y ago
> 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 4y ago
  > 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 4y ago
> 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 4y ago
  > 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 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      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.)
jka 4y ago
> 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).
blacklight 4y ago
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.
- Deletionk 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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.
tomjen3 4y ago
> 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.
deanmoriarty 4y ago
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 4y ago
  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
forgotmypw17 4y ago
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.
blendergeek 4y ago
> 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 4y ago
  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 4y ago
  That's because Reddit greatly limits RSS access. It's not Feedly's issue, but Reddit.
pllbnk 4y ago
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.

PainfullyNormal 4y ago

> 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 4y ago
True, and in the case of the Mac you've got a lot of good options with different design choices.

hamdouni 4y ago

> 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.

prepend 4y ago

> 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 4y ago
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 4y ago
  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 4y ago
Not giving out a service for free is probably the best option.

applefangirl 4y ago

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 4y ago
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 4y ago
  I use a similiar app on my Mac. It helps me catch poorly behaving apps so I can remove them.
- j5155 4y ago
  PiHole is similar to this but self-hosted (and also blocks ads)
  - reitanuki 4y ago
    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.

rammy1234 4y ago

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.

Gualdrapo 4y ago

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

sys_64738 4y ago

> 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 4y ago
> 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 4y ago

> 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 4y ago
> 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 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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.)

jka 4y ago

> 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).

blacklight 4y ago

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.

Deletionk 4y ago
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 4y ago
  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.

tomjen3 4y ago

> 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.

deanmoriarty 4y ago

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 4y ago
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

forgotmypw17 4y ago

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.

blendergeek 4y ago

> 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 4y ago
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 4y ago
That's because Reddit greatly limits RSS access. It's not Feedly's issue, but Reddit.

pllbnk 4y ago

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.