Which Feed Reader

What do you do if you don’t want to get endless emails from different organisations?

Well you often find that the emails have more or less the same content as you could read on the websites of those organisations, So instead of subscribing you could visit the various websites individually.

That means fewer emails in your inbox.

But then it is on you to remember to visit all the websites to read the articles.

There is another way,.

You could sign up to a feed reader and catch up on the articles there.

When you add the URL of a website to a feed reader, the reader updates automatically when the website publishes a new article.

Then whenever you want to catch up on articles, you go to the feed reader and read the articles there in the feed reader itself. You do not need to go chasing around to all the different websites to read the articles.

Which Feed Reader

I took on the task of recommending a feed reader to someone. I googled and looked at a few, including Inoreader. that I signed up to a long time ago.

I wasn’t sure exactly when I signed up so I asked – and it was in 2013.

Oh my…..

I signed up to Inoreader at a time when I used to read the articles from a number of websites regularly.

If you ask me today to name websites I visit regularly, there are very few – just two or three. So maybe I am no longer a good candidate for a feed reader.. I just don’t need somewhere to go to catch up. I can just as easily visit the websites. I am not going to forget one.

Or maybe that is not true because I realise there are a couple of sites I visit and then forget they exist until something prompts me – and then I am usually glad to catch up on the articles.

Plus I read news sites and I don’t need a reminder about those. I pay to read some news sites.

Meanwhile, there are the new kids on the block, the newsletters that primarily exist as newsletters – they don’t have a home website but are just a collection of newsletters that drip out regularly. In other words there is nowhere you can go to catch up on the newsletters. You either read the newsletter when it arrives in your inbox, or if you don’t subscribe then you miss it. They have to have somewhere where you can subscribe in the first place, but that ‘somewhere’ is just that – a place you can sign up.

But that’s rare, and it most cases you will find you can read the newsletters ‘at source’.

One newsletter I read is Thomas Pueyo’s Uncharted Territories.

Uncharted Territories is built on Substack and if I go to the website then there isn’t a home page with articles. Instead I see an invitation to subscribe to the newsletters ad that is pretty much it. Ah yes, I can ignore the invitation to subscribe and click on the little word ‘archive’ and then I see the articles,. And the content is exactly the same as the newsletters I get in my inbox. The website is the newsletters. The newsletters are the website.

Like a number of Substack newsletters there are two levels of readership – unpaid and paid. If you pay you get to see more stuff. Here is an extract from one of Thomas Pueyo’s free newsletters that I can also see in his archive.

Energy & Environment
Solar Is Getting Cheaper even Faster

In Solar Energy Solves Global Warming, I quote that solar costs are dropping by 12% per year, or about 23% every two years. It appears to be an underestimation! The true cost might be a drop of 25% per year!

This is because we used to look at cost drops per unit of time. But we don’t learn simply because time passes. We learn because we make things. The more we make them, the more we learn.

When weighing the learning speed of solar panels by volume built instead of time passed, we see that over the last two decades, since volume is doubling faster and faster, we’ve been accelerating our pace of learning.

Getting back to the subject of the task of recommending a feed reader to someone, I looked at Inoreader again today for the first time in a long time.

And I see that of the sixty or so websites I was/am following – a large majority haven’t been updated for several years. And some no longer exist.

It is strange clicking to read the ‘latest’ articles from a website in the reader and seeing that the last article the website published was in 2015.

I am human, so after looking at these defunct or abandoned websites it feels strange that I am still writing this blog seventeen years after I published the first post. I am now on post number 1,983. On the one hand I feel like someone who didn’t notice the music had stopped. On the other hand I still have the yen to write, even though churn has killed off all these other blogs.

Churn rate: the annual percentage rate at which customers stop subscribing to a service or employees leave a job.

I assume it is churn that killed off those defunct or abandoned websites. I assume that if they had had a huge loyal following then they would still be writing. Which begs the question of why I keep writing.

And of course there are new sites coming along all the time.

Which feed reader?

So which feed readers did I look at and which would I recommend. Here’s the list – and long story short – I would choose Inoreader. It has an app for reading on iPad or iPhone as well as on the web on a laptop – and it synchs between them. And it has a generous free tier. The only reason I can see to upgrade is to catch those websites that don’t play ball with feeds (Inoreader claims it can capture those as well) or to increase the number of sites you follow beyond the free tier limit.

Feedly
NetNewsWire
Feedbin
Feedwise