Reader easily handled thousands of unread items. It just didn’t show the correct unread count. It has *never* marked anything as read that you haven’t actually read yet.
^^. I would actually be happy if the counts just stopped after ~1000 (or even 500), but keeping the read state of ‘everything’ is the whole point of using a reader in the first place.
Samuel, I’m a fan of your work (and premium user, without actually using the product for the reasons outlined in this topic and also because of the sunsetting issue), but you have to stop thinking there are any sensible limits at all. RSS is, however imperfect it might be, a solution to the drinking-from-the-waterhose-information-overflow-problem. It gave you the security that you could go on vacation and not miss a blip. Google Reader became the best RSS Reader by being fast, storing everything and, most importantly, giving full control to the user. By setting limits on usage you are taking away user’s control by imposing reading habits and schedule onto them. With Google Reader I could go away on a prolonged vacation, take care of my family, spend days in a hospital, work long shifts and I could be sure that I’d get back to it and will have the opportunity to read or at least skim over everything that I’ve missed. This is something that NewsBlur simply doesn’t do in its current form.
You’ve outlined a roadmap for the next versions on Twiiter: “offline, tagging, batch organizer, and OAuth”. Other people have already implemented offline Android clients for NewsBlur, and neither tagging nor OAuth nor a batch organizer is as important as delivering that warm and fuzzy my-reading-list-is-still-there-when-I-come-back feeling from Google Reader. Kill the limitations and your users will love you. Users don’t care about exact unread counts above a certain level, they care about their reading items actually being there.
And yes, I know, it’s technically hard, and I’d be happy to wait for it, but on the emotional side even something as crappy as Feedly gets this, so why don’t you?
2 Likes
My users already love the service. If this limit is an issue, then use a service that doesn’t have them. And I’m happy to provide refunds to users who are not satisfied with NewsBlur. NewsBlur is not an archive, it’s an RSS reader. That means old stories are removed. Your example of Feedly isn’t particular a strong case, as they are VC backed and may run out of fuel some day. I intend to keep NewsBlur around for a long time, and these limits are the only way to keep sane.
Don’t forget that NewsBlur is not a startup. It would be naive to think NewsBlur is anything like a startup. The RSS market is contracting and there is no growth here. I am not trying to attract every user who wants to read RSS. I want the power users who want filtering. I want the sharers who want to share stories. But that means on low volume feeds, I have to trim them. If you don’t agree with that, then there are many other readers out there that don’t have those limits (and with the requisite hit in speed that such a massive archive entails).
Where do I email for a refund?
Samuel, I’m not one of refund-seekers. I’m really rooting for NewsBlur to become my Google Reader replacement, I want NewsBlur to succeed as a product, but I also want to understand your reasoning for certain design decisions.
I’m confused by your definition of a power user. You want “power users who want filtering” – alright, but you also want to trim high-volume feeds. But for a hundred unread items, I don’t need filtering, skimming would be enough, I can read those in about five minutes. If anything, I’d need filtering on hundreds and thousands of unread items, which I don’t get to see because the feed has been trimmed.
I consider myself an RSS power user. I’ve got more than 200 sources right now, many of them somewhere between low-volume and stone-dead, others highly active (tech news, HN etc). One of the high-volume ones is a personal Twitter feed, which I generate from my timeline using the Twitter API on my own server (because I don’t want to be checking the timeline every five minutes). It easily produces a hundred or more items a day. Sometimes, unreads in this feed accumulate to thousands when I’m busy or not in the mood to look at Twitter. I’d be more than happy to filter those and mark “unimportant” ones unread, but for this to work, I need all of them to actually be in the list. How is that not a power-user use-case?
NewsBlur doesn’t cover all use cases. There are tens of thousands of users who don’t need that feature and I’m happy to provide a great reader for them. If that’s what you want, then you’re better off either running your own hosted version or using a competitor that will archive those stories. But I am not in the market to attract every single power user.
Thank you for defining a line for me. I wish you the best of luck; I will follow NewsBlur’s development for a while, but for now, I’ll be looking elsewhere.
I pay $16/year for 10GB of email… I pay $24/year for how much RSS? Though the main reason I am not actually using NewsBlur is that the craigslist feeds don’t work consistently. Not trying to be rude, it’s just frustrating with such a nice tool you’ve made. Who knows, maybe I will just setup a personal server again instead of paying…
That’s the market. If there were more RSS readers (supply), the price would be lower. But because there isn’t a market, I’m forced to raise prices to be able to afford to continue running the service. You illustrated supply and demand perfectly.
I wasn’t saying that it was worth $24/year or that I would be paying again next year. I only spent the money to encourage you to fill the void in hopes that the result would satisfy me. It doesn’t at present. Ah well, it was worth a shot and perhaps it will by the time my year is up.
That said, markets work the other way. More supply forces your price down. Less supply does not force your price up, it merely allows you to raise your price and lose fewer customers. Though that only goes so far.
FYI, Paypal says I paid once. NewsBlur shows two payments (on the same date) and lists my premium account expiration in 2017 (four years? not one or two?).
If it was possible to run a startup on RSS, then NewsBlur would be free. But it’s not and so I need to maintain the prices I have. These restrictions allow me to run NewsBlur for a long time. If I didn’t have these restrictions, I’d be spending way more time on infrastructure and no time at all on new features. There are competitors who fulfill different needs.
Besides, very very few users need all 500 stories at once. The majority want a week of unreads (and that’s why I doubled it to two weeks) up to a reasonable high number of stories across hundreds of feeds. I can’t handle the extreme cases and don’t plan to. I am moving to a month of unreads, but for more the reason that I think a month is a nice round number and it becomes easier to figure out if a story can be left unread (Today’s August 13th, so any story after July 13th will still be unread). That hasn’t launched yet, but will soon. But these limits of the number of stories are perfectly reasonable. If you don’t feel that way, email me and I’m happy to offer a refund. I don’t want unhappy users. I want to delight everybody who uses NewsBlur.
I wish this was more visible, I’m not sure I would have purchased if i had known what the limits were along these lines. Its not uncommon for me to end up with thousands of things unread that I’ll go through in batches when I have time.
5 Likes
Welp, sorry such a detail had to spoil the otherwise fluffy service. I canceled the PayPal subscription and deleted my two feeds to save you the traffic.
Please feel free to downgrade the account (Ponyfeeder) and donate the difference to Your Siblings. 
And please update this thread when you have lifted the limits. I get email notifications of new posts here.
3 Likes
Wow. @Samuel, you never mentioned any of these limits and now I’m just disappointed. I’ll be switching over to something else and canceling NewsBlur, won’t even recommend it to anybody else.
3 Likes
Oh c’mon, it’s not even a bug!
It’s Feed.trim_feed that cuts off the feeds and discards all my unread entries before I can read them in the morning.
A feed with only one premium subscriber—me—is trimmed to 100 entries.
And I was worried about how to import my backlog of ten thousands of entries I need to keep a record of.
What is this trimming good for? You have a cluster of 4+ servers running MongoDB, which has “humongous” in its name. I’m sure you can store more than a few hundred entries per feed.
This is a complete show blocker for me. A backlog of 1000 entries would be barely acceptable, since we would at least get to read them, but Google Reader has always functioned as an archive for us that could use in our research. The lack of a search function is already a problem in that regard.
@happy.cerberus Yep, I’ve used TinyTinyRSS for a while, and our server doesn’t have much load anyway. It works great, I just don’t like the frontend so much, but that should be the least of my worries.
6 Likes
You should publish these limits in a clearly visible place. That would be much more helpful than people running into them and taking months to discover the cause of the problem.
3 Likes