Earlier this year I found https://kill-the-newsletter.com (no affiliation) and have moved over ALL of my newsletter subscriptions to it. I now get like no email and it's so awesome!
I now read everything with https://bazqux.com (the most true-to-Google Reader I found and the only SaaS I pay for, no affiliation) and it's really enjoyable. The RSS reader format is definitely one of the best reading formats in my opinion.
Will be interesting to see if this becomes the Google Reader replacement missing all these years. Substack is uniquely positioned to offer this kind of product.
I was worried that the silent RSS defaults with Wordpress would be murdered by stuff like Substack, and was very relieved to have the blah.substack.com/feed option. This is cool! Hope it gets enough traction for them to be happy about it
An article about RSS? Someone's gotta mention Feedly so it may as well be me :)
I've been using Feedly for a while (since Google Reader went away) and it works well. I'm on the 'free' tier and am happy with it.
Note: I'm not associated with Feedly directly (not an employee, not paid by them, etc)
This doesn't really work for paid newsletters. The two exceptions I've found are for RSS readers that operate as browser extensions and for substack podcasts, which come with a dedicated RSS address for each subscriber. I like to read newsletters on my Kindle via Calibre and it would really make things much simpler if substack just did what they did for podcasts for all newsletters without exception.
This is similair to one of my favorite features of RSS reader https://newsblur.com/. Your (free) account gives you an email address that can be used to register for newsletters. Then, when they come in, its presented exactly like the RSS feed. And if a particular newsletter gets a little too noisy, you can remove it forever without hunting down the unsubscribe button.
That's what I use as well, and that was my baseline for comparing this new one. It's missing most everything so far compared to newsblur.I've been using newsblur since Google killed Reader and I've been happy with it.
I gave it a shot, it's off to a good start. It's VERY basic so far. No OPML support, no categories either. But it looks nice and I think the idea is a good one. It's lacking a bunch of standard RSS reader features, but I assume they're aware and probably going to add more.
They’re adding features for their customers. I mean I have exactly one Substack subscription, but the fact that I pay $100/year for it makes me rather firmly invested in getting some value out of it, so I actually do read the emails that come in, but some parts of the publication I prefer to read in NetNewsWire instead like the fact checking portions.
I could see why they would want Substack readers subscribed to multiple publications to have one place outside their inbox to get more value. Some people don’t actually like the email newsletter format and words are words wherever they are.
Newsletters are always at risk of being flagged as spam, or not delivered (eg the recent Gmail outage). Meaning their email delivery has to be perfect or their subscribers miss out.
An RSS reader makes perfect sense for them, actually.
Does this work with just Substack content? Or does it work with any RSS feed? I like Substack but am wary of giving control to yet another centralized tool that may ultimately try to leverage a walled garden as their platform strategy.
Glench|5 years ago
I now read everything with https://bazqux.com (the most true-to-Google Reader I found and the only SaaS I pay for, no affiliation) and it's really enjoyable. The RSS reader format is definitely one of the best reading formats in my opinion.
imsky|5 years ago
amanzi|5 years ago
AndrewDucker|5 years ago
kixiQu|5 years ago
MikeTheGreat|5 years ago
I've been using Feedly for a while (since Google Reader went away) and it works well. I'm on the 'free' tier and am happy with it. Note: I'm not associated with Feedly directly (not an employee, not paid by them, etc)
pinkano|5 years ago
ravivyas|5 years ago
topynate|5 years ago
nickthegreek|5 years ago
michaelmarion|5 years ago
_fs|5 years ago
ranqet|5 years ago
blakesterz|5 years ago
blakesterz|5 years ago
pier25|5 years ago
Seems like a weird move for a company focused on newsletters.
SllX|5 years ago
I could see why they would want Substack readers subscribed to multiple publications to have one place outside their inbox to get more value. Some people don’t actually like the email newsletter format and words are words wherever they are.
signal11|5 years ago
An RSS reader makes perfect sense for them, actually.
loughnane|5 years ago
That combined with kill-the-newsletter (for turning email into RSS feeds) has been working really well for me for the past year or so.
throwawaysea|5 years ago
jamesgeck0|5 years ago