Feedly, for instance, has for the last two years gravitated toward being a tool for research rather than passive entertainment. That's partly in response to platforms eating the open web. "If you go after entertainment, you're not competing against other reader news tools. You're really competing with Instagram and other things people do to kill time," says Khodabakchian. "On the other hand, if you think of this as an intelligence tool, or research assistant, we see a huge and increasing demand for that."
Still, Feedly has plenty to offer casual users. It has a clean user interface, and the free version of its service lets you follow 100 sources, categorized into up to three feeds—think News, Sports, Humor, or wherever your interests lie. It also shows how popular each story is, both on Feedly and across various social networks, to give you a sense of what people are reading without letting that information dictate what you see. Paid accounts—of which Feedly has about 100,000—get you more feeds and integrations, faster updates, and better tools for teams.
For more of a throwback feel, you might try The Old Reader, which strips down the RSS reader experience while still emphasizing a social component.
"In terms of evolution, we're coming from a different perspective," says Ben Wolf, whose Levee Labs acquired The Old Reader in 2013. "We're trying to keep things as they were."
For the million or so Old Reader users, that means not many bells and whistles. Even the mechanism to add new feeds feels just a touch more onerous than you'll find elsewhere. But once you do get properly organized, it's a fast and light experience, and if you can convince some friends to join, its social features will help you cut through the clutter. Most of all, there's not much to get in the way of the headlines, which is what you came for in the first place.
Power users, meanwhile, might try Inoreader, which offers for free many of the features—unlimited feeds and tags, and some key integrations—Feedly reserves for paid accounts. "I would say that at the moment Feedly is ahead of us in terms of mass appeal design look and UX, which is something we will try to tackle with our upcoming redesign," says Victor Stankov, Inoreader's business development manager. "Hardcore nerds love us way more than Feedly."
And those are just three options of many. The point being: In 2018, it's easy to find an RSS reader out there that suits your needs. Which, in hindsight, is no small miracle.
Throwback
Five years ago, when Wolf took over The Old Reader, he offered a prescient insight: "How long will it be before your Facebook stream is so full of promoted content, bizarre algorithmic decisions, and tracking cookie based shopping cart reminders that you won't be getting any valuable information," Wolf wrote. "For as little as $60, a business can promote a page to Facebook users. It won't be long before your news feed is worthless."
Which, well, here we are. Not only that, but two-thirds of Americans get at least some of their news from social media, according to a recent Pew Research Center study, leaving traditional sources behind.
The platformization of the web has claimed many victims, RSS readers included. Google Reader's 2013 demise was a major blow; the company offed it in favor of "products to address each user's interest with the right information at the right time via the most appropriate means," as it Google executive Richard Gingras put it at the time. In other words, letting Google Now decide what you want. And the popular Digg Reader, which was born in response to that shuttering, closed its doors this week after a nearly four-year run.
Despite those setbacks, though, RSS has persisted. "I can't really explain it, I would have thought given all the abuse it's taken over the years that it would be stumbling a lot worse," says programmer Dave Winer, who helped create RSS.
