genmon / aboutfeeds

Web feeds/RSS "getting started" guide for new users.
https://aboutfeeds.com
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Feature: Comparison page of newsreaders #12

Open genmon opened 4 years ago

genmon commented 4 years ago

Problem: There are lots of newsreaders (which is a hurdle to getting started because choosing takes energy) and some of them are challenging for users new to feeds on first run (which means there's a risk that news users bounce off. Also, the more newsreaders that are listed, the greater the overhead in checking that the download/add-subscription instructions are accurate and up to date.

One solution is to narrow down on a small number of recommended readers (which is what I've done to start with).

But another solution might be a comparison matrix, narrowed down to just the most popular readers that are aimed at a general audience.

Two questions to start:

tullyhansen commented 4 years ago

So far as starting points go, Wikipedia has this hot mess: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_feed_aggregators

And this is… not entirely terrible (but mostly terrible): https://www.slant.co/topics/446/~best-news-readers

genmon commented 4 years ago

Ok, thinking about criteria for inclusion... I'm considering the following as a starting point.

To be considered for inclusion in the comparison table, a newsreader must:

To be included, the newsreader must have a page on the About Feeds wiki (currently empty) which includes

The screenshots should include app chrome and have an clean white background.

The reason for the screenshots is that the homepage instructions have to work for all recommended newsreaders -- and so we need to ensure that there's not an app which uses a super strange way to add subscriptions.

I know this feels like a pretty high bar to list newsreaders. But the alternative is listing newsreaders as-and-when people suggest them, and I can see it turning into that Wikipedia page out of an overabundance of fairness on our end, and that's no good for new users.