Feedly launches strikebreaking as a service:
Several of us who’ve used the tool for a while have discussed how it seemed that Feedly was paying more and more attention to its Enterprise users, advertising tools that were highly corporate and unappealing to me and my food blogs. It felt like every month or two I’d get a pop-up informing me I could “Track competitors and emerging trends” or “Track the influence of the largest US companies”. They also took a clear turn towards courting the cybersecurity industry, with somewhat military-sounding blog posts about how to “Track emerging threats” or set up a “Feedly for Threat Intelligence” account.
I have seen a few articles the last week or two recommending RSS reader apps. On the one hand, that’s great—the more people that move to RSS readers for subscribing to stuff online, the better. On the other hand, most of these posts have Feedly as their top recommendation, and then a bunch of other apps that offer free tiers.
While some of the articles do mention Feedbin, they tend to regretfully note that it does not offer a free tier. One of the reviews at least that the app is so good that they couldn’t not recommend it and had, in fact, gone ahead and subscribed themselves because they liked it so much.
I guess I appreciate that they are trying to meet people where they are rather than telling them “You need to go pay for this new app that you only maybe sort of vaguely understand even the concept of.”
Still, I’m not sure that sending people to ad-supported services and borderline creepy business models like Feedly is really that much of an improvement over just having them stick with the shitty social media platforms.