Al_Borland

I use NetNewsWire as well; can’t beat it. It’s been around forever, free, open-source, and actively maintained.

Facebook and Twitter were a big blow to RSS, as a lot of people would follow news sites/blogs that would cross post to those sites, but it never died. Now that some of these sites like Twitter are imploding I hope more people go back to RSS. I never stopped using it and think it’s a great tool more people should be aware of. It seems like the people who were involved in creating the early tools of the internet were really smart in thinking about protocols instead of monolithic platforms, then the Web2.0 bros screwed everything up for a while.

If it’s a small experiment, it was probably pushed out to a fraction of a percent of users.

I pay for Premium. I find YouTube insufferable without it. I do most of my watching on an AppleTV, so there aren’t great ad-blocker options (maybe a Pi-Hole, but I haven’t bothered). I feel like I need to put my money where my mouth is. I hate how much of the internet is ad supported, so if I can throw the biggest reason for that some money to support a different business model to prove “free with ads” is not the only way to make the internet work, I’ll do it.

That being said, Premium comes with YouTube Music, which I never use. I wish there was an option to just remove the ads without any “value added” services.

My guess is that this is a way to prevent people from using screen scrapers to pull data from Twitter now that API access is gone. I can’t help but think they would have better served from looking for that activity and blocking it, rather than putting limits on paying customers… even if that limit is high enough to be essentially unlimited. Someone would need to spend 12 hours on Twitter looking at 500 posts per hour to hit it.

This whole company looks like a ploy to defraud investors.