The Secret Power of ‘Read It Later’ Apps | Hacker News Reader

The Secret Power of ‘Read It Later’ Apps

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153 pointswalterbell64 comments

The "secret power" of Pocket is that someone is making money off selling detailed information on what people red, probably including when, where, probably how long a given document is read. They aren't offering their bandwidth and storage as some sort of charity; those server costs are obviously being covered by surveillance-as-a-business-model.

The database Pocket is building is an incredibly tempting target for many different groups (governments, insurance companies, etc). Even if Pocket isn't using that data (unlikely), the probability of leaks/theft is high.

Building a better bookmark system is a good idea. Such a system doesn't need network access. If for some reason you need to share between devices, a socially responsible bookmark/read-it-later tool would be encrypting at the endpoints so an opaque encrypted blob is the only thing stored remotely. (prior art: the original Firefox "sync")

Safari has a Reading List which also syncs between devices and downloads the content in case one doesn't have internet access. It may not be an open-source solution and it's only within the Apple ecosystem but at least it's run by a company that is increasingly differentiating itself by how it is NOT monetizing its users' content. For me, that's good enough.

Having said that, I'd love to see an open (or at least extensible) and private bookmark system.

There's always wallabag[1]. It's self-hostable and open source. You can even install it using sovereign[2].

[1]: https://www.wallabag.org/

[2]: https://github.com/sovereign/sovereign

Pinboard.in fits the bill nicely. In fact, I'm reading this thread after bookmaking it earlier in the day. :)

> Private bookmark system Couldn't you just write one for yourself?

Pocket has anything but a glowing record when it comes to security:

https://www.gnu.gl/blog/Posts/multiple-vulnerabilities-in-po...

Needs to be a standard protocol alone the lines of CardDAV/CalDAV.

The unmentioned perk of 'Read it Later' apps that I haven't seen mentioned: downloading the articles ahead of time while you're on home wifi.

On my phone it's really not a big deal, since the data consumption is minimal. But I like to do longform reading on my Nexus 7, which is a wi-fi only model, and the places where I'm liable to sit around for an hour (i.e. the doctor's office, the gym, a lo-fi coffee shop, etc.) usually don't have accessible wi-fi. The ability for the tablet to sync with Pocket while it's on wifi and have everything cached when I'm off is extremely useful.

Amen.

I do the same thing; reading on an older Nexus 7. I installed pocket when I first heard of it for this exact ability. Back then it had no recommendations or sharing or whatever. I hardly use those.

It's also very useful for when I am doing cardio on a stationary bike. Makes good use of your time while doing boring cardio work. Of course it doesn't work with anything that requires a lot of focus.

I think you're doing the gym wrong if you've got a lot of downtime where you can also read :)

Stationary bikes are a great way to read and still be quite active.

A lot of heavy powerlifting programs have a few minutes rest between sets, which while not great for longform, does allow for a minute or two reading once your heartrate comes down a tad

It's supposed to be active rest, and even then, if your heart-rate is low enough to where you can comfortably read anything, you're definitely not working out with enough intensity to matter, let alone call it power-lifting. You should be dreading the next set, basically, and get right back on it before your heartrate comes down.

I am interested in the source of your expertise

Plenty of reputable programs call for up to 8 minutes of rest if you need it. Powerlifting is not cardio; the idea is to lift as much as possible even if that means letting your heart rate drop to RHR between sets.

That's mentioned pretty early on in this article.

A recent article in the Harvard Business Review puts a name to this new neurological phenomenon: Attention Deficit Trait. Basically, the terms ADD and ADHD are falling out of use because effectively the entire population fits the diagnostic criteria. It’s not a condition anymore, it’s a trait — the inherent and unavoidable experience of modern life characterized by “distractibility, inner frenzy, and impatience.”

This stood out to me, and warrants a discussion of its own. What was widely considered maladaptive to the point of being a mental disorder is now common to the entire population? Do we accept this as a new reality or are there steps we can take to restore flow, reduce interruptions, and enhance concentration at a macro level?

No, the referred article doesn't claim that. In fact it draws a distinction between people having ADD and people with ADT.

Have a look: https://hbr.org/2005/01/overloaded-circuits-why-smart-people...

Unlike ADD, a neurological disorder that has a genetic component and can be aggravated by environmental and physical factors, ADT springs entirely from the environment. Like the traffic jam, ADT is an artifact of modern life. It is brought on by the demands on our time and attention that have exploded over the past two decades. As our minds fill with noise—feckless synaptic events signifying nothing—the brain gradually loses its capacity to attend fully and thoroughly to anything.

If ADD is genetic in origin, why isn't a DNA test used to diagnose the condition?

That's a good question. There are a lot of conditions where twin and adoption studies have established a genetic predispositions decades ago, but the exact cause of these disorders is unknown, and understood to be more stochastic in nature.

Rather then single gene mutations, such complex disease predispositions could be combinations of single base variations in the binding sites of transcription factors and/or slight variations in proteins, which elevate disease risk, but may still require environmental factors for an actual outbreak.

Our understanding here is improving rapidly, while we are learning about the regulatory elements in our genome (see the ENCODE project), and the influence of the 3D arrangement of the genome into what is known as chromatin.

However, teasing apart these variations and causal relationships is extremely complex, as you can imagine.

Bottom line, there is still so much we don't know or understand, but progress is being made.

A) Just because we know something is genetic (via identical twin studies, for example) doesn't mean we know which parts of the genetic sequence are responsible

B) There might be a constellation of genetic polymophisms involved, such that anything short of full-genome sequencing & analysis wouldn't yield anything useful

C) Even the cheapest genetic tests are likely more expensive and take longer than a 15-minute behavioral test.

Just because it is genetic (in this case they probably mean heritable and supported by twin studies) doesn't mean you can find the genes that cause it. RE: why we know that intelligence has genetic components but you will be laughed out of the room if you claim to have a genetics based IQ test.

People often forget that the last "D" in ADD or OCD stands for "disorder." It means that a behavioral or mental trait is creating enough harm or distress to disrupt a person's life.

Being easily distracted is a trait. But plenty of people with that trait can live productive, happy lives anyway--so they don't have a disorder.

But some people do; I disagree with the article that ADD is "falling out of use." Rather, it is (hopefully) being used more properly to describe actual disorders, which are generally rare.

I also question the degree to which anything can be a "new neurological phenomenon." Our tools for measuring, qualifying, quantifying, or distinguishing neurological phenomena are themselves changing so rapidly that it is almost impossible to tell the difference between a new thing and new detection or awareness of an old thing.

For what it's worth, that "recent" article is ten years old.

Or more likely that's how most people are and ADHD is just an excuse to sell more drugs (at least for the most moderate cases)

A clean reading layout was the gateway drug that introduced me to "read it later" apps and really changed my reading habits in the process, making this sort of app a mainstay on my devices.

As a side note, I hadn't gone on Medium after they put all those little menus when you scroll up the page. This sucks because medium used to have the best layout around (specially contemplating the possible alternatives that some hipster designer could come up with) but they could improve it with adding a waiting period before bringing up that menu. Bringing it up for a single scroll up is insane. Sometimes you just want to read a line you missed, particularly if you're "reading" article quickly.

PS: am I the only one who thinks those persistent bars (usually with page name/logo, some "share" buttons to other pages, etc.) at the top of a page are the worst thing to have ever happened in web design? It's pretty much standard now and it seems that not that many people care.

> PS: am I the only one who thinks those persistent bars (usually with page name/logo, some "share" buttons to other pages, etc.) at the top of a page are the worst thing to have ever happened in web design? It's pretty much standard now and it seems that not that many people care.

It's driving me crazy. It's even worse on phones where the chrome url bar/top menu will disappear when scrolling down but pop ups again when scrolling up: 95% of the time I don't need the menu, I just want to re-read a paragraph.

> am I the only one who thinks those persistent bars (usually with page name/logo, some "share" buttons to other pages, etc.) at the top of a page are the worst thing to have ever happened in web design? It's pretty much standard now and it seems that not that many people care.

If it's a page that'll take longer than a few seconds to read, I usually open up the developer console and delete the element. I have never once later wanted anything from the "helpful" pop-down menu and had to reload to get it back.

I just open the article in one of the "read it later" services (via bookmarklet) without saving it to your account. Most services offer this.

I'm frustrated by the sticky bar designs on a bunch of websites as well. I'm even often frustrated at some of the other "subtle" fancy on-scroll behaviors and parallax effects many designs are also doing. It's one of the reasons I like that Edge has made the "Reading View" button prominent on the desktop now as much as it has been on mobile IE/Edge for quickly getting a clean reading layout without even needing a "read it later" app.

I love that reader view modes is becoming standard in browsers now. It's a shame that some sites aren't rendered though...

> So you need a little entertainment, and you open…an ebook?

Yes. My Kindle Paperwhite goes with me everywhere.

My ideal "read it later" app would extract the text and send it to kindle. Maybe append chapters to a single book so all those little articles aren't cluttering things up.

A reader with a dedicated interface for this would be even better. Divide articles into categories, let me easily delete or archive them, then automatically bring up the next article in the category. As long as I'm dreaming, add search and automatic text summarization, and give me a view that shows everything I highlighted in a continuous document instead of a bunch of snippets I have to individually tap to read in full.

I use Amazon's Send-to-Kindle chrome extension. It extracts an article's text and sends it to the kindle. It does clutter things up though, but I don't mind that so much.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/send-to-kindle-for...

My ideal "read it later" app would extract the text and send it to kindle. Maybe append chapters to a single book so all those little articles aren't cluttering things up.

Instapaper does this.

Many apps do this. Instapaper, Pocket and others. Amazon even have their own "send to kindle" browser extension.

Didn't know that. You may have just changed my internet reading habits.

https://david-smith.org/blog/2012/10/11/instapaper-on-the-ki...

You can configure instapaper to regularly send your queue in kindle magazine format. Apparently there's also a bookmarklet to send a single article directly to your kindle.

Kobo ereaders have Pocket integration, it was one of the reasons why I bought one Kobo Glo HD instead of a Paperwhite

But it relies on Pocket successfully extracting the content. Plenty of sites yielded a broken ereader version on my Kobo (mainly missing or unreadable figures).

I use pushtokindle[•] to do just this and it's fabulous. If falls over on a few article types, but works for most things.

[•] http://fivefilters.org/kindle-it/

I pay US$1 each month to Instapaper to do it for me

You can already do this with pocket using this third party: https://p2k.co/

The secret power of these apps is that I don't waste time reading bullshit in the Internet. I see an interesting page in HN, go to it, click in "Read Later" and Instapaper will send it to my Kindle. Now there's 99% of chance that I'll never read it, but I won't fill the urge to read it instead of working. Win! Win!

That's mostly what happens to me. And then I travel, or I go to a cafe, or I commute. And either because I don't have internet, or because I am in a different setting, I open Pocket. And then I read, I read, ... only the good content I knew I would want to read given the right moment, the right amount of attention.

Pocket it's just awesome.

I "read" tens of articles a day through various forms, but I wouldn't add up the words and equate it to reading books. Most of the articles I see are so padded with verbiage that they just get a quick skim - I like being exposed to the stories and ideas they contain, but I feel like if anything I'm trading the ability to deep-read like I do with technical literature for the ability to skim.

I guess my point is that it's pretty rare that I see an article that I think merits the sort of deep reading that the author is espousing (for reasons other than recreation, that is). Maybe that's just a function of the literature I expose myself to.

I think this is a really important point. It's dangerous to think that reading x amount of articles is the same as reading a book. With a book, you're taking one idea and going into immense detail over the course of a day, a week, or a month. Additionally, the size of books encourages and even requires in many instances that they be written with some degree of organization. This means it's much easier for the reader to find the information they're looking for and to skip over information they already understand. Most of the articles I read are poorly written. They fail the reader by not introducing important information (such as their point) as soon as possible. In fact, authors will purposely leave out all the important information til the end in a hubris effort to sensationalize the piece. This means that the best way for someone to read these articles is actually backwards (so you don't commit 15 minutes of reading just to find out you don't care about what the author actually had to say). It's silly, and I don't think I've ever seen it done in any book that I've actually read.

I like the idea of better bookmarks. Is there a bookmark app that doesn't collect my data and associate it with an email address? I find the fact that Pocket needs an email address appalling in this day in age with all of the privacy concerns. Even then, I don't want some company storing my bookmarks. The U.S. government has proven that they can get data from any website they want to and it's none of their business what we read. I'm not paying them to read my bookmarks, and I'm not going to enable them.

On iOS, 2Doapp and Omnifocus have Safari plugins for saving links locally to a designated list or project in the app. 2Do can sync via CalDav and Omnifocus can sync via WebDav, to a self-hosted Linux VM, for optional cross-device sync.

What is missing is an app that will perform text analysis of the content behind the bookmarks, either on the mobile device or in the self-hosted VM. Computing "related stories" in the VM would conserve mobile device power.

I have been doing my bookmarking with Pinboard.in which also happens to have a "Read It Later" feature that I've been using now after I stopped using Pocket and Firefox few months ago (stopped using them together). It works really great. On OSX I use Shiori app (for both bookmarking and RIL) and on Android I use Pindroid (a 3rd party app) that adds two options "bookmark" and "read it later" options in Android's "share" pick menu.

However I must say their official browser extensions leave a lot to be desired and that honestly is sad.

Am I the only one who cannot understand why "read it later" would rebrand themselves as pocket?

"Pocket" could be anything. A small physical object, or in this case a service. But even as a service you can imagine tons of different services that could go by that name.

And they couldn't even get the domain pocket.com.

Meanwhile they had readitlater.com, and a name that screamed "if you want to read this later, we are the defacto standard"

Why would you throw out such good branding?

I've tried this approach and one thing that I couldn't fit in my workflow was consuming HN comments. Many times I find the comments as valuable as the article, but no read it later app will

A) format the comments section sanely AND

B) update the comments so if I save an article when it has 5 comments I can browse the comments later when it has 100 comments.

I know I am missing the point here, but Pocket's stats seem a little off to me.

It claims at 1M words is about 22 books. Googling around it seems like ~90k words is a normal adult book. So 1M words is more like reading 11 books, not 22. Pocket is assuming people read very short books (which may be the case).

When I was using it I got a similar email. I was using more like a bookmarking service than a reading service, so my guess the numbers were more about pocketed items than read items.

My "Read It Later" app is SimpleNote. I have a text file which I append every article I like.

The authors comment about algorithm, which is "Personalized, in this case, not by a cold, unfeeling algorithm, but by your past self"

The hilarious thing is that most of the problem addressed in this article will hopefully be solved by algorithms, etc. Also, yes, I know that quote was talking about UI/UX, but it is still funny that this cold unfeeling algorithm will be the one that will help OP the most about his futuristic pondering.

Also, I'd like to point out that OP makes a great case about not re-inventing the wheel. Let's think about that for a moment.

How many cases do you guys know about wheel re-invention?

Eh, I'm always looking for and consuming longform content... I never have a backlog because I prefer searching for articles, then consuming them on the spot, with no effort of indexing. I guess this quickly becomes very hard to track down exactly what you have read in the past, but if a longform article is that forgettable, do you really want to read it again?

Good sources for longform: aeon.co, aldaily.com. longform.org has too much debris to bother with, IMO.

Out of curiosity, what are the top 10 best longform pieces you've ever read?

I'll give you the top one: Politics and the English Language by Orwell.

Reading this as a young man sent me down a wonderful road of critical thinking and skepticism and altered my life in a major way... no guarantee it'll do the same for you, though.

Another long essay on the english language: Tense Present by David Foster Wallace. It touches rhetoric, conservatism vs liberalism, and offers advice w/r/t how to communicate. And it's laugh-out-loud funny.

This is the PDF version. Because this is a magazine article, the PDF captures formatting detail that an epub version lacks:

http://harpers.org/wp-content/uploads/HarpersMagazine-2001-0...

Hm, I can't stand DFW's writing style, but I'll check this out anyway since I admit he has fruitful thoughts on occasion.

That's one of my favorites too! Good to know. :-)

(I use Pocket, and also got that top 5% thing.) Where this really excels is when you accidentally stumble across something that looks interesting, but can't read it right now. For example someone may mention something in a HN comment, but you have an appointment in 5 minutes. Or it is the workday. Being able to separate the time of discovery from the time of consumption is a big benefit.

Some other sources are digg (check every 24 hours, they have links to about 20 items and often enough some are good long reads) and on reddit - eg DepthHub and FoodForThought.

I do like that my tablets and phone have Pocket on them, and I can read content anywhere anytime (no connectivity needed, position synced up). Heck I have even done it at a theme park while waiting for rides!

OP here. Really cool to see the discussion here. So much deeper and more critical than anywhere else. I've made a note of many of the tools mentioned here and will check them out soon.

TL;DR - saved it in Readability.

ducks

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