Hacker News Reader

Comment by dmix | Hacker News Reader

Good opportunity to build an OSS alternative? Or even a side-project... in the possible event Instapaper gets sidelined. That always seems to happen. With the exception of maybe Reddit.

View on HN

Can you summarize what their features are?

From a quick web search, it seems to be:

- Parsing a page for main body content, removing cruft, and reflowing it into an aesthetically pleasing layout

- Cloud bookmarking these artifacts

So how does this not run up against anti-scraping TOS provisions? Does money change hands between the publisher and the content-reflower?

I know that traditionally Instapaper basically required you to load the page at least once first so you'd get all the ads then. But since then there's APIs that bookmark directly to it. My guess is that it isn't used enough for Web sites to bother.

I view it as a specialized browser view, although the cloud bookmarking doesn't fit with that. I use Safari's reading view on pages all the time as they're too visually busy for the screen on my iPhone 5.

For me the ability to have articles read to me on my phone while on the go is the key feature. I pay because of that feature alone, and would pay a LOT more to see general improvements in that direction.

Without that it's just another in a long series of fresh buckets to put under the leaky pipe of bookmarks.

Oh and...

Fuck you Pinterest and the wedding planners you rode in on!

For the most part, it does not scrape around paywalls (though I have seen it work in some cases). I'm not sure how they pull that off, perhaps sending the source from the client instead of the URL and re-rendering it on the server.

Wallabag seems to be the best-known/best-supported open-source option in this space.

If you don't want/need open source, but just a sustainable business that is not part of a data-harvesting company, then pinboard.in is probably your best bet.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com