This Post Was Too Long To Read, So We TL;DR’d It | Hacker News Reader

This Post Was Too Long To Read, So We TL;DR’d It

techcrunch.com

31 pointsbond11 comments

Amazing what putting a flashy UI around an outwardly boring piece of software can achieve. LIBOTS has been around since 2003 I think... Mint and Yodlee, Hipmunk and Orbitz - I wonder what other unglamorous services could be improved with a better UI? Maybe GDS?

Congrats to Jeremy for the coverage - good luck with any plans you have for TLDR!

Well there's a bit more to it than just OTS. I do a little work on the summarization part myself then there's also the extraction piece. I did spend a few hours writing code. :P

Thanks for the congratulations, though; who knew a quick little weekend hack would get so much coverage? I didn't (hence why I didn't pump up the volume on the server's resources initially ;)).

This will fail and I'll tell you exactly why. Longish articles are already being TL;DR'd by something, called "attention spans". So as this service gets better and more popular, and I'm not sure exactly how that's possible, the feeds it will be shortening will already be shortening by pressures from editors and audiences.

I joke about article length and even satirize myself, but speaking candidly, the drive towards link-batish titles and articles that simply summarizes other articles actually encouraged me to write longer pieces, not shorter ones.

It's just simple contrarian thinking. There may be a massive market for blink-of-an-eye posts that are forgotten in moments, but there is a small niche of readers who are looking for reading they can savour and dive into.

Naturally, the market for blink-of-an-eye reddit front page posts is many orders of magnitude larger, but it also has many orders of magnitude more competition. Niches are smaller but with less competition.

The niche for blowhards may have a small readership, but the more the rest of the world goes towards tweets, the hungrier those readers are for that 141st character of exposition.

JM2C.

Jeremy, an obvious suggestion, keep track of the traffic/traffic sources data, add adwords/amazon/etc... as soon as possible and do a series of blog posts on it. The traffic directed to your personal blog could turn out to be more valuable than the one going to tldr.it (i'm thinking about promotion of future projects).

Update: I don't know how much you can tweak the algorithm for a single site, but fixing the result of this:

http://tldr.it/summarize/?summary[url]=http://www.reddit.com...

and submitting it to reddit ("Reddit? tl;dr it.") is what i would do now :).

I was hoping it would also cut boring posts from RSS feeds entirely.

The only thing preventing me from subscribing to the big news sites like techcrunch or the register is the sheer volume. I could subscribe to one feed that updates seven times a day, or to fifty blogs that update once a week. Subscribing to more than one big site just isn't worth it.

Something that would remove boring posts from rss feeds would be pure gold.

That is another app idea I have that I plan on implementing when I get the time. I have the algorithms planned and so on, but who knows if I'll ever have the time to make it happen. :/

Well, I tried it out on with a few very mainstream sources. It appears that it just takes the first few sentences. I was led to believe that it somehow extracted meaningful information, sort of like Amazon's SIPs.

Sites currently down.

If you're going to be featured by TechCrunch or big media, please contact your hosting provider and make sure you can handle the hits. This is exactly the WORST time to have your site down.

It loads eventually if you leave it. Does TC actually let people know before they feature them?

It should be up now actually. I doubled the resources on my box but I'm also getting hit with Twitter traffic from popular Twitter users. :/

I switched to nginx which seems to handle the traffic much better!

(Also: I asked them to hold this story til Wednesday so I could do a few things and check the stability of the app. Oops. ;))

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