Text-only news sites are slowly making a comeback. Here’s why | Hacker News Reader

Text-only news sites are slowly making a comeback. Here’s why

poynter.org

57 points_lwad21 comments

Why can’t we have a text only newspaper with text only ads?

Advertisement in modern world is so insanely rotten to the core, it is disgusting. These people have made the web unbearable.

I really think there is a place for text only ads on a sites such as text.npr.org, even though they’re not as “eye catching”. Where is the innovation in advertisement? It’s the same bullshit banners, eye catching gifs and insanely long loading times with custom fonts and what not. Yes, it is “eye catching” but I am also convinced that there is a place for text only ads (such as on Google.com). Visual bandwidth of the human brain is obviously much higher than auditory (language and reading) pathways, but I might just click a text only ad if it’s relevant and “vetted” - I.e. no shady companies, no scams, etc.

May be we could see a growth in independent journalism with text only sites and ads: low startup costs, low bandwidth and server infrastructure and high click rates on their ads.

Just thinking about the advertisement industry, the people that work in it and the kind of dark patterns they employ makes me infuriated. You know, I don’t want to be friends with these kind of professionals.

I'm really glad to hear that. This lightweight design is great.

Maybe it shouldn't be for the news sites only. I make http://wordsandbuttons.online in this spirit, too. It's not text only, it has interactive plots, and quizzes, and everything. But the core idea: give people only what they come for, - works well for it as well. Since the pages are in tenths of KB, I pay for the cheapest hosting possible and it still holds "slashdot effect".

Very clean and elegant website, well done.

Question: how are you producing the code, with a static website generator such as Hugo or Pelican, or are you typing it manually?

Thanks! Mostly manually, but I write Python scripts for menial jobs. It's surprisingly easy when the site is that simple.

The images don't appear in Firefox reader mode. Not that reader mode is much needed on that site but it's useful if someone's got a preference on formatting.

Thank you for bringing this up! Apparently, the JavaScript behind canvases gets disabled. I'll think something out.

I recently made the switch back to firefox and discovered their reader view. I tested this with some articles but wasn't impressed. Then a few days ago there was some interesting inuit article about child education from npr and I chose that plain text option. I remembered the reader view and used those two features in combination and it synergizes perfectly. Also the narrate feature within that view (previously missed that completely) works flawlessly without the usual clutter.

Good news. I've been looking for text news for years now in order to be able to access a purer news source than what is available ( and the tired old 'all news is biased' argument doesn't change the fact that most MSM long ago gave up any pretence of impartiality on particular topics), and even thought about writing my own aggregator. Even text + careful use of images would be preferable - I remember the BBC news website circa 2001 which was a reasonably sensibly presented and objective news source, and contrast it to the absolutely disastrous (both in presentation and content) pseudo-news destination it has become in 2019.

It would be nice to have a media query like "@print" that a browser could prefer ("@accessible" or "@text"... Is this a thing?).

This runs counter to bring able to easily display ads, perform cro tests, collect analytics, etc.

I think offering full, text only, RSS feeds that a browser could check for first if in "text mode" is a better approach that would also use existing channels. If bandwidth was limited, check for /feed.xml, or something.

On Safari you can set individual domains to always open in reader mode. That helps me eliminate most of the noise when I visit news sites that are out of control. (I’m looking at you, mercurynews.com)

Also, it helps to never ever visit a local TV station site. The ads on those things get approved by the same type of people who approve shouting local car ads on television.

https://text.npr.org is a good example

I use that and http://lite.cnn.com/en for a good chunk of my daily news. Very Raspberry Pi friendly, whereas CNN's regular site crashes it much too often, and the speed is unbearable.

I really liked https://legiblenews.com, but they haven't been updated since Jan 15. Wish I had some way to help them or get in touch.

I've built and been running https://dailypopulous.com/ for the last year or two for precisely the reasons mentioned in the article. It generates a static, downloadable "edition" every 4 hours from what's popular on social media as a snapshot. Small images, no video, summary content and no JS.

Seemed good until I got to the memes section. Then I was completely turned off.

If you have time, maybe add a version that is news only, without the social media stuff.

Well, it's automated based on what's most popular over the last 6 hours. The meme stuff is what people vote for. I could start curating it, but then it would lose the original point. The news articles are usually pretty good, the odd stupid thing goes viral and sneaks in but it's generally real news. Just ignore the pictures if that bothers you. A core concept of it is to preserve an unedited snapshot of opinion from a point in time, news articles can be deleted or edited, plus the top reactions to them as a historical record, like https://dailypopulous.com/2018-03-19-morning/ - it's an unedited newspaper based on what people actually read, which unfortunately does include memes these days.

I like this. It got me to thinking about creating a text-only version of my website, but so much of what I publish relies on pictures that without them there wouldn't be a whole lot of interest left.

Publish it with lower-res versions of the pictures, perhaps clickable if someone really wants the higher-res version. The no-frills, no-JS, no-bloat reading experience is still useful even if your content is mostly picture-centric.

>Publish it with lower-res versions of the pictures, perhaps clickable if someone really wants the higher-res version.

Already doing that

FYI, if you use uBlock Origin you can style plain text websites like:

    text.npr.org##html:style( background-color: palegreen; font-family: sans-serif !important; margin: 5% 10%; )

    text.npr.org##html:style(margin:40px auto;max-width:650px;line-height:1.6;font-size:18px;color:#444;padding:0 10px; )

Is my preference.

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