Readability's new service | Hacker News Reader

Readability's new service

marco.org

173 pointsmcav37 comments

The only pages I am using the Readability bookmarklet on are those that are impossible to read in their native design. Rewarding authors of such pages (and effctively excluding well-designed blogs from the rewarding process altogether) seems counter-productive. Also this gives them a tangible incentive to not improve the usability of their websites. I'm all for micropayng for the content, but this solution is backwards.

If I understand the model correctly, they want you to browse various sites through their applet. They'll dish out money based on which sites you visit.

Yes, you are right, the article says exactly that. And now, what is your opinion about this strategy? You consider it a bad thing to do?

If you look at my other comments in this thread, you'll see that I independently conceived of a slight variation of the same idea (as have several others). I still think it has amazing potential.

I agree, I only use Readability on sites that are difficult to read in their native format. It seems that the Readability guys are presupposing that most users use readability on everything, and that the user would be happy to see money going to sites the user likes and visits often. However, I don't really like most sites I end up using Readability on, and they also rarely need any more money. This will probably last a short time and spend most of its lifecycle entirely gamed by publishers.

Like eps, you've assumed that this application is like the Readability bookmarklet. It isn't. It's an almost completely different thing.

Here's the model.

1. Publisher embeds Readability code on their site.

2. Subscriber reads sites through Readability application.

3. When the Subscriber visits a known Publisher, Readability records the visit.

4. At the end of the billing period, Readability dishes out cash, divided up according to how many times the Subscriber visited each known Publisher.

I understand this model well because it is almost exactly the same model I dreamt up in 2008, that Contenture launched with circa 2009 and that Kachingle filed a business method patent application for in 2007 (as I recall). Not long ago another such company / site, Sprinklepenny, was up for sale on flippr.

Because I am a big sook, I pretty much gave up on this idea in late 2009 when I learned about Kachingle and Contenture. Since then Contenture have quit the field. Kachingle has remained but their site basically seems like a social network for crazy cat ladies. Flattr have gotten awesome publicity because of the PirateBay connection, but their model is flawed in that it requires all parties to pay in.

I am hoping to get back into this space myself this year. My advantage is technological -- basically a secure tracking protocol that doesn't require a special application or any buttons to be clicked. Other than that I'm probably doomed to fail, but fuck it, so was every other successful startup of the last 10 years.

There's no need to embed any code on anyone's site. The whole point is that Readability automatically detects the main body content from a page and extracts it.

As a publisher, if your main body content isn't being detected automatically, probably because your HTML is awful, you can add some classes to the key elements to fix that. But that's not necessary.

There's also no need to register as a publisher to receive contributions. From their FAQ:

"Readability keeps track of pages visited even before a publisher registers with us to view their statistics. If your site has garnered traffic to Readability, we’re already earmarking money for you."

https://www.readability.com/faq/#view-plainGuidelines

However, you will need to register to actually get the funds.

Ah, so it's completely mediated by their app. That's a clever way to get publishers to sign up -- "you could be earning $X right now!"

Actually, if you check out the NYTimes article: > The company plans to pay them “regardless of their participation”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/01/technology/01read.html?_r=...

I am different. I use readability bookmarklet almost everywhere, in order to read in the unified clean design, but with the two exception: I read some blogs in Google reader, and I send some articles to Instapaper and read them in my phone. But I almost always get rid of the original webpage design, even if it is easily readable. I just got used to the "pure text with the same font" approach.

It will work better for Instapaper. I use it regardless of the site formatting, maybe biased towards the longer pieces, which is a good thing.

Personally, I use a port of Readability in my feed reader to get around feeds with summaries in it. I should probably release it some time soon...

I think of it more like a micropayment system and I like the idea. It's not like I can't continue to use readability (or Safari's built in add-on), but this sets up a system to subscribe to content with some value added. I understand your point that people might only use it for sites they use readability for, but I think it could also be used like instapaper, a way of getting your reading in one place the way you want it. You're probably right that there should be some incentive for sites that "play by the rules."

The move to all online content is actually a bit disturbing to me because, as a librarian, I see print magazines go under and leave libraries out in the cold in terms of getting the content to users. Paywalls are designed for individuals, not institutions. I hope the "one subscription" model might catch on as there's a way to include institutions in that mix.

You're already rewarding them by reading the pages and going to the trouble of using Readability on them.

Seems to be a riff on flattr / kachingle / contenture / others I can't remember right now. The key difference is that they value-add through the Readability reformatting service.

I've seen this called a number of things -- crowd funding, social micropayments. I had the same basic idea (Contenture was closest) back in August 2008. By carefully hiding the idea I have parlayed my insight into literally zeroes of dollars.

Personally I call it microsubscription.

One thing that Readability have solved neatly is the problem of trustworthy allocations by requiring users to go through their application. My own secret sauce (apart from the business model) is a prototype secure protocol for tracking users in a fraud- and theft-resistant fashion without relying on a trusted application -- just a web browser.

While announcements like these continue to fill me with fear and dismay, watching the rise of Facebook over MySpace et al has taught me not to be such a giver-upper and to get into it. After the fashion of Messrs Page and Brin I am planning to do it as an honours project this year. Might as well double up on the benefits.

When you think long enough about this whole idea of supporting web content, there are some major requires that arise:

• Support should be direct (whereas ads are indirect)

• People publish all over the Internet, most people don’t own a domain, they have (hosted) Wordpress, Blogger, Flickr, YouTube, Vimeo, GitHub accounts where they publish content, this content _has_ to be supportable.

• You can’t effectively charge someone fees for their acts of voluntary support.

• Voluntary, is voluntary, is no subscription, and is the right to choose!

• Easy to use, low barrier to give, no pulling out the credit card for 25¢.

• Support something while browsing the web and on that web page.

• The mechanism/service you use to support content online can’t be the only winner, consumers and publishers have to be the outright winners!

• The service used _must_ be trustworthy and transparent.

• The service _has_ to work with the Internet, which means it has to work when only given URLs of web pages to support.

So! We actually did this, and built TipTheWeb http://tiptheweb.org/ with all these ideas in mind!

A non-profit that gives 100% of the money tipped by people to the web publisher of the content, non of that fee or cuts crap, 100%. You can support something with TipTheWeb by just giving us a URL to what you want to support and an amount, that's it; no publisher integration required.

We want to provide a positive feedback loop for the web, give publishers a way to know what their followers actually like, give readers/consumers a way to directly support what they truly love online and choose how much they want to give (5¢ — $100 per Tip). We want to encourage publishers to keep it up! Keep their content freely-accessible to everyone <— _this_ is what makes the Internet so great.

The Internet is valuable. Good publishing is hard. Selling content doesn’t work. Advertising is not sufficient. Community-supported web publishing can work!

You say "100% of claimed Tips". How much initiative do you take to inform publishers that they've received a tip and should sign-up and claim their money? What do you do if a publisher who has received tips declines participating?

The idea that I could donate money which the publisher hasn't agreed to receive and you could end up keeping it if the publisher doesn't decide they want to be a part of your service rubs me the wrong way.

We hope to always error on the side that will benefit the user in these cases.

Telling web publishers they have tips waiting for them is tricky business, i.e. Don't want to be spammy. We hope to develop some interesting ways to notify people that they have tips; but tippers have been filling this void by mentionig on services like Twitter that they've tipped someone for something.

For now, if a tip goes unclaimed by the publisher for 6 months, it's automatically canceled, and the money is returned to the tipper for them to use to tip something else.

We don't currently have a way for someone to block or decline tips for a particular website, but we've talked about adding this type of feature; someone could claim their site, then say they don't accept tips there.

Bottom line, we don't have any intentions of keeping people's money that goes unclaimed, we rather return it so they could fund other tips with it. People can also help support our operations by tipping us, TipTheWeb; eating our own dog food.

Thanks for clarifying :)

I don't know that I agree with the refund strategy as the way to handle the issue but it's good to hear you guys come down in a good place ethically/morally on the issue (as you say, the most important thing with this sort of site is trust).

Hmm interesting to see Arc90 making a bigger move in the space, especially partnered up with Instapaper. I've been curious why they hadn't done much more since the simple readability bookmarklet was so well received.

I wonder if they'll run in to any copyright issues now that they're actually re-serving full article content from their servers and not just reformatting in the user's browser. I've been playing with a service with some server side readability functionality built in and the issue came us as a concern in my planning. Even with full attribution and considerate seo practices, it seems possible some publishers may take exception to full reproduction. There are existing services like viewtext.org that would be infringing by the same standards, but I assume it'll take fairly major notoriety or traffic to attract the ire of the papers. Or is this clear cut fair use?

> ...give most of the proceeds to the authors of the pages you choose (by using the Readability bookmarklet on them, or adding them in other ways)

I'm glad "in other ways" was added there. To me Readability serves two purposes - To make long-form content nicer to look at, and to make awful websites bearable. I can understand people supporting providers of long, interesting articles, but I'd hate to accidentally donate to a site covered in obtrusive ads because I thought there might be some interesting content hidden somewhere.

If the Instapaper app causes a Readability payment to the visited website, isn't that against Apple's new "no in-app purchases without Apple getting a cut" rule?

So as a website owner I get paid each time a paying readability user views my website in readability?

If I get my pages to load a second copy of themselves inside a hidden iframe, except including the extra readability bookmarklet js, will that allow me to "game the system" by getting every visitor to my site to view (in the background) my site via readability...

I would never do this. It was just a thought...

More details in the NYTimes: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/01/technology/01read.html?_r=...

Isn't this just begging to get sued by some publisher who really doesn't want to participate? IANAL, but it seems like they'd have a decent case.

I suspect that they'll have to allow publishers to opt out if they wish to, in the same way that Instapaper does: http://www.instapaper.com/publishers

I don't think it likely that many publishers will opt out, though. They'll still get ad impressions for the initial page load in addition to the kickback for the visitor's readability click.

Statements like, The company plans to pay them "regardless of their participation." make me think otherwise

I didn't read that as 'the company will pay them even if they explicitly don't want to be paid'. I read it as, 'the company will attempt to make contact and pay them even if they haven't yet signed up.'

I often feel like my reading on the Internet is more hurried and distracted. Part of that is due to the medium, but I wonder if part of it isn't due to the writing style of writing for the Internet. It will be interesting to see how writing on the Internet changes if this takes off.

My old readability bookmarklet isn't working now.

Apparently, they've retired the old one.

Here's a link to the new free bookmarklet: https://www.readability.com/bookmarklets/

My old bookmarklets still work and the old site still seems to work fine (http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/). It would be pretty foolish of them to break everyone's existing endpoints like that.

Really? Mine (yet) works fine. I'm using Google Chrome 8; my bookmarklet is:

javascript:(function(){readConvertLinksToFootnotes=true;readStyle='style-apertura';readSize='size-medium';readMargin='margin-wide';_readability_script=document.createElement('script');_readability_script.type='text/javascript';_readability_script.src='http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/js/readability....);document.documentElement.appendChild(_readability_script);_readability_css=document.createElement('link');_readability_css.rel='stylesheet';_readability_css.href='http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/css/readability...

[Your JavaScript breaks this page for me on iPhone and Safari; maybe post a link to a GitHub Gist instead?]

Slightly O/t, but at what level do you get downvotes? I'd like to use one here.

I apologise for the inconvenience! Is it due to the long JavaScript? I didn't think it'd break the formatting, and now that I have realised I can't edit or delete it.
Could you please tell me why you want to downvote my comment? Thanks!

Why all the downvotes? I only wanted to point out that the old bookmark worked fine for me. Is it due to the JavaScript I posted (in an attempt to help a fellow commenter) "breaking the page"? If so, perhaps that is more the website's design's fault rather than mine. (I'd edit the JS it into a gist if I could but the editing time has passed; additionally, I can't delete the offending comment.)
Perhaps next time you could point out why someone has been downvoted as well so as for them not to repeat their mistake again?
I'm very sorry for the inconvenience!

I think it's because this page has been rendered unreadable now. The irony of this comments page having poor readability is not lost on me :)

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