Ask HN: What Happened to Outline.com? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What Happened to Outline.com?

www outline.com is offline/unreachable since about 10 days. It is/was(?) a very useful service to make some webpages more readable and (in some case) avoid the paywall. I also used it a lot of time to extract the "reader view" of some article to send it via email. But since 7-10 the website is down but domain looks okay. I'm also using a recursive DNS resolver so it's not blocked via DNS from my ISP.

Someone know what's going on? I haven't found other info.

Thanks

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If you want to save a clean copy of a webpage, https://www.printfriendly.com/ works nicely, but some URLs are not supported. But sometimes, you can use https://tinyurl.com/ to create an spoof link which will process. Another good one is: https://pdf.fivefilters.org/ And of course, you should be reading the news with Firefox browser, so you can invoke the "Reader View" feature (very easy). This Firefox solution is the best, easiest fix to replace outline.com https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-reader-view-clu...

The OP is a question about what happened not looking for the hundred alternatives and add-ons there are out there. What happened?

They probably got rekt by legal takedowns.

:( it was my suspect but since I can’t find any confirmation, I’m not sure of this.

I've noticed that when it was still active was not working with some website at some point (eg. Financial time, new York times etc)

Probably was a tentative to fix thing before was too late (and eventually closed completely)

So... HTTP 451 Unavailable for Legal reasons

12ft.io works

Yes, I know but it doesn’t work on all the websites. I’m not asking for an alternative, I know a lot of alternatives, I’m just curious to know what happened to outline.com =)

Can you list the alternatives you know?

So, I could check them later on.

I use the most https://archive.is and https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome/blob/ma...

https://txtify.it

It's a high value domain, maybe they sold it and it's in the process of being transferred?

5 figures? 6 figures?

Archive.is (etc) did it better?

Archive.is is a different service, it’s indispensable but it saves the page for the future, outline.com is/was only making the article more readable by extracting only the text, and it doesn’t save anything offline, it’s also way more fast than archive.is. It is/was something like an Instapaper whiteout the login.

In effect tho, using reader mode in the browser on archive.[a-z]* is about the same as outline.

The problem is some brilliant product manager decided that the reader mode button should not be available on all websites and should only be available on those it seems to be articles.

I’ve never had reader mode not work on archive.is

Which browser do you use? I've never seen it work on archive.is in Firefox. Case in point: https://archive.is/ZPvrO

Specifically only speaking of iOS and Safari. Don’t have FF installed and have never found reader mode option in Chrome.

I am using Firefox 78.15.0esr (64-bit) and had no problem getting to the URL with the above link. Arrived at: https://www.economist.com/briefing/2022/03/05/vladimir-putin...

You can add

    about:reader?url=

before any URL to enable it on any website.

Only on desktop? Does not work on Firefox 98 on Android.

Yeah, only on desktop.

Omg thank you so much! I never knew this. Thank you so much for sharing this!

Damn, I don't actually care about the paywalling, I just really liked their reader view.

I've been using Firefox. Reader view is decent.

Do you have any screenshots of the reader view?

What do you use now, Chrome? If so, I strongly suggest just try Firefox, cares more about privacy, no constantly pushing to link your browser to an account, addons like multi-containers, built in fingerprint resistance (experimental).

I use FF for my daily driver. I misread and thought you were describing a reader view of this service.

RIP, it did a pretty good job at keeping reading distraction free. Hope it will make a comeback one day

I would pay for this service. I follow articles all over the place, and it would be crazy to subscribe to each source as if I'm a specialist in that field. But I recognize that content was not created at no cost, and it's fair to pay something for it.

What I do is use "_Bypass Paywalls Clean_" for Firefox, on my desktop. [1]

Then on my iPhone (safari), I use a handy little iOS shortcut that routes the page to archive.is and then shows the reader mode version. [2]

I used to use a cool shortcut for apple news that would also parse the URL, find the original article, and show it reader mode. Sadly, apple disabled sharing of News+ articles.

[1] https://gitlab.com/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-firefox-clea...

[2] https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/81c670b532e340e38a35cc62e3e...

Hey! That shortcut gave me an idea. I just wrote a quick UserScript that will basically do the same, only completely automatically [0]. Maybe I'll add something that will popup and ask if you want to be redirected.

[0] https://gist.github.com/evanreichard/83467a4775f1672756140fc...

That iCloud shortcut was great. Took a bit of fiddling to get it to work. And I often have to be the first to cache a page from my RSS reader, miniflux, it’s still pretty great and definitely a huge quality of life improvement. Thanks a bunch!

The domain does not look okay. There are no A or CNAME records, only NS (AWS) and MX (Google) records

How would one build such a service in a way that is resilient against legal takedowns?

Make it a browser extension.

I don't like browser extensions because of the security model.

Also, it has to get its data from somewhere, and this source can still be taken down, I suppose.

Perhaps you can hash the original url, use that as a key and upload the ascii text of the article as a torrent.

Why would it need to get data from anything except the page you are looking at?

I think the parent is thinking of a proxy type model which would be more robust in the long run since bypassing paywalls is cat and mouse. Rather than do everything client side, which would eventually stop working anyway, one could proxy the requests to a server that would deliver the contents. This is not too different from the existing outline.com model, but the servers can be shuffled around more easily.

Open sourcing it?

For western takedowns, until recently, host it in Russia?

Don't read the news it's bad for your health.

Ahah, yeah, but it could be worse if there's a nuclear explosion at 1000km from my home and I don't know anything about it =) (PS: I live in north-italy, quite near to Ukraine)

You will find out if that happens. One doesn't have to be glued to every little news update to know what's going on around the world. People right now unfortunately (not saying you are doing that) are seeing every world crisis (pandemic, Ukraine etc) as entertainment.

My friend trust me, if it's bad enough you will find out. Your friends will tell you.

Add all news sites and social media to your hosts.txt on your android device.

If it's not bad enough you will have saved weeks of worrying, spend time with your family.

> Your friends will tell you

Not unless they follow the same advice.

There's something to this. Over the past few weeks I built up live RSS feeds that sucked in the latest submissions to apposite subReddits, and a collection of other feeds and sources.

Two days ago I deleted all that, as it was making me sick and crazy. I think maybe what we need is 'slow news', and to rely on anything we really need to know percolating through the misinformation and speculation.

What stressed me most was the unexpected extent of polarized alarmism all over Reddit, and (to a lesser extent) even here on HN. There's no logical reason why I couldn't have expected that to happen; I guess I just didn't map it out internally in the calm before the storm.

Don't use Reddit as a news source. Some subreddits are cool and interesting, some are cesspools, but by definition they're mostly echo chambers. I only pull tech subreddit submissions because there the organic nature is actually a benefit.

For real news, assuming anglophone, i can recommend FT ( subscribtion), The Guardian ( no subscription but if you read a lot they have a banner asking you to donate), Axios ( no subscription, short form content mostly focusing on the facts). Axios skews a bit too much US for my taste ( I'm in France), but still has interesting things.

>stressed me most was the unexpected extent of polarized alarmism all over Reddit

Reddit is a website mostly consumed and curated by people who have anxiety disorders, it seems. There's just nothing healthy on any of the major subreddits, it's nonstop fear porn and alarmism. It doesn't in any way reflect reality and the viewpoint of the average human being. That's why the advertisements on it are a total disaster, because the advertisers know there's no real value to be extracted from those eyeballs.

Heavy disagree here. Maybe it depends on the person and some take stuff too personally and get depressed, but knowledge is important ( and power in some cases). How can one be a citizen participating in his civic duties without knowing anything about the world outside of their immediate circle/bubble? How would you know X is going to happen so you need to prepare or protest against it? How would you know representative Y is a shithead you should vote out ot office?

I use to work in sales many years ago, even though I know all the tricks I am not powerful enough to resist them.

Maybe you are the exception, the one who's emotions and human instinct can only be controlled by you.

For me and most people, we over consume the news. I have seen it truly break people, turn them into shells of their former self.

Refreshing the page waiting for the next bomb to go off.

How do you know you are only being told what some others want to you believe?

Yea ignorance is bliss. Governments all over the world must love you.

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