Tell HN: Outline.com is offline, domain for sale | Hacker News Reader

Tell HN: Outline.com is offline, domain for sale

40 pointsdredmorbius18 comments

Outline.com was a website readability / paywall bypass site. It's been modestly popular for years among HN users, including myself.

The domain now redirects to a seller site: https://outline.com

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A 2020 LifeHacker post describes its basic use and mechanic: https://lifehacker.com/use-this-site-to-read-and-annotate-ar...

It's apparently been down for a month or so. The domain is now being listed for sale.

Internet Archive's final active capture was on 27 February 2022: https://web.archive.org/web/20220227091525/https://outline.c...

Present result when attemtping domain: https://archive.ph/LYN9z

Sad but unsurprising. I'm amazed that archive.is is still around, to the extent that I wonder who really funds it...

This website is very similar: https://www.darkread.io/

It's great!

@jer0me this is actually NYT capable as of April 2022

I noticed the first day this was down because I was using their API in a demo. Bad luck

Alternatives:

https://12ft.io/

https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome (also for firefox)

Although still up, 12ft has been hit with legal notices and no longer works with bigger outlets like NYT

There's another service that offers a similar simplified presentation option, though I can't remember it presently.

The creator was mentioning it on HN for a while.

Just use a browser extension version (works on Firefox despite the name only mentioning Chrome): https://gitlab.com/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-chrome-clean

I've never understood why these sites exist when the above extension exists, as they're slower than the extension.

Not everyone is sitting at a desktop and using FF or a Chromium variant.

You can use Kiwi browser with this plugin on Android. If you are on iOS, sorry!

That’s a niche browser without an update since 2020. Doesn’t bolster OP’s case:

> I've never understood why these sites exist when the above extension exists, as they're slower than the extension.

One could say why use Kiwi browser and a plug-in when websites exist.

I used it to point people to a reader-view of an article here on HN, or where an article was paywalled. Sadly it needed javascript to work, and sometimes it wouldn't allow certain articles to be 'outlined', randomly and without reason.

I recommend https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome

This is the clean version without analytics: https://gitlab.com/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-chrome-clean

It's a fork?

Correct, without analytics attached.

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