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Comment by gravypod | Hacker News Reader

Odd to see CNN last when https://lite.cnn.com/en exists. Maybe that should be another entry?

For some reason these just look unreadable to me, a huge wall of text and just too much information thrown at me at once from all sorts of random topics that I may or may not care about. I actually really enjoy the newspaper style visual layout, even if they use stock photos. It makes it easier to navigate with my mind. The ads and bloat can all be solved by installing an ad blocker.

You're not wrong. This is how the internet used to look like. Modern web layouts and designs evolved to be this way because they result in higher engagement metrics.

There's also the fact that screens have gotten so much bigger since the early web. A wall of text didn't look as much like a wall when it was in a 640x480 window. (Minus a couple of banner ads, of course!)

Well, higher engagement metrics seems like a cynical way to say "more readable" especially given the parent comment's complaint.

You don't need commercial interests to think about UX. The early web looked the way it did mostly due to hobbyism and undeveloped UX standards that we take for granted today.

I didn’t intend to use engagement metrics in a negative way. We also have to note that the audience has changed. The audience of the early web was very different to the average audience today (almost everyone).

Got a 96 for me: https://pagespeed.web.dev/report?url=https%3A%2F%2Flite.cnn....

Oddly enough legible news only got an 86: https://pagespeed.web.dev/report?url=https%3A%2F%2Flegiblene...

Oops that was on the Mobile tab. Both score 100 on Desktop.

Yeah speed varies depending on time of day and whether or not your Heroku instances are being subjected to an influx of HN traffic.

:-)

Cranking up the Dynos to keep up.

Which BTW, that's the funny thing, Heroku is super duper slow, and I still manage to run a reasonable fast news website.

Here's response times under HN load: https://s3.amazonaws.com/bradgessler/Eu1cKE24dpKjTkqNcK3qPqH...

99th percentile is at 175ms.

If your page is only updated once a day, why not render a static html site and put it on a host like netlify?

This. There is no need for a cloud server. Even better get a 10GB port private server from Interserver and stop using Heroku.

Hadn’t heard of Interserver before. How are they?

Really good for the price. I think you can get 150TB bandwidth on 10G port with a dedicated server for around $55/month.

I thought about including the "lite" websites, but decided against it since those are not the primary news reading experiences that they're pushing. What I might do is add a link to any news website that has a lite/text-only website.

I'll go ahead and say that yes, this is somewhat self-serving, but I'm hoping this puts pressure on some news websites to get their act together and make their primary news websites faster for everybody.

---

Edit: I've pushed out the updates

1. Individual speed reports now include a link to the text-only sites.

2. Methodology makes a mention of it at https://legiblenews.com/speed/methodology (I still need to refine it; wrote and published in haste)

Why don’t the lite versions count? They are what I use on mobile for primary reading. If the goal is pressuring sites that are too slow you should reward the ones that are quick.

The goal is clearly self-promotion, and not neutral observation.

This is crazy. You made a lightweight, text-only news site, but then refuse to compare it to the other lightweight, text-only news sites.

As well as CNN, NPR has one too: https://text.npr.org

There's also http://68k.news which is particularly nice because it hyperlinks to images in the stories rather than embedding them.

Tangentially https://lite.pbs.org/ also launched this year.

I came here to point out the existence of text.npr.org but it seems I'm way too late!

It's annoying the the lite.cnn.com URLs look nothing like the normal ones, e.g.:

https://edition.cnn.com/2022/06/28/entertainment/tom-hanks-f...

https://lite.cnn.com/en/article/h_fdb58e07457b1cd96266160502...

Does anyone know how to automatically map one to the other?

you can't connect that two at the moment. Though there will be an update soon to use the same slug as www.cnn.com

Also, I will say that the normal CNN site is slow to completely load, but decently fast to become interactive. Like on my iPhone, everything above the fold is loaded and interactive reasonably quickly, even if the little blue loader bar does take quite awhile to finish. But if you’re not focusing on that, the site doesn’t FEEL slow, as the key content you want to start reading right away does load decently fast.

Didn't know https://lite.cnn.com/en exists

Looks very clean, thanks for this

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