Hacker News Reader

Comment by samwillis | Hacker News Reader

Nice idea on legiblenews.com, however it looks to me like it's just using https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events and changing the format? All the articles are from there, verbatim, and you are exactly copying the list of articles - even the categorisation of them.

I'm not sure that a 10% donation to Wikipedia from subscription revenue is quite enough when you are doing quite a simple reformat of all the volunteer work that goes into the current events section of Wikipedia.

You are effectively changing $9.99 for a weekly email digest of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events page and giving them $1. I think if you went 50/50 on it I would probably feel it was more fair, you are adding value but I assume thats all automated.

I will give you credit for your 100 score, that page on wikipedia gets an 86 on page speed insights.

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If true, and appears it is, if the source for the feed really is Wikipedia, shouldn’t it be credited on the site?

Related Wikipedia page on reusing it’s content:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Copyrights

It is, see the "License" link at the bottom of pages that display Wikipedia content. Front page currently points at https://legiblenews.com/june-27-2022/license.

Note: there was a bug that I fixed at around noon PST that wasn't display this link for daily news articles, but it was for the contextual articles.

I intend on fully complying with Wikipedia's copyright notices. If you see otherwise please LMK because its a bug.

Might just be me, but hiding that information behind a "license" link feels like you want to hide that you are just copying from Wikipedia. In fact, the Wikipedia current events section also has a pagespeed of 100, so what do we need your website for?

PST or PDT? I didn't think anyone was using PST anymore :-/.

Um, you mean they're not using it until November?

https://www.timeanddate.com/time/zones/pst

… I mean, I use it right now, if I have a timestamp in America/Los_Angeles that's between about November and March. Not all timestamps are right now.

Heck, my coworkers use PST all the time (ah, timezone pun?). One of these days I should honor those timestamps to the letter.

The US hasn't used PST to describe current time since March 13th.

Yeah, and then it will be used again starting this November. It hasn't gone away permanently IOW, unless you know otherwise.

How about PT :-)

Also it's been done better by https://newsasfacts.com/, which actually does give 50/50 like you suggested.

News as Facts also gets a 95 on page load speed:

https://pagespeed.web.dev/report?url=https%3A%2F%2Fnewsasfac...

That site seems supremely... Not optimized for utility by humans.

See also https://currentevents.email

Yes! The news content and links from them are from Wikipedia, which is why I donate a portion of revenue to them. The value I'm delivering is speed and focus, going further than Wikipedia, hence your observations from the page speed score. The design of their pages is quite busy and some articles actually take a really long time to load when they're re-built from scratch and not served up from a cache.

Regarding, "not enough", I'm currently losing money on Legible News, so if I increased the amount, I'd lose even more money. For now I consider a 10% donation generous given the current unit economics. I may raise prices to offset these loses, but I'll grandfather in people who subscribe today.

If Legible News reaches a large enough scale I'll consider switching from the current donation model to a Wikimedia enterprise subscription (https://enterprise.wikimedia.com/pricing/) or hiring my own editorial staff to put together the days headlines.

---

Edit: Oops, there's a bug on the news articles that are not displaying the license. If you want to see what this should look like, check out https://legiblenews.com/articles/Mekelle and scroll to the bottom and click on "License".

Fixing this now for news articles.

---

Update: Licenses are now working for news pages. You can see today's at https://legiblenews.com/june-27-2022/license. This broke navigation at the bottom, which I'm now fixing.

> Regarding, "not enough", I'm currently losing money on Legible News, so if I increased the amount, I'd lose even more money. For now I consider a 10% donation generous given the current unit economics. I may raise prices to offset these loses, but I'll grandfather in people who subscribe today.

This feels in very bad taste to me. As another user pointed out, these articles are being authored and maintained by volunteers, who are donating their time and effort to make information accessible to people. Instead of joining them in that pro-bono effort, you're trying to leverage their work to your own profits. Yes, it requires some up-front work from you to format the articles, but it's a one time cost while the authors are continuously working. And sure, you have to pay for hosting costs, but then you could still run it as a non-profit that only recoups costs and donates the rest to Wikipedia.

If you want to make a business out of this, I'd suggest investing in having people author some original articles. But taking someone else's volunteer work for your own gain is not something I will support. Not wanting to invest your own time and money to make your project work long-term doesn't justify using other people's time and efforts to make your project work long term.

If there's any part of your data pipeline that I misunderstand and rectifies the situation, I'd be happy to have my understanding fixed.

I don't understand why you would feel that way. Under Wikipedia's license:

> You are free to:

> Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format

> Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially.

This seems like exactly the kind of behaviour they want to encourage. It's not taking anything away from the project, just adding another way to consume the information for those who choose to.

You forgot this part:

> Under the following terms:

> Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.

> ShareAlike — If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you must distribute your contributions under the same license as the original.

> No additional restrictions — You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits.

Proper attribution is not optional. While OP's license link might put him in the clear legally (although IANAL, it might not) it is can still be questionable ethically and I agree with the other commenters here thinking it is.

I was only addressing the comment that OP is "trying to leverage their work to your own profits". I agree that the attribution could be more explicit on OP's webpage, but I don't see that for/not-for profit really has anything to do with it (legally or morally).

I occasionally make edits to the structure of the original content, but given my limited resources, which is a fraction of my personal time, that's all I can do. In the future if this brings in more revenue I will consider donating more to Wikimedia, hiring editorial staff to contribute back to CurrentEvents, or purchasing a Wikimedia Enterprise subscription.

I do want to acknowledge and be upfront that I won't be able to satisfy everybody's level of fairness, taste, etc, but this is currently what is sustainable for me given the amount of time and resources I have available to put into this project. Some will think this is done in very bad taste, like yourself, and others won't. That's fine! I accept constructive or thoughtful critiques and will reflect on them in the future as things change.

The ease at which you gloss over the fact that your site is simply accepting money for the time and effort of volunter Wikipedia editors is truly innovative, good job.

For those that believe Brad's take on Wikipedia's content isn't adding a fair amount of value...

Presumably, if Legiblenews takes off and doesn't add value, Wikimedia is free to compete with it. Wikimedia could form a for-profit company that donates more of user revenue to the foundation and feature that company on Wikipedia. Therefore, for the foreseeable future, Wikimedia effectively retains the option to copy & crush Brad's side-project. And if Legiblenews takes off Wikimedia does nothing at all...they will still almost certainly receive more $$$ than the current state of the world.

In that way, Wikimedia is outsourcing innovation to Brad, who Wikimedia is well-positioned to copy/compete with in the future, and being paid to do so. While Brad loses money.

I'm not 100% sure who is on which side of "fair," but ultimately if it complies with Wikimedia's license I'm good with it. And if you don't like it, why not start something better?

OP sounds like they're honoring the terms of Wikipedia's content license and donating money on top. Why is that a problem?

They're presumably also benefitting from the work volunteers put into Linux, nginx, and whatever else is in their stack, but nobody suggests that websites using open source technologies should be forfeiting all profits.

Wikipedia: “please reuse our content”

Random internet user: “such bad taste to reuse Wikipedia content, I should complain on their behalf“

I generally agree with this and would add another take:

Delivering good news is expensive! The big players are not doing that for the most part, instead doing "newstainment" and I almost never pay attention.

Indie journalists are challenged right now, but are doing News. Most can barely make it.

Your platform could help! Having them author and get some revenue would be something I would pay for. And I do that now via Patreon, Substack, others. It is all too coarse though.

All that said, maybe plenty of people will pay. You are likely to find out. And like I said in my other comment:

Speed is nice, but compelling rules!

Maybe invite those getting views to author original material. Helps you, them, the reader / viewer.

When you say losing money, do you mean opportunity costs from your time developing it?

Because running a website like that should cost basically nothing.

> I'm currently losing money on Legible News

> The news content and links from them are from Wikipedia

How are you losing money if all of your content is from Wikipedia, and presumably free?

Close to zero income plus hosting fees most likely. If I built something like this I’d expect to lose money on it for awhile as well. I’d also expect to have to deliver a bit more “product” but I feel this guy is having a ton of fun with this project. I’d love to see it grow and develop into something amazing.

In fairness, it doesn’t seem to be offering much at the moment, but I’m genuinely curious about the directions the owner imagines taking the project.

This is accurate.

Current costs are:

1. Hosting - $30-$60/mo depending on traffic levels. The more subscribers, the more this will cost.

2. Workstation - Its fractional, but the workstation I use to build this isn't free.

3. Dev time - This is the big one. If this is to become sustainable, I'd need to build up subscription fees to pay for a team. $200k/engineer, administrative staff, and whatever an editorial staff costs if I go down that route.

Saying "it costs nothing" would be a recipe for eventually shutting down this website since I'd be working towards none of the infrastructure above that's needed for this thing to continue on without me.

I also want to build out a mobile application, which also costs money in the form of App Store fees and dev time.

Keep in mind: I'm not targeting the HN crowd with this, who know how to find CurrentEvents, throw it in their RSS feed, find the optimized mobile version, etc. This was built for people who don't have the time or knowledge to do the digging needed to find and format this content.

What HN found interesting was the relative rankings of news website speed, which I hope brings awareness and results in faster websites for us all.

Photopea.com was able to keep their hosting costs down to about $50/yr while still serving 7 million people[1]. Their website was hosted statically at a size of 1.8 megabytes. Yours is different of course because you scrape Wikipedia regularly, but there may be a cheaper solution than your current setup out there for you fyi

[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/i8j5te/i_made_a_free_...

If OP had 7 million people, they wouldn't be losing money, even if it were serving ads.

I don't think GP was talking about profitability, but about the absolute level of the cost.

> Hosting - $30-$60/mo depending on traffic levels. The more subscribers, the more this will cost.

> Workstation - Its fractional, but the workstation I use to build this isn't free.

> Dev time

I mean, no offense, but it sounds like you don't actually have any costs besides hosting, and you'll break even somewhere between 40 and 80 subscribers.

I think what everyone's objecting to is your misrepresentation of the content on the home page as your work. Nothing on the "today's news" or "about" pages credits Wikipedia or its contributors.

You are losing money based on the fact you might have to hire staff one day??

What??

> 1. Hosting - $30-$60/mo depending on traffic levels. The more subscribers, the more this will cost.

Does the cost of subscription pay for the hosting costs? It sounds like this is the only current hard cost, so hopefully it's growing slower than the associated subscription revenue!

Hosting - $30-$60/mo depending on traffic levels

Stick it on Netlify and that cost will drop to $0.

So I actually love the idea, even using Wikipedia! Their news/current affairs section is amazing, but not accessible or readable in a "new site" like way. If I were you I would be championing that aspect, making it a key feature, talk about how it is making this amazing resource accessible. But part of that would be to donate a larger portion to them. Just charge $20/year and give Wikipedia half...

I'm not committing to that specific price change and donation reallocation, but I will raise prices in the future (if you subscribe now you'll be grandfathered in) and changing the donation allocation with Wikipedia.

The problem now is that fixed costs are barely covered. Once that hump is achieved I can start playing around with donation allocations more. It will take some time to get there as the cost structures aren't that well established yet.

The mobile version https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events is less busy and arguably better readable/accessible than the desktop version.

How the hell are you losing money on this?

Why are your costs so high?

Multiple edge servers for extra speed?

Please don’t complain on behalf of others. Wikipedia has a licence that explicitly allows (even encourages) what OP is doing.

Thanks for mentioning and noticing it. I like the original idea (one of those that I thought myself doing back during the pandemic), but seeing it is just a wrapper around another source made it lost its magic, at least for me.

If it introduces more people to Wikipedia's excellent Current Events portal, then I'm glad it exists.

TIL - actually I like the wikipedia's tree like formatting much more than the mirror options mentioned in this thread.

Wikipedia needs money?

This is completely BS. What is he showing here? That a static copy of wikipedia "news"[0] is faster than a full featured news website. Is this just a contrived ad? My news aggregator also achieves 100% performance[1] but I don't dare to use that info to make such a irresponsible claim. Is also some orders of magnitude easier to be a news curator than a news producer.

[0] Is hard to consider local news like "Two policemen and a polio vaccinator are shot dead by gunmen on motorcycles in North Waziristan, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan" relevant news.

[1] https://gtmetrix.com/reports/www.slowernews.com/XOAMfY1i/

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