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Comment by rightbyte | Hacker News Reader

Honestly, I miss teletext so much. I was my primary news source until it was in practice abandoned.

It was so nice. No pictures at all. Just text of different sizes and block art. And the wait time made you read in order once and not 'doomscrool'.

The limited text length forced the writers to keep it short.

My point being, one way coms are underrated.

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In The Netherlands the teletext system of the Dutch public broadcasting system does still exist and has a loyal following. It's also available on the web [1] and as a mobile app.

Even nowadays I still use it a lot myself for a quick catch up of the news. Some of the benefits: - Since space is limited, the news stories are ultra short and to the point - No ads - No "related stories" - No toxic comment sections - No misleading 'thumbnails'

It doesn't take longer than a minute or two to catch up on the most important stories.

[1] https://teletekst-data.nos.nl/webplus?p=100

For Americans, the closest would be:

https://text.npr.org

https://lite.cnn.io

gopher://magical.fish/1/news

same as above, but for proxied to the web:

https://gopher.floodgap.com/gopher/gw?a=gopher%3A%2F%2Fmagic...

If you are so inclined, ARRL transmits amateur radio news bulletins daily on a regular schedule[1] in the USA. The bulletins can be received with any shortwave radio that supports SSB (single sideband modulation) and decoded with a soundcard and appropriate software. Obviously, it's considerably different content, but if you are looking more for the experience of receiving and decoding a radio text bulletin, you can certainly have it! Many other teletext services[2] exist as well.

[1] https://www.arrl.org/digital-transmissions

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_teletext_services

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