Show HN: Summaries of interesting content, written by people
tldr.io
tldr.io
Though, really, I would like to try the service out without having to drag/drop a bookmarklet and then going off to another website and then clicking tl;dr. Can't I just put in a URL to try it out? Or provide a demo URL for us to try out?
It is not yet possible to try the service without the bookmarklet, but here is an example of a summary we created for the video of Anders Hejlsberg on Typescript that is on the frontpage so that you can see what it looks like : http://api.tldr.io/tldrs/506aee4ec8f814a2370004fa
Thanks for the feedback!
http://tldr.io/iframe/iframe.html?url=http%3A%2F%2Fblogmaver...
I had the same feeling, but then I clicked tl;dr on the page where they show you how to add the bookmarklet !
A demo without having to login/install anything extra would be nice.
But my thought was that I will gladly pay someone 10$ a month, to scan through HN instead of me, and send me summaries of things that I'm interested in (e.g. web frameworks, JavaScript, Scala, CSS3/HTML5 etc)
Here is a feature that Wikipedia can't have for ethical reasons, and you might be able to get away with:
- user clicks on bookmarklet (hopefully a chrome / ff extension soon)
- no tl;dr
- user has a button saying "ask someone to summarize it"
- now you either hire some good shorthand writer, or crowd source it and cut a percentage of the transaction
another way is to say - the first 3 hours of an article's peek (e.g. you do it actively for each front page article in HN for a start) you charge 1$ to see the tl;dr version of it , after 3 hours, it's free for all.
I think a lot of people here would love not having to read everything just to find the point or understand if this is really relevant
I think you have a huge market here, saving time is a very important service nowadays, especially when there is so much good content wrapped with a lot of needless, but mandatory decorative language.
We've thought about it more in terms of volume of consumption for now but are going to look into the users' patterns to see what fits them best. We also thought about paid mobile apps, or plugins for content creators if we can prove them it drives more traffic to their content.
edit: found it! "Summly", looks like their site is down :(
He says he is currently working in stealth mode and will launch a product soon, and you can be sure we will be among the first to test it to see if our hypothesis is correct :)
Given that the majority of sites will not likely have a tl;dr I am unlikely to click the bookmarklet every time I open a web page.
By the way, a slightly more elaborated version would be much appreciated. I'm thinking of
- A button/notification which changes color when there is a TL;DR available
- Something sidebar-like
- Better community integration
- This is indeed planned, and as you can see in the comments you're not the only one thinking that! It cannot be done with a bookmarklet but we will release Chrome and Firefox extensions that will have this feature.
- I don't get what you mean by "something sidebar-like", are you talking of a pannel on the top of your screen automatically displaying the summary if it exists?
- Yep, building an active community around tldr.io will likely be key to its success. We are thinking hard on how to do it, and if you have any ideas or suggestion they are more than welcome
Regarding the community, It wasn't in the line of "building a community as a key to success" but rather give profiles some more strength, use something karma-like to reward users who work, the ability to score TL;DRs and allow multiple per page, etc.
Overall though, it's a really good idea and I am interested to see how you flesh it out.
This is definitely a very interesting space. We ARE moving towards bite-sized pieces of information anyways, and you guys seem to be riding on this trend.
Best of luck, and looking forward to how this will turn out!
Also I love the hover feature on the bookmarklet when you first see it.
Thank you.
I, too, needed something like this forever. Every time I see a long article, I complain about the lack of a tl;dr.
Unfortunately, I am not so optimistic about humans creating the content. You guys have a really, really hard job. Creating the right tools is easy. Convincing people to create tl;dr's is hard.
I'm really curious about how you are planning to solve this problem.
I really do hope that you'll succeed though : ]
Edit: Also, for me, this tool is great for articles that are new. Assuming you don't have enough contributors at the moment, after seeing a few articles that don't have tl;dr, I probably use the tool less and less everyday. Until I forget about it. I'm sure I am not the only one.
You're completely right, the real challenge starts now, we need to find a way to get humans to contribute, because right now you have too much probability of getting a "summary not created yet" message when clicking on the bookmarklet. We already have some ideas we want to explore, if you do have some please tell us it would help a lot!
What would be awesome is if you could somehow automate summarization using NLP. Check out condensr.com. They are able to summarize restaurant reviews...might not be at the same quality level as your current summaries but it came out of research from MIT & could be useful to you.
Humans are so much better than algorithms at summarizing content and we really want to focus on quality rather than quantity for now. We want to become a platform for the content that people deem worthy of being summarized and are hopeful that the overall quality will therefore be astounding. As such we are focusing on building a community of excited contributors.
I'll definitely checkout condensr.com to see if it can help at all though!
From a business standpoint, are there maybe certain types of content that just aren't viable to "summarize?" Would it be better to tailor your service towards certain other types of content? Just my thoughts.
The people that won't read the full article after reading the summary probably would have just bounced or skimmed the article extremely quickly.
You're right that there are probably certain types of contents that lend themselves to be summarized better than others. We're still figuring this one out by observing what our users and experimenting with what we summarize.
I'm no expert on any of this; just a college student with a interest in a lot of things. But growth is what will make or break this as a viable service. Duolingo is successful because it is an incentive to learn another language.
The incentive to summarize something that is difficult is there; but if people are not willing to read the whole thing in the first place then they probably aren't willing to summarize it. The problem is to solve this by providing at least some form of incentive or general interest in it. That requires some key thinking.
Thanks for your input!
The web is a big place, so realistically there will almost never be a tl;dr waiting, for at least the first year of this service, which means the bookmarklet is effectively a "create tl;dr" button.
You are also right about the fact that the bookmarklet is currently a "create tl;dr" button, since we have so little of the web covered. For now we can provide you with tldrs this way: - You can follow @tldrio on twitter or like the "tldr" page on facebook - We are planning on summarizing all (at least most) of the articles from some well known blogs such as AVC and bothsidesofthetable - We are thinking of a newsletter with the latest hot tldrs - If you have any other ideas please share them !
(Hint: ignore the video-specific text and paste in a blog post or article URL.)
Couple of examples: http://www.streamliner.co/s/S2C72QTZ/booster-camera-video-of... (video) and http://www.streamliner.co/r/eErbi/always-be-skeptical-of-nut... (text)
We rolled out with video initially because of text-stripping issues and the extreme low likelihood of users installing a bookmarklet/extension. Building a community of engaged trustworthy summarizers is also very hard.
Good luck!
You might want to put a list of the day's top tl;drs on your landing page, or def. under "want some". When you roll over the title of the story, you get a floating tl;dr.
This would encourage skeptical users to do what you want them to do (drag that link up to the toolbar).
It should automatically stick the tldr on the page if I installed the bookmark, and a tldr exists.
Any particular reason you guys went with Express/Mongo?
Your tutorial made me smile! How rare is that?