I'm really glad to hear that. This lightweight design is great.
Maybe it shouldn't be for the news sites only. I make http://wordsandbuttons.online in this spirit, too. It's not text only, it has interactive plots, and quizzes, and everything. But the core idea: give people only what they come for, - works well for it as well. Since the pages are in tenths of KB, I pay for the cheapest hosting possible and it still holds "slashdot effect".
Definitely. Would love to see more sites embrace this. I was glad to see that NPR has a text-only news site too.
Of course the benefit of your project is you get to pull from multiple news sources instead of just one, so that broadens the information available.
Still sad to see that on CNN's lite site the analytics js file itself is ~7 times larger than the page. 52KB of analytics for a 7KB page seems crazy to me. Still better than forcing users to download an entire copy of React for a text page, haha :)
Thanks, I've been looking for something like this for a while!
Hope you don't mind a few additional suggestions/feature requests!
- Single key scroll up/down a page of text (can work around it on my laptop keyboard with fn-down but would prefer not to have to use two hands).
- Maybe customizable key bindings? (i.e, I'm used to hitting space to scroll down a page of text, and don't need to open the story in a browser so often)
- Filters to view only the top stories (I use this[1] site a lot for that).
So the title basically tells the focus of the site. A quality social news site without cat pictures etc and with a very easy submit system (a firefox addon). It's a bit like a hybrid between stumbleupon and hacker news/reddit.
I'm planning to add at least chrome extension later if the site goes as planned..
At the moment the site is in it's beginning but all comments and suggestions are welcome :-)
Here are 2 screenshots that show the addon (the panel at the bottom only appears after you move mouse over the vote buttons)
This looks terrific. It seems to be exactly the service I have been looking for. I too found myself easily distracted and addicted to my phone when browsing the news. To help combat my addiction, I wrote a script that'll parse my favorite news websites and email them to my Kindle. It's been "life transforming". I can now read my news addiction and distraction free. Plus, I have always preferred reading walls of text on an e-ink display, especially before going to bed. The only downside of my approach is that it takes a lot of time to write my scripts. Every website is different and some websites don't provide APIs. For example, the WSJ provides no APIs to consume their content even as a paying member. So I find myself resorting to selenium to do the parsing work for me. There are many other websites and blogs that I'd like to have sent to my kindle, but I dread the effort needing to do that. So I'd happily pay a small fee, such as your site, to have this work done for me.
I love this, I like how it's not image heavy. It also seems to aggregate all the sites I like to read :)
I really like the responsive multi-column, as someone who increases the text on webpages all the time , i find a lot of a more shinier things out there don't like 150%, your site scales nicely.
Love it! It feels like a glorified RSS viewer, but with much more thought put into what people actually want to read and know on the 21st century. I would probably put much more thought and concentration into reading the news if I'd have a page like that with my own news feed that I usually read.
Founder here. Thanks for submitting it.
The main idea is pretty simple. I wanted to be able to read the news without being agitated every time I do so.
Clickbait, paywalls, autoplaying videos - the news are a mess. So my friends and I created a text-only news reader that looks like google reader used to, but also a) it filters out most of the things that are obviously junk, and b) it gives the user as much control as possible to customize what ends up in the feed. And yes that mean nutrition labels!
P.S. By the way, we're up on PH now too: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/otherweb
Looks really clean.I built something similar http://newsofworld.org. It's not an app but a real time responsive site.Click on category , country etc. and you'll get news as it comes in.
Site owner here. A few thoughts:
- HN has been pretty hostile towards Summly and how it is "trivial" or "basic" to create an app that summarizes the news. I've always wanted to try. All of the negativity actually motivated me to think "Why can't I make something similar."
- This has been an incredible learning experience for me.
- Feedback is more than welcome.
The site looks great. A welcome change from Large news articles on your face. Great for skimming through the headlines when you are late for your morning classes.(my use case). If you add more general categories I will definitely use it.
Love it. Would love to read my news this way. I find this much more intuitive and antural than Twitter. You have a hot product here OP, congratulations.
I've been dreaming about a site like this for years. Casual newsreaders need context given to them in a friendly way so they can properly engage with the content. Vox.com explainers are one thing but this is even better. Kudos on launching!!
What I like:
- the ability to EASILY select what news sources I want news from
- Rss feeds for well .. ALMOST EVERYTHING! I live in Google Reader for about 2 hours a day so this is great
- Slick design, but as some people said yes, very close to NYTimes (Actually thought it was for a split second before I blinked again)
What I don't like / other critique:
- The up/down arrows for the "sources" made me think it was to show more, not to hide it. I think a minimize/maximize style box which is more natural for any user would work better
Great service, but I'll still use reddit for finding all the other kind of news. That's the one thing I kind of hate, there's no PERFECT thing out there. Reddit is great for all the various news, fun articles, even random pictures at times and this is great for getting good stories from quality sources, but then you miss out on those fun, obscure extras reddit picks up on. Find some way to get that, and you will win me (and probably others) over. :-)
Interesting project and appreciate the simple / brutalist layout.
A couple questions:
1) That's a lot of news! Just browsing the headlines would take a long time. Any ideas on how to make it more compact? I'd definitely be interested in a site that could give me 15-30 high quality links per day across a diverse spectrum of content and sources.
2) I personally appreciate the discussion aspect of HN and wouldn't enjoy just visiting the links alone. Any thoughts around including a link back to the original HN discussion?
I wonder if people would be interested in an HN style site, but one that is fantastically designed, and scales to all sorts of media (phones, tablets, desktop). I think that's what it needs.
You can't simply download the news.yc, make a new colour header, give it a name, and then set it off into the net.
I think you need to distinguish yourself and really just use news.yc as a base to build on.
Maybe it shouldn't be for the news sites only. I make http://wordsandbuttons.online in this spirit, too. It's not text only, it has interactive plots, and quizzes, and everything. But the core idea: give people only what they come for, - works well for it as well. Since the pages are in tenths of KB, I pay for the cheapest hosting possible and it still holds "slashdot effect".
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