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https://readability.com/ https://readability.com/

• a3n 11y ago
  I run my browser at half my laptop's screen width. It's ironic that I have to turn off styles (Firefox: View/Page Style/No Style) so that I can read the page without horizontal scrolling back and forth. But more fundamentally, as a free service, I wonder how they can afford the server and storage resources needed for this (it's not in their FAQ). I'm not a member, so I don't know what their logged in pages look like, nor their readability-ized pages. But I doubt if advertising is paying the bills. The next obvious thing is some kind of analytics. "People who read this also read that." Sold to whoever can use such information. Or maybe it's a charitable effort. Or maybe they expect to be sold, I don't know. I'm not bashing them at all, but I am becoming much more critical, privacy-wise, of everything I touch on the web. I'm always asking, subconsciously at least, "what's in it for them?" Similarly, I'm looking up at my toolbar, and wondering what's in it for the people who made my addons for Ghostery, Disconnect and UBo. They would seem to be sitting on a goldmine of analytics. Dunno. But my web experience feels much more adversarial today than it did in the early nineties.