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Instapaper is going independent
- jxdxbx 8y agoI've been using Instapaper since the day it came out on the app store (never saw the point of the web version). Pinterest has been the worst owner! There used to be periodic improvements and updates. There's not even a full black mode for iPhone X! In the old days Instapaper would have been the first out of the gate with little features like that. Let's home there's an improvement. Luckily the service is still better than Pocket, which has unusable pagination, no ability to sort by length, and is generally just a cluttered mess.
- bonaldi 8y agoWas GDPR so terrifying that they had to sell it off?
- jakobegger 8y agoBackground Info for users outside of Europe: Instapaper has been geoblocked for European users for the last two months.
- rjvbk 8y agoIs it still blocked? It works here, but some geo DBs locate me in Russia because my ISP bought the IP address I use from there recently.
- bumholio 8y agoStill blocked for me. C'mon now, I get it as an emergency measure, I get it when LA Times does it since they aren't interested in European visitors; but this here is just plain lazy.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- chmars 8y agoNobody is really GDPR-ready, however, data privacy law is about being good enough. Yep, there isn’t full compliance ever. Instapaper looks very desperate with its GDPR-lockout of EU users. I guess the EU market is mostly lost …
- adtac 8y agoIf only the EU gave these companies a 2-year headstart to become compliant. Oh wait.
- mherdeg 8y agoYeah it was weird -- I remember very clearly reading about GDPR in early 2016 and then I also remember it appearing in people's development plans in late 2017/early 2018 and seeming like it was a big surprise.
- briandear 8y agoEven if you are 100% compliant, that doesn't protect you from getting sued or having to answer potentially hundreds of thousands of inquiries. The compliance risk is what's dangerous and challenging, not the actual "fixing" of systems. Many people in these comments seem to have no experience with business risk management. They think it's as simple as "just make data deletable." But, the technical side is the easy part. It's the getting sued part that's potentially catastrophic. Even if you "win" you still have spent thousands or tens of thousands defending. And even if you do win, you could be sued again the very next day. GDPR is more than just deleting data, it's a massive business risk to even companies doing it "right."
- flukus 8y ago> Even if you are 100% compliant, that doesn't protect you from getting sued or having to answer potentially hundreds of thousands of inquiries. You can be sued at essentially anytime for any reason, long before the GDPR. If you're worried about a GDPR lawsuit ruining your company then you're either violating the GDPR or you should have shut down already because the risk was already there.
- denzil_correa 8y agoIt redirects to : https://www.instapaper.com/gdpr https://www.instapaper.com/gdpr
- mtmail 8y agoMy home computer (in the center of Europe) is not blocked, but I see that as ip2country mapping issue (in my favor). That would explain the couple of "works for me" reports I've seen on Twitter. Still useless to me because I can't safe URLs at work or on mobile.
- corobo 8y agoIt also works for me at the office because the connection there has native IPv6 No luck at home with Virgin Media's "ehhh we'll look at IPv6 eventually"
- msh 8y agoAnd only gave the users one days notice before locking them out. I will never again trust instapaper, independent company or not.
- bad_user 8y agoPocket (https://getpocket.com https://getpocket.com) isn’t blocked and is now owned by Mozilla. I’m an European and a heavy Pocket user and it had no downtime. That Instapaper blocks EU users is fishy to say the least. What it means is that they are probably selling user data and cannot keep doing it without informing users of it. I can’t express how grateful I am for GDPR.
- Permit 8y ago>What it means is that they are probably selling user data and cannot keep doing it without informing users of it. It seems like you'd have to willfully misunderstand the requirements of GDPR to argue that the only reason for non-compliance is that 'they are probably selling user data'. However, if you can instead imagine that two employees might not want to manually manage GDPR requests for a userbase of two million users (in their free time, no less!) then you might come up with other likely reasons for non-compliance. For example, I wouldn't want to architect a backup system that deletes user info from my backups whenever I receive a GDPR request.
- bad_user 8y agoIf the service can’t delete a couple hundred links, representing private interests I might want to erase, then it’s not a service I’d like to use. Deleting my data is an ability that I want in all the services that I use. Also I do know what the GDPR requirements are, as I’ve been in charge of GDPR compliance. While we may disagree on how easy or hard it is to implement it, there’s nothing in it that’s not common sense, which shouldn’t need a law for companies to implement. Tip: if you’re doing backups, encrypt them with the user’s key and on deletion just throw away the key. Not rocket science.
- bcoates 8y agoI don't think that helps unless I don't back up the user's key too.
- draw_down 8y agoSure, but why should we believe that’s related to the sale?
- clapsclaps 8y agoI was a hardcore Instapaper premium user from the early beginnings. Nothing stopped me for continuing using the app, BUT the GDPR. When you have duties of protect user's data and you don't comply with it, I'm done. Months ago I changed to Pocket (Mozilla owned) and I'm ok with that. I missed little stuff like the text render and other minimum things. Just wanted to say that because protecting user's privacy is also a business model.
- mstolpm 8y agoAt least, they have burned a lot of trust from once loyal EU users. And the GDPR "shutdown" for EU citizens with no given warning was a topic in every major newspaper here, not only computer/internet focused sites and papers.
- joshenders 8y agoBurned a lot of trust? How is this a violation of trust? If a company can’t meet their GDPR obligations under this law, EU citizens have successfully voiced through legislation that they don’t want these businesses operating in the EU. You can’t have your tea and drink it too. This is a consequence.
- ergothus 8y ago1) But why can't they meet their GDPR obligations? Are they doing something they've not been up front about? 2) Giving (reportedly) one day notice that they are shutting down access is definitely a trust hit. They should have known long before that. I don't use Instapaper and I'm not in the EU, but those of these points are raised elsewhere in this thread, and both seem valid concerns in terms of "trust" regardless of whether you approve/disapprove of the GDPR.
- xienze 8y agoIt's a bit of a mischaracterization to label US companies that punt on GDPR with the "well they're obviously shitty companies that wantonly toss around their users's personal information, so good riddance" brush. As someone very deeply involved with a medium-sized company's move to GDPR compliance, I can confirm that there are about a million different legal opinions about what GDPR means and it's causing a LOT of anxiety at all levels of the company. Whether that's right or wrong, that's an experience been echoed all over the country by companies big and small. And that's not even getting into the seismic shift involved in making sure that a "delete me" request is properly distributed to all downstream consumers of data, assuming that we even know who all those groups in the company are. And is this service my app uses GDPR-compliant? It goes on and on. It's not at all surprising to me that some companies are just punting on it because they're terrified that they will somehow get knocked for millions of dollars over something like that.
- msh 8y agoDeleted, was overly negative.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- brad0 8y agoFrom what I’ve seen this is usually what happens when the parent company wants to close the service down. First they spin off the service into its own company then the company shuts down because of a lack of income. Is that what’s happening here? What’s the name of this process?
- chubot 8y agoCounterexample: Reddit was acquired by Conde Nast and then spun out. Although honestly I am not a fan of the recent UI changes, which are presumably done for monetization. An explanation would be nice as I am mystified. I guess a redesign is a way to make more room for ads without making it completely obvious.
- whalesalad 8y agoInstapaper is an anomaly. It's been passed around like a stepchild since birth. I think there is a perceived-value fallacy around the number of people who use it or the intelligence that can be gleaned from knowing what people are bookmarking... but it looks like no one has been able to crack that nut. Every few years it gets passed to someone else. Nothing really ever changes... it just gets a new owner.
- dejv 8y agoIt would be great to get insider info on why Pinterest thought it is great acquisition target. I never really understand the point of this deal.
- soneca 8y agoIt changes. When Pinterest acquired, it offered all features for free for all users (it used to be a freemium model). I hope it doesnt change back, but I understand if they do. It's fair.
- paulcole 8y ago> It's been passed around like a stepchild since birth Didn't Marco create it and run it independently for over 5 years?
- dejv 8y agoI am glad it happened and I hope they are going to find sustainable model. I've been using alternatives for past two months as Instapaper was blocked in EU and all those alternatives are horrible. Good luck guys.
- chipotle_coyote 8y agoI admit I'm rather hoping they go back to something like the pre-Pinterest "Premium" model, or perhaps better yet, just charge everyone a modest amount across the board.
- dejv 8y ago+1 Instagram is (well it was) my everyday core app, something I can't really live without. I am paying like 30 USD/year for RSS reader and I would gladly pay same amount just to be sure the app is going to be alive in few years.
- driverdan 8y agoIf you've tried Pocket why do you think it's horrible?
- dejv 8y agoMostly text crawling and rendering. Sometimes the articles are turncated (say half of article is missing), saving from pastebin doesn't work at all (my favorite way to save long forum posts). Also text rendering is not really good: in Instapaper you get nicely fullscreen text, not really true for Pocket: they keep too much text formating (colors, sometimes also some layouts elements) and quite often I am getting articles that are cut the way that one line contains just one word (and sometimes just few letters out of word). Last thing is bloat, which is just minor issue: I don't care about trending posts, best offs and recomendation.
- subpixel 8y agoI can only imagine they dropped the $2.99/mo fee when Pinterest bought it b/c the numbers were inconsequential. Now that they will need income, they must be betting on the numbers being robust enough to support a team of 5. But I'm genuinely not sure if I'd pony up when they start charging again.
- chmars 8y agoI am fine with paying a reasonable subscription fee for Instapaper. Privacy – if guaranteed – has its value too. (At the moment, Instapaper blocks EU users because it’s obvious violating the GDPR, that’s troublesome …)
- soneca 8y agoI used to be a free plan user and happy with it. The paid features (search I guess) were fine, but unnessential. If they come back with the same feature distribution I would keep being a free user.
- corobo 8y agoExcellent news! Not been able to use it since GDPR came into play, assumed it was down to slow large company -itis. Peeved by it the point I was planning out my own replacement product for Instapaper. Hopefully everything is back on track soon
- m-localhost 8y agoSelf-hosted Wallabag instance is great. I collect article there first, sync them to pocket as a backup. (Wallabag RSS->IFTTT->Pocket) https://wallabag.org/en https://wallabag.org/en
- corobo 8y agoDoes it send articles to Kindle? I had a look around and in an attempt to pre-empt - no, I'm not jailbreaking my kindle
- m-localhost 8y agoThere are attempts with some serverside voodoo, but it doesn't look like it's possible.
- ommunist 8y agoShall you start to serve the EU customers, like you did before GDPR nonsense?
- nvr219 8y agoShould I switch to Instapaper from Evernote?
- djhworld 8y agoI stopped using instapaper a few years ago, I found their HTML parsing didn't play well with articles that had code in or used <pre> tags. Might be much better these days but I can't try it out again because they've blocked anyone in the EU
- bambax 8y agoSame here.
- reality_czech 8y agoExpect an insta-shutdown in a few months.
- tschellenbach 8y agoAnybody know any good APIs or projects that help you get the article content for a given url? There is of course Mercury API, but are there any alternatives?
- soared 8y agoIs this what you mean - a bookmarklet that gets rid of all the clutter? https://readable.io/ https://readable.io/
- welanes 8y agoTry Lanes - https://lanes.io https://lanes.io. It combines tasks, bookmarks and video annotations and uses the Mercury API under the hood. Disclaimer: I made this. We've nailed down tasks and now we're focusing on making the read-later/bookmark feature top class. Articles are highlight-able and you can reference articles as tasks (because 'read this article' is a essentially a task) - we find this helps you read more, as most bookmark managers are essentially "here's a thing I like enough to save but will probably never read". Give it a try.
- david_ar 8y agohttps://github.com/mozilla/readability https://github.com/mozilla/readability
- k1m 8y agoSomething I've worked on: http://fivefilters.org/content-only/ http://fivefilters.org/content-only/ Actually uses the original Insapaper site-specific extraction rules (they were hidden after Marco sold it I think) which can now be found here: https://github.com/fivefilters/ftr-site-config/ https://github.com/fivefilters/ftr-site-config/ We get contributions from users of Wallabag (good open source alternative to Instapaper/Pocket). It also uses the original Arc90 Readability code ported to PHP to figure out where the article content is without any knowledge of the site. We sell the latest versions (AGPL licensed) but older versions go up in our public repository: https://bitbucket.org/fivefilters/full-text-rss https://bitbucket.org/fivefilters/full-text-rss
- raajg 8y agoI use instapaper solely for its 'highlight' feature. Strange that other read-it-later apps don't provide it (at least in their free versions).
- welanes 8y agoLanes (https://lanes.io https://lanes.io) has highlights - although articles are secondary to tasks, for now. Diigo does highlights too, and Feedly. Agree that highlights are a brilliant feature - the next natural step after saving an article is saving the best bits of that article.
- dfabulich 8y agohttps://twitter.com/alexeheath/status/1018903893814775810 https://twitter.com/alexeheath/status/1018903893814775810 > Some clarification from a Pinterest spokesperson: The two employees Pinterest brought on from the Instapaper acquisition will continue working at Pinterest and run Instapaper independently on the side. So sounds like Instapaper wasn’t really working out inside of Pinterest.
- onyva 8y agoI’ll stick with Mozilla’s Pocket for privacy, durability and integration with Firefox, emacs etc.
- andrepd 8y agoWhy would anybody use instapaper over pocket?
- aytekin 8y agoYears of saved articles.
- m_fayer 8y agoBecause, at least while instapaper was still maintained, it really had a focus on empowering the serious reader and getting out of their way. While pocket seems to be more interested in adding social media elements and generally being a "platform."
- twblalock 8y agoI prefer the Instapaper interface.
- amatix 8y agoInstapaper sends weekly digests of new articles direct to my Kindle.
- zulrah 8y agoInstapaper is still not available to users in EU. It's been to months. I started to use Pocket because of this and now I don't think I'm coming back.
- bthdonohue 8y agoHey zulrah, we are working on GDPR and plan to have the service available in the EU as soon as possible. Hope to have you back on Instapaper when we become available in the EU again. Really sorry for the inconvenience.
- TillE 8y agoIsn't that exactly what you said a couple months ago? At this point it's pretty concerning that you still have nothing to say publicly except "we're working on it", no detail, no schedule, no nothing.
- kevingadd 8y agoWell, considering there are apparently only two people working on Instapaper, it's not hard to come up with reasons why it might take more than two months or why they might not be conducting a detailed PR campaign about it
- corobo 8y agoShort of selling everyone's reading habits to the lowest bidder.. what on earth needs changing? Edit: To clarify I'm not saying they do that, I just can't see what part of GDPR they're having trouble with
- oh_sigh 8y agoPerhaps that's because you are not a part of the corporation. Why would you expect to have insight into their operations?
- jasaloo 8y agoI'm just curious b/c I use Instapaper but am surprised that it's risen through the ranks here. Are people bumping in this b/c of interest in Pintrest, or b/c they find Instapaper an amazingly useful app? If the latter, what else are you all using it for other than saving long articles on plane flights w/o wifi?
- andygates 8y agoI imagine their GDPR failure will be a reason it's interesting.
- max_im 8y agoI'd imagine it might be a financial liability in light of the Pinterest IPO that was pushed to 2019
- tomashertus 8y agoI have an off-topic question: After seeing their brand new buildings in SF in SOMA area, I’ve been wondering about the Pinterest’s success lately. Does anyone have any resources talking about their current trends, numbers and their business model? Honestly, I lack the context, because I was so annoyed by their spam on the Google’s search result pages that I started to use queries with -site:pinterest.com. So, to me this is completely irrelevant website.