10 ms·

Unbearable news

423 points by zuhayeer 7y ago

kuroguro 7y ago
+1 for pun :)
colinmegill 7y ago
CNN exists in the form suggested here. Posted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21798835 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21798835
- _nothing 7y ago
  The 3rd paragraph mentions the text-only versions of both CNN and NPR.
- melzarei 7y ago
  > I'm more than ready and willing to pay for a text-only version of every news website like the ones provided by NPR and CNN. The article already mentions that.
  - anthk 7y ago
    Get an RSS reader.
- js2 7y ago
  NPR too. https://text.npr.org/ https://text.npr.org/
viburnum 7y ago
OMG this made me laugh so hard.
fortran77 7y ago
Or go back to the original form, but delivered digitally: a mix of news, editorial content, and paid ads, all served from the same server, with no moving banners, pop ups, sticky headers, third party servers, scroll-alongs, click-to-read more, etc.
- anthk 7y ago
  This. Small unobstrusive ads, with a custom CSS so they are either for mobile or PC. No flash, no popus, no moving banners. Just a small square with a picture/promotion.
johnobrien1010 7y ago
If anyone in the comments can figure out a sustainable business model for news that doesn't involve bloat-inducing ads or unrealistic expectations of consumers paying subscription fees, I'll Venmo them (money to buy) a beer.
- lemagedurage 7y ago
  Start a counter movement and make dry, accurate news, with a humoristic undertone (ha-ha this is barely interesting, but it's accurate!)?
  - haggy 7y ago
    Posting content with little to no validation of fact isn't a valid form of journalism and isn't any kind of "counter movement" IMO. That's called a gossip column or tabloid.
- lawn 7y ago
  I don't understand why paying for single articles isn't more popular. It's the same for streaming services: I should be able to pay for that one TV-series I want to watch, or that one movie that's only available on that one streaming service I don't have.
  - mynameisvlad 7y ago
    I mean, you can do the latter already. You can buy a season or a single episode of a show on iTunes, Amazon, etc. You can also rent or buy single movies across many different platforms. It’s just absurdly expensive compared to a streaming service. This is partly due to legacy pricing (I don’t think the price of a movie or TV show has gone down in many years, and all the providers charge the same) but also because I’m sure a lot of revenue for subscription services comes from people who buy the subscription but don’t use the service.
  - the8472 7y ago
    Transactions (micro or not) have wall-time, monetary and psychological overhead. If you split this among dozens of items and providers it only gets worse. Paying per article may make sense for in-depth analysis, investigative journalism and other large pieces. But for the daily news it's probably just too small a unit.
generalpass 7y ago
Firefox has solved this problem, at least for me: Ctrl+Alt+R
- sjnair96 7y ago
  Cmd + Shift + R on Safari/MacOS I believe.
sdan 7y ago
Nowadays I can't even go to news websites so I get my news primarily from HN, Twitter, or Reddit, where news is condensed and I rarely get to see the other point of view (in other words, good journalism). Obviously I understand they need to make money, but at the same time most of the news articles even posted to HN have some limit to reading (even with JS blocked). Maybe a student pass would be good for students like me. I don't think I'll have a problem paying for them... but then I'll have to manage each of these subscription. It would be nice to have a Netflix for news (to pay for all news subscriptions in one go).
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- anthk 7y ago
  A lot of articles with "mandatory" JS can be read just fine with Lynx/Links. Better with Links -g.
burlesona 7y ago
What a zinger at the end. Point well-made. :)
danso 7y ago
> I suggest they become more creative with their business model or at least try to see the value in moderation. The vast majority of news sites were free from the get-go, with the NYT being one of the first major websites to put up a website [0]. That's roughly 20 years of giving free content out on the web. The author is (partially) right that "the article text is all anyone really cares about". The thing is, plaintext is absurdly easy to disseminate and copy. for most of the history of newspapers, ads were themselves a reason to get the newspaper, especially for coupons and classified ads. Of course, print ads, like print pages, were much more deliberately and better designed than what we experience today online. [0] https://www.niemanlab.org/2016/01/20-years-ago-today-nytimes-com-debuted-on-line-on-the-web/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2016/01/20-years-ago-today-nytimes...
- DrScump 7y ago
  The San Jose Mercury-News and WSJ both had full-content websites before NYT. The Mercury-News even had a selective email feed of wire service content called Newshound. For $5 a month, you got up to 5 "hounds" (sets of search criteria), and every article matching your criteria was individually emailed to you, whether a wire story, a syndicate story, or one internally generated within Knight-Ridder. This was in 1993 if not earlier yet.
  - danso 7y ago
    Yeah definitely the Merc News was a pioneer on the web and in many other ways: https://archives.cjr.org/feature/the_newspaper_that_almost_seized_the_future.php https://archives.cjr.org/feature/the_newspaper_that_almost_s... It's hard to imagine now, but papers like the Merc News – thanks to basically having a virtual monopoly – were basically printing presses for money. They most definitely had the capital to fund ventures that could save the company, such as their own Craigslist or Groupon. And I believe they and other news companies did blow a good chunk of money on failed tech ventures. In hindsight, they should've continued throwing money at greenfield projects, since just about any longshot success would've been better than the current state of things. But it's too easy and reductive to say, "Well the news industry should've just invented Google/Facebook if it really wanted to survive".
XCSme 7y ago
I was actually looking at the source-code of the page first to see if it has any CSS (to my surprise it actually has a stylsheet with only two rules, for performance reasons it would have been a lot better just to have it directly in a style tag). Once there I was wondering what's up with all this text and thought the entire site was a single-page-application where you could read all his articles :)
- mastazi 7y ago
  Regarding the style of the site (this made me chuckle): https://zainamro.com/brutalist https://zainamro.com/brutalist
- djsumdog 7y ago
  Hmm .. also some google analytics at the bottom.0 under the book I still use log parsers (awstats and matomo) .. really am just interested in number of unique/non-crawler visitors and don't care about the rest really.
taurath 7y ago
Not sure that speed is really the factor that matters. That content loads quickly and would exacerbate that there’s frequently little worthwhile content. The internet has stretched communication to be a nation and worldwide thing. Eventually we’ll figure out that local concerns matter more - until then we’ll have to suffer through some really bad media that doesn’t affect any of our lives while most of our communities crumble due to lack of attention.
- jordanpg 7y ago
  Agree. Focusing on web application performance is entirely beside the point. Most modern news sites are typical modern web applications. The issue is that the value of the words themselves has changed, both in the economic sense as well as culturally, not to mention the problem of the erosion of trust.
msvan 7y ago
The problem is that revenue from paying subscribers is not enough. For most newspapers, ads are needed to run a profitable digital business. Ads cannot be removed for paying subscribers, since paying subscribers are precisely who advertisers want to target. And if you want to display ads on the internet, you have to track people just like your competitors Google and Facebook do. > If news companies believe their core purpose is the dissemination of valuable information, it would make a lot of sense for them to provide a text-only static version of their website. I think most serious news companies think they have an important democratic mission. But at the end of the day, the economics have to make sense in order for quality journalism to exist in the first place.
- itronitron 7y ago
  you do not have to track people in order to display ads on the internet, you just incorporate the ad on the webpage, and whoever visits the page sees the ad
  - presumably 7y ago
    That sounds an awful lot like how ads in newspapers used to work... you put the ads in the paper, and whoever reads the paper sees the ads. So why do we let people tell us it can’t be done on the internet?
    - grmn 7y ago
      Computers cut the ads out of the page with no effort.
      - presumably 7y ago
        I don’t understand the relevance of that argument in this context. Computers can cut ads that do tracking out of the page with the same effort they can cut out anything else from the page. The difference is that ads without tracking remove the incentive for the user to block them. This is why people don’t cut ads out of the newspapers before reading. If the ads in newspapers were cameras, analogous to the tracking used in online advertising, you’d see people expend that effort. Just as you see people blocking ads online.
avenger123 7y ago
I think is somewhat of a solved problem via PressReader.com or it's variant. Depending on where you are getting access is free if you have a library card. Whether using it via browser or dedicated apps, it's as close to reading a real newspaper as can be. I particularly like the low-noise way of aggregating comments on articles. If there is comments with an article, a little indicator with the the number of comments is shown which can be clicked to read or ignore as desired.
projectileboy 7y ago
Ads are the monster, but developers are at least partly to blame. Most news and magazine sites could be served up as single pages, but instead are implemented as Javascript-heavy single page applications that load 50 different elements asynchronously, because it’s just so much more fun to build that than it is to write HTML and some CSS.
lettergram 7y ago
Maybe news papers should get back to their roots. Embed ads To users who don’t pay (don’t use google ads, embed them, like they used to working with companies). Further offer good coupons based on the users location and offer more coupons if they register for $3 / month subscription They should easily be able to make decent money this way.
friedman23 7y ago
The majority of news sites don't even make a profit despite how desperately they try to monetize every inch of their website.
kdkirsch 7y ago
Touché. I agree with you about user fatigue and have already changed news sites I check for this reason. Also it was very effective and rewarding demonstration for those of us who read to the end…of the article not the book.
yellow_lead 7y ago
News is unbearable, but not because of the format. Recognize that reading the news becomes habit because the news of the day becomes useless fast. I realize that this is a contradiction from me, a HackerNews reader, but I feel that part of the reason I come here is for inspiration - on new technologies, ideas, and new code (show HN). When I refer to news earlier, I'm talking about the stories and articles you might have found in a newspaper. They may contain inspiration but IMO are much more clickbaity and only written to fill space.
- Goladus 7y ago
  Agreed. I cannot stand news from major news sites. Good articles exist on smaller sites, where there is a legitimate attempt to cover something interesting in a thorough and well-researched manner (for example today I just read this: https://www.quantamagazine.org/to-decode-the-brain-scientists-automate-the-study-of-behavior-20191210/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/to-decode-the-brain-scientist...). But good articles on mainstream sites are rare. Most of them just make me angry. It used to be that I was just contemptuous of mainstream news and annoyed by bias. Apart from basic critical reasoning skills, back in 1998 I took a course on mass communication and learned a whole host of dirty tricks they use, and it's just gotten worse sense then. Now it's gotten to the point where it's maddening to see brazen deceptions promoted by mainstream sites, and just absolutely sickening and not a little bit terrifying to see this huge push toward "authoritative" news sources by the likes of YouTube and Facebook. So, given that there's so little I can do to stop the onslaught of deceptive, grossly misleading propaganda, I try to ignore it for the sake of my own emotional health. (That includes Hacker News, which I rarely visit anymore)
sgillen 7y ago
This was worth the read just to discover text.npr.org. Much better on mobile than their app for me.
thomasahle 7y ago
This is the first time I've noticed that you can no longer grab the scrollbar in Chrome (on Mac, visible when you scroll). If I can't drag the scroll bar to the bottom, what other ways are there to scroll all the way down fast? (Other than using another browser of course.)
- osamagirl69 7y ago
  Do macs still have end keys? Or page down at least?
- tedkx 7y ago
  Cmd + Down arrow works
- michaelmrose 7y ago
  - On a touch screen including a laptop you can scroll with your finger. - Space scrolls down several lines. - Scroll wheel - Up and down arrows scroll down a line at a time. - Page up and page down scroll down almost an entire page leaving what was the bottom-most section previously now the topmost section so that readers aren't disoriented or lost. Some apps let you configure this overlap size. - If you like vim you can add extensions to your browser and use j and k. - Home and End keys go to the very top and very end respectively. - Windows you can hold down middle mouse and drag to scroll. This isn't common in linux where people rely on middle mouse paste but is possible to configure https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/101867/make-mouse-movements-scroll-when-the-middle-button-is-held-down https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/101867/make-mouse-m... On Mac this is apparently called "smart scroll" https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/64115/enable-mouse-wheel-autoscroll-feature-in-chrome https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/64115/enable-mouse... If you just want it on chrome there is an extension https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/autoscroll/occjjkgifpmdgodlplnacmkejpdionan https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/autoscroll/occjjkg... In general however you do it grabbing the scrollbar in chrome is inefficient. You must grab a smallish UI element on the side of your screen. Your keyboard and mouse are always at hand.
  - anthk 7y ago
fallous 7y ago
The problem with the newspaper/news industry is that the value their audience places in the product is less than the value that advertisers place on access to that audience. Additionally the cost to generate and deliver that product exceeds what the audience is willing to pay and in many cases the value of that audience is low enough that even advertisers don't offer enough to cover the costs. Print newspaper subscription revenues were pretty much a break-even with the costs of delivery. That does not include the costs of paper, ink, printing press and associated personnel, or the cost of actually staffing and running a newsroom. A large part of both their revenue and audience attraction was the classifieds section, which was killed off by craigslist.
donohoe 7y ago
This is completely true and frustrating. It is possible to have fast loading web pages that incorporate decent levels of ads but making that change is hard. I track 60 or so news sites (mostly US and EU based) and as of today: On a "Fast 3G" connection the average article takes 45 seconds to load and is 3.8mb in size. Article Performance Leaderboard (Site): https://webperf.xyz/ https://webperf.xyz/ Data and Speed Tests: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1c1zhkdvWE0WvG84TT3Czekj0N-0sRUEBKO3c0Aeflxw/edit#gid=1790251413 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1c1zhkdvWE0WvG84TT3Cz... The Harry Potter ebook is 1.3MB in size yet we wrap 25kb text of a news article in all this unnecessary crap. It is all avoidable, even without AMP.
- chewxy 7y ago
  3 seconds is the fastest??! p.s: HN takes 950ms on 3G with no cache.
- JeanMarcS 7y ago
  The Tale of two cities is around 785kB, as demonstrated here !
- 3xblah 7y ago
  "The New Yorker The average load time is 102.127 seconds 431 requests" Author is asking for "text-only"; this of course only requires one request. curl -4o https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/05/25/high-gear-current-cinema-anthony-lane | tr -cd '\11\12\15\40-\176' | sed 's/</\ &/g;s// /g;s/ *//;' #tab |sed -n '/./{/sectionBreak/,/<\/div>/p;/figcaption/,/<\/figcaption/p;}' > a.htm firefox a.htm We do not need a complex, graphical browser that autoloads resources and runs Javascript in order to request or display a page of text-only content. "Reader Mode" is great but it is not available for every website. The time spent by the browser on those 431 requests is significant. What if a simpler client was used, e.g., time printf "GET /magazine/2015/05/25/high-gear-current-cinema-anthony-lane HTTP/1.1\r\nHost: www.newyorker.com\r\nConnection: close\r\n\r\n" |openssl s_client -connect www.newyorker.com:443 -ign_eof > /dev/null curl -4o /dev/null https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/05/25/high-gear-current-cinema-anthony-lane time tnftp -4o /dev/null https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/05/25/high-gear-current-cinema-anthony-lane time links -dump https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/05/25/high-gear-current-cinema-anthony-lane > /dev/null Guess how many seconds this one request takes when we do not use a popular graphical browser to make it
mark_l_watson 7y ago
The advice to use the text only versions for NPR and CNN is solid advice. I think news is negative and by and large news organizations serve elite interests. In the USA this is mostly to make democrats hate republicans and vice-versa (the slave class, formerly known as the 'middle class', is thus easier to manipulate and control). Since I like to keep my news ingestion to 5 or 6 minutes a day, I use The Guardian's (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news https://www.theguardian.com/us-news) free morning email of top stories. Really a nice service. Also compared to corporate/elite lacky news sites like MSNBC, Fox News, CNN, ABC, etc., I find Democracy Now (https://www.democracynow.org/ https://www.democracynow.org/) to be a breath of fresh air. I contribute to The Guardian and Democracy Now.
- DubiousPusher 7y ago
  You should consider adding, "The Intercept" to your regular rotation. https://theintercept.com/ https://theintercept.com/ Edit; I also like The Drudge Report and RealClearPolitics because they're kind of just raw feeds of a bunch of articles that may not surface on choosier aggregators.
- presumably 7y ago
  > The advice to use the text only versions for NPR and CNN is solid advice. Is it? https://text.npr.org/ https://text.npr.org/ You can access some 10 stories, not much more. There is no apparent functionality beyond that. At least for NPR, their text interface is a step in the right direction - but a slap in the face at the same time.
- closeparen 7y ago
  Wingnut partisan sources will always be a breath of fresh air to you when they're on your side. Right wingers feel the same way about Fox.
  - mark_l_watson 7y ago
    I think that Amy Goodman on Democracy Now is about the furthest a person could be from a “wingnut.” I agree that too many people are overly devoted to either Fox News or MSNBC. Just my opinion but these two “news” services seem to care most about fracturing US civil society. We need more acceptance that in fundamental ways most Democrats and Republicans want the same things: opportunity for their children and themselves, security of our country, etc. It does not make money to run news stories that bring people together.
fishtoaster 7y ago
> I'm more than ready and willing to pay for a text-only version of every news website like the ones provided by NPR and CNN. This may be true of you individually, but not you statistically. We used to have more minimalist news sites, but they were outcompeted by sites heavy with trackers, banners, ads, and all the other cruft we love to hate. This is largely because, given the option between paywalled quality and free crap, most consumers end up choosing the latter.
cleandreams 7y ago
I subscribe to the paper version of my local paper because it is so much easier to actually get information from. It's so well designed. I think the reason people have gravitated to online news is herd mentality. What I like about paper news: my focus is more under my control. I can evaluate and skim whole articles at once. I am not constrained by what if visible in the window. Also, no distractions. Every time I open my computer or phone I am waylaid by distractions. I am a software / AI engineer and I think we have created a dystopia. One thing I am seriously afraid of is that our tech dystopia will drive local newspapers out of business. I hate to think of what that will do for corruption, inefficiency, everything. Just awful. I dread the day my local newspaper announces they are ceasing publication. The reduction is staffing over the last 15 or 20 years is incredible. I think the San Jose Mercury went from 1800 to 35. That is depressing.
- hilbertseries 7y ago
  Yea, pretty much 100% the web is destroying news. Everyone wants a free ad supported product now and the only way that model works is if you get enough page views. So news websites have to prioritize content that generates views, rather than good reporting. Which is slowly killing journalism.
  - Swizec 7y ago
    This has always been the case in physical news as well. You live and die by your readership (views). Real money always came from ads.
    - cortesoft 7y ago
      Yeah, but the market effect is very different when readers view articles individually verse having to buy the entire paper. If you are trying to sell a whole paper, you need a mix of content to attract all the readers. Once you have all the sports fans in your area buying your paper, you aren't going to get more by adding more sports articles. You need to make sure all the areas are covered. With individual articles being the unit of currency, you need every single article to generate as many clicks as possible. You can keep adding more of the same and getting more clicks. This is the flaw that people ignore in all "unbundling" efforts. When things are unbundled, people will only make things that have huge audiences. Bundling allows niche things to be made.
possibleworlds 7y ago
The Guardian website, whilst not perfect according to the standards of the article and some other posts, is very performant. They have ads and other dynamic content, but load is deferred on this stuff and wrapped properly to avoid reflow, so the entirety of the article text is immediately readable. Just for interest, see also their tech blog [0] and their entire frontend on GitHub [1]. I can ignore ads, but what I find incredible on major (insert news/tech/whatever here) sites is the reflow from not properly reserving space for both ads and lazyloaded images. The following seems particularly to be a problem on mobile and in apps like Apple News: load a page, scroll to the meat of the article, then experience 1, 2, 3 page jumps as stuff loads in above your scroll position. [0] https://www.theguardian.com/info/series/digital-blog https://www.theguardian.com/info/series/digital-blog [1] https://github.com/guardian/frontend https://github.com/guardian/frontend
- aembleton 7y ago
  I often find switching off Javascript helps with the reflow issues.
  - awinter-py 7y ago
    can't agree more with both of these comments -- JS has zero user value for news sites, only contributes to annoying. and reflow on most news sites is intolerable -- it's like FOUC in the old days (flash of unstyled content), but way worse because of all the different ways assets get loaded and laid out.
- jspash 7y ago
  I've been to talks by Guardian devs (on more than one occasion) where they talk about the techniques they use to make the site as performant as it is. From critical path css to font fallbacks etc. Variants of this talk over the years: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dfweWyVScaI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dfweWyVScaI I applaud their efforts, but am continually underwhelmed by the final result. Without an adblocker the website is simply too slow, jumpy and exhibits strange behaviours that I'm not sure the problem can be solved - as long as advertising pays (most of) the bills.
agumonkey 7y ago
I forgot which newspaper website it was (some big name) offered me to either subscribe to see the full presentation or go to the text only version, which I did. It was a delight. ps: not only web based newspapers goal aren't aligned with users, I feel an unbearable hypocrisy of internet being passed as the disruptive revolution of the old world when in fact it's exactly the same (text, ads, survival, bias) but coated in even more fallacies. At least newspapers have a price tag somewhere.
- nothrabannosir 7y ago
  NPR. https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-women-stopped-coding https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when...
spyckie2 7y ago
I think as a society we are waking up to the fact that we don't like how the market shapes many, many industries. We know that the market isn't perfect from Economics 101. Public goods, free rider problem, and other basic issues show us that market forces and rational players alone will NOT provide the best outcome for society. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_goods_game https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_goods_game https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-rider_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-rider_problem We currently have three systems of distribution in our society - pure capitalism / globalism, regulated capitalism, and government run programs: 1. pure capitalism is where there is very little regulation or market intervention 2. regulated capitalism is where policies, penalties, or subsidies exist to shape behavior of companies in ways that market forces wouldn't 3. government run programs (or other similar programs) receive funding and try to deliver a service for free or heavily subsidized at cost There are some markets / areas of consumption that are running well in our country (that we as a society are happy with the cost and quality of service provided). These include: - Food, clothing, most consumables, physical goods, hobbies / activities, recreational media, etc. Some markets that are not running well are: - Housing, education, transportation, news media / information dissemination, health care, etc. Now, there's 3 ways of affecting change: 1. Add in policies, penalties, or subsidies to an existing market to enforce specific behaviors 2. Reduce or modify policies to revert specific behaviors or combat inefficiency 3. Create a sustainable fund / program to allow the service be delivered without market forces attached Unsurprisingly, these all require government intervention. It's why most people are so vested in the political situation of the present, because our government is the only power that can shape markets and solve these problems. There is one other route - the public comes together does #3 - creates a fund / organization that is meant to provide the good and service without market forces attached. Now, unfortunately the public lacks a huge factor to sustainability - the ability to tax. So whereas funds from government can be sustaining because of taxes, funds from the public have to rely on a large endowment or other such thing in order to be self sustaining. Local news, news reporting, and social media currently exist under system #1. But they need to move to #2 or even #3 if it turns out we really don't like giving the market what it values - our time on ads and our data for ads. Or even worse, giving the market the ability to shape our thoughts and public discourse.
- 7y ago
3xblah 7y ago
"I'm more than ready and willing to pay for a text-only version of every news website like the ones provided by NPR and CNN." How much is the author willing to pay? He is going to subscribe to "every news site"? That seems like it could get costly. Chances are, he can only afford to subscribe to a few newspapers. If he provides a list of those sites, maybe someone would help him get the "text-only" reading experience he wants. "Text-only" is within the user's control, not the website's. It matters what software the user chooses to use to retrieve and view the text. If the software is financed indirectly or directly by ad revenue, then "text-only" is likely to be more difficult. This is why the author is complaining. He is using a browser funded directly or indirectly by advertising. He is therefore at the mercy of the browser authors and the website operators.
stabbles 7y ago
For those who care about text only news: NPR has http://text.npr.org http://text.npr.org CNN has http://lite.cnn.io http://lite.cnn.io I've created http://noslite.nl http://noslite.nl for Dutch news
- doomjunky 7y ago
  http://old.reddit.com http://old.reddit.com http://i.reddit.com http://i.reddit.com http://mbasic.facebook.com http://mbasic.facebook.com http://lite.cnn.com http://lite.cnn.com http://text.npr.org http://text.npr.org http://twitter.com http://twitter.com (with JS disabled) http://m.twitter.com http://m.twitter.com
- maxxk 7y ago
  It looks like at some point in last 7 hours CNN closed lite.cnn.io. Now it shows a single "Main story": "Please update to the latest version of the CNN app".
throwaway8291 7y ago
> Text only. I have a good experience reading news and blogs via links. Example: links -dump "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/13/science/hermit-crabs-wealth-inequality.html" https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/13/science/hermit-crabs-weal... | less
- scribu 7y ago
  Just tried it now on a few different sites. The content is burried in a lot of cruft, such as navigation menus, footer links etc. How do you get rid of that?
  - 3xblah 7y ago
    "Just tried it now on a few different sites." Which sites?
  - anthk 7y ago
    links -g works better than Lynx, altough Lynx supports Gopher.
- smt88 7y ago
  Firefox, Brave, and likely other browsers have "reader mode" which does this same thing and doesn't reduce you to CLI usage.
dgudkov 7y ago
Of course news sites know how to create fast, easy-to-read websites. There is no point in complaining about poor usability and bloated websites, because it's just a symptom of a decease. The internet in its current state is ill-equipped for making good journalism a sustainable business. Google and other search engines are a direct threat to good quality news media. The search engines took the lion's share of advertisement revenue from news media and made them starve of cash. They encourage click-baity headlines and shallow articles, do not protect or poorly protect from stealing/copying content. This is the real problem. Bloated websites are horrible, but they are a symptom, not a decease. There is not point in complaining about symptoms. The comparison with newspapers is good. This is what news websites would have looked like if the decease had been cured.
WalterBright 7y ago
> And if it isn't already clear that news websites are bloated, in order to prove it to you, I've embedded A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens on this page in its entirety, and you probably didn't even notice. Ya got me :-) Very clever way to make the point.
- stOneskull 7y ago
  it's got me reading the book. ooh, those nasty royals!
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
s17n 7y ago
HN: News sites are unusable Also HN: AMP is the devil
DanielBMarkham 7y ago
Economically, there's something very strange going on with the net today. Aside from streaming video and perhaps some specialized apps like games, for the vast majority of people, they're just fine as long as they can move around a few MBs every day, mostly in text. Even photo sharing doesn't use a huge amount of data, relatively speaking. But to get to that paltry amount of data we actually need, we have to sift through 50, 100 times as much garbage, all of it related to engagement or advertising. For people who have transfer caps or end up in "jail" when they use too much internet, it puts them in a really odd place. We're charging them to pay for us to do things we want to do, not things they want to do on their own. Then, when we charge them, if we're lucky we reach our goal: more usage of our site or the user buying something they normally wouldn't, both of which involve spending even more money. This seems a bit like the old "heads I win, tails you lose" joke. There is an illusion of choice, but not really.
- nine_k 7y ago
  The signal-to-noise-ratio looks much like that of email's. 99% of email traffic is spam. It gets filtered quite successfully in most cases. Still the penetrating few fractions of a percent make enough money for spammers to persevere. I wonder if this could be the endgame state of all add-related tracking, heavy ads, etc on the web.
magical_mishka 7y ago
I dont even bother reading on the actual site anymore. I just save them to Pocket and read a clean text-only version on it later.
muzani 7y ago
I had this same experience quite recently. First thing that popped in my brain was, "Wow. Paper newspapers have awesome UI," then I realized how ridiculous that was a few seconds later. But it is true - they have had decades of experience crafting good headlines. It's also really clear what the news of the day is. I can't think of a news site that has "front page news". All of them today are lists of headline news, and prolonged exposure to clickbait makes headlines less appealing. It's the main reason I've never done a paid subscription to one; I just don't know what to read. I also don't want videos or sound playing. I hate it when an article goes into a video without text; I'm here to skim something in 15 seconds, not 3 minutes. I'm glad Firefox blocks autoplay videos.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
tonfreed 7y ago
I wonder if it's even possible in this day and age to run a subscription news service and still be viable. Are people even willing to pay for good journalism anymore?
- dragonwriter 7y ago
  > Are people even willing to pay for good journalism anymore? They never were; subscription prices never paid the bills for most publications, they just provided “paid circulation” numbers to support advertising sales, since paying subscribers were an indicator actual readership as opposed to copies printed that no one actually read.
- d0gsg0w00f 7y ago
  Wall Street Journal is subscription only. I think it's a great publication and I've been a happy paying member for 5 years.
shortformblog 7y ago
Pointing out that a news site can be faster with less stuff on it is besides the point. That’s the easy part. Point out a way that news outlets can pay their bills efficiently with dozens of people on staff—the ones that actually gather the news to fill your feed. Because if news sites can’t pay for a staff, they can’t offer their service to the public. That’s the only way it’s going to work.
kickscondor 7y ago
> The core of the problem is the fact that the incentives of these companies and their users are not aligned at all. Maximizing revenue at all costs is every news website's motto. For further reading, see this one: (I presume this is a classic in HN circles, not sure) https://stratechery.com/2015/popping-the-publishing-bubble/ https://stratechery.com/2015/popping-the-publishing-bubble/
tim333 7y ago
From the users point of view uBlock origin does a pretty good job with the ads and https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome for quite a few paywalls. Of course that leaves the question of how the papers will make a living.
salutonmundo 7y ago
noscript makes many news sites more bearable—of course, there are some which whitewall you—which can sometimes be bypassed with reader view—but sometimes not :(
louisch 7y ago
The final point would perhaps be made a bit better if the embed was the same width as the article. I was wondering why there was horizontal scrolling when the content fit on screen at first.
peterwwillis 7y ago
Software & data undergo diffusion, such that they will always expand to fill all available resources. Unless it's designed with very specific limits, it will always continue to expand. In 10 years we will be filling up terabyte hard drives on our mobile devices, but a quarter of that will be operating system/app data/cache.
bradgessler 7y ago
I always plug my news website, https://legiblenews.com/ https://legiblenews.com/, when I read about the state of news on the web because I too feel this frustration. It got so bad I decided to create a news website that: 1. Loads in one request. Seriously, load it in your browser with the network inspector open. One request. 2. Is private. I don’t care who reads it. I provide this as a public service and have no interest in running targeted ads. 3. Links to source content. This is the worst thing about news websites today: the articles summarize complex issues and rarely link to source documents because they want to keep you on their website and pump you full of more ads. I joke that “you might accidentally learn something if you click one of the links” because it loads Wikipedia articles. I get why people read paper news. It’s private, no pop-ups, and is fast. Legible News is as close as I could get to that. I hope you enjoy!
- LordJZ 7y ago
  Thanks, this looks great. I can only wish it had RSS.
  - g0ran 7y ago
    Made one for myself: https://feed43.com/3068865104604836.xml https://feed43.com/3068865104604836.xml
- baby 7y ago
  I too thought about these issues. There are two major problems I see with news websites these days: - facts mixed with opinions - cherry picked and maliciously re-ordered facts The first one you seem to have taken care of The second one I’m thinking of some solutions: - random order (per visit) of news item on the page - each news item focuses on one information at the same time - each news item comes with “context”. This is the hard part because context can be cherry picked and ordered.
  - powerapple 7y ago
    Do people read news about facts or opinions? I think the latter was actually more valuable. People follow their favourite columnists and reporters on papers because of their in-depth analysis and opinions on issues, rather than plain cold facts.
vermaden 7y ago
I looked for UNIX/BSD/Linux related news that would be really important, not just usual bullshit, pointless 'small' things or PR from companies. ... and I failed. I was not able to find one or several such news sources. The nearest thing that I was able to find was 'In Other BSDs' series from https://www.dragonflydigest.com/ https://www.dragonflydigest.com/ page, but it is very limited and small. In all that I decided to create my own 'Valuable News' series, with latest (weekly) episode available here: https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2019/12/16/valuable-news-2019-12-16/ https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2019/12/16/valuable-news-2019... It may sound as shameless self promotion, but I really was not able to find such news source ... Regards.
- progval 7y ago
  There's LWN.net
kingludite 7y ago
From a user perspective: Just stop visiting those websites. The internet echo chamber will repeat those exact same articles a million times (not kidding) Until we stop visiting these places their business model works and they are doing what they should be doing. There might even be an advantage in filtering out low end machines. A more constructive idea imho would be to fix it with more sensible implementation of the circus. Like the article in the link demonstrates you can append an entire book to an article. You can also progressively load images and videos for dozens of advertisements without turning the page into a tragedy of bloat. 20 assets??? More like 200-500! It isn't that what they want is so ridiculous, it is the way it is implemented. You should have one analytic implementation producing data used by all 50 advertisers in stead of each having their own combined with additional 3rd party ones for each. Advertisement providers should deliver a usable product for their client where usable doesn't refer to ease of implementation for the news agency. They should make an effort to promote in stead of bothering people.
- Goladus 7y ago
  > Advertisement providers should deliver a usable product for their client where usable doesn't refer to ease of implementation for the news agency. They should make an effort to promote in stead of bothering people. For what it's worth, this was Adsense back in the 2000s. At a time where banner ads were characterized by obnoxious "smack the monkey" flash games, Google's ads were clean, fast-loading, and un-obtrusive. They looked different enough from normal text to be clearly recognizable as an ad, but otherwise plain and tasteful. However the sad truth is that, to some extent, bothering people is the desired goal of advertisers. Their goal is to get the attention of a customer and if they annoy some others in the process, it doesn't matter because the one customer they did get is worth it.
dandare 7y ago
> Maximizing revenue at all costs is every news website's motto I find this statement truly idiotic. The last time I checked almost all legit newspapers, that support quality journalism, are financially struggling, experimenting with paywalls and desperately looking for a business model that could support real journalism in this "everything is free on the internet" era.
CTOSian 7y ago
with all that shit on the news pages, I use RSS (kriss RSS on a RPi-zero server) and read the articles on spot, plus -on the RSS ,again- the articles are clean from ad crap.
Whistl3r 7y ago
Genious! Thanks for sharing that.
manskybook 7y ago
Safari 13 for MacOS allows you to selectively, or universally, see most news sites in reader view without having to select each time. Most other browsers have add-ons that do a similar thing, and Instapaper and Pocket, among others create text-only versions of most articles. Most of those also work outside of adblockers, so, even when an adblocker is detected, the news/text reader displays the article text when the adblocked page won't (examples include Wired and the Los Angeles Times). There is probably still some significant overhead in loading and parsing the original page, but, as some have pointed out, the lag is usually "acceptable" even on the original page. There appears to be some added value in using these various strategies in multiple browsers.

423 points by zuhayeer 7y ago

+1 for pun :)

CNN exists in the form suggested here. Posted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21798835 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21798835

_nothing 7y ago
The 3rd paragraph mentions the text-only versions of both CNN and NPR.
melzarei 7y ago
> I'm more than ready and willing to pay for a text-only version of every news website like the ones provided by NPR and CNN. The article already mentions that.
- anthk 7y ago
  Get an RSS reader.
js2 7y ago
NPR too. https://text.npr.org/ https://text.npr.org/

viburnum 7y ago

OMG this made me laugh so hard.

fortran77 7y ago

Or go back to the original form, but delivered digitally: a mix of news, editorial content, and paid ads, all served from the same server, with no moving banners, pop ups, sticky headers, third party servers, scroll-alongs, click-to-read more, etc.

anthk 7y ago
This. Small unobstrusive ads, with a custom CSS so they are either for mobile or PC. No flash, no popus, no moving banners. Just a small square with a picture/promotion.

johnobrien1010 7y ago

If anyone in the comments can figure out a sustainable business model for news that doesn't involve bloat-inducing ads or unrealistic expectations of consumers paying subscription fees, I'll Venmo them (money to buy) a beer.

lemagedurage 7y ago
Start a counter movement and make dry, accurate news, with a humoristic undertone (ha-ha this is barely interesting, but it's accurate!)?
- haggy 7y ago
  Posting content with little to no validation of fact isn't a valid form of journalism and isn't any kind of "counter movement" IMO. That's called a gossip column or tabloid.
lawn 7y ago
I don't understand why paying for single articles isn't more popular. It's the same for streaming services: I should be able to pay for that one TV-series I want to watch, or that one movie that's only available on that one streaming service I don't have.
- mynameisvlad 7y ago
  I mean, you can do the latter already. You can buy a season or a single episode of a show on iTunes, Amazon, etc. You can also rent or buy single movies across many different platforms. It’s just absurdly expensive compared to a streaming service. This is partly due to legacy pricing (I don’t think the price of a movie or TV show has gone down in many years, and all the providers charge the same) but also because I’m sure a lot of revenue for subscription services comes from people who buy the subscription but don’t use the service.
- the8472 7y ago
  Transactions (micro or not) have wall-time, monetary and psychological overhead. If you split this among dozens of items and providers it only gets worse. Paying per article may make sense for in-depth analysis, investigative journalism and other large pieces. But for the daily news it's probably just too small a unit.

generalpass 7y ago

Firefox has solved this problem, at least for me: Ctrl+Alt+R

sjnair96 7y ago
Cmd + Shift + R on Safari/MacOS I believe.

sdan 7y ago

Nowadays I can't even go to news websites so I get my news primarily from HN, Twitter, or Reddit, where news is condensed and I rarely get to see the other point of view (in other words, good journalism). Obviously I understand they need to make money, but at the same time most of the news articles even posted to HN have some limit to reading (even with JS blocked). Maybe a student pass would be good for students like me. I don't think I'll have a problem paying for them... but then I'll have to manage each of these subscription. It would be nice to have a Netflix for news (to pay for all news subscriptions in one go).

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
anthk 7y ago
A lot of articles with "mandatory" JS can be read just fine with Lynx/Links. Better with Links -g.

burlesona 7y ago

What a zinger at the end. Point well-made. :)

danso 7y ago

> I suggest they become more creative with their business model or at least try to see the value in moderation. The vast majority of news sites were free from the get-go, with the NYT being one of the first major websites to put up a website [0]. That's roughly 20 years of giving free content out on the web. The author is (partially) right that "the article text is all anyone really cares about". The thing is, plaintext is absurdly easy to disseminate and copy. for most of the history of newspapers, ads were themselves a reason to get the newspaper, especially for coupons and classified ads. Of course, print ads, like print pages, were much more deliberately and better designed than what we experience today online. [0] https://www.niemanlab.org/2016/01/20-years-ago-today-nytimes-com-debuted-on-line-on-the-web/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2016/01/20-years-ago-today-nytimes...

DrScump 7y ago
The San Jose Mercury-News and WSJ both had full-content websites before NYT. The Mercury-News even had a selective email feed of wire service content called Newshound. For $5 a month, you got up to 5 "hounds" (sets of search criteria), and every article matching your criteria was individually emailed to you, whether a wire story, a syndicate story, or one internally generated within Knight-Ridder. This was in 1993 if not earlier yet.
- danso 7y ago
  Yeah definitely the Merc News was a pioneer on the web and in many other ways: https://archives.cjr.org/feature/the_newspaper_that_almost_seized_the_future.php https://archives.cjr.org/feature/the_newspaper_that_almost_s... It's hard to imagine now, but papers like the Merc News – thanks to basically having a virtual monopoly – were basically printing presses for money. They most definitely had the capital to fund ventures that could save the company, such as their own Craigslist or Groupon. And I believe they and other news companies did blow a good chunk of money on failed tech ventures. In hindsight, they should've continued throwing money at greenfield projects, since just about any longshot success would've been better than the current state of things. But it's too easy and reductive to say, "Well the news industry should've just invented Google/Facebook if it really wanted to survive".

XCSme 7y ago

I was actually looking at the source-code of the page first to see if it has any CSS (to my surprise it actually has a stylsheet with only two rules, for performance reasons it would have been a lot better just to have it directly in a style tag). Once there I was wondering what's up with all this text and thought the entire site was a single-page-application where you could read all his articles :)

mastazi 7y ago
Regarding the style of the site (this made me chuckle): https://zainamro.com/brutalist https://zainamro.com/brutalist
djsumdog 7y ago
Hmm .. also some google analytics at the bottom.0 under the book I still use log parsers (awstats and matomo) .. really am just interested in number of unique/non-crawler visitors and don't care about the rest really.

taurath 7y ago

Not sure that speed is really the factor that matters. That content loads quickly and would exacerbate that there’s frequently little worthwhile content. The internet has stretched communication to be a nation and worldwide thing. Eventually we’ll figure out that local concerns matter more - until then we’ll have to suffer through some really bad media that doesn’t affect any of our lives while most of our communities crumble due to lack of attention.

jordanpg 7y ago
Agree. Focusing on web application performance is entirely beside the point. Most modern news sites are typical modern web applications. The issue is that the value of the words themselves has changed, both in the economic sense as well as culturally, not to mention the problem of the erosion of trust.

msvan 7y ago

The problem is that revenue from paying subscribers is not enough. For most newspapers, ads are needed to run a profitable digital business. Ads cannot be removed for paying subscribers, since paying subscribers are precisely who advertisers want to target. And if you want to display ads on the internet, you have to track people just like your competitors Google and Facebook do. > If news companies believe their core purpose is the dissemination of valuable information, it would make a lot of sense for them to provide a text-only static version of their website. I think most serious news companies think they have an important democratic mission. But at the end of the day, the economics have to make sense in order for quality journalism to exist in the first place.

itronitron 7y ago
you do not have to track people in order to display ads on the internet, you just incorporate the ad on the webpage, and whoever visits the page sees the ad
- presumably 7y ago
  That sounds an awful lot like how ads in newspapers used to work... you put the ads in the paper, and whoever reads the paper sees the ads. So why do we let people tell us it can’t be done on the internet?
  - grmn 7y ago
    Computers cut the ads out of the page with no effort.
    - presumably 7y ago
      I don’t understand the relevance of that argument in this context. Computers can cut ads that do tracking out of the page with the same effort they can cut out anything else from the page. The difference is that ads without tracking remove the incentive for the user to block them. This is why people don’t cut ads out of the newspapers before reading. If the ads in newspapers were cameras, analogous to the tracking used in online advertising, you’d see people expend that effort. Just as you see people blocking ads online.

avenger123 7y ago

I think is somewhat of a solved problem via PressReader.com or it's variant. Depending on where you are getting access is free if you have a library card. Whether using it via browser or dedicated apps, it's as close to reading a real newspaper as can be. I particularly like the low-noise way of aggregating comments on articles. If there is comments with an article, a little indicator with the the number of comments is shown which can be clicked to read or ignore as desired.

projectileboy 7y ago

Ads are the monster, but developers are at least partly to blame. Most news and magazine sites could be served up as single pages, but instead are implemented as Javascript-heavy single page applications that load 50 different elements asynchronously, because it’s just so much more fun to build that than it is to write HTML and some CSS.

lettergram 7y ago

Maybe news papers should get back to their roots. Embed ads To users who don’t pay (don’t use google ads, embed them, like they used to working with companies). Further offer good coupons based on the users location and offer more coupons if they register for $3 / month subscription They should easily be able to make decent money this way.

friedman23 7y ago

The majority of news sites don't even make a profit despite how desperately they try to monetize every inch of their website.

kdkirsch 7y ago

Touché. I agree with you about user fatigue and have already changed news sites I check for this reason. Also it was very effective and rewarding demonstration for those of us who read to the end…of the article not the book.

yellow_lead 7y ago

News is unbearable, but not because of the format. Recognize that reading the news becomes habit because the news of the day becomes useless fast. I realize that this is a contradiction from me, a HackerNews reader, but I feel that part of the reason I come here is for inspiration - on new technologies, ideas, and new code (show HN). When I refer to news earlier, I'm talking about the stories and articles you might have found in a newspaper. They may contain inspiration but IMO are much more clickbaity and only written to fill space.

Goladus 7y ago
Agreed. I cannot stand news from major news sites. Good articles exist on smaller sites, where there is a legitimate attempt to cover something interesting in a thorough and well-researched manner (for example today I just read this: https://www.quantamagazine.org/to-decode-the-brain-scientists-automate-the-study-of-behavior-20191210/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/to-decode-the-brain-scientist...). But good articles on mainstream sites are rare. Most of them just make me angry. It used to be that I was just contemptuous of mainstream news and annoyed by bias. Apart from basic critical reasoning skills, back in 1998 I took a course on mass communication and learned a whole host of dirty tricks they use, and it's just gotten worse sense then. Now it's gotten to the point where it's maddening to see brazen deceptions promoted by mainstream sites, and just absolutely sickening and not a little bit terrifying to see this huge push toward "authoritative" news sources by the likes of YouTube and Facebook. So, given that there's so little I can do to stop the onslaught of deceptive, grossly misleading propaganda, I try to ignore it for the sake of my own emotional health. (That includes Hacker News, which I rarely visit anymore)

sgillen 7y ago

This was worth the read just to discover text.npr.org. Much better on mobile than their app for me.

thomasahle 7y ago

This is the first time I've noticed that you can no longer grab the scrollbar in Chrome (on Mac, visible when you scroll). If I can't drag the scroll bar to the bottom, what other ways are there to scroll all the way down fast? (Other than using another browser of course.)

osamagirl69 7y ago
Do macs still have end keys? Or page down at least?
tedkx 7y ago
Cmd + Down arrow works
michaelmrose 7y ago
- On a touch screen including a laptop you can scroll with your finger. - Space scrolls down several lines. - Scroll wheel - Up and down arrows scroll down a line at a time. - Page up and page down scroll down almost an entire page leaving what was the bottom-most section previously now the topmost section so that readers aren't disoriented or lost. Some apps let you configure this overlap size. - If you like vim you can add extensions to your browser and use j and k. - Home and End keys go to the very top and very end respectively. - Windows you can hold down middle mouse and drag to scroll. This isn't common in linux where people rely on middle mouse paste but is possible to configure https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/101867/make-mouse-movements-scroll-when-the-middle-button-is-held-down https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/101867/make-mouse-m... On Mac this is apparently called "smart scroll" https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/64115/enable-mouse-wheel-autoscroll-feature-in-chrome https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/64115/enable-mouse... If you just want it on chrome there is an extension https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/autoscroll/occjjkgifpmdgodlplnacmkejpdionan https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/autoscroll/occjjkg... In general however you do it grabbing the scrollbar in chrome is inefficient. You must grab a smallish UI element on the side of your screen. Your keyboard and mouse are always at hand.
- anthk 7y ago

fallous 7y ago

The problem with the newspaper/news industry is that the value their audience places in the product is less than the value that advertisers place on access to that audience. Additionally the cost to generate and deliver that product exceeds what the audience is willing to pay and in many cases the value of that audience is low enough that even advertisers don't offer enough to cover the costs. Print newspaper subscription revenues were pretty much a break-even with the costs of delivery. That does not include the costs of paper, ink, printing press and associated personnel, or the cost of actually staffing and running a newsroom. A large part of both their revenue and audience attraction was the classifieds section, which was killed off by craigslist.

donohoe 7y ago

This is completely true and frustrating. It is possible to have fast loading web pages that incorporate decent levels of ads but making that change is hard. I track 60 or so news sites (mostly US and EU based) and as of today: On a "Fast 3G" connection the average article takes 45 seconds to load and is 3.8mb in size. Article Performance Leaderboard (Site): https://webperf.xyz/ https://webperf.xyz/ Data and Speed Tests: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1c1zhkdvWE0WvG84TT3Czekj0N-0sRUEBKO3c0Aeflxw/edit#gid=1790251413 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1c1zhkdvWE0WvG84TT3Cz... The Harry Potter ebook is 1.3MB in size yet we wrap 25kb text of a news article in all this unnecessary crap. It is all avoidable, even without AMP.

chewxy 7y ago
3 seconds is the fastest??! p.s: HN takes 950ms on 3G with no cache.
JeanMarcS 7y ago
The Tale of two cities is around 785kB, as demonstrated here !
3xblah 7y ago
"The New Yorker The average load time is 102.127 seconds 431 requests" Author is asking for "text-only"; this of course only requires one request. curl -4o https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/05/25/high-gear-current-cinema-anthony-lane | tr -cd '\11\12\15\40-\176' | sed 's/</\ &/g;s// /g;s/ *//;' #tab |sed -n '/./{/sectionBreak/,/<\/div>/p;/figcaption/,/<\/figcaption/p;}' > a.htm firefox a.htm We do not need a complex, graphical browser that autoloads resources and runs Javascript in order to request or display a page of text-only content. "Reader Mode" is great but it is not available for every website. The time spent by the browser on those 431 requests is significant. What if a simpler client was used, e.g., time printf "GET /magazine/2015/05/25/high-gear-current-cinema-anthony-lane HTTP/1.1\r\nHost: www.newyorker.com\r\nConnection: close\r\n\r\n" |openssl s_client -connect www.newyorker.com:443 -ign_eof > /dev/null curl -4o /dev/null https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/05/25/high-gear-current-cinema-anthony-lane time tnftp -4o /dev/null https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/05/25/high-gear-current-cinema-anthony-lane time links -dump https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/05/25/high-gear-current-cinema-anthony-lane > /dev/null Guess how many seconds this one request takes when we do not use a popular graphical browser to make it

mark_l_watson 7y ago

The advice to use the text only versions for NPR and CNN is solid advice. I think news is negative and by and large news organizations serve elite interests. In the USA this is mostly to make democrats hate republicans and vice-versa (the slave class, formerly known as the 'middle class', is thus easier to manipulate and control). Since I like to keep my news ingestion to 5 or 6 minutes a day, I use The Guardian's (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news https://www.theguardian.com/us-news) free morning email of top stories. Really a nice service. Also compared to corporate/elite lacky news sites like MSNBC, Fox News, CNN, ABC, etc., I find Democracy Now (https://www.democracynow.org/ https://www.democracynow.org/) to be a breath of fresh air. I contribute to The Guardian and Democracy Now.

DubiousPusher 7y ago
You should consider adding, "The Intercept" to your regular rotation. https://theintercept.com/ https://theintercept.com/ Edit; I also like The Drudge Report and RealClearPolitics because they're kind of just raw feeds of a bunch of articles that may not surface on choosier aggregators.
presumably 7y ago
> The advice to use the text only versions for NPR and CNN is solid advice. Is it? https://text.npr.org/ https://text.npr.org/ You can access some 10 stories, not much more. There is no apparent functionality beyond that. At least for NPR, their text interface is a step in the right direction - but a slap in the face at the same time.
closeparen 7y ago
Wingnut partisan sources will always be a breath of fresh air to you when they're on your side. Right wingers feel the same way about Fox.
- mark_l_watson 7y ago
  I think that Amy Goodman on Democracy Now is about the furthest a person could be from a “wingnut.” I agree that too many people are overly devoted to either Fox News or MSNBC. Just my opinion but these two “news” services seem to care most about fracturing US civil society. We need more acceptance that in fundamental ways most Democrats and Republicans want the same things: opportunity for their children and themselves, security of our country, etc. It does not make money to run news stories that bring people together.

fishtoaster 7y ago

> I'm more than ready and willing to pay for a text-only version of every news website like the ones provided by NPR and CNN. This may be true of you individually, but not you statistically. We used to have more minimalist news sites, but they were outcompeted by sites heavy with trackers, banners, ads, and all the other cruft we love to hate. This is largely because, given the option between paywalled quality and free crap, most consumers end up choosing the latter.

cleandreams 7y ago

I subscribe to the paper version of my local paper because it is so much easier to actually get information from. It's so well designed. I think the reason people have gravitated to online news is herd mentality. What I like about paper news: my focus is more under my control. I can evaluate and skim whole articles at once. I am not constrained by what if visible in the window. Also, no distractions. Every time I open my computer or phone I am waylaid by distractions. I am a software / AI engineer and I think we have created a dystopia. One thing I am seriously afraid of is that our tech dystopia will drive local newspapers out of business. I hate to think of what that will do for corruption, inefficiency, everything. Just awful. I dread the day my local newspaper announces they are ceasing publication. The reduction is staffing over the last 15 or 20 years is incredible. I think the San Jose Mercury went from 1800 to 35. That is depressing.

hilbertseries 7y ago
Yea, pretty much 100% the web is destroying news. Everyone wants a free ad supported product now and the only way that model works is if you get enough page views. So news websites have to prioritize content that generates views, rather than good reporting. Which is slowly killing journalism.
- Swizec 7y ago
  This has always been the case in physical news as well. You live and die by your readership (views). Real money always came from ads.
  - cortesoft 7y ago
    Yeah, but the market effect is very different when readers view articles individually verse having to buy the entire paper. If you are trying to sell a whole paper, you need a mix of content to attract all the readers. Once you have all the sports fans in your area buying your paper, you aren't going to get more by adding more sports articles. You need to make sure all the areas are covered. With individual articles being the unit of currency, you need every single article to generate as many clicks as possible. You can keep adding more of the same and getting more clicks. This is the flaw that people ignore in all "unbundling" efforts. When things are unbundled, people will only make things that have huge audiences. Bundling allows niche things to be made.

possibleworlds 7y ago

The Guardian website, whilst not perfect according to the standards of the article and some other posts, is very performant. They have ads and other dynamic content, but load is deferred on this stuff and wrapped properly to avoid reflow, so the entirety of the article text is immediately readable. Just for interest, see also their tech blog [0] and their entire frontend on GitHub [1]. I can ignore ads, but what I find incredible on major (insert news/tech/whatever here) sites is the reflow from not properly reserving space for both ads and lazyloaded images. The following seems particularly to be a problem on mobile and in apps like Apple News: load a page, scroll to the meat of the article, then experience 1, 2, 3 page jumps as stuff loads in above your scroll position. [0] https://www.theguardian.com/info/series/digital-blog https://www.theguardian.com/info/series/digital-blog [1] https://github.com/guardian/frontend https://github.com/guardian/frontend

aembleton 7y ago
I often find switching off Javascript helps with the reflow issues.
- awinter-py 7y ago
  can't agree more with both of these comments -- JS has zero user value for news sites, only contributes to annoying. and reflow on most news sites is intolerable -- it's like FOUC in the old days (flash of unstyled content), but way worse because of all the different ways assets get loaded and laid out.
jspash 7y ago
I've been to talks by Guardian devs (on more than one occasion) where they talk about the techniques they use to make the site as performant as it is. From critical path css to font fallbacks etc. Variants of this talk over the years: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dfweWyVScaI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dfweWyVScaI I applaud their efforts, but am continually underwhelmed by the final result. Without an adblocker the website is simply too slow, jumpy and exhibits strange behaviours that I'm not sure the problem can be solved - as long as advertising pays (most of) the bills.

agumonkey 7y ago

I forgot which newspaper website it was (some big name) offered me to either subscribe to see the full presentation or go to the text only version, which I did. It was a delight. ps: not only web based newspapers goal aren't aligned with users, I feel an unbearable hypocrisy of internet being passed as the disruptive revolution of the old world when in fact it's exactly the same (text, ads, survival, bias) but coated in even more fallacies. At least newspapers have a price tag somewhere.

nothrabannosir 7y ago
NPR. https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-women-stopped-coding https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when...

spyckie2 7y ago

I think as a society we are waking up to the fact that we don't like how the market shapes many, many industries. We know that the market isn't perfect from Economics 101. Public goods, free rider problem, and other basic issues show us that market forces and rational players alone will NOT provide the best outcome for society. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_goods_game https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_goods_game https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-rider_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-rider_problem We currently have three systems of distribution in our society - pure capitalism / globalism, regulated capitalism, and government run programs: 1. pure capitalism is where there is very little regulation or market intervention 2. regulated capitalism is where policies, penalties, or subsidies exist to shape behavior of companies in ways that market forces wouldn't 3. government run programs (or other similar programs) receive funding and try to deliver a service for free or heavily subsidized at cost There are some markets / areas of consumption that are running well in our country (that we as a society are happy with the cost and quality of service provided). These include: - Food, clothing, most consumables, physical goods, hobbies / activities, recreational media, etc. Some markets that are not running well are: - Housing, education, transportation, news media / information dissemination, health care, etc. Now, there's 3 ways of affecting change: 1. Add in policies, penalties, or subsidies to an existing market to enforce specific behaviors 2. Reduce or modify policies to revert specific behaviors or combat inefficiency 3. Create a sustainable fund / program to allow the service be delivered without market forces attached Unsurprisingly, these all require government intervention. It's why most people are so vested in the political situation of the present, because our government is the only power that can shape markets and solve these problems. There is one other route - the public comes together does #3 - creates a fund / organization that is meant to provide the good and service without market forces attached. Now, unfortunately the public lacks a huge factor to sustainability - the ability to tax. So whereas funds from government can be sustaining because of taxes, funds from the public have to rely on a large endowment or other such thing in order to be self sustaining. Local news, news reporting, and social media currently exist under system #1. But they need to move to #2 or even #3 if it turns out we really don't like giving the market what it values - our time on ads and our data for ads. Or even worse, giving the market the ability to shape our thoughts and public discourse.

7y ago

3xblah 7y ago

"I'm more than ready and willing to pay for a text-only version of every news website like the ones provided by NPR and CNN." How much is the author willing to pay? He is going to subscribe to "every news site"? That seems like it could get costly. Chances are, he can only afford to subscribe to a few newspapers. If he provides a list of those sites, maybe someone would help him get the "text-only" reading experience he wants. "Text-only" is within the user's control, not the website's. It matters what software the user chooses to use to retrieve and view the text. If the software is financed indirectly or directly by ad revenue, then "text-only" is likely to be more difficult. This is why the author is complaining. He is using a browser funded directly or indirectly by advertising. He is therefore at the mercy of the browser authors and the website operators.

stabbles 7y ago

For those who care about text only news: NPR has http://text.npr.org http://text.npr.org CNN has http://lite.cnn.io http://lite.cnn.io I've created http://noslite.nl http://noslite.nl for Dutch news

doomjunky 7y ago
http://old.reddit.com http://old.reddit.com http://i.reddit.com http://i.reddit.com http://mbasic.facebook.com http://mbasic.facebook.com http://lite.cnn.com http://lite.cnn.com http://text.npr.org http://text.npr.org http://twitter.com http://twitter.com (with JS disabled) http://m.twitter.com http://m.twitter.com
maxxk 7y ago
It looks like at some point in last 7 hours CNN closed lite.cnn.io. Now it shows a single "Main story": "Please update to the latest version of the CNN app".

throwaway8291 7y ago

> Text only. I have a good experience reading news and blogs via links. Example: links -dump "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/13/science/hermit-crabs-wealth-inequality.html" https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/13/science/hermit-crabs-weal... | less

scribu 7y ago
Just tried it now on a few different sites. The content is burried in a lot of cruft, such as navigation menus, footer links etc. How do you get rid of that?
- 3xblah 7y ago
  "Just tried it now on a few different sites." Which sites?
- anthk 7y ago
  links -g works better than Lynx, altough Lynx supports Gopher.
smt88 7y ago
Firefox, Brave, and likely other browsers have "reader mode" which does this same thing and doesn't reduce you to CLI usage.

dgudkov 7y ago

Of course news sites know how to create fast, easy-to-read websites. There is no point in complaining about poor usability and bloated websites, because it's just a symptom of a decease. The internet in its current state is ill-equipped for making good journalism a sustainable business. Google and other search engines are a direct threat to good quality news media. The search engines took the lion's share of advertisement revenue from news media and made them starve of cash. They encourage click-baity headlines and shallow articles, do not protect or poorly protect from stealing/copying content. This is the real problem. Bloated websites are horrible, but they are a symptom, not a decease. There is not point in complaining about symptoms. The comparison with newspapers is good. This is what news websites would have looked like if the decease had been cured.

WalterBright 7y ago

> And if it isn't already clear that news websites are bloated, in order to prove it to you, I've embedded A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens on this page in its entirety, and you probably didn't even notice. Ya got me :-) Very clever way to make the point.

stOneskull 7y ago
it's got me reading the book. ooh, those nasty royals!
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]

s17n 7y ago

HN: News sites are unusable Also HN: AMP is the devil

DanielBMarkham 7y ago

Economically, there's something very strange going on with the net today. Aside from streaming video and perhaps some specialized apps like games, for the vast majority of people, they're just fine as long as they can move around a few MBs every day, mostly in text. Even photo sharing doesn't use a huge amount of data, relatively speaking. But to get to that paltry amount of data we actually need, we have to sift through 50, 100 times as much garbage, all of it related to engagement or advertising. For people who have transfer caps or end up in "jail" when they use too much internet, it puts them in a really odd place. We're charging them to pay for us to do things we want to do, not things they want to do on their own. Then, when we charge them, if we're lucky we reach our goal: more usage of our site or the user buying something they normally wouldn't, both of which involve spending even more money. This seems a bit like the old "heads I win, tails you lose" joke. There is an illusion of choice, but not really.

nine_k 7y ago
The signal-to-noise-ratio looks much like that of email's. 99% of email traffic is spam. It gets filtered quite successfully in most cases. Still the penetrating few fractions of a percent make enough money for spammers to persevere. I wonder if this could be the endgame state of all add-related tracking, heavy ads, etc on the web.

magical_mishka 7y ago

I dont even bother reading on the actual site anymore. I just save them to Pocket and read a clean text-only version on it later.

muzani 7y ago

I had this same experience quite recently. First thing that popped in my brain was, "Wow. Paper newspapers have awesome UI," then I realized how ridiculous that was a few seconds later. But it is true - they have had decades of experience crafting good headlines. It's also really clear what the news of the day is. I can't think of a news site that has "front page news". All of them today are lists of headline news, and prolonged exposure to clickbait makes headlines less appealing. It's the main reason I've never done a paid subscription to one; I just don't know what to read. I also don't want videos or sound playing. I hate it when an article goes into a video without text; I'm here to skim something in 15 seconds, not 3 minutes. I'm glad Firefox blocks autoplay videos.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

tonfreed 7y ago

I wonder if it's even possible in this day and age to run a subscription news service and still be viable. Are people even willing to pay for good journalism anymore?

dragonwriter 7y ago
> Are people even willing to pay for good journalism anymore? They never were; subscription prices never paid the bills for most publications, they just provided “paid circulation” numbers to support advertising sales, since paying subscribers were an indicator actual readership as opposed to copies printed that no one actually read.
d0gsg0w00f 7y ago
Wall Street Journal is subscription only. I think it's a great publication and I've been a happy paying member for 5 years.

shortformblog 7y ago

Pointing out that a news site can be faster with less stuff on it is besides the point. That’s the easy part. Point out a way that news outlets can pay their bills efficiently with dozens of people on staff—the ones that actually gather the news to fill your feed. Because if news sites can’t pay for a staff, they can’t offer their service to the public. That’s the only way it’s going to work.

kickscondor 7y ago

> The core of the problem is the fact that the incentives of these companies and their users are not aligned at all. Maximizing revenue at all costs is every news website's motto. For further reading, see this one: (I presume this is a classic in HN circles, not sure) https://stratechery.com/2015/popping-the-publishing-bubble/ https://stratechery.com/2015/popping-the-publishing-bubble/

tim333 7y ago

From the users point of view uBlock origin does a pretty good job with the ads and https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome for quite a few paywalls. Of course that leaves the question of how the papers will make a living.

salutonmundo 7y ago

noscript makes many news sites more bearable—of course, there are some which whitewall you—which can sometimes be bypassed with reader view—but sometimes not :(

louisch 7y ago

The final point would perhaps be made a bit better if the embed was the same width as the article. I was wondering why there was horizontal scrolling when the content fit on screen at first.

peterwwillis 7y ago

Software & data undergo diffusion, such that they will always expand to fill all available resources. Unless it's designed with very specific limits, it will always continue to expand. In 10 years we will be filling up terabyte hard drives on our mobile devices, but a quarter of that will be operating system/app data/cache.

bradgessler 7y ago

I always plug my news website, https://legiblenews.com/ https://legiblenews.com/, when I read about the state of news on the web because I too feel this frustration. It got so bad I decided to create a news website that: 1. Loads in one request. Seriously, load it in your browser with the network inspector open. One request. 2. Is private. I don’t care who reads it. I provide this as a public service and have no interest in running targeted ads. 3. Links to source content. This is the worst thing about news websites today: the articles summarize complex issues and rarely link to source documents because they want to keep you on their website and pump you full of more ads. I joke that “you might accidentally learn something if you click one of the links” because it loads Wikipedia articles. I get why people read paper news. It’s private, no pop-ups, and is fast. Legible News is as close as I could get to that. I hope you enjoy!

LordJZ 7y ago
Thanks, this looks great. I can only wish it had RSS.
- g0ran 7y ago
  Made one for myself: https://feed43.com/3068865104604836.xml https://feed43.com/3068865104604836.xml
baby 7y ago
I too thought about these issues. There are two major problems I see with news websites these days: - facts mixed with opinions - cherry picked and maliciously re-ordered facts The first one you seem to have taken care of The second one I’m thinking of some solutions: - random order (per visit) of news item on the page - each news item focuses on one information at the same time - each news item comes with “context”. This is the hard part because context can be cherry picked and ordered.
- powerapple 7y ago
  Do people read news about facts or opinions? I think the latter was actually more valuable. People follow their favourite columnists and reporters on papers because of their in-depth analysis and opinions on issues, rather than plain cold facts.

vermaden 7y ago

I looked for UNIX/BSD/Linux related news that would be really important, not just usual bullshit, pointless 'small' things or PR from companies. ... and I failed. I was not able to find one or several such news sources. The nearest thing that I was able to find was 'In Other BSDs' series from https://www.dragonflydigest.com/ https://www.dragonflydigest.com/ page, but it is very limited and small. In all that I decided to create my own 'Valuable News' series, with latest (weekly) episode available here: https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2019/12/16/valuable-news-2019-12-16/ https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2019/12/16/valuable-news-2019... It may sound as shameless self promotion, but I really was not able to find such news source ... Regards.

progval 7y ago
There's LWN.net

kingludite 7y ago

From a user perspective: Just stop visiting those websites. The internet echo chamber will repeat those exact same articles a million times (not kidding) Until we stop visiting these places their business model works and they are doing what they should be doing. There might even be an advantage in filtering out low end machines. A more constructive idea imho would be to fix it with more sensible implementation of the circus. Like the article in the link demonstrates you can append an entire book to an article. You can also progressively load images and videos for dozens of advertisements without turning the page into a tragedy of bloat. 20 assets??? More like 200-500! It isn't that what they want is so ridiculous, it is the way it is implemented. You should have one analytic implementation producing data used by all 50 advertisers in stead of each having their own combined with additional 3rd party ones for each. Advertisement providers should deliver a usable product for their client where usable doesn't refer to ease of implementation for the news agency. They should make an effort to promote in stead of bothering people.

Goladus 7y ago
> Advertisement providers should deliver a usable product for their client where usable doesn't refer to ease of implementation for the news agency. They should make an effort to promote in stead of bothering people. For what it's worth, this was Adsense back in the 2000s. At a time where banner ads were characterized by obnoxious "smack the monkey" flash games, Google's ads were clean, fast-loading, and un-obtrusive. They looked different enough from normal text to be clearly recognizable as an ad, but otherwise plain and tasteful. However the sad truth is that, to some extent, bothering people is the desired goal of advertisers. Their goal is to get the attention of a customer and if they annoy some others in the process, it doesn't matter because the one customer they did get is worth it.

dandare 7y ago

> Maximizing revenue at all costs is every news website's motto I find this statement truly idiotic. The last time I checked almost all legit newspapers, that support quality journalism, are financially struggling, experimenting with paywalls and desperately looking for a business model that could support real journalism in this "everything is free on the internet" era.

CTOSian 7y ago

with all that shit on the news pages, I use RSS (kriss RSS on a RPi-zero server) and read the articles on spot, plus -on the RSS ,again- the articles are clean from ad crap.

Whistl3r 7y ago

Genious! Thanks for sharing that.

manskybook 7y ago

Safari 13 for MacOS allows you to selectively, or universally, see most news sites in reader view without having to select each time. Most other browsers have add-ons that do a similar thing, and Instapaper and Pocket, among others create text-only versions of most articles. Most of those also work outside of adblockers, so, even when an adblocker is detected, the news/text reader displays the article text when the adblocked page won't (examples include Wired and the Los Angeles Times). There is probably still some significant overhead in loading and parsing the original page, but, as some have pointed out, the lag is usually "acceptable" even on the original page. There appears to be some added value in using these various strategies in multiple browsers.