19 ms·

TL;DR — Faster News

287 points by swader 14y ago

swader 14y ago
While I feel like this is a very interesting initiative, my distrust in humankind makes me fear bias and sponsorship. What if a big sponsor decides competitor news are to be ignored and their own news are to be kept at the top longer?
- OafTobark 14y ago
  Talk to yourself much?
  - swader 14y ago
    Ain't my site. I just posted the link and expressed my opinion on it.
jackyyappp 14y ago
love the idea.
olog-hai 14y ago
No feed.
- rogem002 14y ago
  Yeah there is: http://toolong-didntread.com/feed http://toolong-didntread.com/feed
corporalagumbo 14y ago
Nice clear tablet-friendly design. Bold to go with text-only too. How is this news chosen and paraphrased though?
- cskau 14y ago
  The info page[0] says a little more, though not much. The news seems simply selected by the small handful of guys behind it, rewritten and posted manually. This being HN and all I must admit I had my hopes up for something more .. technical. Some kind of text summariser perhaps.. Nice site never the less. [0] http://toolong-didntread.com/info http://toolong-didntread.com/info
  - jimsilverman 14y ago
    agreed. the current "hand curated" approach does not seem sustainable in the long term. it's already showing some quite old news as a result. the new jersey earthquake was several weeks ago, positioned as the third "world news" story. great concept and design, though.
    - fwr 14y ago
      > "hand curated" approach does not seem sustainable Seriously, you want to take people out of journalism? Even if it's an excerpt from the story, I wouldn't trust an algorithm to do it for me.
      - mbesto 14y ago
        Which is why I believe we are still a long way away from solving that "problem": http://www.techdisruptive.com/2012/09/18/we-are-far-from-solving-signal-to-noise-problems-with-technology/ http://www.techdisruptive.com/2012/09/18/we-are-far-from-sol...
      - jimsilverman 14y ago
        this site isn't about journalism, it's about aggregation.
    - logn 14y ago
      >the current "hand curated" approach does not seem sustainable in the long term I disagree. I had the same idea for a news site and I'm disappointed they beat me to it. I think it would only take me maybe 30-minutes to and hour to summarize the news of the moment. Do it three times a day. How hard is that? You could easily hire extremely smart people to do this. What English major at a top college wouldn't love to put this on his/her resume for some extra beer money?
logn 14y ago
Cool. I was just complaining how cluttered and junky Google News has been looking lately. Way too many links, borders, and images. It used to feel so clean compared to the other news sites. This is what I was looking for. Also, how did you get the summaries? It's like you have some algorithm to re-word the first paragraph of the story.
hdragomir 14y ago
If it would create separate twitter accounts per section (like tech) and autopost stuff there, that would be a major win.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
allsystemsgo 14y ago
I like the idea. I really do. But doesn't twitter do a lot of this already? Good luck to you.
DanielBMarkham 14y ago
I don't want to step on these guys' PR, but I do have a similar personal project for anybody who is interested, http://newspaper23.com http://newspaper23.com Initially it's just an aggregator that presents commentary in plain text. I plan on adding a summarizer one day. For a personal project, I've been using it daily for over a year, so I know I find a lot of value in this type of thing. As sites try to get more sticky, the signal-to-noise ratio decreases. You spend more time reading a lot of trivial articles that a Facebook friend recommended instead of a few articles that you've scanned yourself. I know Google and FB say social search is the cool thing, but in my experience the only thing it does is increase consumption of mediocre shiny stuff. Much better to pre-qualify sources and then control the depth of your dive. For newspaper23, one of the original ideas was a timer for each day. 30 minutes of scanning and the site would refuse to load until the next day. I'd like to see more of this type of thing -- gearing content consumption to humans instead of site creators and advertisers.
- logn 14y ago
  Very nice too. But some advice: the titles are way too big and look unprofessional, and the front page needs summaries. Other than that I like it.
  - DanielBMarkham 14y ago
    Thanks. I threw it together using the first version of Bootstrap if I recall. I think the titles are actually buttons. Also the UI is buggy. I have to use the back buttons to get back to the main page. Many times it's easier just to reload the site to get to the first page. But it scales nicely out to a tablet. And a phone. Part of the initial appeal for my writing it was to download all of the daily commentary as json to my tablet. Then I could walk around town and such without having to worry about an internet connection. The idea was -- how much real static text do you consume in a day? Can't be more than 100 or so articles. So why not just download the plain text and consume it at your leisure? Another feature I wanted was the ability for people peering over my shoulder to NOT be able to tell what I was consuming. Many times at work or on the train I'd have some time to read commentary, and the last thing I wanted to do was load up a page with a branded look and feel. I wanted the plainest amount of pure text possible. I appreciate the feedback. Although I use it daily, it's not high on my list of priorities. Next up I think I'll double the amount and type of content. Maybe after that I'll go back to the UI for some rework. For me this is more of a personal thing than a business feeler. So even if nobody else in the world likes it, I'm good. :)
czzarr 14y ago
Seems like there are a lot of people trying to tackle this problem at the moment. We are using a different route with our tl;dr Chrome extension for Hacker News: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tldr/ohmamcbkcmfalompaelgoepcnbnpiioe https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tldr/ohmamcbkcmfal...
- drakaal 14y ago
  I like https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tldr/giepilabiomhlcmlefmbfkgeoccfhhhc?hl=en-US https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tldr/giepilabiomhl... better. It doesn't make you leave a website to get the summary and even works with your email, and facebook.
nathan_long 14y ago
Nice. My curmudgeonly response, though, is: "Now all we have to do is put another TL;DR on top of that: a monthly or yearly summary of 'items that actually mattered.'" It's always interesting to pick up a newspaper from a year ago and see how few items are worth reading anymore, and imagine how many stories I've read and forgotten. The same might be said for HN, for that matter... what am I doing here again? ;)
slashcom 14y ago
As an NLP researcher, this is interesting as a sort of summarization data set. The thing is though, summarizing news articles is best done by just reading the first paragraph of the article. News articles are intentionally written this way, and it's a very difficult baseline to beat in automatic summarization. Still nice site though.
- crusso 14y ago
  No, the first paragraph of a news article is designed to give the reader just enough information to get the gist of the article, but tease the reader into continuing to read along. On web sites, the goal is to get the user to click the "more" or "details" link to get the whole article and thus display more ads. The reality is that most of the "good stuff" for a news article could be summarized in a paragraph that would satisfy 90% of the need to read the full article - but that would defeat the business model of most sites/media dispensing news. I like the idea of this site.
  - look_lookatme 14y ago
    Militants took their fight with Israel into the heart of the country Wednesday, exploding a bomb on a public transport bus in Tel Aviv. The attack is likely to complicate already tenuous efforts to achieve a cease-fire. http://www.cnn.com/2012/11/21/world/meast/gaza-israel-strike/index.html?hpt=hp_t1 http://www.cnn.com/2012/11/21/world/meast/gaza-israel-strike... American efforts to help negotiate a cease-fire between Israel and Palestinian militants in the week-old Gaza rocket battle faced a new obstacle on Wednesday when the first bus bombing in years traumatized Tel Aviv, raising the prospect of a new Israeli retaliation just as Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton was working to achieve even a brief pause in the fighting. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/22/world/middleeast/israel-gaza-conflict.html?hp http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/22/world/middleeast/israel-ga... At least 24 people have been injured in an explosion on a bus in Israel's commercial capital, Tel Aviv, in what police described as a "terrorist attack". http://www.aljazeera.com/news/middleeast/2012/11/20121121101723829887.html http://www.aljazeera.com/news/middleeast/2012/11/20121121101... None of these sites teased me into clicking through, they presented their stories in full text. I pay for NYT access, but their paywall is unrelated to your theory of PV corralling. These are all decent, concise treatments of the story. What does "90% of the need to read the full article" mean to you? It seems like indefinable to me.
abemassry 14y ago
Did something very similar to this in node with socket.io realtime updates. http://mashrd.com/ http://mashrd.com/
lambersley 14y ago
There was a previous discussion on this topic (1) but I found skimthat.com served useful information to me via daily email. (1) http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4734654 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4734654
iaskwhy 14y ago
The idea is good but the implementation is what sets it apart, good work!
nathell 14y ago
The domain name seems slightly TL;DR.
- criswell 14y ago
  tldr.com would be such a sweet domain name. It doesn't look like it's getting much use right now, either. I wonder if they'd sell.
tokenadult 14y ago
I browsed around a bit to check it out. tl;dr: I can get the same use out of Google News by customizing sections there and scanning headlines. Longer comparison with the main competition: Google News also allows me to group sources that are consistently reliable (which appear in an "Editors' Picks" section that I can customize). The Spotlight section of Google News seems to provide much of the same usability as the prototype site submitted here, showing only headlines at a glance, but as another comment here has already said, news stories are written with lede paragraphs to give you the main idea rapidly. The kind of automated curation and formatting I look for most in a news aggregation site is not curation for short snippets and formatting for good-looking white space, but curation for quality of content and formatting for information density. As I have customized it on my browser, Google News provides that. I sympathize with anyone who feels too busy making a living to have time to read. But when I can win reading time, I'm glad to read long articles, and I still try to read actual books even in this era of most people doing a lot of their reading online. I appreciate people working on the issue of getting more reading done in less time, and meanwhile hope that the long writings continue to get plenty of attention from thoughtful readers, and plenty of discussion here among the busy participants on Hacker News.
- MichaelApproved 14y ago
  "I sympathize with anyone who feels too busy making a living to have time to read." Yes, being too busy is one reason for wanting summarized news but it's not the only reason. Often, news stories are created for search engine consumption, not human consumption. You find long articles full of repetitive information and bloviating. A good summary can cut out everything but the basic facts of the story so you're up to date on the news without having to consume all the fluff. Of course, liking summarized news doesn't mean you can't take the time to read an in-depth article or a book. In fact, you probably have more time to do that since you saved time with the TLDR version of the news.
  - goldfeld 14y ago
    Not to mention books which are often stuffed with lots of filler rehashing points, to avoid being the below-hundred pages quick read it should have been.
pseut 14y ago
Is this trying to be, "headlines done right," "a newspaper's home page done right," or something else? FWIW a combination of twitter and the BBC's mobile site[1] work for me. I was surprised that Gaza was mentioned on your front page but not world news (at 10:20 ET) and that a 2.0 earthquake in new jersey made world news. [1] http://m.bbc.co.uk/news/world http://m.bbc.co.uk/news/world EDIT: after thinking about it some more, I'm still not sure how your website is different than, "We opened a Tumblr and/or Twitter account." There are lots of link blogs.
cwilson 14y ago
Would love to see a "top stories from last week" feature. Imagine I'm on vacation, or I've just been too busy to keep up with current events but would like to catch up. This is nicely done. I'll be giving it a shot as a tab that never closes.
- eterps 14y ago
  http://hckrnews.com/ http://hckrnews.com/ (for Hackernews posts)
  - cwilson 14y ago
    This is awesome, thank you.
- mysteryleo 14y ago
  Like this? http://news.rawsignal.com/default.aspx?mode=1 http://news.rawsignal.com/default.aspx?mode=1 It is done for each category. I wish the up would do it for all categories at once, because I don't always have time
- mjn 14y ago
  I sometimes use Wikipedia's archive of its front-page "In the news" blurbs to catch up on news I've missed: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events
iamdave 14y ago
Caveat: Not speaking against you (the developers of this) or the work you put into it, but instead against the notion behind this trend of summarizing the news: Why? That's a curious "Why", not a crotchety "Why". Lots of people are talking about browser extensions that summarize the news or are linking to other sources that do this; is the state of journalism so that a summary is better than what media outlets produce because of excessive filler (redundancy department all hands alert), or because we don't like reading anymore?
- petercooper 14y ago
  People are short of time and want to feel they've skimmed enough news to feel up to date to catch cultural references, bluff their way through a discussion, or notice things 'on the radar' that might be directly relevant to them. Reading full form journalism is great but if you had to do it for 100 news stories a day, your day is gone. And, right or wrong, many people want to get a breadth of information and then focus on a few parts of it, rather than solely consume a deep amount of information. Newspapers used to fulfil this role quite well. You could "scan" a paper in 20 minutes and feel reasonably up to date. But "scanning" online is somewhat trickier because of the format. So these services seem to try and bridge that gap of offering you a ton of headlines and summaries all in one place.
jnazario 14y ago
i like it, guys! neat! i share the concern about sustainability if humans drive it, but beyond that well done. i do a sector (infosec) specific site for myself and a handful of friends using twitter to seed links and libots to summarize, works like a champ and has been running solidly and automatically for over 3 years. could be easy to retarget. python, mysql, libots powers it, think delicious+twitter.
viggity 14y ago
wow. I can't count the number of times I've thought about doing something similar. looks like I don't need to now.
amanuel 14y ago
I always had thought it was TooLazy;Didn'tRead....I guess TooLong also works.
- OafTobark 14y ago
  First time I've heard of Too Lazy. But makes sense. Always known it as Too Long
macrael 14y ago
If you haven't seen http://evening-edition.com/ http://evening-edition.com/ I highly reccomend it. It is bite sized world news published every weekday at 5 pm in a few different locales. The news is all written by a journalist, and they track some of the same stories day to day. It's not trying to solve the same problem as this site, and its not just summarizing articles you could read elsewhere. I've been reading it pretty much every day for a few months; it's great.
- antrix 14y ago
  Agreed. After their UK & France editions, I am hoping they'll launch an Asian edition too.
rglover 14y ago
Why don't people like to read anymore?
- tjr 14y ago
  It appears to be because everything written is believed to be... too long.
- MichaelApproved 14y ago
  Reading news isnt necessarily recreational for everyone. Just because someone want to stay informed about current events in a concise manner, doesn't mean they don't like to read. You can consume the news quickly and take your time reading something else that you enjoy.
  - rglover 14y ago
    That's what I assumed, but what happens if I'm in a conversation and my knowledge is only as long as the little blurb I just read? Ultimately it ends up devaluing my conversation and could make for an awkward experience. Better to be oblivious to something rather than semi-educated. So if I'm honest and say "no, I haven't read that," the person I'm speaking with can fill me in and we can have a great talk. There's a little term I came across a few years ago that's brilliant: info snacking. Paralleled with a healthy diet (food), too much "snacking" can result in poor health. Same thing here: without substance you're but a balloon waiting to be popped.
    - MichaelApproved 14y ago
      I see your point but what I'm trying to do with my site Skim That[1] is actually convey nearly all the information in a source story. So, if you just read the summary and someone else reads the source, you should both be able to have a conversation on the same level. [1] http://skimthat.com http://skimthat.com
  - lutusp 14y ago
    > You can consume the news quickly and take your time reading something else that you enjoy. This isn't meant to disparage either your point or the idea being discussed, but there are some things that cannot be condensed without destroying their meaning. As just one example, on reading the history of the Vietnam War, it becomes obvious that those who moved us into the conflict simply didn't understand Vietnam and ought to have studied longer and deeper before committing troops to an unwinnable war fought over a misunderstood principle. This is obvious now, but only to those willing to read more, and deeper, to the degree that they actually understand the topic. This obviously doesn't apply to everything -- many topics can be safely condensed -- but the risk remains that an issue will be condensed to a state of incomprehensibility with the best of intentions. For another example, it is the attractiveness of of tl;dr that make many people think science is a collection of facts. Or that Frankenstein is the monster, not his maker. Or that "decimated" means completely destroyed. Or that "literally" means figuratively. And so forth. Most worthwhile ideas can't be meaningfully compressed past a certain point.
pseut 14y ago
One point in addition to what I posted earlier: check out the old (maybe the original) version of Slate's "Today's Papers." It was awesome: a ~1 page prose summary of the major newspapers every morning. The Slatest is but a pale shadow.
MojoJolo 14y ago
If you want my "TextTeaser" (http://textteaser.com/ http://textteaser.com/) can really help provide "faster news". I'm currently doing an API that accepts a URL as an input and returns a JSON result that contains the following: title, url, sentences with their respective scores. The scores are based on title, sentence length and sentence position for now. Because there are more to come. They are included in the JSON output.
elliott99 14y ago
I like Prismatic. Why is that not popular?
mysteryleo 14y ago
Weird. I like how hacker news is all text and read it daily. But I could see my eyes getting bored after a while on tldr. I much prefer this layout http://www.rawsignal.com/ http://www.rawsignal.com/ Optimized for fast consumption or just dicking around.
irahul 14y ago
You probably already know that, but your "sponsors" page is completely broken on my system, and it blames adblock. Page: http://buysellads.com/buy/detail/158594?utm_source=shorturl&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=selfpromote http://buysellads.com/buy/detail/158594?utm_source=shorturl&... Error message: Does BuySellAds look broken? Disable your ad blocker, their haphazard default filters sometimes break our site. I don't care enough about you(yet) to disable adblock. I don't even know what "sponsor" means in context of your site. I was just clicking around. Also, you probably need it for tracking, but I don't like clicking on http://toolong-didntread.com/sponsorship http://toolong-didntread.com/sponsorship and being redirected to http://buysellads.com/buy/detail/158594?utm_source=shorturl&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=selfpromote http://buysellads.com/buy/detail/158594?utm_source=shorturl&...
drd 14y ago
Effective news consumption has been a huge problem since Internet got exponentially publishing disease. Unfortunately today writing for some writers and journalists is a matter of mass producing text not informing people. I don’t think today’s technology can auto-summarize news for us properly. The approach taken by TLDR is the correct one. The news should be summarized by human to be useful. To crowd source this function we can create groups of like-minded people. Members of each group need to split the job. Such a process will save many souls.
ErikGelderblom 14y ago
Compared to all the others, I really like this execution of the simple, eye friendly design and the color coding. Well done! A small source url after the headline like reddit and HN do, would be a welcome addition imo.
- genwin 14y ago
  Would a small source url still have benefit when there are thousands of unique domains possible? I think it would be ignored by most people.
tolos 14y ago
isn't that the point of headlines?
j2labs 14y ago
That's an amusingly long URL, given the context of the name...
lutusp 14y ago
This tl;dr thing can be taken too far -- "War and Peace", Leo Tolstoy, 1,225 pages : it's about Russia. "Hindenburg" : a really nice dirigible, until something bad happened in New Jersey. "Adolf Hitler" : politician, didn't like Jews very much. "Helen of Troy" : nice-looking woman. "Calculus" : a province somewhere north of algebra.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
samspot 14y ago
I will always maintain that "summary" is easier to type than "TL;DR"
Jemaclus 14y ago
This is one of those things I wish I'd thought of first. Good job!
joelthelion 14y ago
I have a request: make a "real news" feed, which is only about things that will actually make your life a bit different. Two or three items a week would be a maximum.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
nickbarone 14y ago
There's something missing from the summaries: An indication of how much there is to read when non-summarized / how wrong the summary might be. Two of my favorite examples for this are the DCA cancer treatment news and those people who don't pay for fire protection in counties that don't require it; the typical headlines are "Canada Cures Cancer" and "Firemen stand by as house burns down". The former isn't very true and there's a fair amount to read, while the latter is entirely true, only missing a little, critical, bit. To put it another way, you're teaching me something with all those summaries, but you're NOT teaching me how much I don't know or when to go look up more information, and I think you should try.
rhplus 14y ago
I don't have a citation for this, but I read recently that BBC News articles always lead with a concise one-sentence summary rather than something that trails to ellipses... supposedly the original reason was to fit the text within the fixed width of their CeeFax (Teletext) news pages. The result is that their RSS feeds are still rather concisely descriptive. [1] http://newsrss.bbc.co.uk/rss/newsonline_uk_edition/world/rss.xml http://newsrss.bbc.co.uk/rss/newsonline_uk_edition/world/rss...
billirvine 14y ago
Common problem, problematic solution. Humans, no matter how altruistic, have inherent bias that will influence their selection of news to summarize, as well as the nature of their summarization. Circa is another prime example of right idea, problematic solution. It gives me news and photos with no attribution... not even bylines of whomever created their shortened bits of things that they claim could be news. (intentional sarcasm) There's no mechanism whereby I can learn to trust them, or toolong-didntread.com.
- sixbit 14y ago
  Hi Bill, if you hit the (i) info button on the top bar in the circa app it will show the attribution for each point in a given story.
  - billirvine 14y ago
    Now I see that -- not sure why I didn't notice sooner (@@) I wonder how many other users may have had a different takeaway of the product if the attribution and sources was more obvious?
    - sixbit 14y ago
      We are definitely working on calling it out better in an update to the app. Thanks for the feedback!
      - billirvine 14y ago
        Oh, you're associated with Circa. As a digital publisher myself, I'm curious as to how you obtain the rights to the images you're using in the app.
azinman2 14y ago
I love how the featured news contained like 90% tech, and not even a single mention of the current war between Hamas & Israel... with a cease fire brokered by Egypt already. Priorities?
- billirvine 14y ago
  Human bias.
mstefanko 14y ago
I've given a lot of thought to the TL;DR approach to content digestion. It works extremely well, in a vacuum, or on the site it was made popular, reddit. Their, the original poster writes the TL;DR, which is why it works so well. If you write a large post, then immediately after summarize the post into 1-2 sentences, it becomes a very efficient message that still expresses exactly what you wanted to get across. TL;DR is the future, almost to a sad degree. A lot of time it digs deeper than just wanting to filter out the articles you have no interest in reading. But this becomes the only form of digesting news. You begin consuming a lot of news, stories, articles, but you're no longer actually informed on any of the topics, you just end up with a vague idea of what is going on around you. That's far beside the point though. This is a actually a very nice effort. The issues I have with growth and actual value, is with how the summaries are generated. Automatic generation is fast and inaccurate, manually curated is slow and very accurate. In a world where people no longer have the time to read newspapers, their not only looking for quick news on the run, they want current news. Something that happened today, everything that happened today. But quick, not the full story, "i'll read that later." Meeting in the middle between fast and slow approaches does not work here. You're too slow, and the headlines in my RSS feed and twitter have already informed me of the news, too fast and your summary becomes a failed attempt to make twitter and RSS better quality. I have no idea how your TL;DR are currently generated. But I would think you'd have an aggregation and be doing some manual curation. To me for this to really work, you'd have to have a large group of people that read the article generating the TL;DR, constantly iterating, until you end up with an extremely efficient 2 sentence summary. Or there needs to be a project that integrates TL;DR on large scale, the publishers, news papers of the world, blogs..They submit these directly. I think there's still a lot of value in what you're doing. I just don't think it will take off as it is now. Away from the name/marketing/novelty/social aspect not really being there. Twitter, RSS feeds, and sites like http://skimfeed.com/ http://skimfeed.com/ end up providing me with far more day to day value. If you took this and spoon-fed me the TL;DR via my phone, i'd consider being a repeat visitor a little bit more. But you'd then be competing with a whole 'nother slice of the pie.
- OafTobark 14y ago
  Thanks for including the skimfeed link. Didn't know they existed. I am building out something almost exactly like their site but going to expand on it a bit.
redcircle 14y ago
Why do people put the TL;DR summary at the bottom? If the content is too long, and I didn't read it, then I'm not going to see a summary at the bottom. Abstracts, introductions, executive summaries, etc., go at the top. You don't even have to call it one of those: the goal of good writing is to engage people before they move onwards. I guess that locating it at the bottom is equivalent to adding a conclusion, and I'll grant that some people skim to the conclusion, rather than use the abstract/intro/exec-summary.
tanaytandon 14y ago
clipped.me/tftrial check it out - Its a one man teen startup - would love to get feedback from the community!
abalashov 14y ago
Torn about whether to praise or damn this. On the one hand, I'm critical of modern attention spans, laziness and ADD-addled brains (allegedly) that don't have the discipline and intellectual wherewithal to actually focus on a single thought for a whole minute or more. On the other hand, far too much of journalistic prose (and even more so, speech) in mainstream media is contentless fluff.
halayli 14y ago
I like using nextly.com for the same reason.
damian2000 14y ago
Good to see these guys are from Perth, Western Australia. We need more startups here!
robmcm 14y ago
Amazing, still only read the titles though!
perfunctory 14y ago
What is their business model?
JeremyMorgan 14y ago
Recently someone did this to one of my articles and I think they did an excellent job summarizing it, and it got me hooked on reading similar stories. It's a good idea to capture interest and save time
g3orge 14y ago
I'd like to see the favicons of the original poster's website added.
dev360 14y ago
If this was done algorithmically, then it would be way cool.
luckysh0t 14y ago
http://www.reddit.com/r/tldr http://www.reddit.com/r/tldr I'm not sure there's any advancement here.
pasbesoin 14y ago
I'm popping a comment in here without reading all the content (I guess there's irony in that, if not disrespect, but I'm due shortly for a dinner party). That said, my comment is that I don't mind the length of articles so much as the circumstance that nobody seems to write in the "traditional", top-down ("inverted pyramid", etc., etc.) "newspaper" style, anymore. In that style, a summary and broad overview with the most salient points, is presented first. Then the article may delve into further detail. The reader can quickly get an overview and then decide whether and how much further they care to read into the details. Instead, today everything seems to be written in a "narrative style". Often, the first some paragraphs set the scene -- they're "atmosphere" -- sometimes before the writer even deigns to tell you, the reader, what the story is actually about. Facts are interspersed throughout the remainder of the story, and often don't even lead paragraphs but rather remain buried within them amidst a muddle of further descriptive language. For the conveyance of news, it's actually quite crappy writing. I hear/read that it's part and parcel of the push for everybody to have a byline and to establish a "name" for themselves. Which I can in part understand particularly in this day and age of contract work and zero job security -- or even a job (as opposed to endless freelancing) per se. But, for the seeking and consuming of news, it sucks.
mea36 14y ago
I like this, it's simple and easy to skim. I'd suggest adding date/time so the user knows when the article was published.

287 points by swader 14y ago

While I feel like this is a very interesting initiative, my distrust in humankind makes me fear bias and sponsorship. What if a big sponsor decides competitor news are to be ignored and their own news are to be kept at the top longer?

OafTobark 14y ago
Talk to yourself much?
- swader 14y ago
  Ain't my site. I just posted the link and expressed my opinion on it.

jackyyappp 14y ago

love the idea.

olog-hai 14y ago

No feed.

rogem002 14y ago
Yeah there is: http://toolong-didntread.com/feed http://toolong-didntread.com/feed

corporalagumbo 14y ago

Nice clear tablet-friendly design. Bold to go with text-only too. How is this news chosen and paraphrased though?

cskau 14y ago
The info page[0] says a little more, though not much. The news seems simply selected by the small handful of guys behind it, rewritten and posted manually. This being HN and all I must admit I had my hopes up for something more .. technical. Some kind of text summariser perhaps.. Nice site never the less. [0] http://toolong-didntread.com/info http://toolong-didntread.com/info
- jimsilverman 14y ago
  agreed. the current "hand curated" approach does not seem sustainable in the long term. it's already showing some quite old news as a result. the new jersey earthquake was several weeks ago, positioned as the third "world news" story. great concept and design, though.
  - fwr 14y ago
    > "hand curated" approach does not seem sustainable Seriously, you want to take people out of journalism? Even if it's an excerpt from the story, I wouldn't trust an algorithm to do it for me.
    - mbesto 14y ago
      Which is why I believe we are still a long way away from solving that "problem": http://www.techdisruptive.com/2012/09/18/we-are-far-from-solving-signal-to-noise-problems-with-technology/ http://www.techdisruptive.com/2012/09/18/we-are-far-from-sol...
    - jimsilverman 14y ago
      this site isn't about journalism, it's about aggregation.
  - logn 14y ago
    >the current "hand curated" approach does not seem sustainable in the long term I disagree. I had the same idea for a news site and I'm disappointed they beat me to it. I think it would only take me maybe 30-minutes to and hour to summarize the news of the moment. Do it three times a day. How hard is that? You could easily hire extremely smart people to do this. What English major at a top college wouldn't love to put this on his/her resume for some extra beer money?

logn 14y ago

Cool. I was just complaining how cluttered and junky Google News has been looking lately. Way too many links, borders, and images. It used to feel so clean compared to the other news sites. This is what I was looking for. Also, how did you get the summaries? It's like you have some algorithm to re-word the first paragraph of the story.

hdragomir 14y ago

If it would create separate twitter accounts per section (like tech) and autopost stuff there, that would be a major win.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

allsystemsgo 14y ago

I like the idea. I really do. But doesn't twitter do a lot of this already? Good luck to you.

DanielBMarkham 14y ago

I don't want to step on these guys' PR, but I do have a similar personal project for anybody who is interested, http://newspaper23.com http://newspaper23.com Initially it's just an aggregator that presents commentary in plain text. I plan on adding a summarizer one day. For a personal project, I've been using it daily for over a year, so I know I find a lot of value in this type of thing. As sites try to get more sticky, the signal-to-noise ratio decreases. You spend more time reading a lot of trivial articles that a Facebook friend recommended instead of a few articles that you've scanned yourself. I know Google and FB say social search is the cool thing, but in my experience the only thing it does is increase consumption of mediocre shiny stuff. Much better to pre-qualify sources and then control the depth of your dive. For newspaper23, one of the original ideas was a timer for each day. 30 minutes of scanning and the site would refuse to load until the next day. I'd like to see more of this type of thing -- gearing content consumption to humans instead of site creators and advertisers.

logn 14y ago
Very nice too. But some advice: the titles are way too big and look unprofessional, and the front page needs summaries. Other than that I like it.
- DanielBMarkham 14y ago
  Thanks. I threw it together using the first version of Bootstrap if I recall. I think the titles are actually buttons. Also the UI is buggy. I have to use the back buttons to get back to the main page. Many times it's easier just to reload the site to get to the first page. But it scales nicely out to a tablet. And a phone. Part of the initial appeal for my writing it was to download all of the daily commentary as json to my tablet. Then I could walk around town and such without having to worry about an internet connection. The idea was -- how much real static text do you consume in a day? Can't be more than 100 or so articles. So why not just download the plain text and consume it at your leisure? Another feature I wanted was the ability for people peering over my shoulder to NOT be able to tell what I was consuming. Many times at work or on the train I'd have some time to read commentary, and the last thing I wanted to do was load up a page with a branded look and feel. I wanted the plainest amount of pure text possible. I appreciate the feedback. Although I use it daily, it's not high on my list of priorities. Next up I think I'll double the amount and type of content. Maybe after that I'll go back to the UI for some rework. For me this is more of a personal thing than a business feeler. So even if nobody else in the world likes it, I'm good. :)

czzarr 14y ago

Seems like there are a lot of people trying to tackle this problem at the moment. We are using a different route with our tl;dr Chrome extension for Hacker News: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tldr/ohmamcbkcmfalompaelgoepcnbnpiioe https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tldr/ohmamcbkcmfal...

drakaal 14y ago
I like https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tldr/giepilabiomhlcmlefmbfkgeoccfhhhc?hl=en-US https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tldr/giepilabiomhl... better. It doesn't make you leave a website to get the summary and even works with your email, and facebook.

nathan_long 14y ago

Nice. My curmudgeonly response, though, is: "Now all we have to do is put another TL;DR on top of that: a monthly or yearly summary of 'items that actually mattered.'" It's always interesting to pick up a newspaper from a year ago and see how few items are worth reading anymore, and imagine how many stories I've read and forgotten. The same might be said for HN, for that matter... what am I doing here again? ;)

slashcom 14y ago

As an NLP researcher, this is interesting as a sort of summarization data set. The thing is though, summarizing news articles is best done by just reading the first paragraph of the article. News articles are intentionally written this way, and it's a very difficult baseline to beat in automatic summarization. Still nice site though.

crusso 14y ago
No, the first paragraph of a news article is designed to give the reader just enough information to get the gist of the article, but tease the reader into continuing to read along. On web sites, the goal is to get the user to click the "more" or "details" link to get the whole article and thus display more ads. The reality is that most of the "good stuff" for a news article could be summarized in a paragraph that would satisfy 90% of the need to read the full article - but that would defeat the business model of most sites/media dispensing news. I like the idea of this site.
- look_lookatme 14y ago
  Militants took their fight with Israel into the heart of the country Wednesday, exploding a bomb on a public transport bus in Tel Aviv. The attack is likely to complicate already tenuous efforts to achieve a cease-fire. http://www.cnn.com/2012/11/21/world/meast/gaza-israel-strike/index.html?hpt=hp_t1 http://www.cnn.com/2012/11/21/world/meast/gaza-israel-strike... American efforts to help negotiate a cease-fire between Israel and Palestinian militants in the week-old Gaza rocket battle faced a new obstacle on Wednesday when the first bus bombing in years traumatized Tel Aviv, raising the prospect of a new Israeli retaliation just as Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton was working to achieve even a brief pause in the fighting. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/22/world/middleeast/israel-gaza-conflict.html?hp http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/22/world/middleeast/israel-ga... At least 24 people have been injured in an explosion on a bus in Israel's commercial capital, Tel Aviv, in what police described as a "terrorist attack". http://www.aljazeera.com/news/middleeast/2012/11/20121121101723829887.html http://www.aljazeera.com/news/middleeast/2012/11/20121121101... None of these sites teased me into clicking through, they presented their stories in full text. I pay for NYT access, but their paywall is unrelated to your theory of PV corralling. These are all decent, concise treatments of the story. What does "90% of the need to read the full article" mean to you? It seems like indefinable to me.

abemassry 14y ago

Did something very similar to this in node with socket.io realtime updates. http://mashrd.com/ http://mashrd.com/

lambersley 14y ago

There was a previous discussion on this topic (1) but I found skimthat.com served useful information to me via daily email. (1) http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4734654 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4734654

iaskwhy 14y ago

The idea is good but the implementation is what sets it apart, good work!

nathell 14y ago

The domain name seems slightly TL;DR.

criswell 14y ago
tldr.com would be such a sweet domain name. It doesn't look like it's getting much use right now, either. I wonder if they'd sell.

tokenadult 14y ago

I browsed around a bit to check it out. tl;dr: I can get the same use out of Google News by customizing sections there and scanning headlines. Longer comparison with the main competition: Google News also allows me to group sources that are consistently reliable (which appear in an "Editors' Picks" section that I can customize). The Spotlight section of Google News seems to provide much of the same usability as the prototype site submitted here, showing only headlines at a glance, but as another comment here has already said, news stories are written with lede paragraphs to give you the main idea rapidly. The kind of automated curation and formatting I look for most in a news aggregation site is not curation for short snippets and formatting for good-looking white space, but curation for quality of content and formatting for information density. As I have customized it on my browser, Google News provides that. I sympathize with anyone who feels too busy making a living to have time to read. But when I can win reading time, I'm glad to read long articles, and I still try to read actual books even in this era of most people doing a lot of their reading online. I appreciate people working on the issue of getting more reading done in less time, and meanwhile hope that the long writings continue to get plenty of attention from thoughtful readers, and plenty of discussion here among the busy participants on Hacker News.

MichaelApproved 14y ago
"I sympathize with anyone who feels too busy making a living to have time to read." Yes, being too busy is one reason for wanting summarized news but it's not the only reason. Often, news stories are created for search engine consumption, not human consumption. You find long articles full of repetitive information and bloviating. A good summary can cut out everything but the basic facts of the story so you're up to date on the news without having to consume all the fluff. Of course, liking summarized news doesn't mean you can't take the time to read an in-depth article or a book. In fact, you probably have more time to do that since you saved time with the TLDR version of the news.
- goldfeld 14y ago
  Not to mention books which are often stuffed with lots of filler rehashing points, to avoid being the below-hundred pages quick read it should have been.

pseut 14y ago

Is this trying to be, "headlines done right," "a newspaper's home page done right," or something else? FWIW a combination of twitter and the BBC's mobile site[1] work for me. I was surprised that Gaza was mentioned on your front page but not world news (at 10:20 ET) and that a 2.0 earthquake in new jersey made world news. [1] http://m.bbc.co.uk/news/world http://m.bbc.co.uk/news/world EDIT: after thinking about it some more, I'm still not sure how your website is different than, "We opened a Tumblr and/or Twitter account." There are lots of link blogs.

cwilson 14y ago

Would love to see a "top stories from last week" feature. Imagine I'm on vacation, or I've just been too busy to keep up with current events but would like to catch up. This is nicely done. I'll be giving it a shot as a tab that never closes.

eterps 14y ago
http://hckrnews.com/ http://hckrnews.com/ (for Hackernews posts)
- cwilson 14y ago
  This is awesome, thank you.
mysteryleo 14y ago
Like this? http://news.rawsignal.com/default.aspx?mode=1 http://news.rawsignal.com/default.aspx?mode=1 It is done for each category. I wish the up would do it for all categories at once, because I don't always have time
mjn 14y ago
I sometimes use Wikipedia's archive of its front-page "In the news" blurbs to catch up on news I've missed: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events

iamdave 14y ago

Caveat: Not speaking against you (the developers of this) or the work you put into it, but instead against the notion behind this trend of summarizing the news: Why? That's a curious "Why", not a crotchety "Why". Lots of people are talking about browser extensions that summarize the news or are linking to other sources that do this; is the state of journalism so that a summary is better than what media outlets produce because of excessive filler (redundancy department all hands alert), or because we don't like reading anymore?

petercooper 14y ago
People are short of time and want to feel they've skimmed enough news to feel up to date to catch cultural references, bluff their way through a discussion, or notice things 'on the radar' that might be directly relevant to them. Reading full form journalism is great but if you had to do it for 100 news stories a day, your day is gone. And, right or wrong, many people want to get a breadth of information and then focus on a few parts of it, rather than solely consume a deep amount of information. Newspapers used to fulfil this role quite well. You could "scan" a paper in 20 minutes and feel reasonably up to date. But "scanning" online is somewhat trickier because of the format. So these services seem to try and bridge that gap of offering you a ton of headlines and summaries all in one place.

jnazario 14y ago

i like it, guys! neat! i share the concern about sustainability if humans drive it, but beyond that well done. i do a sector (infosec) specific site for myself and a handful of friends using twitter to seed links and libots to summarize, works like a champ and has been running solidly and automatically for over 3 years. could be easy to retarget. python, mysql, libots powers it, think delicious+twitter.

viggity 14y ago

wow. I can't count the number of times I've thought about doing something similar. looks like I don't need to now.

amanuel 14y ago

I always had thought it was TooLazy;Didn'tRead....I guess TooLong also works.

OafTobark 14y ago
First time I've heard of Too Lazy. But makes sense. Always known it as Too Long

macrael 14y ago

If you haven't seen http://evening-edition.com/ http://evening-edition.com/ I highly reccomend it. It is bite sized world news published every weekday at 5 pm in a few different locales. The news is all written by a journalist, and they track some of the same stories day to day. It's not trying to solve the same problem as this site, and its not just summarizing articles you could read elsewhere. I've been reading it pretty much every day for a few months; it's great.

antrix 14y ago
Agreed. After their UK & France editions, I am hoping they'll launch an Asian edition too.

rglover 14y ago

Why don't people like to read anymore?

tjr 14y ago
It appears to be because everything written is believed to be... too long.
MichaelApproved 14y ago
Reading news isnt necessarily recreational for everyone. Just because someone want to stay informed about current events in a concise manner, doesn't mean they don't like to read. You can consume the news quickly and take your time reading something else that you enjoy.
- rglover 14y ago
  That's what I assumed, but what happens if I'm in a conversation and my knowledge is only as long as the little blurb I just read? Ultimately it ends up devaluing my conversation and could make for an awkward experience. Better to be oblivious to something rather than semi-educated. So if I'm honest and say "no, I haven't read that," the person I'm speaking with can fill me in and we can have a great talk. There's a little term I came across a few years ago that's brilliant: info snacking. Paralleled with a healthy diet (food), too much "snacking" can result in poor health. Same thing here: without substance you're but a balloon waiting to be popped.
  - MichaelApproved 14y ago
    I see your point but what I'm trying to do with my site Skim That[1] is actually convey nearly all the information in a source story. So, if you just read the summary and someone else reads the source, you should both be able to have a conversation on the same level. [1] http://skimthat.com http://skimthat.com
- lutusp 14y ago
  > You can consume the news quickly and take your time reading something else that you enjoy. This isn't meant to disparage either your point or the idea being discussed, but there are some things that cannot be condensed without destroying their meaning. As just one example, on reading the history of the Vietnam War, it becomes obvious that those who moved us into the conflict simply didn't understand Vietnam and ought to have studied longer and deeper before committing troops to an unwinnable war fought over a misunderstood principle. This is obvious now, but only to those willing to read more, and deeper, to the degree that they actually understand the topic. This obviously doesn't apply to everything -- many topics can be safely condensed -- but the risk remains that an issue will be condensed to a state of incomprehensibility with the best of intentions. For another example, it is the attractiveness of of tl;dr that make many people think science is a collection of facts. Or that Frankenstein is the monster, not his maker. Or that "decimated" means completely destroyed. Or that "literally" means figuratively. And so forth. Most worthwhile ideas can't be meaningfully compressed past a certain point.

pseut 14y ago

One point in addition to what I posted earlier: check out the old (maybe the original) version of Slate's "Today's Papers." It was awesome: a ~1 page prose summary of the major newspapers every morning. The Slatest is but a pale shadow.

MojoJolo 14y ago

If you want my "TextTeaser" (http://textteaser.com/ http://textteaser.com/) can really help provide "faster news". I'm currently doing an API that accepts a URL as an input and returns a JSON result that contains the following: title, url, sentences with their respective scores. The scores are based on title, sentence length and sentence position for now. Because there are more to come. They are included in the JSON output.

elliott99 14y ago

I like Prismatic. Why is that not popular?

mysteryleo 14y ago

Weird. I like how hacker news is all text and read it daily. But I could see my eyes getting bored after a while on tldr. I much prefer this layout http://www.rawsignal.com/ http://www.rawsignal.com/ Optimized for fast consumption or just dicking around.

irahul 14y ago

You probably already know that, but your "sponsors" page is completely broken on my system, and it blames adblock. Page: http://buysellads.com/buy/detail/158594?utm_source=shorturl&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=selfpromote http://buysellads.com/buy/detail/158594?utm_source=shorturl&... Error message: Does BuySellAds look broken? Disable your ad blocker, their haphazard default filters sometimes break our site. I don't care enough about you(yet) to disable adblock. I don't even know what "sponsor" means in context of your site. I was just clicking around. Also, you probably need it for tracking, but I don't like clicking on http://toolong-didntread.com/sponsorship http://toolong-didntread.com/sponsorship and being redirected to http://buysellads.com/buy/detail/158594?utm_source=shorturl&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=selfpromote http://buysellads.com/buy/detail/158594?utm_source=shorturl&...

drd 14y ago

Effective news consumption has been a huge problem since Internet got exponentially publishing disease. Unfortunately today writing for some writers and journalists is a matter of mass producing text not informing people. I don’t think today’s technology can auto-summarize news for us properly. The approach taken by TLDR is the correct one. The news should be summarized by human to be useful. To crowd source this function we can create groups of like-minded people. Members of each group need to split the job. Such a process will save many souls.

ErikGelderblom 14y ago

Compared to all the others, I really like this execution of the simple, eye friendly design and the color coding. Well done! A small source url after the headline like reddit and HN do, would be a welcome addition imo.

genwin 14y ago
Would a small source url still have benefit when there are thousands of unique domains possible? I think it would be ignored by most people.

tolos 14y ago

isn't that the point of headlines?

j2labs 14y ago

That's an amusingly long URL, given the context of the name...

lutusp 14y ago

This tl;dr thing can be taken too far -- "War and Peace", Leo Tolstoy, 1,225 pages : it's about Russia. "Hindenburg" : a really nice dirigible, until something bad happened in New Jersey. "Adolf Hitler" : politician, didn't like Jews very much. "Helen of Troy" : nice-looking woman. "Calculus" : a province somewhere north of algebra.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

samspot 14y ago

I will always maintain that "summary" is easier to type than "TL;DR"

Jemaclus 14y ago

This is one of those things I wish I'd thought of first. Good job!

joelthelion 14y ago

I have a request: make a "real news" feed, which is only about things that will actually make your life a bit different. Two or three items a week would be a maximum.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

nickbarone 14y ago

There's something missing from the summaries: An indication of how much there is to read when non-summarized / how wrong the summary might be. Two of my favorite examples for this are the DCA cancer treatment news and those people who don't pay for fire protection in counties that don't require it; the typical headlines are "Canada Cures Cancer" and "Firemen stand by as house burns down". The former isn't very true and there's a fair amount to read, while the latter is entirely true, only missing a little, critical, bit. To put it another way, you're teaching me something with all those summaries, but you're NOT teaching me how much I don't know or when to go look up more information, and I think you should try.

rhplus 14y ago

I don't have a citation for this, but I read recently that BBC News articles always lead with a concise one-sentence summary rather than something that trails to ellipses... supposedly the original reason was to fit the text within the fixed width of their CeeFax (Teletext) news pages. The result is that their RSS feeds are still rather concisely descriptive. [1] http://newsrss.bbc.co.uk/rss/newsonline_uk_edition/world/rss.xml http://newsrss.bbc.co.uk/rss/newsonline_uk_edition/world/rss...

billirvine 14y ago

Common problem, problematic solution. Humans, no matter how altruistic, have inherent bias that will influence their selection of news to summarize, as well as the nature of their summarization. Circa is another prime example of right idea, problematic solution. It gives me news and photos with no attribution... not even bylines of whomever created their shortened bits of things that they claim could be news. (intentional sarcasm) There's no mechanism whereby I can learn to trust them, or toolong-didntread.com.

sixbit 14y ago
Hi Bill, if you hit the (i) info button on the top bar in the circa app it will show the attribution for each point in a given story.
- billirvine 14y ago
  Now I see that -- not sure why I didn't notice sooner (@@) I wonder how many other users may have had a different takeaway of the product if the attribution and sources was more obvious?
  - sixbit 14y ago
    We are definitely working on calling it out better in an update to the app. Thanks for the feedback!
    - billirvine 14y ago
      Oh, you're associated with Circa. As a digital publisher myself, I'm curious as to how you obtain the rights to the images you're using in the app.

azinman2 14y ago

I love how the featured news contained like 90% tech, and not even a single mention of the current war between Hamas & Israel... with a cease fire brokered by Egypt already. Priorities?

billirvine 14y ago
Human bias.

mstefanko 14y ago

I've given a lot of thought to the TL;DR approach to content digestion. It works extremely well, in a vacuum, or on the site it was made popular, reddit. Their, the original poster writes the TL;DR, which is why it works so well. If you write a large post, then immediately after summarize the post into 1-2 sentences, it becomes a very efficient message that still expresses exactly what you wanted to get across. TL;DR is the future, almost to a sad degree. A lot of time it digs deeper than just wanting to filter out the articles you have no interest in reading. But this becomes the only form of digesting news. You begin consuming a lot of news, stories, articles, but you're no longer actually informed on any of the topics, you just end up with a vague idea of what is going on around you. That's far beside the point though. This is a actually a very nice effort. The issues I have with growth and actual value, is with how the summaries are generated. Automatic generation is fast and inaccurate, manually curated is slow and very accurate. In a world where people no longer have the time to read newspapers, their not only looking for quick news on the run, they want current news. Something that happened today, everything that happened today. But quick, not the full story, "i'll read that later." Meeting in the middle between fast and slow approaches does not work here. You're too slow, and the headlines in my RSS feed and twitter have already informed me of the news, too fast and your summary becomes a failed attempt to make twitter and RSS better quality. I have no idea how your TL;DR are currently generated. But I would think you'd have an aggregation and be doing some manual curation. To me for this to really work, you'd have to have a large group of people that read the article generating the TL;DR, constantly iterating, until you end up with an extremely efficient 2 sentence summary. Or there needs to be a project that integrates TL;DR on large scale, the publishers, news papers of the world, blogs..They submit these directly. I think there's still a lot of value in what you're doing. I just don't think it will take off as it is now. Away from the name/marketing/novelty/social aspect not really being there. Twitter, RSS feeds, and sites like http://skimfeed.com/ http://skimfeed.com/ end up providing me with far more day to day value. If you took this and spoon-fed me the TL;DR via my phone, i'd consider being a repeat visitor a little bit more. But you'd then be competing with a whole 'nother slice of the pie.

OafTobark 14y ago
Thanks for including the skimfeed link. Didn't know they existed. I am building out something almost exactly like their site but going to expand on it a bit.

redcircle 14y ago

Why do people put the TL;DR summary at the bottom? If the content is too long, and I didn't read it, then I'm not going to see a summary at the bottom. Abstracts, introductions, executive summaries, etc., go at the top. You don't even have to call it one of those: the goal of good writing is to engage people before they move onwards. I guess that locating it at the bottom is equivalent to adding a conclusion, and I'll grant that some people skim to the conclusion, rather than use the abstract/intro/exec-summary.

tanaytandon 14y ago

clipped.me/tftrial check it out - Its a one man teen startup - would love to get feedback from the community!

abalashov 14y ago

Torn about whether to praise or damn this. On the one hand, I'm critical of modern attention spans, laziness and ADD-addled brains (allegedly) that don't have the discipline and intellectual wherewithal to actually focus on a single thought for a whole minute or more. On the other hand, far too much of journalistic prose (and even more so, speech) in mainstream media is contentless fluff.

halayli 14y ago

I like using nextly.com for the same reason.

damian2000 14y ago

Good to see these guys are from Perth, Western Australia. We need more startups here!

robmcm 14y ago

Amazing, still only read the titles though!

perfunctory 14y ago

What is their business model?

JeremyMorgan 14y ago

Recently someone did this to one of my articles and I think they did an excellent job summarizing it, and it got me hooked on reading similar stories. It's a good idea to capture interest and save time

g3orge 14y ago

I'd like to see the favicons of the original poster's website added.

dev360 14y ago

If this was done algorithmically, then it would be way cool.

luckysh0t 14y ago

http://www.reddit.com/r/tldr http://www.reddit.com/r/tldr I'm not sure there's any advancement here.

pasbesoin 14y ago

I'm popping a comment in here without reading all the content (I guess there's irony in that, if not disrespect, but I'm due shortly for a dinner party). That said, my comment is that I don't mind the length of articles so much as the circumstance that nobody seems to write in the "traditional", top-down ("inverted pyramid", etc., etc.) "newspaper" style, anymore. In that style, a summary and broad overview with the most salient points, is presented first. Then the article may delve into further detail. The reader can quickly get an overview and then decide whether and how much further they care to read into the details. Instead, today everything seems to be written in a "narrative style". Often, the first some paragraphs set the scene -- they're "atmosphere" -- sometimes before the writer even deigns to tell you, the reader, what the story is actually about. Facts are interspersed throughout the remainder of the story, and often don't even lead paragraphs but rather remain buried within them amidst a muddle of further descriptive language. For the conveyance of news, it's actually quite crappy writing. I hear/read that it's part and parcel of the push for everybody to have a byline and to establish a "name" for themselves. Which I can in part understand particularly in this day and age of contract work and zero job security -- or even a job (as opposed to endless freelancing) per se. But, for the seeking and consuming of news, it sucks.

mea36 14y ago

I like this, it's simple and easy to skim. I'd suggest adding date/time so the user knows when the article was published.