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Show HN: Unclutter – Reader mode, but better

unclutter.it

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Show HN: Unclutter – Reader mode, but better

#1

Post by phgn »

Hey everyone!

In the last months I've been working on Unclutter, a modern reader mode browser extension. In contrast to all existing approaches, it unclutters articles by modifying their CSS instead of extracting the text content.

This results in a more visually pleasing result that reuses the original article style. The idea is to remove friction so you use the reader mode more often. There are a few more features around saving articles automatically and taking highlights -- more details are on the website.

The extension has about 400 active weekly users right now, mostly from organic web store traffic. Monetisation has proven to be hard and for freemium there would need to be much higher numbers anyways. Do you think I should keep working on the project?

Show HN: Unclutter – Reader mode, but better
unclutter.it

Re: Show HN: Unclutter – Reader mode, but better

#2

Post by phgn »

Here are some past discussions about reader modes, where the motivation for this project came from:

The most underused browser feature: reader mode - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28286493 - Aug 2021 (357 comments)

How does Firefox's Reader View work? (2020) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30864311 - Mar 2022 (102 comments)

Re: Show HN: Unclutter – Reader mode, but better

#4

Post by phgn »

kazinator wrote: post #3

It looks nice! Does it have some paywall-busting powers, like Firefox's built-in reader mode? Quite often, you can get through many a paywall by switching to reader mode and then reloading the page. Previously hidden content appears.

Thank you!

Admittedly, paywall-busting doesn't work as well with Unclutter as with the text-extraction methods. But it's still effective for most sites and there are custom tweaks e.g. for nytimes.com.

I'm thinking about improving on this actually. It would be cool to fetch the page content from web archives automatically if it detects a paywall. Kind of like the "archive.is" links people post here all the time, but with less clutter.

Re: Show HN: Unclutter – Reader mode, but better

#5

Post by kazinator »

phgn wrote: post #4
kazinator wrote: post #3

It looks nice! Does it have some paywall-busting powers, like Firefox's built-in reader mode? Quite often, you can get through many a paywall by switching to reader mode and then reloading the page. Previously hidden content appears.

Thank you! Admittedly, paywall-busting doesn't work as well with Unclutter as with the text-extraction methods. But it's still effective for most sites and there are custom tweaks e.g. for nytimes.com. I'm thinking about improving on this actually. It would be cool to fetch the page content from web archives automatically if it detects a paywall. Kind of like the "archive.is" links people post here all the time, but…

Is that paywall busting even an actual goal/requirement in reader mode, or just a fortuitous side effect of the way it does its "web clipping" (is that still a term?)

Re: Show HN: Unclutter – Reader mode, but better

#6

Post by phgn »

kazinator wrote: post #5
phgn wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you! Admittedly, paywall-busting doesn't work as well with Unclutter as with the text-extraction methods. But it's still effective for most sites and there are custom tweaks e.g. for nytimes.com. I'm thinking about improving on this actually. It would be cool to fetch the page content from web archives automatically if it detects a paywall. Kind of like the "archive.is" links people post here all the time, but…

Is that paywall busting even an actual goal/requirement in reader mode, or just a fortuitous side effect of the way it does its "web clipping" (is that still a term?)

It's an intended side effect. The paywall banners are also just clutter to remove from the DOM, often the entire text is still there.

Technically, messing with paywalls is forbidden for Chrome extensions listed in the webstore (and detrimental for getting press coverage). Which is why no one advertises this.

Re: Show HN: Unclutter – Reader mode, but better

#8

Post by phgn »

hnthrow10282910 wrote: post #7

Might just be me, but the example photos (not the first two) don’t load on the landing page

Do you mean the example videos with the text next to them? Or the 2 rows of images at the very bottom of the page?

They are .webm and .webp. Which browser & browser version are you using?

Re: Show HN: Unclutter – Reader mode, but better

#10

Post by phgn »

clnq wrote: post #9

I would pay to have something like this that could also summarise articles with GPT-3.

Have you used other services that summarise articles?

What would be the workflow? Do you want to read the summary instead of the article, use it to decide whether to read, or something else?

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