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Show HN: Unclutter – Reader mode, but better

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

#111

Post by CrypticShift »

This is not a reader mode. You are literally building a beautifull ‘Read it later" app [1] around a reader mode, or is it a "News Reader" app? You choose.

If you position it this way, I think there is demand for an open source based, local-first option. You will have to differentiate yourself from others like memex.garden.

I can tell you: It is a hot thing right now. People in the tft/note-taking community just can't stop talking about Readwise [2] in twitter. And it is charging 5-10$ PER MONTH !. To be Fair, their app does a lot of things and does it right.

The prices will surely go down with competition, but I don’t think it is a Fad. As a business model, you can take some inspiration from the popular freemium open-source note-taking apps.

[1] https://alternativeto.net/category/books--news/read-later/

[2] https://readwise.io/

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

#112

Post by agumonkey »

phgn wrote: post #108
agumonkey wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I sometime bookmark, but mostly tags.. or just hoarding lumps of links. Hmm thanks for the info, I didn't know pocket did that. Now I just need this as a standalone firefox extension :) ps: in any case, my suggestion was a soft tongue in cheek, not pressing you, unless it excites you. And kudos on your results already.

Another question: do you look at your saved links frequently, for example to browse by the tag you assigned? What's the primary purpose of tagging? I just created a ticket for this: https://github.com/lindylearn/unclutter/issues/595

I don't much because I lack proper auto-tagging, circular problem. tagging is half ergonomics (tagging is auto suggested in firefox ui, unlike folders which require selecting) half categorical, a bookmark can belong to many sets of tags instead of being in one folder (or duplicated)

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

#113

Post by phgn »

pihentagy wrote: post #110
phgn wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seeing many parts of the UI as unnecessary seems to be a common reaction, particularly for people who find it by searching "reader mode" in the Chrome store. What do you think about presenting the library aspect as a "Pocket alternative"?

That would require to sync your library on your Firefox account, right?

Yep, Pocket has an API for this.

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

#114

Post by phgn »

mlinksva wrote: post #109
phgn wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seeing many parts of the UI as unnecessary seems to be a common reaction, particularly for people who find it by searching "reader mode" in the Chrome store. What do you think about presenting the library aspect as a "Pocket alternative"?

I've never used Pocket, and upon seeing it in the Firefox UI, immediately searched for how to hide it. I'm the wrong person to ask. :) But if I were to embrace such features, I'd have a naive question: why do I need to unclutter an article to access them? If I'm perfectly happy reading a normally rendered page and see a phrase I want to annotate, I won't want to break my flow by uncluttering first. This emphasizes to…

Good point. I actually wanted to address this "breaking the flow" with the "keeping the style of the original site" approach for Unclutter, vs. reader modes that have a totally different reading UI.

But maybe that's not working out completely. Thanks for the feedback!

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

#115

Post by mlinksva »

phgn wrote: post #114
mlinksva wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never used Pocket, and upon seeing it in the Firefox UI, immediately searched for how to hide it. I'm the wrong person to ask. :) But if I were to embrace such features, I'd have a naive question: why do I need to unclutter an article to access them? If I'm perfectly happy reading a normally rendered page and see a phrase I want to annotate, I won't want to break my flow by uncluttering first. This emphasizes to…

Good point. I actually wanted to address this "breaking the flow" with the "keeping the style of the original site" approach for Unclutter, vs. reader modes that have a totally different reading UI. But maybe that's not working out completely. Thanks for the feedback!

Yeah, I think the re-render(?) breaks flow as completely as traditional reader mode, it doesn't matter that the uncluttered version retains some of the look of the original. If the text doesn't stay in the same place, flow is broken. In addition it seems there's some animation affect in the original->uncluttered transition that makes it slightly more jarring, but is not fundamental.

Thanks for unclutter, careful listening to feedback in this Show HN post, and pointing out your inspirations at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33718859! Though I've never connected with its functionality beyond reader mode (in any tool), I'd love to at some point, but it's hard to get right in a way that doesn't become burdensome or transitory. I want browsers to become much more powerful user agents. Stuff like hypothes.is that I see you've integrated with is super cool, just not there for me yet. Godspeed!

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

#116

Post by clnq »

phgn wrote: post #107
clnq wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been using Explainpaper ( https://www.explainpaper.com/ ) to get an introductory understanding of textbook chapters and technical articles. I want to do the same for news articles and specialised blogs. Yes, I would like to see a one-paragraph summary of technical articles to decide if they are worthwhile to read. For news articles, the summary might be all I want to read. I have very little time to read things…

Makes sense! I've actually had a similar feature request before: https://github.com/lindylearn/unclutter/issues/297 Have you tried some of the existing solutions mentioned in the ticket? I'm curious if they solve the problem for you, and if not, what Unclutter could do better.

I took time to try all four examples in the feature request.

BlinkNotes didn't work for a technical reason, TLDR; it did not have AI capabilities - only crowdsourced summaries.

TLDR This was good but seemed to use an NLP algorithm they call "AI." So instead of summarizing articles, it seems to produce a bullet list of the essential text fragments. This is in contrast to the much easier-to-read conversational style summaries GPT-3 can provide. TLDR This also did poorly with some of the technical articles I have authored, sometimes extracting pieces of C++ code as meaningful text.

Summari worked very well for me. It summarized even quite technical articles well because it uses a conversational AI. Thanks for the recommendation.

If I had to name one key criterion that differentiates good summaries from bad, in my opinion, it would be the effective use of language. Conversational/language models like GPT-3 are proficient at absorbing much contextual information and synthesizing a short and effective summary. NLP algorithms are good at throwing away superfluous context, which is common in casual writing, but they do not seem to work well for technical writing or texts whose purpose is to explain concepts and where there is little superfluous context to throw away.

Perhaps for something like Unclutter, if the users mainly read news sites, then an NLP approach could be appropriate (it would be cheaper and works well for such content). But the ideal implementation for an article summarizer for me needs that summary-from-a-lot-of-context synthesizing capability.

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

#117

Post by atchoo »

phgn wrote: post #92
atchoo wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just wish we could remove the toolbar that I don't need yet is permanently stuck at the top.

It may be possible to hide that with custom user styles: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1069513 Looking at that link, wow -- I didn't realise the Firefox reader existed for over 7 years now.

I have tried that in the past but it didn't work. Undocumented workarounds like this don't age well over seven years!

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

#118

Post by piyush_soni »

phgn wrote: post #75
piyush_soni wrote: post #66

Just tried a bit, looks nice!

Thanks for trying it! Is there anything that could work better?

Just a few. Enabling it on a few sites doesn't work as expected at all, and the add-on should probably be disabled on those - for example Twitter. First, it tries to enable the dark mode on Twitter, but the tweets itself are all gone (the only thing you see is the heading sections). And when you disable the extension to return to the normal mode, the dark mode remains on tweets (central section) for example, while the rest of it turns white again. That's a bug. I think you might need to crowdsource which websites it doesn't work fine with.

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

#119

Post by catchmeifyoucan »

phgn wrote: post #27
catchmeifyoucan wrote: post #11

Digging this UI. It's actually really beautiful compared to regular ol' reader mode. The UI is nice, and it's a cool touch to see social comments. Nice work! I love that you also opened source it! Which is a huge win. It might also be nice to "auto-activate", so people don't forget it's running. Right now, I have to click the extension to run it. If it could pass paywalls, I'd probably pay ("donate" might be a better…

Hey thank you! I'm really glad you like the extension. There actually is an "auto-activate" feature you can enable in the settings. Is this what you had in mind? Regarding mobile support, I know. I'm not sure how to handle mobile Chrome which doesn't allow extensions, but for Safari this should be possible. No guarantees when I can get to this though. See https://github.com/lindylearn/unclutter/issues/529

Kind of - I don't even want to activate once. Can you run it in the background? And just run it by default (at least on websites you're confident about). I might forget it exists

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

#120

Post by phgn »

piyush_soni wrote: post #118
phgn wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for trying it! Is there anything that could work better?

Just a few. Enabling it on a few sites doesn't work as expected at all, and the add-on should probably be disabled on those - for example Twitter. First, it tries to enable the dark mode on Twitter, but the tweets itself are all gone (the only thing you see is the heading sections). And when you disable the extension to return to the normal mode, the dark mode remains on tweets (central section) for example, while th…

There already is crowdsourcing of broken page reports: https://github.com/lindylearn/unclutter/issues?q=is%3Aissue+...

And twitter.com is a special case: https://github.com/lindylearn/unclutter/issues/570

It's never going to be perfect unfortunately. Thanks for the feedback!

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