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TL;DR — Faster News

toolong-didntread.com

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Re: TL;DR — Faster News

#31

Post by tokenadult »

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.

Re: TL;DR — Faster News

#32

Post by pseut »

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

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.

Re: TL;DR — Faster News

#34

Post by MichaelApproved »

czzarr wrote: post #30
MichaelApproved wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looks like there are a few of us on HN trying to solve the news consumption problem. My site[1] tries to crowdsource the summaries by encouraging the readers to summarize a story themselves. In the meantime, we create most of the summaries in-house. Newser[2] tried to do the same thing but gave up and just focused on in-house created summaries. Regarding the summary process, it's good to see another group manually su…

you forgot http://tldr.io

Thanks! I didn't know about that site before and it looks like they have many contributors. I considered doing a bookmarklet like they do but I figured that I would need a critical number of people before it could be realistic to use.

In the meantime, I created a list[1] of popular stories from Reddit news sources. Each story links to a special hybrid page that allows you to write a summary on top while you read the story below.

[1] http://skimthat.com/unsummarized

edit: clarification

Re: TL;DR — Faster News

#35

Post by cwilson »

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.

Re: TL;DR — Faster News

#36

Post by MichaelApproved »

tokenadult wrote: post #31

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 p…

"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.

Re: TL;DR — Faster News

#37

Post by user24 »

MichaelApproved wrote: post #25
DanielBMarkham wrote: post #15

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 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-nois…

Looks like there are a few of us on HN trying to solve the news consumption problem. My site[1] tries to crowdsource the summaries by encouraging the readers to summarize a story themselves. In the meantime, we create most of the summaries in-house. Newser[2] tried to do the same thing but gave up and just focused on in-house created summaries. Regarding the summary process, it's good to see another group manually su…

adding http://tldr.it as a generic approach.

Re: TL;DR — Faster News

#38

Post by crusso »

slashcom wrote: post #22

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.

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.

Re: TL;DR — Faster News

#39

Post by iamdave »

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?

Re: TL;DR — Faster News

#40

Post by jnazario »

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.

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