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TL;DR — Faster News

toolong-didntread.com

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Re: TL;DR — Faster News

#101

Post by OafTobark »

mstefanko wrote: post #99

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…

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.

Re: TL;DR — Faster News

#102

Post by redcircle »

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.

Re: TL;DR — Faster News

#105

Post by billirvine »

sixbit wrote: post #97
billirvine wrote: post #92

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. (intent…

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.

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?

Re: TL;DR — Faster News

#106

Post by OafTobark »

brador wrote: post #50
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…

I'll add my baby to the pot: http://skimfeed.com .

Inspired by AffBuzz?

Re: TL;DR — Faster News

#107

Post by sixbit »

billirvine wrote: post #105
sixbit wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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?

We are definitely working on calling it out better in an update to the app. Thanks for the feedback!

Re: TL;DR — Faster News

#108

Post by MichaelApproved »

hnriot wrote: post #79
MichaelApproved wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm having trouble getting http://m.yahoo.com/w/legobpengine/news/blogs/clinton-white-h... to work. You should have a few links listed on that page that you know will work well as examples for people to try the service out with. Btw, how do you feel about my other comments in this thread about algorithms not working well? My basic point is that they will most likely produce paragraphs that are out of context.

>My basic point is that they will most likely produce paragraphs that are out of context. Disagree - having written a bunch of these gist extractors I have found that the good ones do not produce out of context paragraphs. In fact, that's pretty much the point - to find the salient portion of the content.

My argument is that many times the salient portion is written in such a way that it's continuing a point from a previous part of the article. So, when you remove it from the complete context of the article, the sentence seems like it's out of place even if it has an important detail.

Re: TL;DR — Faster News

#109

Post by abalashov »

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.

Re: TL;DR — Faster News

#110

Post by MichaelApproved »

mtrimpe wrote: post #70
MichaelApproved wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I read the tldr.io of this TL;DR service first.

Do you mean that you tried the tl;dr bookmarket on Skim That? I just added a summary for Skim That using the bookmarket so you should see it now.

I really like how it uses line by line bullet point fields to help write the summary. I experimented with something like that in the past. It kind of works but it isn't as smooth a read as a paragraph of text but it does make the writing process easier.

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