Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hello Pinboard.
Hey there.
I just subscribed. Very nice and simple service, love it. The only bad thing I can say is that the "popular" tab seems to be HN delayed by half a week or so.
Instapaper Premium is now free for everyone
31–40 of 134 posts
Re: Instapaper Premium is now free for everyone
#32Already lost my business when they paywalled me out.
What do you mean?
Re: Instapaper Premium is now free for everyone
#33So what's the plan here. Just two months since Pinterest acquired them, they've shutdown Instaparser, moved their team across the country (literally: NY to SF.. I wonder how many employees quit instead), discontinued Premium--their sole source of revenue(?), and committed to no-ads... sounds like they have no monetization strategy at all anymore. This doesn't look good.
> I wonder how many employees quit instead I thought I read that it was just a team of three, all of whom chose to move.
Brian from Instapaper here. It was three of us, and two came along with the acquisition. We all agreed to it before making the decision.
Re: Instapaper Premium is now free for everyone
#34Does anyone have experience to share re: Instapaper vs. Pocket (or something better)?
I'm a huge fan of Pinboard. I like that it has a clear I-am-the-customer profit model, and it's performed flawlessly for me for several years now.
Instapaper used to feel like that when Marco still owned it. What is different to me is that because it was primarily an iOS-revenue driven app, it feel like it caught up in the Apple-inspired race to the bottom revenue-wise. Pinboard feels decidedly more indie-web and therefore perhaps less popular but more stable.
Re: Instapaper Premium is now free for everyone
#35Already lost my business when they paywalled me out.
What do you mean?
at some point in the past they were free, then to continue the normal service you had to sign up for a paid plan. So I stopped using their service. This is a "too little too late" for me as far as my customer experience goes.
Apparently that gets you downvotes on HN.
Re: Instapaper Premium is now free for everyone
#36This smells like an app that will be shutting down in about six months.
Brian from Instapaper here. We have no plans to shut the app down, and a big part of the value the app provides (parser improvements, aggregate information on links) requires the ongoing operation of the service.
Re: Instapaper Premium is now free for everyone
#37Looking forward to Pinterest shutting Instapaper down in 2 years.
Plenty of time to get cracking at a Feedly to their Google Reader, then.
Re: Instapaper Premium is now free for everyone
#38So what's the plan here. Just two months since Pinterest acquired them, they've shutdown Instaparser, moved their team across the country (literally: NY to SF.. I wonder how many employees quit instead), discontinued Premium--their sole source of revenue(?), and committed to no-ads... sounds like they have no monetization strategy at all anymore. This doesn't look good.
This is the kind of business model the SF tech scene encourages. People are starting companies to be acquired, not to create a business that stands the test of time.
Re: Instapaper Premium is now free for everyone
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
I run a rival site to these. Can you email me a description of what this kind of plugin would do? (support@pinboard.in)
As someone who is concerned with where Instapaper is heading, how well does your site compete with the likes of Instapaper or Pocket?
sort of different use cases. I love pinboard and use it heavily, but it does nothing for the reading experience afaik (that's not a knock, i love pinboard, but it doesn't do what pocket or instapaper do for making anything more readable).
Re: Instapaper Premium is now free for everyone
#40Does anyone have experience to share re: Instapaper vs. Pocket (or something better)?
I found the general feature set to be similar, but Pocket has pretty decent article discovery/curation. I now use Pocket exclusively. The only downside is that a decent chunk of their content (~5%) is from Business Insider, and there is no way to mute/hide a source (News Republic offers this). But they've got plenty of good sources (NYT, New Yorker), and a pretty good recommendation algorithm.
Not sure if you're talking about this but Pocket recently launched Pocket Explore - it's a little nicer than the "Recommended" tab in dashboard. https://www.getpocket.com/explore/
Also - If you're looking for discovery/curation then you'd probably be interested in what I'm doing - GGather.com. Right now it's in private beta - but you can join on https://beta.ggather.com