Instapaper is going independent

Mostly text crawling and rendering. Sometimes the articles are turncated (say half of article is missing), saving from pastebin doesn't work at all (my favorite way to save long forum posts).

Also text rendering is not really good: in Instapaper you get nicely fullscreen text, not really true for Pocket: they keep too much text formating (colors, sometimes also some layouts elements) and quite often I am getting articles that are cut the way that one line contains just one word (and sometimes just few letters out of word).

Last thing is bloat, which is just minor issue: I don't care about trending posts, best offs and recomendation.

My home computer (in the center of Europe) is not blocked, but I see that as ip2country mapping issue (in my favor). That would explain the couple of "works for me" reports I've seen on Twitter. Still useless to me because I can't safe URLs at work or on mobile.

Look at Brian's comment history: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=bthdonohue.

He's not active on HN, but he jumps in for quick damage control and "clarification" when people have vaguely privacy-related or operational questions about Instapaper. When followup questions are posed, particularly more difficult ones, he never responds. So I find it very unlikely you're going to get an answer here, because this account is clearly designed to do low-touch public reassurance without much commitment or transparency.

Now take a look at Instapaper's privacy policy: https://www.instapaper.com/privacy. In particular, direct your attention to the following, under "The Way We Use Information":

(P1) We use the information you provide to operate Instapaper's features. We do not share this information with outside parties except to the extent necessary to accomplish Instapaper's functionality.

(P3) We use non-identifying and aggregate information to better design Instapaper, to suggest popular content to users, and to share with advertisers and publishers. For example: ...

(P6) In the future, we may sell, buy, merge, or partner with other companies or businesses. In such transactions, user information may be among the transferred assets.

The "License Grant" section of the Terms of Service is also good reading, because it indicates that they can use user data in perpetuity, even after closing your Instapaper account (presumably until you explicitly request your information being deleted). What do you suppose that is used for? Maybe Brian can enlighten us.

My hypothesis is that Instapaper, either from the outset or somewhere prior to being acquired by Pinterest, developed a monetization model dependent upon selling user data (or derivative analysis/features of user data) to third parties. Most likely this is provided for market research or advertising optimization. Note that in their Privacy Policy Instapaper also states they use cookies "and other tracking technology" (and they specifically do not enumerate the full number of reasons which they do so, aside from normal login and session maintenance) in their Privacy Policy.

Further, I'm going to go ahead and assume this can be explained through basic cynicism. This monetization model was probably never terribly significant for Pinterest, except insofar as it was useful for internal discussions and inspirations for ways Pinterest could improve upon their own user data analysis. When GDPR came along, this probably tipped the scales to make Instapaper a net liability for the company (and not one in line with its financial or brand goals). Thus we have Instapaper being cut lose, yet again.

Look for how much debt the subsidiary is taking with them. The key advantage of such spinoffs, over just closing the doors, is that you can also spin away some red ink. You know things are doomed if the spunoff has either debts or onerous contractual obligations from the parent.

I've been using Instapaper since the day it came out on the app store (never saw the point of the web version). Pinterest has been the worst owner! There used to be periodic improvements and updates. There's not even a full black mode for iPhone X! In the old days Instapaper would have been the first out of the gate with little features like that. Let's home there's an improvement.

Luckily the service is still better than Pocket, which has unusable pagination, no ability to sort by length, and is generally just a cluttered mess.