GreyCoder

Distantly.

I'll scan headlines a few times per day, and read the odd story. One problem I'm encountering with websites, aside from the ads and annoyances, is that much of the news seems curiously irrelevant.

There's a list of text-only news sites which ... slightly ... improves the situation, but only just, as few media outlets bother to organise their text-only offerings. What's generated is typically an unordered jumble of clickbaitish headlines. That said, the listing:

<https://greycoder.com/a-list-of-text-only-new-sites/>

Of those I'll hit NPR, CNN, and the Christian Science Monitor most often.

CNN annoyed me so much that I looked under the hood ... and found that the URLs encode both a news topic and date along with a title, e.g., from current headlines:

https://lite.cnn.com/2025/03/08/us/long-island-fire-suffolk-county/index.html Link: <https://lite.cnn.com/2025/03/08/us/long-island-fire-suffolk-county/index.html>

So, that's an 8 Mar 2025 article in US News about fires on Long Island.

Turns out that it's a SMOP[1] to extract URLs and headlines from the published Web page, and regenerate a far more useful page grouped by subject heading. Another interesting side effect is that I've accumulated an archive of > 4,400 stories published since mid-December 2024 and can easily run statistics on the story distribution. There are 30 sections, which I've aggregated to a smaller set of five, represented as follows:

US: 1298 (29.29%) World: 917…

I would say notifications on replies would be the only thing I'd really want. But I think that helps avoid never-ending replies and bloated comments. At some point it's too much to go through and I move on with my life, which is probably good.

> I think if every website has an HN/Craigslist mode it'd be so awesome

I think this is why old.reddit keeps living on. It's simply a better experience than their "modern" UX refresh. I'd say the new UI also encourages a different kind of content which changes how people use the site for the worse.

I've seen other posts on HN asking for 'lite' versions of websites and there are some out there. Here are a couple examples.

- https://lite.cnn.com

- https://text.npr.org

There are some directories of more, here are a couple of those.

- https://www.leanternet.com

- https://greycoder.com/a-list-of-text-only-new-sites/

I should probably go through and replace most of my bookmarks with these versions where it makes sense.

I mention it in the about page, it’s based on a recent Indian news shorts app called Beatroot (“be true”).

I haven’t looked at other regions, but there’s already some good plain text news websites for US/UK - https://greycoder.com/a-list-of-text-only-new-sites/

I don’t wanna add a summary, or in general host older news - the more news there is to read, the more time you’ll spend. I don’t want that. It’s like a newspaper, if something important enough happened this week that you missed - the news will still be reporting on it.

I think there is a thing about starting to boycott overly heavy websites.

There are some useful resources: https://greycoder.com/a-list-of-text-only-new-sites/

There are also some tricks to have a lighter web browsing by default:

- try websites with netsurf, links or w3m first

- using a local web to gemini proxy to browse many websites with a lightweight gemini browser.

And you can go a long way by using an adblocker and/or disabling javascript by default using an extension with a toggle.

These two wikipedia articles are a start:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nntp

As for "why pay separate provider" -- that would be because circa 2000 most ISP's dropped offering Usenet access for their customers as part of the deal, which created a market for the paid providers.

But, you don't /have/ to pay:

https://greycoder.com/best-free-usenet-servers/

> There's also http://text.npr.org/

Lots of great sources in the link below. I already had my own list of the usual players but this link covers many more I didn't know existed:

https://greycoder.com/a-list-of-text-only-new-sites/

The only site that I rarely see mentioned (or included in the link above) is : http://www.dailymail.co.uk/textbased/channel-561/index.html