

Show HN: Summaries of interesting content, written by people - louischatriot
http://tldr.io

======
sync
Lovely drag/drop bookmarklet tutorial w/ animated arrow and helpful prompts
and everything.

Though, really, I would like to try the service out without having to
drag/drop a bookmarklet and then going off to another website and then
clicking tl;dr. Can't I just put in a URL to try it out? Or provide a demo URL
for us to try out?

~~~
stfu
Exactly. Especially if a site wants to get a permanent spot in my browser, it
must demonstrate its value upfront. And without some good examples this is not
going to happen.

~~~
louischatriot
Cofounder here. We put such test URLs at the end of the onboarding process but
it is true they may appear too late! Thanks for the feedback!

------
eranation
Any ideas how to make money out of it? I thought of a similar idea after
developing an addiction to reading every article on HN in fear I'm missing
something that will change the way I do things (sadly, every other day, I find
something that justifies it, this one could be an example if it works out)

But my thought was that I will gladly pay someone 10$ a month, to scan through
HN instead of me, and send me summaries of things that I'm interested in (e.g.
web frameworks, JavaScript, Scala, CSS3/HTML5 etc)

Here is a feature that Wikipedia can't have for ethical reasons, and you might
be able to get away with:

\- user clicks on bookmarklet (hopefully a chrome / ff extension soon)

\- no tl;dr

\- user has a button saying "ask someone to summarize it"

\- now you either hire some good shorthand writer, or crowd source it and cut
a percentage of the transaction

another way is to say - the first 3 hours of an article's peek (e.g. you do it
actively for each front page article in HN for a start) you charge 1$ to see
the tl;dr version of it , after 3 hours, it's free for all.

I think a lot of people here would love not having to read everything just to
find the point or understand if this is really relevant

I think you have a huge market here, saving time is a very important service
nowadays, especially when there is so much good content wrapped with a lot of
needless, but mandatory decorative language.

~~~
czzarr
Hi, these are really great ideas, thank you.

We've thought about it more in terms of volume of consumption for now but are
going to look into the users' patterns to see what fits them best. We also
thought about paid mobile apps, or plugins for content creators if we can
prove them it drives more traffic to their content.

~~~
ArekDymalski
I think you should first focus on building big-enough community of people
who'll create high quality, non-biased, not-spammy summaries. Without it you
won't have anything to monetize. Eranation's ideas were interesting (in the
area of financial incentives you could experiment with Mechanical Turk, maybe
GitTip, MinuteBox etc. as well as BitCoin payments). However you also should
check for other, non-financial motivators for creators. I guess that many
bloggers and other people trying to build their online brand would be
interested in it for clicks, social shares, Whuffies, Klout score impact etc.
The another option worth testing could be some kind of _intelligent_
gamification of the process. In that case browser extension would be handy as
it could provide all the necessary tools like author profile, sharing buttons
and so long. Good luck - I really hope to see your button everywhere soon, as
it's great idea.

~~~
czzarr
Hi Arek, This is exactly what we think as well. Without an engaged community
of quality contributors we won't go anywhere and this is our only priority. I
love your ideas, thank you for sharing them. One problem we face with
convincing bloggers is the mental barrier of them thinking that people are
just going to read the tl;dr and not the whole content. We believe that the
reverse is actually more likely and are starting to aggregate data to back
this claim up. If you are up to discussing intelligent gamification with us,
I'd be delighted to have a chat with you. Contact me on twitter @stanmarion or
by email stan@<tldr>io Thanks for the kind words

------
citricsquid
Slight tangent, there was a kid (maybe 15?) a while back doing an automated
content summariser for mobile and he was all over the tech sites for being
incredible after getting an investment, but I can't for the life of me
remember the name and I want to see his project again. Does anyone recall his
name or the company? All I can remember is a chinese (maybe russian) firm
invested in him and he was young.

edit: found it! "Summly", looks like their site is down :(

~~~
n1c
Seems to just be down because of an upgrade: <https://twitter.com/Summly>

~~~
Hates_
13 weeks is a long time for an upgrade.

------
carlesfe
This is a fantastic idea. I'm going to give it a try for some weeks and see
how it develops. Thanks.

By the way, a slightly more elaborated version would be much appreciated. I'm
thinking of

\- A button/notification which changes color when there is a TL;DR available

\- Something sidebar-like

\- Better community integration

~~~
louischatriot
Cofounder here, thanks for your feedback! This is indeed an early version, and
to answer your points more precisely:

\- This is indeed planned, and as you can see in the comments you're not the
only one thinking that! It cannot be done with a bookmarklet but we will
release Chrome and Firefox extensions that will have this feature.

\- I don't get what you mean by "something sidebar-like", are you talking of a
pannel on the top of your screen automatically displaying the summary if it
exists?

\- Yep, building an active community around tldr.io will likely be key to its
success. We are thinking hard on how to do it, and if you have any ideas or
suggestion they are more than welcome

~~~
carlesfe
Forget about the sidebar. I thought it was a good idea , but it isn't.

Regarding the community, It wasn't in the line of "building a community as a
key to success" but rather give profiles some more strength, use something
karma-like to reward users who work, the ability to score TL;DRs and allow
multiple per page, etc.

~~~
louischatriot
Yep, that is definitely planned. Especially a karma-like system to reward
users who work. Since you're helping people by providing tldrs, we are
thinking about the count of people who read tldrs you created, meaning the
number of people you helped.

------
engtech
It may be better implemented as a firefox/chrome extension?

Given that the majority of sites will not likely have a tl;dr I am unlikely to
click the bookmarklet every time I open a web page.

~~~
czzarr
indeed, wait for it, it's coming soon!

~~~
ArekDymalski
Great. I prefer extension, as I have the bookmarks bar permanently hidden.

------
alecdibble
That's a good idea! Have you thought about making Chrome/Firefox extensions as
well to interface with your service? I feel like the extensions would be more
integrated and provide a better user experience. I would use this service if
an extension notified me that the article had been "tldr'd. Having to remember
to click it is inconvenient and I will probably forget.

Overall though, it's a really good idea and I am interested to see how you
flesh it out.

~~~
Charlesmigli
Hey, cofounder here. Thanks for the feedback, you are totally right the
bookmarklet is a first prototype to gauge interest for the product. We will
package it as browser extensions for the reasons you mentioned and other
awesome ideas that we have in stock.

------
zerostar07
Good luck with the site. I had a similar idea, also implemented as a
bookmarklet (here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2909309> which later
mutated to <http://noteplz.com/>). Maybe the signup requirement is an
overkill, wiki-style voting might work just as well.

~~~
czzarr
I don't know what wiki-style voting is but I'll look it up. Thanks for the
feedback!

~~~
zerostar07
I meant allow everyone to contribute and have an up/down voting system that
also does not require login (based on cookies / ip maybe? dunno)

~~~
czzarr
right, this is definitely something we have in mind. Why not require login
though? Sounds like it would be tough to control without.

------
martinpannier
Interesting idea. Would love to know how you guys will tackle the tl;dr
generation issue—how to incentivize people to contribute, etc.

This is definitely a very interesting space. We ARE moving towards bite-sized
pieces of information anyways, and you guys seem to be riding on this trend.

Best of luck, and looking forward to how this will turn out!

~~~
louischatriot
We do too :) Thanks !

------
erenemre
Best. Bookmarklet. Tutorial. Ever.

Thank you.

I, too, needed something like this forever. Every time I see a long article, I
complain about the lack of a tl;dr.

Unfortunately, I am not so optimistic about humans creating the content. You
guys have a really, really hard job. Creating the right tools is easy.
Convincing people to create tl;dr's is hard.

I'm really curious about how you are planning to solve this problem.

I really do hope that you'll succeed though : ]

Edit: Also, for me, this tool is great for articles that are new. Assuming you
don't have enough contributors at the moment, after seeing a few articles that
don't have tl;dr, I probably use the tool less and less everyday. Until I
forget about it. I'm sure I am not the only one.

~~~
louischatriot
Thanks we worked a lot on the bookmarklet tutorial :)

You're completely right, the real challenge starts now, we need to find a way
to get humans to contribute, because right now you have too much probability
of getting a "summary not created yet" message when clicking on the
bookmarklet. We already have some ideas we want to explore, if you do have
some please tell us it would help a lot!

------
asdfprou
Onboarding process was awesome and effective. I went to the site meaning to
just check it out but the process was almost too easy and now I have the tldr
bookmarklet just sitting there on my toolbar.

Also I love the hover feature on the bookmarklet when you first see it.

~~~
louischatriot
Cofounder here, thank you for your comment on the onboarding process! We spent
a lot of time on it :)

------
rahooligan
This is really cool & solves a problem for me. I installed the bookmarklet and
am looking forward to using it. I see that you are relying on the community to
summarize pages & don't have a large enough data set built up yet.

What would be awesome is if you could somehow automate summarization using
NLP. Check out condensr.com. They are able to summarize restaurant
reviews...might not be at the same quality level as your current summaries but
it came out of research from MIT & could be useful to you.

~~~
czzarr
Hi, thanks a lot for the feedback! we're glad that we're solving a problem for
you! You're right that we have little content for now, but we don't think NLP
is the answer.

Humans are so much better than algorithms at summarizing content and we really
want to focus on quality rather than quantity for now. We want to become a
platform for the content that people deem worthy of being summarized and are
hopeful that the overall quality will therefore be astounding. As such we are
focusing on building a community of excited contributors.

I'll definitely checkout condensr.com to see if it can help at all though!

------
c4urself
Nice site, really nice UI with the arrow pointing to the bookmark bar. A
change in the color of the tl;dr; bookmark when there's a bookmark available
would really go a long way! Great job!

~~~
louischatriot
Thanks for the feedback! What you describe would be a big improvement but is
not feasible with a bookmarklet. We are planning on releasing a browser
extension that will enable just this.

------
hsiaobrandon
I think the idea's really neat, but at the same time I'm concerned about the
effect that things like this have on the attitude of our culture. A large part
of critical reading is being able to take the time to read an article/passage
in-depth and judge its ideas for yourself.

From a business standpoint, are there maybe certain types of content that just
aren't viable to "summarize?" Would it be better to tailor your service
towards certain other types of content? Just my thoughts.

~~~
czzarr
Our goal is to help people find and select what they really want to spend time
reading. We feel that a summary is the perfect step between a title and the
actual content and that it actually incentivizes people to read the whole
thing once they're hooked by the summary.

The people that won't read the full article after reading the summary probably
would have just bounced or skimmed the article extremely quickly.

You're right that there are probably certain types of contents that lend
themselves to be summarized better than others. We're still figuring this one
out by observing what our users and experimenting with what we summarize.

------
switch33
As an interesting idea; why not host a contest for summarizing wiki pages to
promote growth and usage of the system? Also, I think besides your algorithmic
ranking system, can't you also incorporate crowd-sourced ranking into the
equation? Don't sell this business before it really grows. I really think that
shortened topics with good information can be a lot more beneficial and even
grow to be the new facebook or google sort of deal.

~~~
czzarr
Hi, this is a great idea and we're definitely going to give it some serious
thought. If you have some experience with these kind of things, would you be
interested in talking about it a little on Skype or by mail?

~~~
switch33
As another idea you can also look at how Duolingo has developed since it is
mainly crowd-sourced. As for the Wikipedia summation contest I would say do it
by number of tl;dr's as well as quality and have some kind of cash award for
users that post the most with best quality.

I'm no expert on any of this; just a college student with a interest in a lot
of things. But growth is what will make or break this as a viable service.
Duolingo is successful because it is an incentive to learn another language.

The incentive to summarize something that is difficult is there; but if people
are not willing to read the whole thing in the first place then they probably
aren't willing to summarize it. The problem is to solve this by providing at
least some form of incentive or general interest in it. That requires some key
thinking.

~~~
czzarr
yes you're absolutely right. We think summarizing content is useful for one
person because it help sink knowledge in and really understand what one is
reading. The fact that it can help thousands of people save time and browse
more efficiently on the Internet is the cherry on top.

Thanks for your input!

------
mmahemoff
I really like the bookmarklet intro, but my concern with a bookmark is it's
static. If it was an extension, it could change to show if there's already a
tl;dr present.

The web is a big place, so realistically there will almost never be a tl;dr
waiting, for at least the first year of this service, which means the
bookmarklet is effectively a "create tl;dr" button.

~~~
louischatriot
That is true, and we are planning on making such an extension.

You are also right about the fact that the bookmarklet is currently a "create
tl;dr" button, since we have so little of the web covered. For now we can
provide you with tldrs this way: \- You can follow @tldrio on twitter or like
the "tldr" page on facebook \- We are planning on summarizing all (at least
most) of the articles from some well known blogs such as AVC and
bothsidesofthetable \- We are thinking of a newsletter with the latest hot
tldrs \- If you have any other ideas please share them !

------
johndavi
We took a whack at this problem (agree it is big issue worth solving) last
year with Streamliner, <http://www.streamliner.co>.

(Hint: ignore the video-specific text and paste in a blog post or article
URL.)

Couple of examples: [http://www.streamliner.co/s/S2C72QTZ/booster-camera-
video-of...](http://www.streamliner.co/s/S2C72QTZ/booster-camera-video-of-
atlantis-launch/) (video) and [http://www.streamliner.co/r/eErbi/always-be-
skeptical-of-nut...](http://www.streamliner.co/r/eErbi/always-be-skeptical-of-
nutrition-headlines-what-red-meat-consumption/) (text)

We rolled out with video initially because of text-stripping issues and the
extreme low likelihood of users installing a bookmarklet/extension. Building a
community of engaged trustworthy summarizers is also very hard.

Good luck!

~~~
czzarr
thanks!interesting take on the problem. Would love to talk to you about your
experience if you're up for it!

~~~
johndavi
Sure thing, be glad to. Ping me whenever at john@<myusername>.com

------
jamespitts
Pretty cool.

You might want to put a list of the day's top tl;drs on your landing page, or
def. under "want some". When you roll over the title of the story, you get a
floating tl;dr.

This would encourage skeptical users to do what you want them to do (drag that
link up to the toolbar).

~~~
czzarr
Thanks! 3rd cofounder here. This is something we are indeed working on, but we
put off the launch for too long already and really wanted to get feedback.
You're right though that discoverability isn't great as it is. Try it on most
links here on the HN frontpage though, we're doing them for you today!

------
bgrohman
As a user, how do I know that the summary I'm reading is an accurate
reflection of the article? Do you have any plans to validate the tl;dr
entries? Have you thought about a rating system to allow users to rate the
tl;dr entries?

~~~
czzarr
For now, you have to trust us ;) But yeah we obviously have things (votes,
endorsements, verified badges and the likes) planned to ensure the tl;drs
reflect the underlying article accurately. It is a first world problem for now
though.

------
makmanalp
Great UI! One cool idea could be to have automated summarizer snippets already
on the page, and let the user edit those, or suggest those to the user. This
would result in so much more content.

~~~
louischatriot
Thanks! We did consider to show an automated summary of any webpage that was
not already summarized by a human, but our tests showed that our users prefer
to summarize from scratch than from a computer-generated summary that's
usually of very low quality.

------
wiradikusuma
This is great! Love the cute effect when dragging! I think the content of
TL;DR should be in Wiki a'la StackOverflow, so people can refine it together.
And probably showing a couple, not just one, as TL;DR can be very opinionated.
And/or show if the TL;DR is written by the content owner to give
"authoritative" feeling. Anyway I understand if it's too much then it won't be
"TL;DR" anymore, so you must find the balance.

~~~
czzarr
Hi, thanks for the feedback we're glad you like it! To answer your questions:
\- all tldrs are editable by users, so that the content can be refined by the
community. \- we feel that tl;drs should convey the message and tone of the
author of the underlying resource and as such shouldn't be opinionated. \- we
would love to help content owners author, spread and control tl;drs of their
content. If a content owner here is interested in talking with us about such
opportunities, please contact us on twitter or by email

------
peloton
I actually preferred the bookmarklet first approach (vs extension). I'd much
rather test a bookmarklet first and then graduate to a browser extension.

~~~
czzarr
thanks for the feedback, this is one of the reason (on top of cross-browser
compatibility) for which we chose to create a bookmarklet first

------
tarr11
This is a great idea and a solid execution.

It should automatically stick the tldr on the page if I installed the
bookmark, and a tldr exists.

~~~
Charlesmigli
Hey cofounder here. Thanks for your feedback. What you mention is a great
feature that will be available when we'll release browser extensions.

------
RivieraKid
This is great, I regularly wish something like this existed. Almost every
interesting article / blog has a terrible signal to noise ratio.

------
n1c
This stings a bit because I've been [slowly] building basically the same
thing!

Any particular reason you guys went with Express/Mongo?

~~~
czzarr
well we could talk about it! No particular reason, we're not
developers/designers by trade, we have a generalist engineering background and
we wanted to do a startup so we just went with what was buzzing at the time
and learned everything from almost scratch. (could definitely be that it
wasn't the smartest technical choices but since we've been handling the HN
spike on our 20$/month linode VPS pretty handsomely so far we must be doing
something right)

------
thebigshane
Ok, now I wait until someone writes another extension/bookmarklet that
automatically inserts the tl;drs (if any) into the HN front page.

~~~
czzarr
bear with us, we're working on that!

------
rooshdi
I was starting to work on almost this exact same tldr concept recently but
decided to shift to another project instead. It's great to see another group
of people tackling the signal to noise issue. It's definitely a growing
problem that needs to be solved. Great start thus far and I'm excited to see
where you take this!

~~~
czzarr
thank you!

------
nashequilibrium
I actually built something similar for my rss feeds and some bookmarks using
the python "Clips" library but i felt that it needed to be a feature in a
broader product, so i decided against trying to build a business with it. The
difference with mine is that the algo automatically summarized the content for
you.

~~~
louischatriot
That's one way to approach this problem, and there are a couple companies
trying it, most notably Summly. We believe that software-made summaries are
not good enough, which is why we down the human-written summaries road!

------
Doches
I'd have read the description of the tool, thought 'eh, cool', and clicked
away if it weren't for the absurdly cute instructions for installing the
bookmarklet. Probably one of the best, tongue-in-cheek pieces of tutorial I've
seen in a while.

Your tutorial made me smile! How rare is that?

~~~
czzarr
hehe glad we could make you smile! We put a lot of work into it. We thought it
would be hard to convince people to install it otherwise as it is sort of a
technical abstract conceptual thing for now so we added humor :)

------
secoif
Planning on creating API for this? I can see content aggregators being very
interested in integrating.

~~~
czzarr
There is one, we're just not advertising it yet. If you're interested, please
to get in touch with us. meta@<tldr>.io

------
lhnz
Very smart move on sending emails to people who clicked for summaries and
didn't get them. (But in which they are later created.)

~~~
czzarr
we thought you'd like that :)

------
ArekDymalski
Got "We detected that you are using Internet Explorer to browse this site" on
Android Chrome. Will checkk laterr.

~~~
czzarr
Hi, this is strange as we followed the html5 boilerplate way of detecting IE.
We will look into the matter, thanks for the feedback. As a sidenote, our site
isn't optimized for mobile (to put it mildly) so I recommend trying it on a
computer.

------
matthieurouif
I love the few summaries I could read, it is to the point. If you can find
writers, it could become a must have

~~~
Charlesmigli
Cofounder here. Thx that's cool. Building the community is the true challenge
you're right.

------
nancyhua
Tldr. Where's the version of this that jacks straight into my brain matrix-
style?

~~~
louischatriot
Ha ha that would be great indeed. Maybe the next evolution of the Google glass
?

------
bbayer
which summarization engine did you use? Also how accurate is your boiler plate
removal algorithm? Can you point me open tools that you use?

~~~
czzarr
the human brain :)

------
stevewilhelm
Pinterest is super easy. tl;dr sounds like work.

~~~
louischatriot
I don't think the two can be compared, since we're really focused on
summarizing content. But you're right: summarizing content is a lot of work,
it takes a couple minutes to create the summary of an article of average
length. That is why summaries have so much value, and also why this problem
has yet to be cracked.

------
rkda
Isn't this what gis.to does?

~~~
louischatriot
Indeed the philosophy is close to gis.to: having humans, and not computers,
write summaries. There are some key differences though, mainly the bookmarklet
which enables you to create a summary of the webpage you're on without having
to leave it. Also, I am under the impression that gis.to is not active
anymore, the latest summary dates back to January, correct me if I'm wrong ?

------
Angelo8000
Yeah, my sentiment exactly.. I don't want to have to go to another website.
I'm lazy.

