
Ask HN: What does your ideal “read it later” service look like? - jamil7
This is a little hobby project of mine I&#x27;ve had for a while that I built for myself. It&#x27;s nothing special but I dogfood it and enjoy working on it when I can. If the sky was the limit, what would you love to see in a service like this?
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AdmiralAsshat
Pocket already does about 85% of what I want (5% missing features I do want,
and the other 10% being removing features I _don 't_ want, like the Sponsored
content showing up in my feed), so I'm mostly happy with it.

But as long as we're talking pie-in-the-sky:

\- Grabs only content, none of the crap

\- Should be able to grab images that are core content to the article

\- Completely FLOSS, with option for self-hosting. Member pricing would
basically pay for cloud hosting and support.

\- Robust platform support. Win/Mac/Linux/iOS/Android support or support for
major browser extensions. Client support for popular e-readers also a huge
plus--Pocket integration was a major influence on my getting a Kobo instead of
a Kindle

\- Bi-directional article management within the client. I should be able to
Archive/Favorite/Delete an article within the RIL client and have those
changes pushed back to the server.

\- An option to read aloud an article using the OS's native Text-to-Speech
engine so that it does not require a wifi connection (again, existing quibble
with Pocket)

\- Privacy-focused. Don't share my lists with marketers, don't put "popular"
content into my feed if I didn't ask for it. I don't care what other people
are reading, much as I don't care what other people choose to Bookmark. My
Reading List is for me and me alone.

\- Ability to crawl older, multi-page articles and consolidate into a single
view.

\- Ability to cache the article itself so that it would still be readable if
the content at the URL itself vanishes between the time I add it to RIL and
the time I actually get around to reading it.

EDIT: RSS support would be cool, too.

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mtmail
I'm happy with instapaper. Even more now that it's independently owned and
GPDR compatible. Gladly pay knowing they don't have to sell my data or add
advertising to make a living.

bthdonohue.com/2018/11/17/ycombinator-operating-instapaper-through-an-
acquisition.html

[https://blog.instapaper.com/post/170231611161](https://blog.instapaper.com/post/170231611161)

Saving youtube (or any other) videos would be nice for offline viewing (train,
airplane). I can understand it's not a core feature, would use too much
bandwidth and storage on mobile devices.

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LeonB
Features I rely upon in existing services:

\- Able to use a favelet (bookmarklet) or a plugin to save any website with 1
click.

\- Can synchronize to my ereader (thanks to Pocket integration with Kobo)

Features I don't have that I really need:

\- ability to apply tags to articles, including on ereader, and sort/filter by
tags.

\- ability to highlight snippets and put them into some kind of log
(particularly from ereader) including tagging the snippets (this would be
awesome... for me)

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justhw
Something I want is a periodical (weekly or monthly) digest of my bookmarks
(read it later) links, preferably as a browser extension. I'm currently doing
that manually to help me decide if the bookmark it worth keeping.

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mersing
Thanks for asking.

\- Automatically filter incoming content by multiple media types, particularly
audio. Pocket has "articles" and "videos" but I get a lot of random stuff in
"videos." If my link is coming from soundcloud.com, podcastnotes.org,
listennotes.com etc., there's a 99% chance it's audio.

\- More filtering options without requiring search, particularly by my most-
saved content sources.

\- This is personal preference, but NO (or at least the ability to disable)
"discover" feed of suggested articles. I consider Pocket a productivity tool,
allowing me to access my own idea of high quality, relevant content whenever I
have a few minutes of downtime. I've already removed all the mainstream
news/social network/scrolly-feed apps from my phone to resist the temptation
to scroll mindlessly through whatever's new. Pocket's prominently featured
feed of popular but lowest common denominator articles presents a problematic
distraction. I understand that Pocket injects ads and paid or partner content
in this feed, but I'd rather pay to have this feature removed than to remove
the ads.

\- No social networking aspect or associated user profiles. Don't care.
Actually this just makes me wary that one day Pocket will decide it wants to
be a social network and suddenly all my presumed-privately saved articles
become "social" meaning visible to everyone on my profile, requiring manual
privacy resetting to hide them, a la Facebook.

\- The option to see which articles were the most-saved by other users in a
given subject area could be interesting. This could have feature overlap with
Nuzzel (app that shows you the articles that were shared by Twitter users you
follow).

\- Seconding another suggestion for the option to read the article aloud,
presuming it's high quality humanish narration.

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latexr
I like Safari’s Reading List, except for the fact it’s chained to Safari. What
it does right is that it gets the whole page (i.e. it’s not _just_ a reader
view) and auto-downloads on the phone so it’s available offline.

I’d like something that is browser-agnostic, has the option to download videos
for offline viewing (for the websites supported by youtube-dl[1], let’s say),
and can be controlled via the command-line.

I wouldn’t pay a subscription for it because I dislike subscription pricing
and my current system is good enough (a mix of Pinboard’s reading list and
Alfred[2] Workflows). Take my points as “pie in the sky” ideas you may wish to
implement if you like them, but I’m unlikely to be a customer.

[1]: [https://youtube-dl.org/](https://youtube-dl.org/)

[2]: [https://www.alfredapp.com](https://www.alfredapp.com)

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gcatalfamo
One thing, most of all: a dark pattern or a habit creating way to help me
avoid saving links (because they might be useful) and never ever read/open
them

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billconan
able to remove ads and stuff unrelated to content.

great typography

able to relayout the content based on screen size, (mobile friendly),
especially when the original content is a pdf.

able to synchronize to kindle, iphone

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runjake
Like Instapaper.

