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Comment by chewz | Hacker News Reader

My impression is that Instapaper team is terribly understaffed and probably lost control over it's code base. They had changed hands twice over the years (Betaworks (Digg) 2013 and Pinterest 2016) with practically zero changes in code or the app. Zero progress, zero updates. That says something.

And the instapaper.com when downloading is sharing data with third parties like there is no tomorrow. Simply it is downloading a lot of crap from original sites (images etc.) which could be used for tracking - no way they could be compliant with GDPR and let user decide which third parties to share data with.

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Hey – Brian from Instapaper here. I've been at Instapaper since the betaworks acquisition in 2013, so I have a lot of context here.

We've made tons of progress since I joined, redesigning the apps, websites, launching highlights, rebooting our business model, text-to-speech, speed reading, re-writing our parser, re-building our full-text search engine. The list goes on.

We currently don't have an image proxy for Instapaper, so yes when you visit the site we load the original images. We have discussed adding an image proxy but felt it would be a lot of overhead in server costs and maintenance for minimal value.

Additionally, I'm not sure it's fair to represent that fetching images from the original sources that a user saved is tantamount to sharing data with third parties, which has a different set of implications.

Of course, that was just my impression and not really an accusation based on facts. I apologize if I got it wrong.

I actually liked it that way, that Instapaper stays the same and reliable while other feels the urge to 'innovate' giving it's loyal users only trouble. Scripts that I have written years ago for uploading articles still work and Instapaper is still my Read-It-Later of choice.

As for images - I had to accept that Instapaper works that way - but always had been little annoyed that it is possible to turn off images but that's not persistent option.

Hi Brian! I was worried when Instapaper was acquired, but so far it's been working fine for the most part. I did get the impression that the whole thing became a lot slower. Is that possible, or is it just my end of things (connecting from NL)?

That said, speed isn't all that important considering that I do most of my reading on my iOS devices and they have that stuff locally. Still!

"its code base"

But yeah, most likely the code is all over the place.

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