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Comment by frereubu | Hacker News Reader

On a side note, I really like the theory behing NPR's plain text option, but it's only occasionally that it directs me to a plain text version of the actual story. Often, as with this, it redirects me to the homepage. Does anyone know the reason for this? Does the author have to explicitly publish a text-only version?

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I don't get that text-only thing either. They give me the choice between ads, cookies, tracking vs text-only; they present it like text-only is the worse option, only for losers, while I very much prefer the text-only version thank you very much. Doesn't look very good maybe, but I don't care and Firefox's reader mode clears that right up.

But then they, as you say, the article I was looking for doesn't seem to be there!? Why do they even ask??

I don't see the text link you are referring to so I can't verify why that is broken, probably on purpose. All stories do seem to have a text only version, including this one.

You can construct the text url yourself from the WWW url, I explained how to do this in a sibling comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24475995

I have javascript disabled, and the regular page loads immediately for me with all of the story shown.

The only question, how do you have the energy to browse the web without javascript, when every site uses it for something.

I imagine he either enables once in a while using NoScript, or just bails out. I do not block Javascript for the time being, but nowadays I bail out much more often, because most of what I see on the web, including on HN, is trash or sightly higher then that, but still inconsequential.

Try sometimes to use links -g and you'll see how web can feel like browsing local resources, if you have a decent connection. Some sites will not work, but it kinda works as quality filter. If only links would support tabbed browsing.

There are plugins (at least in some browsers) that let you turn off/on javascript on a site basis. They are very useful.

Blocking JS is extremely helpful for removing most tracking. I can selectively enable certain JS for specific sites. It takes hardly any time at all to set this up or to engage with this. Plus, it saves a ton of time on page loads.

I look at the pages that other people load, and those bouncing ads, videos, and whatnot.... I simply use a different Internet than others.

Quick toggles

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