I've been playing with visual (screenshot-based) readers for a few years now, with my most recent effort being 'Percolater', a visual reader for the iPad. When demoing Percolater to current iPad users that are used to 'intelligent' content re-arrangers like Flipboard, Pulse, and hn.embed.ly, the people that tend to prefer a screenshot representation tend to be those that are more on the design end of the spectrum. There is a tremendous amount of context contained within the layout of a given page, and we've become very good at determining the likelihood that a page will be worth reading purely based on layout cues. Snapshots have the ability to further allow us to pre-filter what's important. There are a great many people that feel that ad removal is unequivocally a good thing, and for them, pulling out some text and an image and shoving it in a box is perfectly suitable for their browsing needs. I don't happen to be one of those people, hence the thing I've made.

It takes all types to make the world go round. Lets do lunch.

Perhaps a feature like this could bring the best of all worlds. The ability for anyone to change the view to fit how they want to browse.

http://i.imgur.com/KdOR5.jpg

I think this would benefit greatly from some sort of collapse feature. The nice thing about browsing titles-only ("vanilla") HN is that things that I don't want to read take up very minimal screen space. With this, I had to work too hard to scroll past this entry: http://i.imgur.com/Z9t67.png