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Comment by rchaud | Hacker News Reader

A newspaper has a start and an end. That's as simple as it needs to be for me to move on with my day.

On the internet, the news is endless and the information overload constant. Set aside social media. I get a headache just reading an average article on a news website.

A paragraph will have multiple links, which is incredibly distracting on its own. But that is compounded by the fact that paragraphs themselves are broken up by a "Related Articles" block of links.

Add in a dynamic sidebar with the latest stories, a live stock ticker in the top corner, a banner showing "breaking news", and it's no wonder people might pick up a newspaper again.

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The online stories are hard to read because the text will jump several inches or even offscreen as you try to read it, as it randomly inserts more ads.

This effect is especially bad trying to read on the iphone.

What makes it “especially bad” on an iPhone vs an Android device?

I think they probably meant vs a desktop browser. But you can run Firefox with uBlock Origin or Brave on Android.

iPhone users can also block ads, and not just in Safari but in other apps, too. Just like an Android phone can.

Blokada should work fine. I personally use AdGuard Pro.

I pointed this out in the previous debate as to why I like PDF more than modern website. ( Yes I know we could do that on the Web as well )

> A newspaper has a start and an end. That's as simple as it needs to be for me to move on with my day.

That's the heart of it. As the author writes, "Once I've read the paper, I'm done reading the news." I try to get most of my news from a weekly newspaper (in print) for that reason, though I admit I've had middling success maintaining discipline about this lately.

There's no fundamental reason a digital news outlet couldn't achieve the same property by exclusively releasing stories in a discrete "edition" on the web once per week. I guess the incentives just don't line up to make that happen.

It's not exactly what you're describing, but The Economist does something fairly similar. They publish a weekly print edition, and articles on their site are posted at a much slower pace than other sites.

Newsweek is maybe a better comparison?

Yep, The Economist is the weekly print newspaper I subscribe to :)

But my problem is that I have trouble avoiding checking news websites on a more frequent basis. (EDIT: And that includes some online articles from The Economist... which don't seem to come in on a purely weekly schedule, right? Though maybe I'm mistaken.)

The New York Times publishes its daily paper edition online as well.

https://www.nytimes.com/section/todayspaper

The Times in the UK does this albeit several times a day as opposed to a weekly digest.

> A newspaper has a start and an end.

Yes, but sometimes that crossword takes me half the damn day.

Totally agree. I read online still but I read a "daily edition" which is obviously static. I also read a news weekly on a tablet.

I could read the paper versions but for me, having the digital version happens to be more convenient. Point is, simple daily / weekly / monthly editions are my strong preference for an undistracted read of the news with a definite beginning and end.

I’m trying to solve this problem with shoto.io

My goal is to offer a digest of tech news so you can get rid of the infinite feeds!

Set a timer ;D

Time-blocking is useful, but an additional affordance of a physical publication is that when you're done with it, you can simply pick up the whole thing and dispose of it.

Opening up browser tabs creates the problem of having to identify which of those need closing. Depending on your browsing habits and/or tools, that itself can be nontrivial.

Physically manifested information has its advantages.

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