Comment by eranation | Hacker News Reader

Comment by eranation | Hacker News Reader

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Any ideas how to make money out of it? I thought of a similar idea after developing an addiction to reading every article on HN in fear I'm missing something that will change the way I do things (sadly, every other day, I find something that justifies it, this one could be an example if it works out)

But my thought was that I will gladly pay someone 10$ a month, to scan through HN instead of me, and send me summaries of things that I'm interested in (e.g. web frameworks, JavaScript, Scala, CSS3/HTML5 etc)

Here is a feature that Wikipedia can't have for ethical reasons, and you might be able to get away with:

- user clicks on bookmarklet (hopefully a chrome / ff extension soon)

- no tl;dr

- user has a button saying "ask someone to summarize it"

- now you either hire some good shorthand writer, or crowd source it and cut a percentage of the transaction

another way is to say - the first 3 hours of an article's peek (e.g. you do it actively for each front page article in HN for a start) you charge 1$ to see the tl;dr version of it , after 3 hours, it's free for all.

I think a lot of people here would love not having to read everything just to find the point or understand if this is really relevant

I think you have a huge market here, saving time is a very important service nowadays, especially when there is so much good content wrapped with a lot of needless, but mandatory decorative language.

Hi, these are really great ideas, thank you.

We've thought about it more in terms of volume of consumption for now but are going to look into the users' patterns to see what fits them best. We also thought about paid mobile apps, or plugins for content creators if we can prove them it drives more traffic to their content.

I think you should first focus on building big-enough community of people who'll create high quality, non-biased, not-spammy summaries. Without it you won't have anything to monetize. Eranation's ideas were interesting (in the area of financial incentives you could experiment with Mechanical Turk, maybe GitTip, MinuteBox etc. as well as BitCoin payments). However you also should check for other, non-financial motivators for creators. I guess that many bloggers and other people trying to build their online brand would be interested in it for clicks, social shares, Whuffies, Klout score impact etc. The another option worth testing could be some kind of intelligent gamification of the process. In that case browser extension would be handy as it could provide all the necessary tools like author profile, sharing buttons and so long. Good luck - I really hope to see your button everywhere soon, as it's great idea.

Hi Arek, This is exactly what we think as well. Without an engaged community of quality contributors we won't go anywhere and this is our only priority. I love your ideas, thank you for sharing them. One problem we face with convincing bloggers is the mental barrier of them thinking that people are just going to read the tl;dr and not the whole content. We believe that the reverse is actually more likely and are starting to aggregate data to back this claim up. If you are up to discussing intelligent gamification with us, I'd be delighted to have a chat with you. Contact me on twitter @stanmarion or by email stan@<tldr>io Thanks for the kind words

Gamification, if done right, can be more powerful than money, HN, SO, are a little addictive, we all know that... but not sure how it is translated to money. Qell, if money was everything, not sure if we had Wikipedia, right?

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