czzarr

hey there, did you know that tldr.io now offers an extension that allows you to read tldrs without leaving the HN frontpage? https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tldr/ohmamcbkcmfal...

full disclosure: i'm one of the cofounders

you forgot http://tldr.io

Seems like there are a lot of people trying to tackle this problem at the moment. We are using a different route with our tl;dr Chrome extension for Hacker News: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tldr/ohmamcbkcmfal...

It's a good thing some people actually shoot for the stars so that they build platforms that enable people like you who don't like to gamble to build small profitable apps living a healthy lifestyle. If nobody shot for the stars, we would be stuck at the stone age.

Well the thing is people are not prone to edit a summary that's already there. It's actually easier to start from a blank slate. Are you still working on hnsummaries.com? I would be interested in talking with you.

this is just for demo purposes, if you install the extension you will have the summaries of the actual articles on the frontpage of HN

I made a tl;dr version for people who don't have time to read the whole thing: http://api.tldr.io/tldrs/506d8edd78b3cba85f000416

This is awesome. I remember when the name of rapgenius was decided on the two plus two forums between rapopedia, rapexegesis and rapgenius.

The initial traction really came from the high stakes online poker player community and two plus two generally. I wonder why one of the first guys to be involved, Ariel Schneller (Foxwoodsfiend/Daevils/MikeVickisGod on poker sites) dropped out of the adventure.

This is him commenting on the funding on 2p2: http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/showpost.php?p=35110971...

we thought you'd like that :)

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

thank you!

the human brain :)

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.

Our goal is to help people find and select what they really want to spend time reading. We feel that a summary is the perfect step between a title and the actual content and that it actually incentivizes people to read the whole thing once they're hooked by the summary.

The people that won't read the full article after reading the summary probably would have just bounced or skimmed the article extremely quickly.

You're right that there are probably certain types of contents that lend themselves to be summarized better than others. We're still figuring this one out by observing what our users and experimenting with what we summarize.

right, this is definitely something we have in mind. Why not require login though? Sounds like it would be tough to control without.

bear with us, we're working on that!

There is one, we're just not advertising it yet. If you're interested, please to get in touch with us. meta@<tldr>.io

oops, you're obviously right. our twitter handle is @tldrio

yes you're absolutely right. We think summarizing content is useful for one person because it help sink knowledge in and really understand what one is reading. The fact that it can help thousands of people save time and browse more efficiently on the Internet is the cherry on top.

Thanks for your input!

Hi, this is a great idea and we're definitely going to give it some serious thought. If you have some experience with these kind of things, would you be interested in talking about it a little on Skype or by mail?

well we could talk about it! No particular reason, we're not developers/designers by trade, we have a generalist engineering background and we wanted to do a startup so we just went with what was buzzing at the time and learned everything from almost scratch. (could definitely be that it wasn't the smartest technical choices but since we've been handling the HN spike on our 20$/month linode VPS pretty handsomely so far we must be doing something right)

hehe glad we could make you smile! We put a lot of work into it. We thought it would be hard to convince people to install it otherwise as it is sort of a technical abstract conceptual thing for now so we added humor :)

For now, you have to trust us ;) But yeah we obviously have things (votes, endorsements, verified badges and the likes) planned to ensure the tl;drs reflect the underlying article accurately. It is a first world problem for now though.

I don't know what wiki-style voting is but I'll look it up. Thanks for the feedback!

thanks!interesting take on the problem. Would love to talk to you about your experience if you're up for it!

indeed, wait for it, it's coming soon!

hey, sorry about that, for now you can get them by following us on twitter!

sorry about that, we will make sure to work on showing the value more upfront

Hi, thanks a lot for the feedback! we're glad that we're solving a problem for you! You're right that we have little content for now, but we don't think NLP is the answer.

Humans are so much better than algorithms at summarizing content and we really want to focus on quality rather than quantity for now. We want to become a platform for the content that people deem worthy of being summarized and are hopeful that the overall quality will therefore be astounding. As such we are focusing on building a community of excited contributors.

I'll definitely checkout condensr.com to see if it can help at all though!

thanks for the feedback, this is one of the reason (on top of cross-browser compatibility) for which we chose to create a bookmarklet first