Neuters: Lightweight front end to Reuters News

by walterbell • 2 years ago

135 59 2 years ago

Something similar for the Gemini Protocol (“modern gopher”): https://github.com/acidus99/NewsWaffle

rattray2• 2 years ago

Wish there was an example link on the project homepage. Or better yet, links to a few of the top current articles from the Reuters homepage.

anakaiti• 2 years ago

It's literally on the home page: https://neuters.de

thunderbong• 2 years ago

I agree with the parent comment, though - it wasn't obvious to me that this is the 'About' page of the site. Also, the link to go to the Home page is in footer right at the bottom.

vivzkestrel• 2 years ago

wouldn't that be straight up illegal? just asking

HideousKojima• 2 years ago

Why would it be?

mongol• 2 years ago

Copyright infringment. But to be fair, perhaps the texts are licensed from Reuters to publish this way. It is unclear to me.

throwaway815232• 2 years ago

I did one of these some years back and used it for a while. It stopped working and I didn't bother trying to fix it. I can post the code someplace if anyone wants it. A page or two of Python.

jingojango2• 2 years ago

currently doing something similar with python, I'd love to deepdive your code, would github work?

throwaway815232• 2 years ago

There's not much depth to dive into but I could pastebin it maybe? I don't use github.

palmfacehn• 2 years ago

Ads don't offend me categorically. If publishers had text links, plain banners or any combination of content that added up to around 100kb sans images, I would probably consume more of their content and occasionally click an ad.

Video interstitials, paywalls or modal dialogs asking me to allow megabytes of tracking requests are a deal breaker. Anything that annoys or slows me down is more expensive than the value of the content, which I typically want to skim.

The content is rarely worth it. As it concerns Reuters, the same content will be parroted and recycled elsewhere. Legacy media is tone deaf from editorial policy to the nuts and bolts of how content is displayed.

kristopolous• 2 years ago

From all evidence, this is probably pretty accessible for the blind. Thanks

brokegrammer• 2 years ago

That's how news websites are supposed to look like. It's not good for revenue though, because there's no way to trick the user into clicking ads, nor dive into mindless scrolling.

I wonder if it would be possible to align revenue generation with user experience, instead of both goals being incompatible with each other.

usr1106• 2 years ago

Possible yes, users would need to pay with money.

Successful much less. Most users happily open bloat sites and pay with their privacy and being manipulated.

oneeyedpigeon5• 2 years ago

I would argue it's "begrudgingly" rather than "happily".

bachmeier• 2 years ago

Most users happily open bloat sites and pay with their privacy and being manipulated.

You can use bloat sites and pay with your privacy and be manipulated for free or you can pay for the experience, but you'll be using bloat sites and pay with your privacy and be manipulated no matter what.

ahmedfromtunis3• 2 years ago

That's how news websites are supposed to look like.

No, news websites don't have to be this sterile.

I think NYT is a prime example of how to merge classic text-based articles with multimedia content in a way that's beneficial to the consumer.

anthk3• 2 years ago

Use either Dillo or Netsurf with NYT and then we well talk.

JS and ad bloat made HTML5 video and audio tags rendered null with no actual usage IRL.

flessner• 2 years ago

Most user will probably want images, slightly more styling and recommendations on what to read next... other than that it's a perfectly usable website for the everyday user, something that can't be said about most news sites today, sadly.

I mean who even reads ad-spam websites in the first place? They used to host little bits of knowledge you'd search for... now I can reach that better via ChatGPT (eg. How to do mission X in video game Y)

I can only imagine... I read some well crafted news, no ads, no malicious tracking, no ad-blocker-blocker popup, no newsletter popup - and at end of the article: "This experience was great because we're supported by XYZ company, they have no control of our editorial process" (with company logo). Tasteful, still supported by ads, probably completely unsustainable.

weMadeThat2• 2 years ago

I agree. I'm about to start paying for news again. Had only 2 years worth of subscriptions for news publications in print in about 20 years of adulthood. That's kinda crazy.

And if I subtract university and active library times, I really wonder how I didn't turn towards the conspiratorial kind of thought patterns instead of viewing it all in the light of "cooperation in a complex world full of prenatally brain damaged magic money people".

l3x• 2 years ago

Similar (official):

- lite.cnn.com

- text.npr.org

Unofficial:

- 68k.news

- skinnyguardian.xyz

... I'm sure there are plenty more!

anthk3• 2 years ago

Sadly https://68k.news it's broken.

But you can alwyas either use gopher://magical.fish/1/news under Lynx or Dillo with the Gopher plugin or head to

http://portal.mozz.us/gopher/magical.fish/1/news

under any browser, even the ancient ones from the Netscape 4 era.

sitzkrieg• 2 years ago

https://brutalist.report/

combines many sites

dublinben• 2 years ago

Also CBC.ca/lite as well.

shikck200• 2 years ago

Some issues with pagination. I would recommend a non limit offset combo. Right now i get an error: "You tried to access /world/" when manually change the offset.

theanonymousone2• 2 years ago

Does anyone know about the legal implications of building such a "fronted"? Doesn't Reuters own the copyright zo the contents of their news articles? Can't they send a Cease & Desist (or worse) to the developer, given they are potentially losing some ad revenue?

Or they can and simply don't bother?

cbg0• 2 years ago

If your alternative becomes popular they will sic their lawyers on you.

donohoe• 2 years ago

Yes, it’s copyright infringement.

Yes, they can send a C&D to whomever is hosting the copies of their content.

Yes, they are losing some minor potential ad income.

They will likely bother if their legal department notices and thinks it rises to a level they must contend with. My guess is that it won’t.

theanonymousone2• 2 years ago

Thanks. Is there some rule of thumb about how much should the article change so that the copyright doesn't apply any more? These points come to my mind:

- There is a whole category of software called "news aggregators". Are they all infringers? How can they operate, apart from praying that the news outlet doesn't care?

- News outlets quote each other, e.g. "According to Reuters", etc. Does that solve the copyright issue? Is it only the 100% verbatim copy that is copyrighted?

Many thanks already for the insights.

wgx• 2 years ago

Is there a viable way for me to make every site load like this (iOS)? And optimally toggle back to the “full site” if I want to.

sunshadow2• 2 years ago

I can make this in couple of weeks, but I need an incentive other than just having fun

szszrk2• 2 years ago

Firefox reading mode? It won't work with all sites, though. A lot of large sites are insanely broken, so Firefox doesn't propose reading mode at all, or nothing loads.

Honestly, I have only one way with dealing with those: not using those sites.

walterbell• 2 years ago

For individual websites on iOS, click the "aA" icon:

  Website Settings > Show Reader Automatically

For every website on iOS:

  Settings > Safari > Settings for Websites > Reader > Other Websites

sunshadow2• 2 years ago

What made you use caddy in front of tiny-http? I guess tiny-http should be still fine on its own. genuinely curious

lemagedurage• 2 years ago

Likely for its letsencrypt integration, maybe for HTTP/2 or HTTP/3

anthk3• 2 years ago

What I'd love it's either a public Web Rendering Proxy or Browservice.

casey22• 2 years ago

Awesome site, but it just made me realize that Reuters can't capture my mind share. Most of these articles can't even be used for small talk

Also I clicked on a few 301s in a row

oneeyedpigeon5• 2 years ago

No feed?

HelloUsername• 2 years ago

Related: "Libredirect" Addon to redirect certain websites to privacy friendly front ends

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32916318

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32288732

Also "Redirector"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29665373

On Safari iOS you could try "Stop The Madness"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31625804

uncomplexity_• 2 years ago

man i love the cleanliness

sounded like a vasectomy site though haha

klibertp• 2 years ago

TIL: Reuters has a REST API: https://www.reuters.com/pf/api/v3/content/fetch/articles-by-...

But I can't find any reference for it, somehow. How did the author know how to write this https://github.com/HookedBehemoth/neuters/tree/master/src/ap... ?

insin• 2 years ago

You can see calls to it in the dev tools Network tab when browsing Reuters.

quinncom• 2 years ago

Very cool! I’ve added the following as a redirect in Kagi:

^https://(www\.)?reuters\.com|https://neuters.de

mzd348• 2 years ago

Looks like you've basically created an RSS frontend for reuters.com. Which is useful since they seem to have got rid of their own feeds. Would be nice if you could add your own feed so that neuters is actually readable via RSS.

efxhoy• 2 years ago

Reuters really broke the site for me when they did what looked like a rewrite about a year ago. Glad to see this as I hardly read it anymore. bbc news is going downhill too, another prime candidate for a project like this.

nobodywillobsrv• 2 years ago

"News"

weMadeThat2• 2 years ago

nice, are there extensions/userscripts that replace strings?

"Syria this, France that" should turn into "Gov. this, Gov. that", for example

sigio• 2 years ago

Seems to be dead/down at the moment... noticed because my browser still showed me the same news as 2 days ago ;)

Neuters: Lightweight front end to Reuters News

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