Ask HN: What are some of the best text-only websites?

Posted by anoncoward111 on Saturday August 18, 2018 @06:20AM
from the ask-hn dept.

Hi,

I've spent most of 2018 either in very rural areas, foreign countries, or in "throttled-mode" on my US-based prepaid mobile plan.

My phone's processing power is really excellent, but of course the bottleneck with modern websites is the tons of pings back and forth over the network and the huge image sizes.

Please, take pity on me and send me some links for great websites that offer a text-only service or some other form of lightweight browsing.

Of course, Wikipedia, lite.cnn.io, and outline.com are life-savers :)

( 32 comments | 35 points | on HN )

Re:Ask HN: What are some of the best text-only websites? by danmg on Saturday August 18, 2018 @12:16PM (#17789157)

https://damng.github.io/hackernews-rss-with-inlined-content/...

HN RSS feed with inlined/distilled linked contents. The 300 or so entries on the feed becomes about 5MB (or about 1/5 the size of a single medium.com blog post). The inlined contents from the article are just simple html with no javascript or style sheets.

https://codezen.org/canto-ng/ is a good curses, console rss reader.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Ask HN: What are some of the best text-only websites? by dammitfoo on Saturday August 18, 2018 @06:24AM (#17787828)

NPR : https://text.npr.org/

Harvard Law Review : https://harvardlawreview.org/

I'm also interested in more lite sites. Btw, your CNN link is not working. Correct link is https://lite.cnn.io

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Ask HN: What are some of the best text-only websites? by anoncoward111 on Saturday August 18, 2018 @06:33AM (#17787859)

Thanks!! I confused NPR's format with CNN's :)

There's always Drudge Report for anyone who prefers the "opinion" section... :)

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Ask HN: What are some of the best text-only websites? by IvyMike on Saturday August 18, 2018 @07:35PM (#17791509)

I've spent many hours reading https://yarchive.net/

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Ask HN: What are some of the best text-only websites? by sjmulder on Saturday August 18, 2018 @07:07PM (#17791351)

I’m keeping a list here: https://sjmulder.nl/en/textielhandel.html

There’s not that much out there, unfortunately.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Ask HN: What are some of the best text-only websites? by lazyjones on Sunday August 19, 2018 @04:50PM (#17796106)

https://sjmulder.nl/en/textonly.html

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Re:Ask HN: What are some of the best text-only websites? by sjmulder on Monday August 20, 2018 @02:55AM (#17798156)

Thanks, I posted that on mobile and didn’t notice.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Ask HN: What are some of the best text-only websites? by kotrunga on Monday August 20, 2018 @08:40AM (#17799411)

A good news site that I've been telling people about is Legible News- only text and links. No images, ads, etc.

https://legiblenews.com/

There is also Wiby, the search engine for 'classic websites'. You can only submit a website if it is simple and meets the criteria (not a lot js / css). Whatever you find, add it to Wiby!

https://wiby.me/

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Ask HN: What are some of the best text-only websites? by Digory on Saturday August 18, 2018 @02:58PM (#17789996)

Someone asked a similar question on ProductHunt a few weeks ago (definitely not lightweight)[0]. It introduced me to skimfeed.com, and wttr.in.

[0] https://www.producthunt.com/ask/9071-what-are-some-good-ligh...

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Ask HN: What are some of the best text-only websites? by oftenwrong on Monday August 20, 2018 @09:58AM (#17799890)

You can disable images in some mobile browsers (e.g. firefox for android) [0]. That significantly knocks down the size of pages. I have mine set to only load images when on a wifi connection.

If you can use a desktop browser tethered through your mobile data connection, you can use the extension uMatrix [1] to selectively block scripts, css, images, outbound requests, and more. This would allow you to turn most pages into lightweight, text-only pages.

[0] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/block-or-load-images-ov...

[1] https://github.com/gorhill/uMatrix

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Ask HN: What are some of the best text-only websites? by cm2012 on Sunday August 19, 2018 @01:16AM (#17792727)

You won't regret reading the online only book Worm, by Wildbow. Very light site and an amazing story. It has a huge online fan base for a reason. Warning: it gets dark.

https://parahumans.wordpress.com

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Ask HN: What are some of the best text-only websites? by combatentropy on Saturday August 18, 2018 @07:32PM (#17791488)

Have you tried just turning off JavaScript? A website often is a hundredth the size without it. This is because many use JavaScript to add iframes, images, videos, and more JavaScript.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Ask HN: What are some of the best text-only websites? by hieloz on Saturday August 18, 2018 @08:04PM (#17791642)

CNN lite: https://lite.cnn.io/en

Text Edition of The Christian Science Monitor: https://www.csmonitor.com/layout/set/text/textedition

News aggregator website:Readspike https://readspike.com/

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Ask HN: What are some of the best text-only websites? by 5555624 on Monday August 20, 2018 @08:22AM (#17799322)

My problem with CNN Lite is that there is no apparent way to sort the links. Right now, as I write this -- 0815, 20 August -- the top story is from 1100, 17 August. In fact, the top five stories are all form midday last Friday. The 10th story is from 17 July. Maybe sorting the links by date won't help much; but, it's a start.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Ask HN: What are some of the best text-only websites? by davewasthere on Saturday August 18, 2018 @10:05AM (#17788500)

This is where some sort of Lynx-browser-powered-proxy would be ideal.

I know it'd probably break several sites... but your average news reading would be hugely improved.

I will say that https://forums.whirlpool.net.au/ is one of the best community sites I know of. It's very lightweight, looks good, works incredibly fast. As a dev, I'm really impressed.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Ask HN: What are some of the best text-only websites? by ssh_lynx on Saturday August 18, 2018 @12:56PM (#17789355)

> This is where some sort of Lynx-browser-powered-proxy would be ideal.

No need to go into any of that trouble. Just install ssh on your phone and connect to any box with lynx/elinks/etc.

Works like a charm and is real snappy over any wireless connection.

If you are short of a box to ssh into, sign up for any of the providers of free shell accounts.

There are of course also a lot of native text only browsers like Instabrowser if you prefer an app. Then there are browsers using compression and proxies like Opera Mini.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Ask HN: What are some of the best text-only websites? by vram22 on Sunday August 19, 2018 @03:44PM (#17795842)

>sign up for any of the providers of free shell accounts

Recommendation?

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Ask HN: What are some of the best text-only websites? by vram22 on Sunday August 19, 2018 @03:43PM (#17795840)

>Just install ssh on your phone

Which ssh app would you recommend?

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Ask HN: What are some of the best text-only websites? by crasch4 on Sunday August 19, 2018 @08:52PM (#17797064)

https://termux.com/

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Ask HN: What are some of the best text-only websites? by vram22 on Tuesday August 21, 2018 @04:39PM (#17813574)

Thanks.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Ask HN: What are some of the best text-only websites? by dammitfoo on Sunday August 19, 2018 @12:50AM (#17792668)

Kinda off-topic but if you use Firefox on your mobile, you can install 'uBlock origin'[0] extension which will block pesky, annoying ads and trackers. Not that helpful with text-only sites but very useful with normal browsing.

[0] https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Ask HN: What are some of the best text-only websites? by phakding on Sunday August 19, 2018 @09:45AM (#17794279)

To add to this, if you root your phone and install adaway you would be free from ads even in an app.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Ask HN: What are some of the best text-only websites? by panda888888 on Saturday August 18, 2018 @08:23PM (#17791709)

Not the answer you're looking for, but Reddit. Sure there are images and gifs, but the majority of the content is text. I'm not sure if there's a good way to see a text-only version (aside from turning off js) but if there is, it's a site I recommend.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Ask HN: What are some of the best text-only websites? by anoncoward111 on Saturday August 18, 2018 @09:30PM (#17791992)

I would have been endlessly happy if Reddit worked, but on my current data plan, it hangs instantly :(

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Ask HN: What are some of the best text-only websites? by cupar on Tuesday August 21, 2018 @10:53AM (#17810102)

I think that i.reddit.com is the closest thing to a text-only version.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Ask HN: What are some of the best text-only websites? by achow on Saturday August 18, 2018 @11:24AM (#17788883)

Reuters has a toggle button to switch of photos: https://www.reuters.com/commentary

And nowadays I find Reuters having very interesting informative writeups which rivals NYT, Guardian, etc.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Ask HN: What are some of the best text-only websites? by lun4r on Saturday August 18, 2018 @06:23AM (#17787824)

Hackernews! \o/

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Ask HN: What are some of the best text-only websites? by jsahdeva on Monday August 20, 2018 @07:11AM (#17799026)

http://goosh.org/ - Google command line.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Ask HN: What are some of the best text-only websites? by gumboshoes on Saturday August 18, 2018 @10:10AM (#17788524)

Metafilter.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Ask HN: What are some of the best text-only websites? by uptime on Sunday August 19, 2018 @03:26PM (#17795769)

Great site, ask.metafilter.com as well

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Ask HN: What are some of the best text-only websites? by dokem on Saturday August 18, 2018 @09:46PM (#17792050)

The catcher and the rye.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Ask HN: What are some of the best text-only websites? by refur_augu on Saturday August 18, 2018 @06:59PM (#17791329)

slatestarcodex.com is endlessly interesting and thought provoking.

[ Parent | on HN ]