An even better outline would be without all the terrible irrelevant stock photos.

Yours is not the first post that contains nothing more than an outline version of the link. Why is this becoming a thing? The page seems perfectly readable as it is...

The page is actually a medium post which immediately pops up an annoying modal trying to get you to give them your personal information and phones home who knows what kind of analytics.

I'm not sure about the ethics of outline.com, but I can totally see why people are using it.

I'm not sure about the ethics of taking other people's content and putting it behind a paywall.

But it's Medium's content. You gave it away when you posted it here. In exchange, you got exposure[1]

[1]: https://theoatmeal.com/comics/exposure

As far as I know, Medium writers opt-in to this, in exchange for money if a paying user reads the article.

It's readable as long as you're willing to log in via Google or Facebook. Some people aren't.

I did neither and it opened fine even when I opened the link on incognito mode. Maybe some A/B testing thing?

Anyway, good to know there is a reason for it. One of my pet projects is a self-hosted open source paywall-buster and read-it-later service.

I wonder if the HN admins would be interested in integrating with the site?

I'm not an HN admin, but I'd love to learn more about your pet project.

It is still very basic, but basically it is an alternative to pocket and wallabag, implemented in Python/Django/Celery - I actually wanted to use this as a way to learn Go, but working on the idea itself plus the potential work (activity pub, IPFS integration) became more interesting than working on learning a new language, so I changed to something I more familiar with.

Anyway, the code is at https://github.com/lullis/nofollow. It would be great to have more people curious enough to actually run this.

Thanks, @rglullis, looks really cool! If I find time to play w/ it I'll let you know.

That would be great. I need to make some updates in the code and in the documentation regarding the sunset of the Mercury Parser service. Hope I can get some of it done this weekend.

It tells me to sign up if I want to read the article.

Try the "Just Read" extension.