Few years ago I realized a wild chunk of news websites are mostly tweets coated in menus and [social share] button.

This part of the web makes me so jaded about 'progress' I'm into woodworking now.

> I think my favorite part is just how short some of there articles are...

In an attempt to enjoy this effect more broadly, I have Reader Mode set to enabled by default on Safari mobile.

On Firefox desktop I often use the Reader View button on news stories. There is an extension to enable this by default, but I have a hard time trusting browser add-ons.

What do you think about recommended add-ons by Firefox, for example Tranquility Reader https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tranquility-1... ? Their code is supposed to be checked by Firefox team, so it's probably safe to use.

Oh wow, did not even know you could enable by default on Safari mobile. I really like this!

This is also a great way to work around many paywalls, as when reader mode is on by default, it kicks in before the JavaScript that throws up the paywall.

Chrome also has it under chrome://flags/#enable-reader-mode

its pretty great.

> I have Reader Mode set to enabled by default on Safari mobile

I didn't know you can do that, thank you!

It’s reasonable to have short articles in a newspaper, where you want to fit in a bunch of short factual stories, or on a newswire where you just want to quickly send out some facts before competitors. In the former case you just put lots of stories on one page. In the latter case, it’s often expected to be short.

I think short articles are great! But it is crazy how much crap gets added to nice short articles on most sites.

I guess a lot of the BS filler text is added just so they can fit more ads around the text, huh? The goal for online publications isn't to inform you and save you time... It's to make you click on ads. They want to have you see as many ads as possible, and make sure that you stay on the page as long as possible. If the news article was just a one-paragraph snippet, you couldn't fit 8 ads on the page, it would look absolutely laughable.

A newspaper or news website would source most of their journalism from Reuters or Associated Press, and then fluff it up to fit their editorial stance.

The same articles would seem longer in print because they're formatted in such narrow columns, wrapping around images. There's some thought that goes into the layout.

Of course, the internet breaks that particular illusion. And I'm sure that if a marketing department could do to their printed paper what they do to their website, design and readability be damned, they would jump at the chance.

Where are you seeing the short version of the article? Each link takes me to the original.

The links try to parse out the text and show that, with an additional link to the original article (seems like most links fail to parse however)

A successful Example

http://68k.news/article.php?loc=US&a=https://news.google.com...