Alternatives
Products that do what Because most of us suffer from AD(H)D, here is too-long-didnt-read.com does
Hey HN crowd! Two days ago I realized I'm almost unable to read a book or a long article without getting distracted by Twitter/HN/Reddit/Work. The situation is so terrible, I'm even getting afraid of big articles, and my ReadItLater list is getting pretty long (shameful I know) ... and I'm pretty sure most of you are in this situation :) Being used to TL;DRs on long reddit posts, I thought it would be great to have these for everything, so I quickly hacked this website: http://www.too-long-didnt-read.com/ Here is an example of TL;DR: http://www.too-long-didnt-read.com/5tropy I would love to…
- 1TY
Hi HN! Being locked down with plenty of time in my hands, I clearly noticed a problem that I faced and also felt passionate about tackling. - Excessive screen time in our day-to-day - Diminishing attention spans It was consistently tough to properly read quality longform content online. From screen related tiredness to having ads and notifications pop up and demand a share of my attention, my focus was compromised. Long story short, I wanted to read longform content that lives online (and there is a ton of high quality out there), in an inherent offline medium, paper :p Fast forward 5…
2020
- 2
- 3RH
Link: https://www.reddit.com/r/hnblogs/ Old Reddit Link: https://old.reddit.com/r/hnblogs/ Hi HN, Inspired by this post earlier this week: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23237559, I thought we could make blog discovery easier by having a place to find interesting, unusual, niche, or really any kind of non-marketing blogs that are posted by the people that write them. There are a ton of interesting blogs on the web, probably more than there were when the web was new, but even though there's more they're a smaller…
2020
- 4SR
Hey all, this is a small bookmarklet my partner made last week to save short summaries of long-winded web posts. Hopefully you can help others save time by sharing your TL;DRs with the world. You can also up/downvote the TL;DRs other users post. It should work with your iPad, too. http://tldrplz.com
2011
- 5IM
Hey HN, the full story is on the page, but here's the TL;DR: I'm 35 and somewhere along the way I lost the ability to finish reading articles. I'd open them, read 2-3 paragraphs, get distracted, and close the tab feeling like a failure. My "Read Later" list became a graveyard of 2,000+ unread articles. I tried everything – focus apps, reader modes, blocking extensions. Nothing worked. Then I realized. 'maybe the problem isn't me'. Modern web articles are designed for engagement metrics, not comprehension. Sidebars, popups, related articles, comment sections – everything is optimized to pull…
Jan 2026 · parsely.obasic.app
- 6AB
Hey HN, maker here. It was a serious 4-6 months of effort to build this. I have never poured as much love, attention and detail into a project before. So I really appreciate you having a looksie! The homepage has a fresh list of articles every hour and is open to all. Still, I recommend signing up so you can add stuff to your reading list and follow blogs. My initial plan was to monetize this with subtle ads, but that didn't work out as the traffic to the site isn't nearly enough for that. That said, I have a fair bit invested in this and I need your help figuring out a way to make this…
2023 · boredreading.com
- 7
- 8TH
Hi HN, Like many of you, I found myself discovering dozens of great posts on HN and never actually finding the time read them. I used to save every cool link to Pocket, but… well… same story — I rarely found the time to read them. So I thought it'd be great to listen to the top articles, the same way I listen to podcasts. Initially, I tried out narrating articles with latest text-to-speech synthesis from Amazon and Google, but it was still pretty bad. Especially with long form content. So I thought I'll do this with real humans, real voice actors. So I made ReadByHumans. [1] We are starting…
2017
- 9ET
https://gist.github.com/ivmirx/66a0015884d44297ea05a8c54d935... Sharing this simple thing because it really saves me time in the last weeks. I don't need to comb through news about tech I don't use, "celebrities" or the US anymore. And no more slipping into their comments to procrastinate.
2017
- 10LT
I struggle with wanting to read heaps of stuff I come across on the internet daily, as well as being subscribed to a bunch of tech-related newsletters that I never get around to reading. I made this to get through that content much faster while working or otherwise multitasking. Check it out and please lmk your thoughts! Also, curious if others also feel this pain of too much interesting content to get through daily. FWIW I probably listen to this for >1 hour daily atm.
2024 · lavalamp.ai
- 11AS
http://readdis.com Hey everyone, Readdis is a project that I've been working on recently and I would love to get your feedback on it. I originally wrote it for internal use to help my team and I better track the links that we send to each other. We found it quite useful so I decided to open it up and see if anyone else was interested. It definitely is at the MVP stage right now with lots of things left to be done. I would greatly appreciate any feedback, ideas, and most importantly, comments on whether or not you find it useful. Thanks! Kevin
2010
- 12AN
Checking on some old material to provide some cross-referencing[1] I got this message: We've temporarily limited requests for old items. I've always taken it for granted that HN contained useful information that I'd be able to retrieve whenever I found the need, but this has brought me up short. Perhaps older discussions will eventually become unavailable. Will Google cache still have them? Will the Wayback machine still have them? How convenient will they be to find in the future. Probably this is a temporary glitch to prevent some overly enthusiastic crawler from bringing the site to a…
2012
- 13HN
I love books! I had once come across a great list of book recommendations on the LessWrong website ("The Best Textbooks on Every Subject"). But when I had stumbled upon the list a couple of years ago the last comments and recommendations on it were from 2011. And similarly I found that most recommendations on the web suffer from this form of time decay. What I wanted was a site that had high quality recommendations similar to the LessWrong list that would feel fresh and current. Amazon was overwhelming for me since it has a gazillion books on each subject and the "Thanks! Arrived in good…
2015
- 14RC
A couple of months ago, I realized I was wasting too much time on Reddit. So I quit cold turkey and created a website that would email me top stories from Reddit every morning. After testing it on some of my friends for a month, it is now ready for the world. If you like discovering interesting stuff on the internet without losing much time, check out Redditletter and sign up if you like! :)
2013 · redditletter.com
- 15BA
Hey guys, I drive to work a lot, spending on average of 2 hours each day. So I have plenty of time to listen to Podcast and audiobook on my ride. And I think it would be nice to be able to do the same with my reading list, but I couldn't find any decent app on the market that doing this. So I set out to do it myself. Sooo this is the product: http://sendtopod.com/ You may ask why? The reasons are simple: - It's more convenient to listen to articles while you driving, running, or even before going to bed. - Listen take less effort than reading. - Your eyes need to rest after…
2022 · sendtopod.com
- 16FW
I'm always nervous to post online (this is my very first HN post), so I built an anonymous forum where posts are automatically deleted after 24 hours. Every upvote or comment resets the clock. Some things I like about this concept: - The sheer volume of information on the internet is overwhelming - disappearing.chat keeps that volume low - Unpopular content slowly fades away, so you can visually watch bad takes disappear - Content is always fresh because even popular things will eventually stop getting interaction - Takes the pressure off that your content is going to stick around forever…
2024 · disappearing.chat
- 17IN
I noticed I was getting side tracked reading Hacker News, checking back, reading articles, comments, etc. It felt like my productivity was being hampered so I created a simple web app to receive the most popular stories in a daily email. http://dailyhn.com
2011
- 18MF
Hey everyone, Common advice for inexperienced hackers suggests "scratching an itch." Like many others here, I spent too much time on HN, Google Reader and Twitter searching for interesting stuff, so I decided to write an app that brings interesting links to you with no other distractions. HighFive uses Twitter and bit.ly's APIs to find interesting links in your timeline. When you log in, you'll see a group of five links with voting arrows. No HN comments or RSS feeds with hundreds of links--just a few interesting articles that you can read, then get back to work. HighFive was built using…
2011
- 19TL
2010 · tldrd.com
- 205A
Hey everyone! I wanted to share a project that I've been working on the last few days that I finally finished last night: https://50books.org This is a simple site designed to track your reading list into 2015. My personal goal is to read 50 books this year, and I wanted to hold myself accountable. Major sites like Goodreads are great, but were too much of a social network for my personal taste; on the other hand, using a text file (which was my 2014 solution) was too difficult to track and share. I built https://50books.org using Sinatra, sqlite3 (via datamapper), and…
2015
- 21RA
If someone here reads on Medium a lot, this might be useful for you: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/mediumship This is my second browser extension and it's open-source. It lets you read all Medium stories for free. Hugs and / or bugs welcome!
2019
- 22BC
2023 · boredreading.com
- 23IB
I built Read Fast after realising I was saving hundreds of things to read and reading almost none of them. It automatically turns saved content into a scheduled briefing and sends it to my inbox at whatever time I choose. New version since last post actually allows you to bulk upload URLs. So you can just dump links here and Read Fast will scrape and brief for you. Great for actually reading the things I want to. Curious if that resonates with people?
Dec 2025 · read-fast.replit.app
- 24NOnooooo.ooo▲14
Link: http://nooooo.ooo Github: https://github.com/aiwebb/nooooo.ooo This was just a dumb excuse to use the .ooo TLD. Inspired by the wonderful http://yesno.wtf.
2017
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