Comment by dredmorbius

Totally understand on all points.

Caches on their own would be totally worthwhile, even without de-crufting. If IA are up for it, HN as signal for relevance would likely be worthwhile. Talk to Brewster.

As I said, decrufting/readability would be a really nice value-add!personally. Readability themselves have an API for this which might be one way to approach the concept, and they've done much of the heavy lifting in terms of sorting out sites' various CSS/HTML cruft and sanitizing it. I do my own pretty significant CSS restructuring locally (we've chatted about this before w/ HN), and with some 1800+ individual sites' CSS modified to some extent or anohter, I've got a really good idea of just how effed up the stuff can be.

I totally agree with Nic Bvacqua's "Stop Breaking the Web" posted yesterday.

But on an effort/reward basis as a greenfield project, likely not worth it. Going with Readability (or Instapaper, or Pocket) themselves could well be worth investigating.

As a suggestion: another consideration would be to simply reject submissions which aren't accessible via some putative minimal client. If enough aggregators started penalising sites for inaccessible content, they might start wising up.