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Comment by keane

1 day ago

It’s hard to beat https://lite.cnn.com and https://text.npr.org (I imagine their own employees likely use these as well) or https://newsminimalist.com

Love both of them. CNN has become a bit "left-leaning Fox News" for my taste, though.

If Al Jazeera or BBC had a similar text only site, that would be best. I really love the different perspectives.

I mostly use brutalist.report to find the articles, then deal with them on a case by case basis.

  • > CNN has become a bit "left-leaning Fox News" for my taste, though.

    Don't worry, it'll be just like the real Fox news after the Paramount merger.

  • At least the BBC has RSS feeds for its stories, which avoids having to go through the dire news front page.

Ahh, I love them. The fact that they are fast, give you the exact thing you are looking for without any other noise is just amazing!

https://lite.cnn.com seems to load 200KB of CSS

  • 27KB of CSS for me, but only if I switch off uBO. Otherwise, there's no CSS. I think the CSS is just for the cookie popup styling.

  • Comes to about 2MB for me, which seems to be because they've added the EU cookie policy compliance bloat (probably from a third-party). Once that's agreed to via cookies the page is 47KB.

I’m honestly dumbfounded that these exist

In the past some site had light versions, but I haven’t come across one in over 10 years

Makes me wonder if this isn’t just some rogue employee maintaining this without anyone else realizing it

It’s the light version, but ironically I would happily pay these ad networks a monthly $20 to just serve these lite pages and not track me. They don’t make anywhere close to that from me in a year

Sadly, here’s how it would go: they’d do it, it be successful, they’d ipo, after a few years they’d need growth, they’d introduce a new tier with ads, and eventually you’d somehow wind up watching ads again

  • a lot of these are internal tools that they just haven't disabled access to for whatever reason. old.reddit still exists for whatever reason.