One Tool to Read Them All
Reading some of the feedback on my recent article about reading more books made me realise how much the tools we use influence the way we read. One observation in the article was about replacing the time spent on your phone with a book and making your phone look boring to help you do that. It’s easy to pick up a phone and scroll, so it should be easy to use it to read more. So why don’t people use it to read books? Because a phone is a pocket computer designed to distract users, a book is a boring technology designed to focus their attention.
I’m satisfied with the tools I have for reading books. Unfortunately, I can’t say the same for reading online. After all these years, I still haven’t found a single tool that brings together content discovery, following, reading, and exploring a website’s archive.
My wish for a perfect online reading experience starts with discovering content. I want to find interesting material to read, and since time is always limited, I want it to be filtered according to my interests and ranked in a transparent way that I can directly influence. Then, when I find a good article, I want a good interface to consume it. Since the reading experience varies from one website to another, I want a clean interface designed to keep me focused. I also want to be able to highlight passages and take notes, to help me remember and make reading more rewarding. I’d like a way to keep track of the blogs I follow and get notified when they publish new content. Lastly, I want a tool that treats older content as relevant as newer content. A tool that doesn’t force me to prioritise the latest article.
This last point is really important to me, since I haven’t found anything yet that tries to solve this problem. Relevant content can be found in the entire archive of a blog, not just in the latest posts. Just as I reach for old books considered classics because they have stood the test of time, I often find articles published years ago still relevant. But to discover those articles, I have to rely on other people’s recommendations or hope that the website I’m visiting has an archive page. Without either, old content could stay buried forever on the web.
Most of the tools and platforms we use are designed to show content sorted by publication date, as if it has to be fresh to be worthwhile. And it’s not always an algorithmic decision. Often, it’s simply how the technology has been designed. For how I like to read, the date is just one of the factors that contributes to the value of an article. In some fields, I might prioritise recent content. In others, I’d prefer something that has remained relevant for years, since time can be a sign that an idea has held up. I would like a boring technology that makes reading online a more focused activity, where content is valuable regardless of its novelty. A tool that doesn’t force design decisions or hide content behind algorithmic selection.
Discovery
The most common solution to fix the discoverability problem is the feed. It’s the algorithm that decides what content users see on the social media platforms. It helps people find information relevant to their interests and tailor the platform to their needs. The issue is that users have no control over the algorithms. They don’t know why certain content is shown to them, and they cannot directly influence the choice.
One system I’ve found effective is link aggregators, because they rely on simpler algorithms and usually have a clear interface. I mostly use Hacker News to find new blogs and relevant content in the tech fields. The most interesting articles are ranked daily by the community, where I can contribute directly with my votes and join discussions using the comment system. But when I have to find content unrelated to technology, I don’t have a valid alternative. I have to resort to social-media, video platforms, search engines, hoping that they will do a good job at choosing what I’m looking for.
Following
The concept of feeds was already used to deliver content before social media. RSS feeds have been used to follow websites and blogs since the 2000s. Users can subscribe to a website by adding its feed to an RSS reader and get notified whenever something new is published. The main distinction from social media algorithms is that RSS feeds are not a content discovery mechanism, but a subscription system. Users control which publications they subscribe to, rather than relying on algorithms controlled by platforms.
What I like about RSS is that it keeps track of the blogs I follow, but beyond that the experience is inconsistent: some feeds contain full articles, others only previews, some include years of archives, and others just the most recent posts. On top of that, RSS readers are designed to prioritise new content, emphasising unread counts and showing the newest articles first. Using RSS feeds might free us from the algorithms, but not from the persistent feeling that we need to keep up with whatever is new.
RSS apps let users read articles without distractions. But in doing so, readers may never visit the authors’ websites. They might miss features not available in the RSS reader, and their visits might not count for the website’s analytics. Over time, this can end up giving authors less incentive to improve the reading experience on their websites.
Reading
To improve my reading experience, I rely on read-it-later apps. Instapaper is my favourite so far. It offers a clean and consistent interface across different websites, with useful features like highlights and notes. I’ve saved hundreds of articles over the years, and it’s quite handy to save an article on the desktop and read it later on the tablet or the phone. It works by grabbing the page I’m visiting right now, so if I can read it, Instapaper can likely read it too. The problem is that it does not contribute to content discovery, or following either, since it doesn’t track updates or notify me when new content appears, or help me find more content.
Centralised platforms
Some startups tried to address all the challenges together, creating publishing platforms on the web. One example is Substack, which offers most of the tools needed to write, to read, to find content and even allows users to escape the algorithmic feed trap with personalised newsletters. That said, the price that readers and writers have to pay for the platform is giving up control over the space where they put the content.
If all online content gets centralised on a single platform, users will become dependent on it, having to accept whatever product decisions the company might make. There would also be less individuality than there is on the small web, where bloggers and passionate people customise their own websites, potentially controlling every single detail of them. Finally, the incentives these platforms create still push authors to constantly produce new content rather than focus on creating something refined and durable. They still have algorithmic feeds and email marketing that make new content more important by design.
For now, my online reading remains scattered through many apps and platforms. However, I imagined a solution that has the potential to unify a few of the components of reading online discussed above. It does not have to be another platform or app, but rather something that we all already use to access the internet; the browser.
Centralised platforms tried to solve the integration problem by putting all the content into a single interconnected system, which is exactly what the web already does. And the web also already partially solved content discovery, since search engines, social media, recommendation platforms and link aggregators are already playing a part. The solution in this case is not to look at the web itself, but observe the problem one layer up. It has to live in the interface we use to access the web. The browser is the layer that sits between readers and independent websites. Modern browsers render pages perfectly, integrate bookmarks, can grab RSS instantly, and most of them already integrate a reading mode for articles. Connecting these components together is the key to creating a perfect tool to read online, without removing the website itself from the experience. A browser could let me follow a website directly, notify me when it publishes something new, give me a clean place to read it, and let me browse the entire archive without treating the newest articles as inherently more important.
We saw a recent wave of new browsers that mostly offered UI makeovers on top of existing engines (Blink and Webkit). Maybe a differentiator for the next browser, instead of improving usability or privacy, might be to help people to follow and read more valuable content online.
Curious to hear your thoughts.