Leaving Instapaper for Readability (opens in new tab)

I left Instapaper for Readability as well, but my reason was entirely different and a first for me (at least on the web): Marco. I'm not even sure what it is about him exactly, but after listening to some of his Build and Analyze podcasts and reading his slanted blog posts I just found myself not wanting to use or support Instapaper anymore.

Regarding the thought that Instapaper is somehow robbing writers of ad revenue, I think it needs to be noted that you actually have to visit an article to add it to your Instapaper queue. On top of that, Readability's model of paying authors isn't all that effective, a recent article on The Brooks Review[1] showed that even a moderately popular site such as his generates nearly no income from Readability's service, especially now that the service has gone free with optional payments.

Also, what happens to all those authors that don't opt in to receive payments from Readability? Does readability just take money on their behalf and not actually pay it out to them? It seems like that would be a legal grey area.

[1]: http://brooksreview.net/2012/03/readability-ios/

Like Instapaper, Readability doesn't have an android app, so any other advantage it may have is meaningless for me.

I think Readability's model is a little presumptuous. Why do they get to decide unilaterally that they deserve 30% of the revenue? It's not like the App Store where you agreed to it. Given all the work that goes into creating an article, is extracting the text worth 30%? If I was a publisher, I wouldn't think so.

To me, Instapaper's approach is much more straightforward. You have to have gone to the publisher's site in the first place and seen all of the ads. You pay a flat fee for the Instapaper app, and can subscribe if you like the service. Why make it more complicated than it has to be?

Do you feel guilty when you skip commercials on your TiVo? I don't, sorry.

An ad on a page is no different than a billboard or some other passive advertising. I am not required to notice it.

I left because I felt readability has a lot more features I like. The ability to hit ` on any webpage is awesome. I am also a click away from saving the article.

The latest iteration of Instapaper looks nicer in some ways, (looks like Reeder was an inspiration), but is painfully annoying in others. i.e I now have to touch twice to delete an article. Instapaper needs a stripped down Lite version that all it does is show articles and then let you delete them.

My 2c.

Only one feature keeps me with Instapaper: Readability's crappy bookmarklet implementation. On my iPhone, I can save a page to Instapaper with a click of the bookmark. Readability, however, will throw up a prompt page asking me to confirm that I really want to save the page. The extra latency turns out to be really annoying in practice. If you're going to prompt, at least do it client side.

As far as aesthetics go I actually prefer the approach Marco takes with Instapaper. I think Readability does have more of a polished feel but in no way does this polish make the service any more usable. The Instapaper apps are top notch in my book.

The moral angle of feeling guilty and thus using Readabilty to compensate authors is total garbage. I disagree with this guilt trip blog post on so many levels. The 30% cut that Readability takes is the whole reason Readability exists. Essentially the writers are providing free content to Readability that they get to make a nice profit on. This is exploiting the writers to a far greater degree than Instapaper. Also, not every article I save I deem worthy of a contribution to the author. I may utterly hate an author's guts and am simply reading their article to better understand their insane philosophies before I decide I despise them. I'll fall back on an old Techdirt term: CwF+RtB. If I like a writer and want to support them I'll visit their site enough to earn them ad impressions, or I'll buy their book, or I purchase something using their affiliate link. I certainly don't need Readability paying people for me while pocketing a handsome chunk of change in the process.

I really like Instapaper. I only really use it within the iOS ecosystem, and only by adding articles directly from the instapaper site, or from longreads or longform. I use an ad blocker anyway, so the sites aren't losing out on marginal ad revenue from me.

Maybe Readability or Read It Later are better, but instapaper is the first one I found, and I'm happy with it, and have a queue of about 500 nice articles built up, so I'm not likely to switch unless I see a better reason than "Marco is a bit presumptuous in podcasts" and "a competing site integrates a tipjar."

I used Instapaper for quite a while, even wrote a small Android utility app to quickly bookmark a link to my Instapaper account and read it later on a bigger screen. But it was a long time ago.

I use Read It Later these days. Simply because it's a better product than Instapaper. It runs on all devices I own and use daily: iPhone, Android phone and tablet, MacBook, Linux laptop, Linux workstation. I bought Instapaper app and still have it on my iPhone mostly to check if its latest update has anything great which I miss in RIL. Nothing.

PS Marco's personality certainly "helped" me switch. But it's minor.

As we all already know, Readability has been running what could be considered a scam by pocketing some of that money simply because the authors don't know about it.

And, I really don't see why I would have a moral obligation to pay for every single article I read. Not every article is worth paying for. 90% of the stuff I read is trash. Plus, a lot of blogs offer their own ways to donate. If a writer is good, they'll get my money anyway. I'm not handing out cash to everyone, and I'm definitely not giving it to Readability.

Ever wonder if any publishers have actually collected any of your contribution? There's NO accountability about how much money actually makes it to publishers; since Readability does not seek the publishers, each publisher must be aware of their money, and go collect it from Readability, and if they do not, eventually it becomes Readability's. It's a great model, and the ethics are wonderful, but it suffers from this fatal flaw.

Following this train of thought simply leads to a further moral dilemma. If the concern is that Instapaper is bad because it bypasses the content providers income methodology then Readability is also bad because it does the exact same thing. The only difference is that Readability has created their own income methodology, of which a portion they feed back to the content providers (sometimes). At no point does either service require a content provider opt-in before the service's users are able to pull content from the providers.

I believe Instapaper has an opt-out function for content providers whereby Instapaper users are prevented from adding that content providers content to their Instapaper account. Does Readability have that opt-out capability as well? If not, Readability could very well be considered worse than Instapaper on a moral scale since Readability then becomes a form of blackmail: agree to accept payment for your content that we decide is just, otherwise we'll simply eliminate your existing payment method anyway.

I fail to see how any moral analysis of either service could conclude one is good and the other bad. They are both bad from the perspective of the average content provider. Half measures, and possibly blackmail, do not assuage the moral concern.

I do not like to use ad-blockers but ads have made internet really impossible to use. Some sites have few layer of ads before you can actually access the content. I feel content providers don't respect their customer by putting hundreds of ads on their website. You do not always appreciate intrusive ads like music or video or resource intensive flash. If content providers can be considerate of the number of ads they put on their website, I will not have to use ad-blocker at all.

Read-It-Later is the only solution on Android, so, I go with it.

Revenue distribution is an interesting variation of Flattr.com's business model.

Flattr is more general as it's a platform for distributing micro-donations to creators of music, games, etc., whereas Readability is specifically about publishing and effectively offers a product/service directly to micro-donators. You could see the same model being applied to other verticals.

Instapaper has a great api and yes it is not usable as readability. But I can still use instapaper on any platform.

I've left Instapaper and Readability for e-mail/desktop shortcuts and Readable.

Read It Later beats both.