Hi! My name is Nikola and I’m the author of Plainews. My motivation behind it was to build something that would make reading news and articles more enjoyable and easier for me. Since I’m not the biggest fan of reading the current news but I also want to be up to date with what’s happening, I wanted to have something that provides and smoother experience and makes the whole experience better.

I’m also not a fan of ads, and the relentless snooping and tracking that is nowadays the norm in the internet. And alongside cooking blogs, news websites are some of the worst in this regard. I know businesses need to make money, but the user experience reading news is horrible. We get bombarded with ads, cookies, popups and sponsored content.

Shoutout to my Pi-hole server at home that even without a lot of configuration blocks around 20% of traffic as it’s classified as ads. 20%! And I still see loads of ads.

Ad blockers, reader views (and in Safari and Firefox) can go along way to improve the situation, but it doesn’t need to be that complicated. There are libraries, such as Newspaper3k (which Plainews uses) that can extract useful text from a web page source. That way, we can automatically focus to the content we came to a webpage for, and not the rubbish around it. A distraction-free reading experience.

A secondary motivation for me was to digest the information quicker, since I tend to not have a lot of patience with news. The top problem there for me is that maybe articles are overly bloated for no reason. I understand that longer text looks more credible, but often times I just want to get the gist of it and move on. Luckily, since 2022, LLMs make it easy to summarize longer texts into something more straight to the point.

This has been a passion project for me for a while now and I hope you will enjoy it! If you do, share some feedback, star the repository on Github and maybe share it with a friend!

Thank you!