<story><title>Show HN: I ranked news websites by speed</title><url>https://legiblenews.com/speed</url><text>I&amp;#x27;ve been working on building &amp;quot;the fastest news website&amp;quot; for a few reasons:&lt;p&gt;1. I got tired of waiting for news websites to load, so I made a text-only news website that only has major news headlines.&lt;p&gt;2. I wanted to demonstrate to the world that if you want to build something really fast on the web, you can do it without loads of JavaScript.&lt;p&gt;3. I wanted to show that you can design something that looks good without having tons of images, etc.&lt;p&gt;I put together the speed page at &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;legiblenews.com&amp;#x2F;speed&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;legiblenews.com&amp;#x2F;speed&lt;/a&gt; to hold my website to be more accountable for speed, but it&amp;#x27;s also interesting to see how fast other news websites are (or in most cases, are not).&lt;p&gt;Some feedback I&amp;#x27;m interested in receiving:&lt;p&gt;1. What&amp;#x27;s your take both on the speed ranking methodology for Legible News?&lt;p&gt;2. Are my descriptions of the metrics for a non-web developer reasonable? Example of that at &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;legiblenews.com&amp;#x2F;speed&amp;#x2F;websites&amp;#x2F;associated-press&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;legiblenews.com&amp;#x2F;speed&amp;#x2F;websites&amp;#x2F;associated-press&lt;/a&gt;, and if you click through the links on that table, you see a description like &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;legiblenews.com&amp;#x2F;speed&amp;#x2F;audits&amp;#x2F;cumulative-layout-shift&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;legiblenews.com&amp;#x2F;speed&amp;#x2F;audits&amp;#x2F;cumulative-layout-shift&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;Sorry ahead of time, but I can&amp;#x27;t fit all news websites on the speed report. I had to target general news websites, not ones for specific niches like HN for Tech. If there&amp;#x27;s something you think that&amp;#x27;s missing please post it, but I can&amp;#x27;t promise that I&amp;#x27;ll add it.&lt;p&gt;If you like it, please consider subscribing! Thanks!</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>ysavir</author><text>&amp;gt; Regarding, &amp;quot;not enough&amp;quot;, I&amp;#x27;m currently losing money on Legible News, so if I increased the amount, I&amp;#x27;d lose even more money. For now I consider a 10% donation generous given the current unit economics. I may raise prices to offset these loses, but I&amp;#x27;ll grandfather in people who subscribe today.&lt;p&gt;This feels in very bad taste to me. As another user pointed out, these articles are being authored and maintained by volunteers, who are donating their time and effort to make information accessible to people. Instead of joining them in that pro-bono effort, you&amp;#x27;re trying to leverage their work to your own profits. Yes, it requires some up-front work from you to format the articles, but it&amp;#x27;s a one time cost while the authors are continuously working. And sure, you have to pay for hosting costs, but then you could still run it as a non-profit that only recoups costs and donates the rest to Wikipedia.&lt;p&gt;If you want to make a business out of this, I&amp;#x27;d suggest investing in having people author some original articles. But taking someone else&amp;#x27;s volunteer work for your own gain is not something I will support. Not wanting to invest your own time and money to make your project work long-term doesn&amp;#x27;t justify using other people&amp;#x27;s time and efforts to make your project work long term.&lt;p&gt;If there&amp;#x27;s any part of your data pipeline that I misunderstand and rectifies the situation, I&amp;#x27;d be happy to have my understanding fixed.</text></item><item><author>bradgessler</author><text>Yes! The news content and links from them are from Wikipedia, which is why I donate a portion of revenue to them. The value I&amp;#x27;m delivering is speed and focus, going further than Wikipedia, hence your observations from the page speed score. The design of their pages is quite busy and some articles actually take a really long time to load when they&amp;#x27;re re-built from scratch and not served up from a cache.&lt;p&gt;Regarding, &amp;quot;not enough&amp;quot;, I&amp;#x27;m currently losing money on Legible News, so if I increased the amount, I&amp;#x27;d lose even more money. For now I consider a 10% donation generous given the current unit economics. I may raise prices to offset these loses, but I&amp;#x27;ll grandfather in people who subscribe today.&lt;p&gt;If Legible News reaches a large enough scale I&amp;#x27;ll consider switching from the current donation model to a Wikimedia enterprise subscription (&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;enterprise.wikimedia.com&amp;#x2F;pricing&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;enterprise.wikimedia.com&amp;#x2F;pricing&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;) or hiring my own editorial staff to put together the days headlines.&lt;p&gt;---&lt;p&gt;Edit: Oops, there&amp;#x27;s a bug on the news articles that are not displaying the license. If you want to see what this should look like, check out &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;legiblenews.com&amp;#x2F;articles&amp;#x2F;Mekelle&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;legiblenews.com&amp;#x2F;articles&amp;#x2F;Mekelle&lt;/a&gt; and scroll to the bottom and click on &amp;quot;License&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;Fixing this now for news articles.&lt;p&gt;---&lt;p&gt;Update: Licenses are now working for news pages. You can see today&amp;#x27;s at &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;legiblenews.com&amp;#x2F;june-27-2022&amp;#x2F;license&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;legiblenews.com&amp;#x2F;june-27-2022&amp;#x2F;license&lt;/a&gt;. This broke navigation at the bottom, which I&amp;#x27;m now fixing.</text></item><item><author>samwillis</author><text>Nice idea on legiblenews.com, however it looks to me like it&amp;#x27;s just using &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Portal:Current_events&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Portal:Current_events&lt;/a&gt; and changing the format? All the articles are from there, verbatim, and you are exactly copying the list of articles - even the categorisation of them.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m not sure that a 10% donation to Wikipedia from subscription revenue is quite enough when you are doing quite a simple reformat of all the volunteer work that goes into the current events section of Wikipedia.&lt;p&gt;You are effectively changing $9.99 for a weekly email digest of the &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Portal:Current_events&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Portal:Current_events&lt;/a&gt; page and giving them $1. I think if you went 50&amp;#x2F;50 on it I would probably feel it was more fair, you are adding value but I assume thats all automated.&lt;p&gt;I will give you credit for your 100 score, that page on wikipedia gets an 86 on page speed insights.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>colonwqbang</author><text>I don&amp;#x27;t understand why you would feel that way. Under Wikipedia&amp;#x27;s license:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; You are free to:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially.&lt;p&gt;This seems like exactly the kind of behaviour they want to encourage. It&amp;#x27;s not taking anything away from the project, just adding another way to consume the information for those who choose to.</text></comment>
<story><title>Show HN: I ranked news websites by speed</title><url>https://legiblenews.com/speed</url><text>I&amp;#x27;ve been working on building &amp;quot;the fastest news website&amp;quot; for a few reasons:&lt;p&gt;1. I got tired of waiting for news websites to load, so I made a text-only news website that only has major news headlines.&lt;p&gt;2. I wanted to demonstrate to the world that if you want to build something really fast on the web, you can do it without loads of JavaScript.&lt;p&gt;3. I wanted to show that you can design something that looks good without having tons of images, etc.&lt;p&gt;I put together the speed page at &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;legiblenews.com&amp;#x2F;speed&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;legiblenews.com&amp;#x2F;speed&lt;/a&gt; to hold my website to be more accountable for speed, but it&amp;#x27;s also interesting to see how fast other news websites are (or in most cases, are not).&lt;p&gt;Some feedback I&amp;#x27;m interested in receiving:&lt;p&gt;1. What&amp;#x27;s your take both on the speed ranking methodology for Legible News?&lt;p&gt;2. Are my descriptions of the metrics for a non-web developer reasonable? Example of that at &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;legiblenews.com&amp;#x2F;speed&amp;#x2F;websites&amp;#x2F;associated-press&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;legiblenews.com&amp;#x2F;speed&amp;#x2F;websites&amp;#x2F;associated-press&lt;/a&gt;, and if you click through the links on that table, you see a description like &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;legiblenews.com&amp;#x2F;speed&amp;#x2F;audits&amp;#x2F;cumulative-layout-shift&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;legiblenews.com&amp;#x2F;speed&amp;#x2F;audits&amp;#x2F;cumulative-layout-shift&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;Sorry ahead of time, but I can&amp;#x27;t fit all news websites on the speed report. I had to target general news websites, not ones for specific niches like HN for Tech. If there&amp;#x27;s something you think that&amp;#x27;s missing please post it, but I can&amp;#x27;t promise that I&amp;#x27;ll add it.&lt;p&gt;If you like it, please consider subscribing! Thanks!</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>ysavir</author><text>&amp;gt; Regarding, &amp;quot;not enough&amp;quot;, I&amp;#x27;m currently losing money on Legible News, so if I increased the amount, I&amp;#x27;d lose even more money. For now I consider a 10% donation generous given the current unit economics. I may raise prices to offset these loses, but I&amp;#x27;ll grandfather in people who subscribe today.&lt;p&gt;This feels in very bad taste to me. As another user pointed out, these articles are being authored and maintained by volunteers, who are donating their time and effort to make information accessible to people. Instead of joining them in that pro-bono effort, you&amp;#x27;re trying to leverage their work to your own profits. Yes, it requires some up-front work from you to format the articles, but it&amp;#x27;s a one time cost while the authors are continuously working. And sure, you have to pay for hosting costs, but then you could still run it as a non-profit that only recoups costs and donates the rest to Wikipedia.&lt;p&gt;If you want to make a business out of this, I&amp;#x27;d suggest investing in having people author some original articles. But taking someone else&amp;#x27;s volunteer work for your own gain is not something I will support. Not wanting to invest your own time and money to make your project work long-term doesn&amp;#x27;t justify using other people&amp;#x27;s time and efforts to make your project work long term.&lt;p&gt;If there&amp;#x27;s any part of your data pipeline that I misunderstand and rectifies the situation, I&amp;#x27;d be happy to have my understanding fixed.</text></item><item><author>bradgessler</author><text>Yes! The news content and links from them are from Wikipedia, which is why I donate a portion of revenue to them. The value I&amp;#x27;m delivering is speed and focus, going further than Wikipedia, hence your observations from the page speed score. The design of their pages is quite busy and some articles actually take a really long time to load when they&amp;#x27;re re-built from scratch and not served up from a cache.&lt;p&gt;Regarding, &amp;quot;not enough&amp;quot;, I&amp;#x27;m currently losing money on Legible News, so if I increased the amount, I&amp;#x27;d lose even more money. For now I consider a 10% donation generous given the current unit economics. I may raise prices to offset these loses, but I&amp;#x27;ll grandfather in people who subscribe today.&lt;p&gt;If Legible News reaches a large enough scale I&amp;#x27;ll consider switching from the current donation model to a Wikimedia enterprise subscription (&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;enterprise.wikimedia.com&amp;#x2F;pricing&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;enterprise.wikimedia.com&amp;#x2F;pricing&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;) or hiring my own editorial staff to put together the days headlines.&lt;p&gt;---&lt;p&gt;Edit: Oops, there&amp;#x27;s a bug on the news articles that are not displaying the license. If you want to see what this should look like, check out &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;legiblenews.com&amp;#x2F;articles&amp;#x2F;Mekelle&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;legiblenews.com&amp;#x2F;articles&amp;#x2F;Mekelle&lt;/a&gt; and scroll to the bottom and click on &amp;quot;License&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;Fixing this now for news articles.&lt;p&gt;---&lt;p&gt;Update: Licenses are now working for news pages. You can see today&amp;#x27;s at &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;legiblenews.com&amp;#x2F;june-27-2022&amp;#x2F;license&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;legiblenews.com&amp;#x2F;june-27-2022&amp;#x2F;license&lt;/a&gt;. This broke navigation at the bottom, which I&amp;#x27;m now fixing.</text></item><item><author>samwillis</author><text>Nice idea on legiblenews.com, however it looks to me like it&amp;#x27;s just using &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Portal:Current_events&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Portal:Current_events&lt;/a&gt; and changing the format? All the articles are from there, verbatim, and you are exactly copying the list of articles - even the categorisation of them.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m not sure that a 10% donation to Wikipedia from subscription revenue is quite enough when you are doing quite a simple reformat of all the volunteer work that goes into the current events section of Wikipedia.&lt;p&gt;You are effectively changing $9.99 for a weekly email digest of the &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Portal:Current_events&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Portal:Current_events&lt;/a&gt; page and giving them $1. I think if you went 50&amp;#x2F;50 on it I would probably feel it was more fair, you are adding value but I assume thats all automated.&lt;p&gt;I will give you credit for your 100 score, that page on wikipedia gets an 86 on page speed insights.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bradgessler</author><text>I occasionally make edits to the structure of the original content, but given my limited resources, which is a fraction of my personal time, that&amp;#x27;s all I can do. In the future if this brings in more revenue I will consider donating more to Wikimedia, hiring editorial staff to contribute back to CurrentEvents, or purchasing a Wikimedia Enterprise subscription.&lt;p&gt;I do want to acknowledge and be upfront that I won&amp;#x27;t be able to satisfy everybody&amp;#x27;s level of fairness, taste, etc, but this is currently what is sustainable for me given the amount of time and resources I have available to put into this project. Some will think this is done in very bad taste, like yourself, and others won&amp;#x27;t. That&amp;#x27;s fine! I accept constructive or thoughtful critiques and will reflect on them in the future as things change.</text></comment>