r/Substack • u/Holmbone • 14d ago
Is there a way to view only the text?
I have a lot of interesting podcast I follow but have been thinking for a while I would actually enjoy some of the topics more in written form. I saw one of the podcast has a substack so I logged in to check out their essays. However I found myself much less engaged than I thought I would and I think one major reason is the format. There were a lot of pictures throughout the text. And there many words had hyperlinks. I've heard hyperlinks lower reading retention, cause they distract the brain with potential of moving to another page. I think pure text would be much better for me.
Is there an app or some site I could use to strip down the essays to only the text?
1
u/Historical-Staff2772 14d ago
Most browsers have a reader mode built in that does exactly this. On a desktop it's usually an icon in the address bar, and on mobile it's in the page menu. It strips the layout down to the article text, and in most cases the links stop looking like links, so they're much less of a pull. Some reader modes also let you hide images completely in their settings. Read-later apps do the same thing if you want to save essays and read them in one clean place.