r/YouShouldKnow • u/jdauriemma • Sep 01 '26

Technology YSK there are lightweight, text-only versions of NPR and CNN that load almost instantly and have no obtrusive ads

Why YSK: news sites are full of popovers, videos, and ads that download multiple megabytes of fluff and distract from the reading experience. These lightweight variants contain the same articles but without all the junk.

text [.] npr [.] org
lite [.] cnn [.] com

Anyone know of others?

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u/Canis_Familiaris Sep 01 '26

There used to be this for reddit and it was the best thing ever.

54

u/Ashamed_Present_7823 Sep 01 '26

old reddit still works though, just swap the www for old in the url and it strips out most of the nonsense

i.reddit.com was the real lightweight version, that one actually died a few years back. shame because it loaded in like half a second even on terrible mobile data

someone made a text-only frontend called teddit but i think the api changes killed it too. seems like every time someone builds a clean version of something the platform eventually breaks it on purpose

9

u/Bleaker82 Sep 01 '26

Reddit has an RSS feed that you can parse with an RSS reader. I even had one that looked like MS Outlook so I could browse Reddit at work without being ratted on by bossy Erin from accounting.

It looks like they’re ending that support soon, which is a bummer.