Instapaper Premium now free
Instapaper Premium, the commercial version of the read-it-later service, is now available for free for all existing and new users.
The company announced today that it has enabled features formerly reserved to premium customers for all Instapaper user accounts.
Existing Instapaper Premium users will get prorated refunds for their subscription, and Instapaper guarantees that accounts won't be billed anymore.
The features that all users gain access to as a consequence are the following ones:
- A website that is completely advertisement free.
- Unlimited notes.
- Full-text search for all articles.
- Unlimited speed reading.
- Text-to-speech playlists.
- "send to Kindle" functionality.
- Kindle digest of up to 50 articles.
Instapaper
Instapaper works similar to the popular Pocket read-it-later service. The service maintains browser extensions and bookmarklets that users of it can use to save articles to their Instapaper account. There is also an option to improve the readability of an article using directly in the browser.
All its take then is to push a button or two to add the article to the Instapaper account. The Instapaper website displays articles in an optimized form that puts the focus on text and images of the article.
You get various controls at the top of the page. These include options to change the font, enable speed reading functionality, and the usual sharing and liking options.
Notes work a little bit different. You may highlight any part of an article. This adds it as a note automatically to Instapaper.
Free Instapaper users benefit from all premium features as of today.
Motivation behind the change
You are probably wondering why Instapaper made the decision to enable premium features for all users and discontinue its paid service.
This has likely something to do with the company's acquisition by Pinterest, the popular discovery service.
There are two possible explanations for that: Pinterest may either be only interested in certain technologies of Instapaper to add to the core experience of its users. If that is the case, it would probably mean that Instapaper won't be a priority anymore from that point forward.
The second explanation is that Pinterest wants Instapaper to grow. Competition is fierce, and one option to better compete with Pocket and other read-it-later services is to make premium features free.
Now You: Do you use a read-it-later service?
Doesn’t Windows 8 know that www. or http:// are passe ?
Well it is a bit difficulty to distinguish between name.com domains and files for instance.
I know a service made by google that is similar to Google bookmarks.
http://www.google.com/saved
@Ashwin–Thankful you delighted my comment; who knows how many “gamers” would have disagreed!
@Martin
The comments section under this very article (3 comments) is identical to the comments section found under the following article:
https://www.ghacks.net/2023/08/15/netflix-is-testing-game-streaming-on-tvs-and-computers/
Not sure what the issue is, but have seen this issue under some other articles recently but did not report it back then.
Omg a badge!!!
Some tangible reward lmao.
It sucks that redditors are going to love the fuck out of it too.
With the cloud, there is no such thing as unlimited storage or privacy. Stop relying on these tech scums. Purchase your own hardware and develop your own solutions.
This is a certified reddit cringe moment. Hilarious how the article’s author tries to dress it up like it’s anything more than a png for doing the reddit corporation’s moderation work for free (or for bribes from companies and political groups)
Almost al unlmited services have a real limit.
And this comment is written on the dropbox article from August 25, 2023.
First comment > @ilev said on August 4, 2012 at 7:53 pm
For the God’s sake, fix the comments soon please! :[
Yes. Please. Fix the comments.
With Google Chrome, it’s only been 1,500 for some time now.
Anyone who wants to force me in such a way into buying something that I can get elsewhere for free will certainly never see a single dime from my side. I don’t even know how stupid their marketing department is to impose these limits on users instead of offering a valuable product to the paying faction. But they don’t. Even if you pay, you get something that is also available for free elsewhere.
The algorithm has also become less and less savvy in terms of e.g. English/German translations. It used to be that the bot could sort of sense what you were trying to say and put it into different colloquialisms, which was even fun because it was like, “I know what you’re trying to say here, how about…” Now it’s in parts too stupid to translate the simplest sentences correctly, and the suggestions it makes are at times as moronic as those made by Google Translations.
If this is a deep-learning AI that learns from users’ translations and the phrases they choose most often – which, by the way, is a valuable, moneys worthwhile contribution of every free user to this project: They invest their time and texts, thereby providing the necessary data for the AI to do the thing as nicely as they brag about it in the first place – alas, the more unprofessional users discovered the translator, the worse the language of this deep-learning bot has become, the greater the aggregate of linguistically illiterate users has become, and the worse the language of this deep-learning bot has become, as it now learns the drivel of every Tom, Dick and Harry out there, which is why I now get their Mickey Mouse language as suggestions: the inane language of people who can barely spell the alphabet, it seems.
And as a thank you for our time and effort in helping them and their AI learn, they’ve lowered the limit from what was once 5,000 to now 1,500…? A big “fuck off” from here for that! Not a brass farthing from me for this attitude and behaviour, not in a hundred years.
When will you put an end to the mess in the comments?
Ghacks comments have been broken for too long. What article did you see this comment on? Reply below. If we get to 20 different articles we should all stop using the site in protest.
I posted this on [https://www.ghacks.net/2023/09/28/reddit-enforces-user-activity-tracking-on-site-to-push-advertising-revenue/] so please reply if you see it on a different article.
Comment redirected me to [https://www.ghacks.net/2012/08/04/add-search-the-internet-to-the-windows-start-menu/] which seems to be the ‘real’ article it is attached to
Comment redirected me to [https://www.ghacks.net/2012/08/04/add-search-the-internet-to-the-windows-start-menu/] which seems to be the ‘real’ article it is attached to
Article Title: Reddit enforces user activity tracking on site to push advertising revenue
Article URL: https://www.ghacks.net/2023/09/28/reddit-enforces-user-activity-tracking-on-site-to-push-advertising-revenue/
No surprises here. This is just the beginning really. I cannot see a valid reason as to why anyone would continue to use the platform anymore when there are enough alternatives fill that void.