Show HN: Parikar, Read long form articles or blogs in a better, measurable way

Show HN: Parikar, Read long form articles or blogs in a better, measurable way(parikar.org)

17 points by skbohra123 2 years ago | 15 comments

skbohra123 2 years ago |

Hi HN, creator here. This is a speed reading tool for longform articles, with speed control. I believe the conversational style UI, can make text reading better and you can come back to the later to read from where you left, it will automatically seek to that position. It also gives you exact time it will take you to read through whole article along with % of article you have read.

I am also experimenting with integrating various AI, APIs like text summarization, automatic tagging etc. to help user read in a better way.

Would love to hear more feedback.

skbohra123 2 years ago | |

I made some improvements based on the feedback received, looking forward to more comments.

devnull3 2 years ago |

"A Better Way of Reading" -> in what way? All I see is teleprompter like text on screen when I click one of the links.

notamy 2 years ago |

I can see the "measurable" part, but why is this better? I didn’t see an explanation on the linked page.

skbohra123 2 years ago | |

Better in way that it's reading is free from distraction and you can control the speed at which you want to read.

fodkodrasz 2 years ago |

Why would I need to read in a measurable way? Who am I racing with, who do I need to beat?

Also it is not any better way to read "long form content" than TikTok is.

skbohra123 2 years ago | |

Thanks for the feedback, the idea is to take the 'addiction' part of UIs like tiktok,IG reels etc. and use it for long form content, making people read more.

fodkodrasz 2 years ago | | |

Interesting idea. I'm not sure fighting addiction with another addiction is the way to go.

throwaway739471 2 years ago |

The way this presents the reading material makes it seem less overwhelming or less likely for you to give up and say TLDR. It seems basically like subtitles for long reading, keeping you engaged (like an audiobook?). Certainly could have helped with summer reading for me back in K-12.

mewpmewp2 2 years ago | |

I feel like this is much worse than normally reading.

Firstly what I usually do is I quickly scan with eyes over the page I'm seeing and it gives me understanding what to expect.

Secondly, different words and different sentences require different paces of reading, so the pace can't always be constant like this. And for different people, different sentences, paragraphs have varying ease of understandability based on past experience, so I don't think it would even be feasible to adapt the pace by "how difficult" a sentence is.

It more like makes me feel claustrophobic and as if control was taken away from me, almost in panicky way I feel like I have no control over the content or ability to think about the content for any time.

I'm frequently seeing this UX being trending in many places, besides reading as well like filling out forms - TypeForms?? If I don't see the whole list of expected inputs/forms, it's much harder to know in many cases what data is exactly expected from and for which reason.

It seems it just makes everything worse as it removes all the info about the context so you are left without any feeling of control or context, just randomly doing something.

skbohra123 2 years ago | |

Thanks for the feedback, yeah that's the main idea behind the project. Glad that you find it useful.

blowski 2 years ago |

I like being able to put long-form articles into a reading list that I might get to one day. This UI would make me feel like a failure for not reading them, so I'd probably not want to add anything.

ghaff 2 years ago | |

I tend to agree. I have far more longish form stuff (and books) come into the house than I'm ever going to read. And that's fine.

perihelions 2 years ago | | |

If you'd like a list of HN threads you won't read either, there's some interesting threads on the topic of tsundoku [0] or an anti-library [1].

[0] https://hn.algolia.com/?q=tsundoku (Wikipedia: "the phenomenon of acquiring reading materials but letting them pile up in one's home without reading them")

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?q=anti-library

skbohra123 2 years ago | |

UI's intention is to let you 'drop' reading anywhere and comeback to that point whenever you feel like.