I'm 35 and couldn't finish reading articles anymore, so I built this
Details
- External ID
- 46509154
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- I'm 35 and couldn't finish reading articles anymore, so I built this
- Website domain
- obasic.app
- Launched
- Jan. 6, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 9
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.461133069828722
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
Description
Hey HN, the full story is on the page, but here's the TL;DR:I'm 35 and somewhere along the way I lost the ability to finish reading articles. I'd open them, read 2-3 paragraphs, get distracted, and close the tab feeling like a failure. My "Read Later" list became a graveyard of 2,000+ unread articles.I tried everything – focus apps, reader modes, blocking extensions. Nothing worked. Then I realized. 'maybe the problem isn't me'. Modern web articles are designed for engagement metrics, not comprehension. Sidebars, popups, related articles, comment sections – everything is optimized to pull your attention away.So I built Parsely. It shows one paragraph at a time, blurs everything else. Stupidly simple. But it worked. I'm finally finishing articles again.Tech stack: WXT framework, TypeScript, Mozilla Readability (same as Firefox Reader View), Shadow DOM for style isolation.Code is MIT licensed: https://github.com/TeamOliveCode/parselyHappy to answer questions about the implementation or commiserate about our collective attention spans!
Enrichment
- Theme
- markdown editors and writing tools
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Content generation
- Audience
- B2C
- AI stance
- AI-native
- Project type
- Commercial product
- Normalized one-liner
- article summarizer for readability
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
Yes Parsely is a standard readability/summarization reader web application or browser extension that reformats articles into digestible chunks using standard LLM prompts.
Discussion
12 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: Reader mode, Physical books and print magazines
Concerns raised: Doesn't solve underlying attention economy and platform incentive problems, Won't make bad writing good or salvage low-quality clickbait, Tool treats symptoms, not root cause of attention issues, Unclear if formal testing/control groups were used to validate effectiveness
Feature requests: Slider for darkness control that goes all the way to pure black, Finer granularity over how much content visibility is shown
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 86 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #46 of 87 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 65 days after the earliest competitor.
- Stumbleback · hn · 2026-05-27 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.49
- I built time to read all the things I want to · hn · 2025-12-14 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.49
- I built Goodreads for academic papers to help my wife survive her PhD · hn · 2026-01-26 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.43
- Rdltr · hn · 2026-09-09 · 24 upvotes · similarity 0.43
- Read while you listen to your Audiobooks · hn · 2026-09-26 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.42
- I built a tool to translate and declutter articles for my immigrant mom · hn · 2026-02-28 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.41
- Forty.News · hn · 2025-11-22 · 443 upvotes · similarity 0.40
- Yapit · hn · 2026-04-06 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.38
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
Same idea, different domain
Nobody's really built a content generation tool for Government yet.