The Best Way to Read the News in 2022
Do you like to read the news? Yes? What is wrong with you? Who hurt you? Well if you are a masochist, like me, who likes to follow the news you have a plethora of options. You can go to the big news sites like CNN, Fox News, or MSNBC. You can go to the smaller players like The Hill, The Intercept, or The Daily Wire. You can go to a news aggregator site/service like Ground News or the Drudge Report. You can even just go to YouTube or another streaming site and get your fix from the curated “trusted sources” that YouTube pushes to the forefront, or you can check out any number of other people on the platform talking about the news — thought I suppose that’s not really reading the news, which is what we’re talking about here.
All of these options are a viable way to read the news, but let’s be real. It’s not necessarily a pleasant experience. Let’s go through the typical experience you might experience:
Navigate to the website you want to visit
Wait
Wait some more
Click to accept all cookies
Start reading
Scroll down
Wait again for the page to load more of the page
Mute the autoplaying video
Start reading again
Find your spot again after the mid-article ad finally loads and pushes the whole article down
Calm down from using the modern web
Scroll down
Read the rest of the news article
Click the link to the next article
Repeat steps 2 - 14, sans step 4
News sites aren’t the only ones like this — not by a long shot — but there is no denying that they kind of suck to use. Well what if I told you there was a better way. What if I told you there was a quality news aggregator that is written in plain-old HTML. No javascript. No HTML5. No SSL. No ads or trackers. No photos or autoplaying video. Just a scrape of articles formatted into basic HTML. And what if I told you that it’s even fully functional in a 20+ year old web browser?
Enter 68k.news
68k.news was created by the vintage computing YouTuber ActionRetro and it was designed to be used by archaic web browsers running on 90’s era computers. I have used it with Internet Explorer 6 on an old ThinkPad running Windows 2000, and once I get internet at the new house I plan to test it out in Netscape Navigator 4 on my PowerMac G3 running Mac OS 9.2.2.
Now the site is designed for browsing on ancient hardware, but that doesn’t mean it’s only for those platforms. I’m currently using it on an M1 MacBook Air, and as you can imagine every page loads almost instantaneously! Is it necessary to use such a barebones website in 2022? No, of course not. Is it a better overall experience? I suppose that depends on what you are looking for. If you want photos and videos, then no; but if you want something that is quick and responsive, that respects your privacy and your compute cycles, and just gives you the information you came for then I would argue there is no better way to get the news on the modern web.
Go check it out for yourself and give ActionRetro a sub over on YouTube. He’s alway putting out cool and quality content.