Readme
p/readme-3
A purposefully feature-lite Twitter reader app
Ben Howdle
Readme — A purposefully feature-lite Twitter reader app
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Readme is a purposefully feature-lite Twitter reader designed to show you the tweets you signed up to see. Take back your timeline.

No interactions, no Moments, no ads, no trends, think of Readme as a media-rich RSS feed for your Twitter feed.

Want to dip into your feed, but not get involved in any threads? Take a glance through Readme.

Replies
Ryan Hoover
There are so many Twitter clients out there. Why build another, @ben_howdle / @scott_riley?
Scott Riley
@ben_howdle @rrhoover This is gonna sound so wanky; but I don't see it as a 'client'. You can't tweet from it, or like, or retweet, or basically do anything except read tweets. You don't see what other people have retweeted, either. So we call it a 'twitter reader' because we're cool like that. We built it because we both wanted something that got (what we see as) noise out of our timelines and have a place to go when we just want to see tweets, from people we actively chose to follow, in chronological order. Twitter is doing more and more weird shit to focus on engagement, and I'm not saying it's bad, or that they have no right to, but I am saying my timeline looks like a random trash fire 50% of the time. And we built this cause we wanted a timeline that looks like the trash fire we curated it to be when we decided to follow the people we do.
Chris Messina
Top Hunter
@ben_howdle @rrhoover @scott_riley I get it — it's like the read-only version of Twitter...! One feature request: support for threads...! It's kind of a bummer now that Twitter does a decent job of supporting longer form content that Readme doesn't make it easy to expand inline to get the full context: Like feed readers too, would be handy to add a permalink to the timestamp make it easier to share....
Scott Riley
@ben_howdle @rrhoover @chrismessina Linking via the timestamp is #1 quick-win-top-priority when we have some time to hit up enhancements, especially given so much of the 'point' of Twitter is removed, if you want to like/rt you have to hunt it on your twitter dot com TL too. Threading is something we've discussed and initially decided to not include (nostalgia for old twitter I guess?!) - Readme being chronological was probably our biggest motivator to make it, and threads don't exactly prevent that, but they're the first step imo to 'blurring' chronological ordering. I think we'll def revisit it as it's now a 'proper' Twitter tool vs the tweetstorms of the past couple years.
Chris Messina
Top Hunter
@ben_howdle @rrhoover @scott_riley fair enough. The permalink thing seems to be in the spirit of what you're doing; threading, maybe less so.
Ashley Baxter
Oh, sweet. I see my face.
Pierrick
Neat! Would love to be able to read my lists though.
Stowe Boyd
Tried it. Some autoplay interview started up that I couldn't shut off. That sucked.
Scott Riley
@stoweboyd Yeah this was terrible and it was us rather naively dealing with how Twitter outputs GIFs as video. We've defaulted to just not auto-playing media at all, cause it kinda sucks and 100% defeats the purpose of a less-distracting timeline.
tsudo
I like it! I can live with serifs but a larger font option would be lovely.
Scott Riley
@tsudo The typography on smaller screens is shocking and I am ashamed of myself and my entire life.
Scott Riley
Thx for looking at our product on product hunt dot com. We built this cause we wanted it to exist. It is still jank in areas. Ben made me use Vue. We don't make any money from this or do anything with your data cause we're too dumb to know how to do either. Hope u like serifs. Smooches xoxo