tildr FREE

TL;DR

tildr is the news reader for people who don't have time to read the news.

Hey, you're busy, we get it. You'd like to keep up with the latest headlines that are making the news, but you don't have time to read the stories. With tildr, you get just the latest headlines on the topics you're interested in and you can't read the stories even if you want to.

This is the free version of Tildr that is supported by in-app advertising and lets you preview the custom color themes. Check out the full version for access to all features and an ad-free experience.

What is tildr?
tildr is a tool to help you develop your capacity for selective ignorance.

Wait. What? Selective ignorance?
The concept of selective ignorance is explained in Tim Ferriss’ book The 4-Hour Work Week as

“. . . learning to ignore or redirect all information and interruptions that are irrelevant, unimportant, or unactionable.”

Cultivating selective ignorance is a key component of the Low-Information Diet and of improving your personal productivity. Briefly, the idea is to stop wasting your time reading the news because most of it falls into one of the three categories above. Instead, Tim recommends simply skimming the newspaper headlines at newspaper machines and newsstands. Reading only the headlines will give you a quick take on the day’s current events while still allowing you to be mostly ignorant.

Which is fine and good advice, but we live in a digital age and with newspapers mostly dead and dying, that’s far less practical than it used to be. Lots of us never see newpapers or news stands any more.

OK, so what does tildr do for me?
tildr provides a virtual newspaper-box experience – viewing only the headlines of current stories without any access to the stories inside. If you’re the kind of person that is easily distracted and find yourself getting lost in a long chain of endless hyperlinks and wasted time when just “catching up on the news”, you’ll immediately get why this is useful. tildr is not a tool for finding interesting long-format reads to occupy a lazy Saturday morning, a la feedly or flipboard. It’s about quick updates on current events and removing the temptations and distractions of traditional online news reading.

tildr is as simple as possible. It requires no login or personal information and by default shows you only the top stories that are currently trending on popular news sites. If you’re really committed to selective ignorance, you’ll never use the options menu to choose additional topics that might interest you, like sports or business or technology. If you’re not yet hardcore-ignorant, go ahead and choose your own topics and your headlines view will be customized for you.

tildr also has a couple other tricks you might not even notice but that are pretty cool – tildr employs a small army of news-reading robots to improve the quality of the headlines that you see. While not yet perfect, these nifty robots are working hard to do their best to remove duplicate news stories and are filtering out all the obvious spammy linkbait headlines that pollute so much of the web. If you really are looking for weird tricks and shocking videos, or amazing celebrity diets, then tildr just isn’t for you, sorry.