How can I save Reddit posts to Instapaper?

September 13, 2024 9:55 AM

I use Instapaper as my "read later" app. It used to be that Reddit articles saved just fine. Looking through my Instapaper articles, there are plenty of old Reddit articles that still display correctly. But lately (the past few weeks? few months?), Reddit articles either don't save at all (failing with an error) or they save as gibberish. Does anyone know why this is and/or have a workaround?

I'll see if I can find a support email for Instapaper to ask them directly, but I thought maybe some Mefite might already have a solution.

posted by jdroth to Computers & Internet (6 answers total)

Response by poster: I should note that I can usually get a link to the post to save in Instapaper, but the saved item will have zero (or little) content, which kind of defeats the purpose. My goal here is to read the Reddit post in Instapaper, not on Reddit.
posted by jdroth at 9:57 AM on September 13

Does it work any better if you use https://new.reddit.com/ rather than the "current" reddit?
posted by chr at 10:53 AM on September 13

Does it work any better if you use https://new.reddit.com/ rather than the "current" reddit?

Could try old.reddit.com, too.

I have sent badly-behaving page links to [e-mail] and they have always turned around a fix very quickly. They’ve been through several owners in the last few years but iirc their current owners are the same folks who’ve been developing the app for more than a decade, so I expect they’re still responsive.
posted by bcwinters at 11:15 AM on September 13 [1 favorite]

I'm guessing it might have something to do with Reddit's new stance of nobody scraping/crawling their site except Google. But, yes, Instapaper would be the only ones who could say for sure.
posted by tubedogg at 12:11 PM on September 13

Yeah, I use Pocket and sometimes it saves the links correctly and sometimes it just saves reddit.com. I presume it may be an issue of Reddit screwing with other sites in general.
posted by jenfullmoon at 2:44 PM on September 13

I get responses from [e-mail] within 36 hours.

Just in case you hadn't tried it yet, Instapaper supports ask.metafilter.com very well!
posted by Jesse the K at 2:28 PM on September 14