Someone sends you a 45-minute video. There are probably two useful minutes in it and you don’t know which two. So you save it, and you never watch it.
Paste that link into yank and about a minute later you get five lines out of it. Not a summary of what it was about. Five things worth keeping on their own, each one still attached to exactly where it came from.
Anyone who keeps getting handed things that are too long. A podcast episode, a company’s earnings call, a 60-page PDF, a lecture, someone talking for an hour.
You can get a summary anywhere now. Your phone will write you one, so will every chatbot, and increasingly the platforms themselves.
A summary gives you an interpretation of the source, which is exactly what you want when that is what you need. But the summary itself becomes one more thing you’re being asked to trust.
We’re doing a different job. We pull out the handful of things worth knowing, keep them in the words they were said in wherever we can, and show our working every time. Press the timestamp and the video plays that exact line. Open the receipt and you see which version of the source we read, and when.
The short version: a summary asks you to trust it. We’d rather hand you something you can check.
Five cards. On each one, a line, and under it the things that tell you where it came from.
A label. Every line says either Verbatim or Distilled, and the difference matters.
Verbatim means we didn’t touch it. Those words were found in the source we read, in that order. We don’t fix the grammar, drop the stumble, or join two sentences together and call the result a quote.
Distilled means we wrote it. Sometimes someone takes four rambling sentences to say one good thing and no single sentence of theirs carries it, so we write one, up to thirty-five words. It is never presented as an exact quote. Open In context and you’ll see what was really said next to it, with our changes marked, so you can judge whether we were fair.
A place. On a video or a podcast, the time under the line is a button. Press it and the source plays that line and stops, right there on the page. On an article, the link opens the publisher’s own page at the exact words.
A receipt. Open it and five things appear, always the same five: what the source was, which version of it we read, where in it the line sits, who said it, and when we checked. If we can’t prove one of those, it says so rather than guessing. “Not established” is a real answer here.
An address. Every line has its own short link, printed on the card itself. So a screenshot that’s been forwarded four times still says where it came from, and the link still works years later.
There’s no single formula.
Sometimes it’s a sentence that says something unusually well. Sometimes it’s a number or a fact buried in something long. Sometimes it’s an admission, a contradiction, or one explanation that changes how the rest of it reads.
What they have in common is that they still matter after you close the source. That is the whole test.
Popularity is not part of it. We tried using likes and view counts and it made the choices worse: it pushes the picks toward whatever was already performing and quietly buries the honest, awkward moments, which are usually the ones worth keeping. And nothing is ever added as filler to reach five.
Not everything has five things in it worth keeping, and sometimes we can’t get enough of a source to stand behind five lines. When that happens you get a refusal rather than three good lines and two pieces of padding.
A messy source often makes a great yank. A polished one often makes a terrible one. Five worth keeping, or nothing.
A refusal tells you what we read and why nothing came back. It never becomes a permanent page.
There’s no account to make. Drop in a document and it’s read on your own device: the file isn’t uploaded and nothing about it is published. Pages behind a login or a paywall we simply can’t read, and we say so rather than publish a guess. What we keep for a public yank is on the Privacy page.
Long things usually find you somewhere else. On Android, open yank.info in Chrome and choose Add to Home screen, and yank shows up in the share sheet like any other app. On iPhone and on a computer it takes one small piece of setup, once.
iPhone. Safari won’t let a website into the share sheet, so this takes one Shortcut. In the Shortcuts app: new shortcut, add the action Open URLs, and set the URL to https://yank.info/share?via=shortcut&url= followed by the Shortcut Input variable. Turn on Show in Share Sheet, accept URLs, and call it Yank this. All it does is open a page. It doesn’t read anything or send anything anywhere.
On a computer. No browser has a share sheet, so make a bookmark, call it whatever you like, and paste this in where the address goes:
javascript:location.href='https://yank.info/share?via=bookmarklet&url='+encodeURIComponent(location.href)
Click it on any page and you land here with that page’s link already in the box. Nothing happens until you press Yank.
Give yank something. You get five lines worth keeping, still attached to where they came from, with enough evidence to check the work yourself.
The five are the useful part. The receipt is what makes them a yank.
There’s a shorter version on the About page. If you publish things, check one of your URLs and we’ll tell you whether we can read it and credit you properly. If you’re building something, Developers has the data.