instapaper is good actually
I saw that Evan Travers mentioned he uses Instapaper the most, even having tried the others. I decided to give it a shot and I can see why Evan likes it. The simplicity is its standout feature. It has been a joy to save and read articles, and my reading has gone way up as a result.
The UI looks like a book, and doesn't scream "look at this fancy bell and whistle that you'll never use". It gets out of the way when reading, and highlighting is easy. Getting those highlights into markdown is also super easy with Instapaper's official Obsidian plugin.
A rant about Readwise
I had gone off read-it-later services mostly because of Readwise. Reader is a pretty cool idea and it seems to have a great vision behind it. Nevertheless, the vibe I get is that Readwise is a dead company; the only marketing I ever saw is some hard-to-find "updates newsletter" where every few months they post something vague like: made sync better. What's the 100 and something dollars a year for? No youtube channel, no X posts, nothing. I see them nowhere, and I am their direct target audience, I'd have imagined if they were pushing anything out into cyberspace, the algorithms would serve that straight to my eyeballs.
The only thing I can imagine is that this is some "we're going outside the norm" push from leadership; maybe they make enough money and they truly aren't concerned with growth. The problem is, when the company doesn't grow, the product also lags behind. Either way, Readwise Reader could be a great product, they just need to talk about it more. I believe in you Readwise!
N.B. I don't understand why they still have Readwise.com direct you to the kindle flashcard sync tool (that is so 2015). Do people like that? Does anyone care?