LinkDigest : LinkDigest Forums

Paste a Xiaohongshu, Douyin, YouTube, TikTok or X link and get back the transcript, on-screen text, image descriptions and metadata as Markdown or JSON. Works as an MCP server, so Claude Code and Cursor call it themselves when they meet a social link. A real 17-image Xiaohongshu article returns 17 image descriptions, 381 text fragments and 13 key points. Three digests free, then $9/month. Cached links are always free.

Hi Product Hunt! I built this because my coding agent kept failing on the links I most wanted it to read. Chinese social platforms are the hard case: fetching a Xiaohongshu URL returns an app-download page, not the post. The content is images and video, and there is no text in the HTML at all. LinkDigest does the unglamorous part — resolve the share link, pull the media, transcribe the speech, OCR the on-screen text, describe every image — and hands back clean Markdown or JSON. It plugs into Claude Code and Cursor as an MCP server, so the agent uses it without being asked. One measured example: a 17-image Xiaohongshu article returns 17 image descriptions, 381 on-screen text fragments and 13 key points. A few things I learned building it. Xiaohongshu serves different payloads by user-agent — desktop gets the real data, mobile gets the app-download shell. YouTube blocks datacenter IPs, so from a server yt-dlp returns nothing and I fall back to having Gemini watch the video, at roughly 25x the cost. Transcription uses SenseVoice rather than Whisper, because the difference on Mandarin is large. It does not work on Bilibili — they block my server's IP and I have not bought a proxy yet. That is listed on the site rather than hidden, along with what each platform actually returns. Three free digests, then $9/month. Cached links are always free. Happy to answer anything about the pipeline.

Update, October 2026: pricing has changed since this comment. It is now 10 free credits to start, then $5 for 250 credits or $9/month for 500 (a post is one credit; video is one credit per started minute). New since launch: a viral breakdown option that takes a post apart into the hook, timed beats and a reusable template, with every quote checked word for word against the source. https://linkdigest.dev

Update: there is now a demo video, so you can see the actual output instead of taking my word for it. A Xiaohongshu note goes from an unreadable app-download shell to 17 image descriptions, 381 on-screen text fragments and 13 key points. It is a screen recording of the real product, not a mockup, and the timings are honest: the one section that speeds up says so on screen. You can run the same link yourself, without an account, at linkdigest.dev

LinkDigest - Social links your AI agent can't open, turned into text

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