101–110 of 568 posts
This static website seems to be down. Archive link: http://web.archive.org/web/20180731143228/https://pxlnv.com/...
Not only that, but it also has 2 trackers on it (google analytics and carbonads). Hard to take this argument seriously.
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I don't think thats a meaningful comparison. Moby Dick is a book, written by 1 guy and maybe an editor or two. NYT employs 1,300 people. When you read a book all you get is the text. NYT has text, images, related articles, analytics, etc. Moby Dick doesn't have to know what pages you read. NYT needs to know how long you spent, on which articles, etc. They need data to produce the product and you can only achieve that…
> NYT needs to know how long you spent, on which articles, etc. They need data to produce the product and you can only achieve that with javascript tracking pixels (Server logs aren't good enough). No they don't. They really don't need to know any of that. They don't even get a pass on tracking because they're providing a free whatever - I pay for a subscription to the NYT. The business, or a meaningfully substantial…
Clearly they disagree. Or maybe you should let them know that they don't need that.
To say it without sarcasm, what you feel you are entitled as a paying customer and what they feel they need/want to understand their customers are clearly at odds. Ultimately, what you think matters nothing in isolation and what they think matters nothing in isolation. What you two agree upon, is the only thing that matters. That is to say, if you think they shouldn't track you but you use their tracking product anyway, you've compromised and agreed to new terms.
I imagine you could come up with a subscription that would adequately compensate them for a truly no tracking experience. But I doubt you two would agree on a price to pay for said UX.
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> NYT needs to know how long you spent, on which articles, etc. They need data to produce the product and you can only achieve that with javascript tracking pixels (Server logs aren't good enough). No they don't. They really don't need to know any of that. They don't even get a pass on tracking because they're providing a free whatever - I pay for a subscription to the NYT. The business, or a meaningfully substantial…
Except that the content is directly related to user behavior. If they see no one reads the style section, they'll cut it and move resources to financial news. If they didn't have tracking they'd never know that, be wasting resources and having a comparatively inferior product. They can't do UX anaylsis, nothing.
Another point for the bullshit web: The GDPR cookie consent notification. I really hate clicking on those notifications to make them go away. Designers, can you please just add a non-obtrusive link, instead of a pop up that covers half my browser screen?
Yes, this a billion-fold!
Every single newspaper site I peruse uses autoplaying video.
The experience goes like this:
Load up the front page of newspaper site. Select an article of interest and click on its link. Article loads. A video player pops into existence on the lower right hand corner of the page, and the video starts playing.
Most annoying. However it gets more egregious...
The video player floats when you scroll down the page, until you reach the part of the page where it usually resides - and warps over into its little area - until you scroll past - whereupon it pops back up on the lower right hand side of your browser again.
Aaaaaargh!
Just as egregious : after viewing a video you might even have been interested inviewing, another video is automatically loaded onto that same player, 99.9% of the time on some completely unrelated subject.
Y'know, someone, somewhere, woke up one morning and thought "Great idea! Let's do !" - why can't the message that "People really hate autoplaying video" get back to whoever makes the decisions on user experiences, so that they just quit doing the above bullshit?
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1. A website's value is the amount of information that it provides to the end user. I would argue that the entirety of the works of Shakespeare or the 1911 Brittanica Encyclopedia provides more information than a high-definition picture of Donald Trump grimacing at EU leaders or an autoplaying ad for Doritos Locos Tacos NEW AT TACO BELL. As far as supplemental uses, at the end of the day, people are using plaintext t…
In response to #2, there is also a reason that photojournalism exists--unless you believe in a world where everyone imagines what important figures and historic events look like based solely on textual descriptions. This is completely ignoring the fact that I, nor most of society, would never attempt to receive the day's news via Morse Code.
As far as photojournalism goes, I can think of thousands of reasons why the predominance of photojournalism has been pernicious to civil society. The strategic use of the identifiable victim effect in atrocity propaganda being the most obvious.
However, with that said, I'm not arguing that visual media is entirely unnecessary, but rather against the idea that every user needs to download a 1680x1050 image when a default 600px width image or even the horror of having the image as an external link would be more than adequate for the overwhelming majority of users, particularly those in rural and developing areas that can't afford to waste their total allotment of monthly mobile data on "What Chance the Rapper’s Purchase of Chicagoist Means".
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atrocity_propaganda
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identifiable_victim_effect
[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/31/opinion/culture/chance-th...
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> NYT needs to know how long you spent, on which articles, etc. They need data to produce the product and you can only achieve that with javascript tracking pixels (Server logs aren't good enough). No they don't. They really don't need to know any of that. They don't even get a pass on tracking because they're providing a free whatever - I pay for a subscription to the NYT. The business, or a meaningfully substantial…
NYT needs to produce and recommend content that people find engaging to continue earning their subscription dollars. The idea that tracking is purely or primarily there to support a business model of selling user data is a strawman invented by self-righteous HNers. You need to know what parts of your product are effective to make it competitive in today’s marketplace.
> The idea that tracking is purely or primarily there to support a business model of selling user data
Purely, no. Primarily? You can bet your sweet ass.
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I don't know why the slack desktop client is so popular. It's almost no different from the web client, but eats more RAM if you already have Chrome open. Just pin Slack in a tab and save your memory
> I don't know why the slack desktop client is so popular. In-dock notifications and system notifications are my reasons, as well as a dedicated window I can alt-tab to instead of tabbing through browser windows, then navigating to the Slack tab. (I realize that for some people, "hiding" Slack in a pinned tab may be a feature.)
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> NYT needs to know how long you spent, on which articles, etc. They need data to produce the product and you can only achieve that with javascript tracking pixels (Server logs aren't good enough). No they don't. They really don't need to know any of that. They don't even get a pass on tracking because they're providing a free whatever - I pay for a subscription to the NYT. The business, or a meaningfully substantial…
Except that the content is directly related to user behavior. If they see no one reads the style section, they'll cut it and move resources to financial news. If they didn't have tracking they'd never know that, be wasting resources and having a comparatively inferior product. They can't do UX anaylsis, nothing.
For the second, I never got explained to me how UX analysis really works for news sites. Isn't it enough to put 2 or 3 people in a room and show them a few variations of the UI? There isn't really much to publishing text, images, and a few graphs. Graphs are a very well explored field, I don't think you can learn more about them by just watching hot maps and click through rates.
Sorry but this piece comes across as entitled and whiny. It's easy to point out how bloated and terrible most modern large sites are and guffaw in disgust at the counts of xhttp requests and scripts that are loaded in order to provide no user benefit. But just moaning about it probably won't make the problem go away. Simply rendering text isn't a business-model anymore unfortunately, and publishers are doing everythi…
And I sadly don't know either what else apart from whining and moaning the average user could do.