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You click a link to a news site, to read an article that seems interesting

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Re: You click a link to a news site, to read an article that seems interesting

#201

Post by johnisgood »

megous wrote: post #85
johnisgood wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> browser vendors can blacklist it. How would they do that? They can remove them from their list of extensions, but I can just download it from elsewhere and add it manually, right?

If you hadn't noticed, extensions have to be signed by the browser vendor, so that you can run them. A few people who re-compile their Firefox or Chromium to get rid of that requirement will not make a great DDoS botnet.

Well, I have not noticed, because last time I wrote a Chrome extension, I just had the .js files in a directory and I could easily add it to Chrome with developer mode on. I imagine it would be possible with this extension as well.

Things may have changed since then, I have not checked.

Re: You click a link to a news site, to read an article that seems interesting

#202

Post by onion2k »

grishka wrote: post #187
onion2k wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've seen sites that autoplay video by implementing a JS h264 decoder that renders to a element. Developers will go to significant lengths to work around browser permissions.

That's... actually viable? You can decode h264 in real time in JS with a single thread that also runs the UI?! Sometimes I have this crazy thought that we maybe, just maybe, should undo all the JS performance optimizations in browsers. So JS again becomes the macro language for hypertext documents it's meant to be, not an "application platform".

That's... actually viable?

Developers who do things like that probably aren't checking whether their code works well on any machines besides their own.

Re: You click a link to a news site, to read an article that seems interesting

#203

Post by camillomiller »

Why would anyone expect that a news site would put users first, if we’re all ok with the notion that news organization are regular businesses? For news organizations, the idiosyncrasies of corporate capitalism are more evident, because we keep on accepting the contradictory double bind that journalism has a deeply rooted social role, and that it can be managed as a regular business at the same time. That is, per se, a disqualification of what journalism can be, because business mechanics are directly negating many core tenets of journalism in itself.

Without many more meanderings, the idea is this: as long as we accept that journalistic organization can be operated as showbusiness entities, and as long as we accept that journalism can (or should) generate profits, we won’t be able to either fix these annoying elements (the embedded autoplay video, and 1000s of others) nor the generalized and growing lack of trust in journalism itself.

It might be useful to point out that I say this as a journalist.

Re: You click a link to a news site, to read an article that seems interesting

#204

Post by vorhemus »

makecheck wrote: post #104

I feel like these are “somebody got a promotion” patterns. Basically, somebody was able to “prove” to Higher-Up Managers that $X number of these videos were “watched” or “engaged with” (or whatever today’s BS lingo is), and therefore the business “benefited” in some way by “reaching” more people. Profit? In reality, at least in my case, what happens is: (1) I say “WTF!?!?”, (2) I make a mental note to never ever visi…

Most likely the leadership team is aware that these "viewers" just exist in theorey but they can fool advertisers into thinking their channel has a higher reach and collect more advertising revenue in return.

Re: You click a link to a news site, to read an article that seems interesting

#205

Post by Washuu »

Blackthorn wrote: post #197
sdoering wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For a lot of people 10 dollars a month isn't cheap. For me - no problem. I have a few side projects and I shell out around 15 - 25 Euros each month. But I know a lot of people who would love to do stuff like that and have no way of at least being easily reimbursed by the community for their efforts. A community of 50 people could be financing this with 20 cents each per month. But as privacy intrusive advertising bec…

> For a lot of people 10 dollars a month isn't cheap. I'm aware of this, but you need to keep in mind that we were one of the largest wikis on Wikia (in the top 30 iirc). That's the only reason it cost $10/month. Most of the wikis on Wikia were tiny, got small traffic, and could have probably been hosted with mine on my VM without even affecting mine.

The last metric that I calculated to host a small wiki on Gamepedia was about $3 USD per month. It is probably a bit higher than that now. That included costs for hosting through AWS next to large wikis like Minecraft Wiki that would easily be a large majority of the monthly costs.(Game updates would vastly skew the monthly costs for each of the large wikis.)

Re: You click a link to a news site, to read an article that seems interesting

#207

Post by chrischen »

hellbannedguy wrote: post #186
ndynan wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This pattern is purely a representation of how financially hurt news institutions are. They are desperate to make revenue and the end user experience is sacrificed in the name of keeping the ship afloat (and sometimes profit).

I'm to the point I'd like to see them go 501c3 nonprofit. Admit defeat. Get used to just making a barely livable income, like the rest of us. Stop begging. Stop the obnoxious ads. Stop the shady subscription schemes. Enough with the .99 cent for six week promos. We obviously don't value you enough to give your access to our debit cards. Newspapers you lost the war. The sooner you realize it the better. Follow the PBS…

I don't think tech workers are making barely livable incomes.

Re: You click a link to a news site, to read an article that seems interesting

#208

Post by MaxikCZ »

dbavaria wrote: post #184

Some cooking recipe sites do this but I recently found it's actually helpful. While the video is playing, my phone screen stays on and the OS doesn't lock itself. Since it's always some unrelated video, I just turn the volume off and let it play while I cook, occasionally glancing over at my recipe.

surely I cant be the only one thinking this: https://xkcd.com/1172/ - Workflow

Re: You click a link to a news site, to read an article that seems interesting

#209

Post by nefitty »

[deleted] wrote: post #195
yellowapple wrote: post #22

Not just news sites, either. A lot of fandom wikis run on the same platform, fandom.com. That site is a pain in the absolute fucking ass to use on any mobile device, specifically because of the autoplaying video that takes up half the screen on every page load . Weirdly, desktop is fine; no autoplaying videos or any such nonsense. It's only on mobile that Fandom has seemingly made a deliberate effort to make the user…

[deleted]

Who in tech do you hold up as an ideal persona? I'm not defending what happened to you. It's surprising to me that even someone like Jimmy Wales, who pioneered the most impactful knowledge-sharing project in the world, is vilified by some people.

Re: You click a link to a news site, to read an article that seems interesting

#210

Post by onion2k »

wruza wrote: post #200
zrm wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or just have browsers disable javascript by default and require explicit permission to use it. 90+% of web pages shouldn't need it for anything.

Or make a dead-slow subset that doesn’t eat cpu cycles, but schedules 10-20 ops every 1ms. And then enable full-speed if the user asks. Ads guys would then resurrect a demoscene spirit out of it. Ah, dreams.

I'd be a lot more in favour of ads if they had more copper effects and shadebobs.
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