Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

mastodon.technology

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 318 posts

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

#231

Post by chrisrogers »

antisthenes wrote: post #214
hellbannedguy wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Right. The issue is twofold - in the internet era, the marginal utility of any additional news source is near zero. Sure, you might cross-check an article once in a blue moon, but most people consume news through a link that was sent to them by someone inside their bubble. And once they read the headline, there's 0 reason to click to another link with the same story ever again. So the links might as well be hosted in…

Don't forget the far more common access barrier. The White House press room and its analogues only hold so many people.

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

#233

Post by tpaulin »

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…

A few months back I opened a link to a new article using an in-app browser (no ad-blockers). I kid you not, upon initial load the entireiy of the screen was ads or "annoyances". The one thing missing was the entire reason I clicked on the link.

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

#234

Post by ant6n »

dragontamer wrote: post #218
pushrax wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I will seek when the option is presented. It’s either tiny or nonexistent though (e.g. for gifs, or if the author didn’t enable the video controls, which default to disabled in many browsers). I’m happiest when a video loads paused, and has a giant play button on it. How are you scrolling? When I’m browsing and reading my hand lives on the mouse. On mobile it’s even easier to click to play. In either case, clicking o…

> When I’m browsing and reading my hand lives on the mouse. My hand lives either on the space bar, or the page-down button. Both of which are far more efficient at scrolling through pages of text.

> My hand lives either on the space bar, or the page-down button. Both of which are far more efficient at scrolling through pages of text.

Neither pgDown nor space bar scroll.

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

#235

Post by [deleted] »

bryan_w wrote: post #77
cblconfederate wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a tragic situation. These sites obviously provide some value (or else you wouldn't be reading them) yet they cannot get paid for that value because google&FB have coopted the entire ad market for themselves. As technologists this is a problem that we should solve, not simply something to complain about

They could...maybe try rubbing two brain cells together in order to come up with a better, higher performing ad product. Nah, they find sticking to the 90's punch the monkey style ads and blaming FB and Google for "coopting" the market to be a better strategy.

[deleted]

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

#236

Post by cblconfederate »

cercatrova wrote: post #40

Off topic, but I've never seen mastodon linked like this before on HN. Interesting this this might've normally been a link to a tweet.

I have a bad feeling about these "invite only" servers though. They are remaking the blue checkmarks of twitter in an even less-transparent way.

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

#237

Post by midasuni »

dragontamer wrote: post #146
TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Not sure why you are downvoted. Because auto-playing motion is something I should be able to disable. It distracts me and I don’t want it. Ever.

There's the option of simply not visiting the webpages that offend you. I'm not going to change my writing / guide style just because some people outside of those gaming communities don't like the way they work. Its one thing if you were the target audience, its a totally different thing if you're just a meta-commentator talking about the internet in general.

Maybe that explains your results. Have a behaviour someone dislikes, they don't revisit, and thus don’t answer your survey question

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

#238

Post by southerntofu »

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…

How is becoming non-profit a "defeat"? I would argue society would fare much better if all work was for the profit of society and not (capitalist) profit.

Also, why don't we tech people lead by example and build non-profits and cooperatives that provide better software/services? See for example the successes of framasoft, sourcehut...

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

#239

Post by _dain_ »

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…

Isn't most (all?) of the content on fandom.com under a Creative Commons license? Is there anything stopping someone from scraping all the content and forking the projects, giving it a more humane and user-friendly interface?

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

#240

Post by ZeroGravitas »

chrischen wrote: post #207
hellbannedguy wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think that comment was aimed at web publishers and legacy news corps.

However, I think there's still a bunch of niches that can be exploited, to both personal and societal benefit, if you explicitly give up on becoming a billionaire with a monopoly over locked in users.

Basically, find something that would be a Billion dollar global business, and then do it on a small local scale in a non-user hostile way.

Think about all the negative things you (or rather the self-directed corporation you create) would do once you've locked in your audience to get those billions (more intrusive ads, clickbait, adding gambling elements to your kid focused app etc.) Then actively prevent yourself from doing them via some kind of organisational structure, like a B corp or non-profit. In game theory terms, this is burning your boats to force yourself to go in a specific direction even if tempted to retreat.

This lets people buy into the idea without the feeling that they're going to get stabbed in the back later.

Do all the things a genuinely user focused company would do if they weren't afraid of going out of business.

You might not be able to employ thousands of marketers, salesmen etc. but can you make a decent software salary without slaving for an ad business? Being able to locate anywhere, work for yourself and possibly have tax benefits of running a charity may swing the decision.

If enough geeks do this, you could end up with some co-operative federation of small independent orgs, like a version of GNU, Linux, Unix for replacing the current web's Facebook's and Amazon's, just as they did to Solaris and Oracle.

I have no idea how rich Linus is for example, but I'd guess 99.9% of nerds would happily switch to being him or small scale version of him.

At the moment most of that energy seems aimed at VC backed small companies that use the "changing the world" motivation and then later sell out.

Co-ops in a variety of industries, fair-trade, ethical makeup and others have developed similar models with reasonable success, someone just needs to perfect the formula for user facing web apps.

Post reply on HN