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

#281

Post by darksaints »

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…

Yeah that mobile experience is just about as bad as you can make it. Also, I'm pretty sure they're doing crypto mining in the browser...at least that's what my device temperatures are implying.

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

#282

Post by _hyn3 »

beowulfey wrote: post #268
[deleted] wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[deleted]

Angela Beesley hasn’t been associated with Wikia since 2012. I don’t know when this happened to you but the site has gone through a lot of ownership changes over the years. And I don’t care what else Jimmy Wales has done, for profit or otherwise — Wikipedia is a goddamn gift and the world would be hurt tremendously if it ever shut down. It’s probably the only non-profit I donate to regularly.

> It’s probably the only non-profit I donate to regularly.

That might say more about you than about Wikipedia.

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

#283

Post by account42 »

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…

I'm always thankful for the game communities that still have independently hosted wikis so that I can avoid that fandom/wikia mess.

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

#284

Post by account42 »

iamacyborg wrote: post #259
_dain_ wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I’m currently working with a number of folks to fork a wiki off of Fandom. Forking the content itself is easy but good luck beating Fandom on a search page.

This is really a problem with google, overvaluing big sites with many subsections/articles compared to independent sites.

Still sucks to have to add "overwiki" or "uesp" to search terms all the time.

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

#285

Post by DarylZero »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #240
chrischen wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ab…

Making it in free software is like making it as an author. You need to achieve some kind of fame to get paid. You need to be an internet celebrity. Then you can raise money.

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

LOL, yes, this represents the 1 in 1,000,000 extreme of programmer celebrity that is far more than anyone could reasonably hope for.

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

#286

Post by 72deluxe »

ahonhn wrote: post #219

Channel News Asia has developed a habit of putting 2 (two) auto-playing videos on some articles and having them both play simultaneously at full volume.

That's actually made me laugh out loud. It's like you'd be constantly subjected to a cacophony of a senseless din for no reason at all whilst browsing the site. Insanity.

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

#289

Post by Firadeoclus »

gruez wrote: post #60
rstat1 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say the worst part is that Firefox has a feature for blocking auto playing video. But it never works.

I suspect that's because you can programmatically start video playback from within event handlers. That's necessary because otherwise any site that use custom playback controls will break. However, that also means malicious sites can implement "autoplay" by adding a onmousedown/onscroll/touchstart event handler and starting playback from there. Video playback will start the moment you try to interact with the page in…

That seems solvable, for example by blocking programmatic control of playback until you allow it for a given video element. That way it only "breaks" when the user wants it to be "broken".

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

#290

Post by iamacyborg »

account42 wrote: post #284
iamacyborg wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m currently working with a number of folks to fork a wiki off of Fandom. Forking the content itself is easy but good luck beating Fandom on a search page.

This is really a problem with google, overvaluing big sites with many subsections/articles compared to independent sites. Still sucks to have to add "overwiki" or "uesp" to search terms all the time.

Yeah, its significantly worse with a fork though as you’ll be hit with duplicate content penalties
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