281–290 of 352 posts
Surprised Gruber isn’t using network level adblocking. I can’t imagine life without it these days.
(Yes I realise you need extensions when not on your own network etc - unless you use your own DNS!)
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I would gladly pay an extra $20/m for a Disney style internet fast pass where I can browse any site that is subscribed to the service without ads, cookie preferences already set, no login or login managed by the extension for the fast pass service, and maybe a search provider that allows me to filter out SSO spam sites and adwhores like Meta and Google, and where some significant portion of my monthly pay is sent to…
I think Kagi is kind of making this happen currently with search. Not sure how their adoption number are going, but people are willing to pay $$ for better search with no "sponsored content" rising to the top. I'm hesitant about a lot of this stuff because it's very easy to get to a place where we let net neutrality degrade even more than it already has. Part of the way that platforms indoctrinate us to accept that p…
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> If I loved King Crimson, I might create a site expressing that love and also host lyrics to their songs. Not to generate ad revenue. Not with any expectation of being reimbursed for hosting costs. I did it because it was fun and because sharing knowledge felt like the point. Anyone can still do this today (I don’t know the legalities of publishing copyrighted lyrics though). Of course, the proportion of people who…
But in search results, you only find the sites that game the system to maximize their profits, while millions of other well-meaning sites get little to no traffic, and eventually people lose interest in maintaining an online presence. They move toward big silos like Instagram, platforms that just use their content to attract more ads. Ads do break the internet, or let's say, fundamentally change the model of how it w…
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> If I loved King Crimson, I might create a site expressing that love and also host lyrics to their songs. Not to generate ad revenue. Not with any expectation of being reimbursed for hosting costs. I did it because it was fun and because sharing knowledge felt like the point. Anyone can still do this today (I don’t know the legalities of publishing copyrighted lyrics though). Of course, the proportion of people who…
>> Anyone can still do this today But no-one would ever find it - which might be fine - and that seems like a waste. >> to expect that much quality content from volunteers to keep flowing. This is a big change in perspective & expectation. The original web was not volunteers doing work for others, but humans voluntarily doing work to share with others.
I used to work at a startup that was trying to replace ads as the funding source for news (we failed, obviously) but the crazy thing we discovered is that the people who run news websites mostly don’t know where their ads are coming from, have forgotten how the ad system was installed in the first place, and cannot turn them off if they try we actually shipped a server-side ad blocker, for a parter who had so complet…
That is just plain ridiculous. How the hell did they end up not knowing how to manage the content on their site?
The entire industry is run by actual journalists, it's one of the few industries where people who know how to do the job still rise to the top. Unlike most other industries, where the top brass are MBAs who don't actually know how to do things like build airplanes or write software or what have you. Which is honestly great except when it's not.
The web has never found a way to make journalism as profitable as it was back in the print days, so they mostly see technologists as people who get in their way, as disposable or replaceable.
So imagine the state of their tech stack — CMS's integrated with the front end, if not Wordpress then something like that, nothing headless. “Hey you should remove this plugin" what's a plugin? "look… this Bonzai Buddy, who installed it?" Some guy who left twenty years ago. And it's not in a template, it's in the articles and executed by an eval().
They have no motivation to fix any of it, because again, web sites for newspapers aren't profitable. Subscriptions are profitable. I think the real reason why Substack is successful is not that email is a good format for journalism — in fact it’s terrible — but because you generally cannot inject javascript into it. Which comes back to Gruber’s point — javascript was a disaster for the web as a document standard.
(personally, I haven't read news on the web in something like twenty years — RSS ftw)
Discussion on source, which this is just a comment on: The 49MB web page https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47390945
Engineering would make tools for the sales guys to make websites. We hated those bastards because they would litter the pates with adds.
"We need revenue" they'd protest. Engineering would respond that past two ads, the revenue was too small to be worth destroying the brand.
What I got out of that was that business folks, often, don't give a shit about the product reputation on a timescale longer then their ownership of it.
> Simplified versions like text.npr.org, lite.cnn.com and www.cbc.ca/lite still exist out there.
TIL, these are awesome. Not in the sense that they're a visual tour de force, obviously, but they make for an easy "hey, type this in for a second and tell me what you think" contrast, to help people realize how inconvenient the default experience has slowly become.
Of course they do, there are ads and unrelated articles on the same page , or, for magazines, full page ads interrupting your reading experience, or flashy callouts.
Paper is just a much more constrained technology, do they can't ruin it dynamically, not that they don't want to or somehow magically respect the reader very much for free
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Interesting. How would you rewrite the first sentence to sound positive?
Well my problem isn't with the writing in its original form, it's with the downvoting in response to it. I am fine with someone bringing bad news if it's helpful info.