301–310 of 326 posts
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This is why I love the gemini space. It feels ... unadulterated somehow.
Gemini is a dead end. If it was backwards compatible with gopher, with added TLS I might even consider it a good idea, but this is just plain text with links. The true power of web used to be self expression. This is why geoticies was a big thing, why myspace worked, and why Flash defined an era. It's not a great idea to reduce options for creativity; instead, we should encourage it again.
I think this unnecessarily reductive. I disagree for two reasons.
1. Technical. The restrictions are on the protocol side. Not the browser side. It's up to the browser to convert links to "more than" links.
The Lagrange gemini browser is a good example of that. E.g. if it detects a link to an image, it adds that image inline.
2. Behavioural. Protocol restrictions do not immediately equate to inability to be creative. In my short stint in geminispace I've already witnessed some wonderfully creative content, ranging from writing, poetry, ascii art, a tictactoe/chess server, and even interactive fiction games.
Advertising crams itself into every nook and cranny unless some external factor keeps it out. if you're old enough, you remember the inserts (usually advertising cigarettes) in pulp paperbacks: https://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/02/books/review/Collins-t.ht...
A static ad wouldn't be nearly as bad as a "audience-targeted" ad that's dynamically served several seconds after the page loads, reflowing the entire layout and causing page jank. For example, I know that every issue of the Economist is going to have an ad for a luxury watch I will never buy on the inside cover. I have full-on banner blindness to that. That's impossible on display ads that are dynamically placed rig…
I'm starting to suspect that page jank that causes spurious clicks is actually being optimized for, by which I mean that changes that cause less jank will also lower CTR,and so fail to pass A/B testing.
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> but they are still far from the worst offenders. Maybe in the type of ads they show. But don't forget increasingly garbage search results that are also indirectly related to the whole ad-tech business they facilitate.
Which search engine do you find shows better search results? I keep coming back to Google because no one else even comes close to the quality of search results. That was true even more so when Google started out. Their competition was Yahoo and AltaVista, which were practically useless. I'd argue that Google has done a lot for the web. But I can agree with the sentiment that they took a turn for the worse at some poi…
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> I long for a curated list of such sites. I don't know if this is good news but I started doing this a while back and found so many sites that it was futile to keep them in one list. These days I tend to keep them in contextual notes or databases. Also many of them fail to pass one or two annoyance tests, but I find that they're worth it anyway. For example they are not mobile friendly in some minor way, like the to…
Someone needs to just scrape the web for light weight websites then offer a search engine just for these sites. Rid the corruption from the web please.
Very fun project and still working on expanding the index. The condition to get into the index is no/low bloat/tracking/spam.
I opened the link, saw the article, and was trying to figure out what point was trying to be made. Then I opened it in incognito mode and it was making a point about the commoditization of the web. Just use browser extensions, folks.
Would you care to share some useful extensions for these problems?