371–380 of 568 posts
I think I heard this on Hacker News, but I don't recall who from. Whenever I see a popup begging me to sign up for a spam list, I put in postmaster@that-domain.com now.
Unpopular opinion alert: Maybe the "bullshit" is only bullshit to you, the thorny tech-savvy reader. Maybe businesses have tried the plaintext approach, and their business was improved by adding fonts, stylesheets, API calls, spinners, scripts, high-res images, and god knows what else. Maybe speed improvements are not important beyond a certain point. Maybe 5MB doesn't matter to most people. Maybe micro-optimization…
What I think is difficult is that most people think a website should be an experience. The client wants this, the designer wants this, the marketeer wants this and even most users want this. So that's how huge headers with high res photo's are born. After that the site must be online asap and the developer doesn't have or take the time to load images responsive. Combine this with a framework that takes 200ms to init…
> What I think is difficult is that most people think a website should be an experience. People on the delivering end. Not the users. The users just want to get the content they came in for, and to continue with their lives. This "website is experience" is a combination of vanity and trying to monetize users better by playing on their emotions.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How intriguing! I would like to subscribe to your... how do you say... letter of news.
but a letter of news may be too small, maybe we can remove that size constraint and call it 'a paper of news' that would be delivered
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know why the slack desktop client is so popular. It's almost no different from the web client, but eats more RAM if you already have Chrome open. Just pin Slack in a tab and save your memory
> I don't know why the slack desktop client is so popular. In-dock notifications and system notifications are my reasons, as well as a dedicated window I can alt-tab to instead of tabbing through browser windows, then navigating to the Slack tab. (I realize that for some people, "hiding" Slack in a pinned tab may be a feature.)
Emacs-slack can get you all of that:-)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree in theory. However, I haven't noticed the slowness in their website and the ads are well done and blend in with the webpage. They may have to redesign/rearchitect their whole website to get what you are asking for. It should be noted that traditional newspapers include ads alongside news content and no one complains. In fact people used to sift through the Sunday NYT simply for the ads.
Tbh they could email me articles plaintext and I'd happily hand over my money.
Or you can just visit it, I suppose.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think thats a meaningful comparison. Moby Dick is a book, written by 1 guy and maybe an editor or two. NYT employs 1,300 people. When you read a book all you get is the text. NYT has text, images, related articles, analytics, etc. Moby Dick doesn't have to know what pages you read. NYT needs to know how long you spent, on which articles, etc. They need data to produce the product and you can only achieve that…
> NYT needs to know how long you spent, on which articles, etc. They need data to produce the product and you can only achieve that with javascript tracking pixels (Server logs aren't good enough). This just seems like such an abuse of what the web was meant to be. I can imagine the horror people in the 90s would have experienced if they new what JS was going to be used for when perusing news sites. Sometimes I wonde…
The app platform would consume the document platform because it is easier to enforce DRM requirements in an app platform than in a document platform.
I'm just thankful that I can still Print to PDF nearly anything. I don't think it will last much longer though because "web" "designers" are driven to destroy anything and everything that was actually good about the web in their quest to monetize every pixel on my screen.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
NYT needs to produce and recommend content that people find engaging to continue earning their subscription dollars. The idea that tracking is purely or primarily there to support a business model of selling user data is a strawman invented by self-righteous HNers. You need to know what parts of your product are effective to make it competitive in today’s marketplace.
NYT used to exist only in paper form which had no tracking abilities at all. They may benefit from this but I’m skeptical that they “need” it.
Unpopular opinion alert: Maybe the "bullshit" is only bullshit to you, the thorny tech-savvy reader. Maybe businesses have tried the plaintext approach, and their business was improved by adding fonts, stylesheets, API calls, spinners, scripts, high-res images, and god knows what else. Maybe speed improvements are not important beyond a certain point. Maybe 5MB doesn't matter to most people. Maybe micro-optimization…
People have spoken time and again about needless auto-playing video clips. About weird, busted scroll hijacks and massive header images. About newsletter beggars which take up the whole screen on every. single. site. About ubiquitous "got it!" cookie disclaimers. About pages that load mountains of extraneous crap while you're trying to read, and reflows the text halfway through the second paragraph, suspiciously at the exact moment you try to tap a link which makes you click an ad instead, which is of course bloated with poison dogshit and offal and immediately crashes the tab. About how every single major site bullies you into downloading an app instead of putting effort into making their mobile site run properly. Instead the mobile site is intentionally crippled to incentivize the adtech-infected app even more, and even the request desktop mode is broken. And of course the mobile app is only a thinly-veiled plot to scrape your phone's guts out like a dead fish and gain every permission possible. If it can run in a browser, I think it should run in a browser. I'm highly suspicious of any app that is really just a website in a tarted-up trojan horse.
Adblockers are perpetually on the rise, as the article says, and other content blockers and filters are also in play now. I have to use outline.com to read most news articles, which is an amazing resource. But I think this popular opinion is warranted. The internet is bloated with malicious bullshit. Everyone got in an arms race with each other and had to do it, despite nobody actually wanting it.
I don't think the devs and designers who made this stuff so ubiquitous are evil, nor are they stupid. They were just caught in a catch-22 as web trends do their fickle thing. They are regular people earnestly doing their best, just like everyone else. Doomed to create camel after camel via feedback from ignorant clients, misread focus groups, neurotic middle management, et cetera. People rarely get to decide or unilaterally invent any of these large-scale trends, they just happen as a herd phenomenon I think. And everyone has to jump on board to remain viable, or at least that's the illusion at the time.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a textbook definition of a false dichotomy. There are other distribution models for digital news services. There are other methods for transmitting digital content. It's not an either/or situation.
Fair enough but these rants on HN about publishers never seem to contain any examples of publications that are both successful and delivering pages that weigh scarcely more than their plain text equivalent. I think you invite the “false dichotomy” by making the comparison between plain text Moby Dick and the front page of one of the most successful newspapers in the world in 2018. I agree with many of your points but…
Examples would be the same publications 10 or 20 years ago. They weren't exactly plain text but they were a lot lighter and the content has not improved measurably in that time.
Here's one from the 70's that's still going: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel