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The Bullshit Web

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Re: The Bullshit Web

#431

Post by JetSpiegel »

voltagex_ wrote: post #421
JetSpiegel wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I achieve this with an RSS reader, in my case Miniflux. Runs on a RPi under my TV and I stay well below my 300MB data cap, while consuming dozens of news sources.

Which news sources? How did you find the ones that still provide RSS? How much of it do you actually read?

I read virtually all of them. Most of them provide RSS feeds, some are a bit hidden but it's Googlable.

I started with the basics BBC, NYT, Guardian, The Intercept for general news, The Conversation for science news without sensationalism, and some tech blogs. Then I just read most of it, and follow some links to find new sources. Most of the times news start with "As reported by X", or just a link, so you can discover new sources like that.

You can also browse HN (and n-gate for the highlights) and Reddit to discover new sources.

If you add so much you can't keep up, remove some, or change the feeds into section feeds. Most online newspapers provide them. I miss Yahoo Pipes, and have yet to find a simple hosted alternative. There is also RSS Bridge for sites without feeds (Twitter, Facebook), but I still haven't found the time to set it up.

You can also add paywalled sources to read the headlines only. You can mark them as read from the index.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#432

Post by DrScump »

komali2 wrote: post #207
thegayngler wrote: post #171

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.

Over 20 years ago, the San Jose Mercury-News offered exactly such a service.

Called Newshound, it let you set up to face sets of keywords (in the basic $5/month subscription), and it would email you the plain text of every article that matched the criteria, whether generated within the publisher network or from wire services.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#433

Post by TekMol »

These days, when I visit a website I have not visited before, it feels like entering a war zone. Trying to extract some information while the enemy tries to kill me.

Enabling hostname after hostname in umatrix until the content is revealed. Hoping not to trigger too much user hostile crap along the way.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#436

Post by moviuro »

thinkingemote wrote: post #416
makecheck wrote: post #126

We have a ridiculously-backwards model on the web where you essentially pay for what you use (via your data plan, and via forced ads prior to promised content) without having any way to know in advance what it will end up costing you to display content. Heck, you don’t even know if the content will display correctly after all that loading. Worse, there are many ways to trigger loads accidentally, meaning you may want…

I use a VPN with a hosts file that is composed of EasyList etc for my phone. It saves me money and battery.

Same here, but is performance of the server OK? Because I've had bad performance issues with ~1k lines in hosts(5).

I've thus written a script that I run daily for my local unbound(8) daemon -or bind: https://gitlab.com/moviuro/moviuro.bin/blob/master/lie-to-me

Re: The Bullshit Web

#437

Post by Pete_D »

kodablah wrote: post #266
cheezymoogle wrote: post #5

I've said this before, but it bears repeating: Moby Dick is 1.2mb uncompressed in plain-text. That's lower than the "average" news website by quite a bit--I just loaded the New York Times front page. It was 6.6mb. that's more than 5 copies of Moby Dick, solely for a gateway to the actual content that I want. A secondary reload was only 5mb. I then opened a random article. The article itself was about 1,400 words long…

This dovetails into an idea I had [0]. Basically just client side scrape the web as it's used and deliver people this plain text and simple forms. It would have a maintained set of definitions and potentially even logic to put a better "front" on all this bullshit. It's like reverse ad block where you only whitelist some content instead of blacklisting it. You could argue sites will get good at fighting it, but if us…

Sounds a bit like tedunangst's miniwebproxy[0]. I've been wondering about writing either something like it or a youtube-dl-like "article-dl" for my own use, but haven't quite been annoyed enough into doing it yet.

[0] https://www.tedunangst.com/flak/post/miniwebproxy (self-signed cert)

Re: The Bullshit Web

#438

Post by themacguffinman »

throwawaymath wrote: post #365
themacguffinman wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm asserting that the NYT can achieve the substantial majority of the advertising optimization and targeting it needs to do to be profitable Majority, not all. Why should they leave money on the table, exactly?

Because it's disrespectful of user privacy, performance inefficient and computationally wasteful? Most companies are not achieving the platonic maximalization of profit or shareholder value. They leave money on the table for a variety of reasons. It's not beyond the pale that this would be one of them. If you don't agree, then frankly it's probably an axiomatic disagreement and I don't think we can reason one another…

There's nothing axiomatic about our disagreement here, it's not like I'm unaware of the existence of inefficient businesses. Individual companies may choose to leave money on the table, but industries and markets as a whole do not (not intentionally, anyway).

You've just described the status quo, where businesses have to sacrifice their lifeblood to achieve your ideals. Those businesses tend to be beaten by more focused competitors, which results in the industry you see today, filled with winners that don't achieve your ideals.

But good luck trying to champion an efficient web industry by essentially moralizing.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#439

Post by krzrak »

cheezymoogle wrote: post #5

I've said this before, but it bears repeating: Moby Dick is 1.2mb uncompressed in plain-text. That's lower than the "average" news website by quite a bit--I just loaded the New York Times front page. It was 6.6mb. that's more than 5 copies of Moby Dick, solely for a gateway to the actual content that I want. A secondary reload was only 5mb. I then opened a random article. The article itself was about 1,400 words long…

> mb

I think you didn't mean milibits, but megabytes (MB). 1.2 mb = 1.5e-10 MB.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#440

Post by superflyguy »

white-flame wrote: post #417
dgudkov wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Thousands of cpu hours, megabytes and dollars wasted on some user spying turdheap the marketing guys NEEDED to put in an app, 'to track user behaviour'. I understand that somewhere in a perfect universe, tech guys just make things right and money just flow in without those pesky marketing people ever involved. Unfortunately, in our universe if you don't do marketing and don't analyze user behavior your business is t…

In the pre-monetized web, yes the tech guys made things right without money extracted from the web. Standards & many applications that implemented them (including commercial) were attempted to be designed to make online computer use possible and beneficial. This is the domain of academics, committees, and concerned individuals creating the means of useful computing & communication, outside of parasitic desperation to…

Swell history lesson, but I don't care about academics and nor do the vast majority of internet users. They can use the internet too, of course, but there's no point moaning about web pages getting larger. I was using the internet in the 90's and it sucked - literally everything about the internet is better today. My life would be no different whether a web page was 5 megs or 5k just like it makes no difference if moby dick was 100k or 100 megs. It's still getting downloaded on my phone, getting copied onto my Kindle etc.
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