A Chrome component, coupled to a straw to slurp all your data a browser cannot reach, and notifications coming out of your arse at 2am because they cannot fathom the idea of other countries existing.
I get why soulless corporations do this, but why do regular folks choose to publish their content on Medium, Substack, Devto, etc. when this is the shitty UX they’ll be forcing on their readers.
I mean, things which worked 20 years ago still work today. You can literally export to HTML from MS Word, am I wrong? Just save the document in HTML and put a link to it from the main page, which you can literally save from MS Word as well.
There are free hostings allowing to create boards phpBB style. One can use them for “comments”.
Doesn’t look cute and modern and blonde-inductive? Well, there’s a logical exclusive OR between blonde-inductive and functional.
There are options outside the ones with heavy marketing departments to host writing. There was a time when hosting your own website was easy/normal. It still is easy (tho requirements like TLS certificates & fail2ban have raised some barrier to entry) & there are tools that automate the process now more than then, but there is an intimidation factor that really needs to be knocked down. The only other barrier has been folks living in places where symmetric internet isn’t the norm & you are expected to be a consumer & not a producer (this also needs to be fixed since it doesn’t cost more to send bits in the other direction).
I think it’s the same reason YouTube can keep shooting itself in the foot and still thrive: it’s where all the eyeballs are concentrated now.
I agree, I’m a “Have your own blog / homepage” proponent myself…
…but I got as far as a domain and have paid (cheap) hosting for a few years…then installing Wordpress and dang is it way clunkier to set up than I ever imagined. 🙃
I think it’s the same reason YouTube can keep shooting itself in the foot and still thrive: it’s where all the eyeballs are concentrated now.
Yeah…it is difficult to jump ships and try out another service - even when the other service is generally a better option than the previous one - if you don’t get an audience big enough to even bother starting with the otherwise better service.
I think YouTube is an interesting & dare-I-say necessary evil at this point tho. Hosting video is prohibitively expensive with all the codecs & bitrates + global distribution. Folks watch YouTube when bored or lonely & scaling that from a home network would put most creators out of business … especially if trying to compete.
…But plaintext? Even with images (reencoded with a few improved codecs like JPEG XL in a ``) is cheap. Especially if you have access to the router & a static IP or dynamic DNS, it can be hosted at home & unless you are insanely popular won’t even put a noticeable dent in one’s bandwidth.
Self-host a static build system (Soupault is my preferred tool for this). If no to self-hosting, static hosting can be found cheap or ‘free’ in many spaces.
If building static files is too complicated, or more social features are desired WriteFreely & Plume operate on the fediverse (like Lemmy) or something like Movim (XMPP powered) can host anything from blogs video conferencing with other social features. I hear some folks like Bear, but I have no experience with it. They all have the advantage of being self-hostable too (but be warned, all of these listed source code is being hosted on the proprietary Microsoft GitHub which will require an account & agreeing to their ToS to interact with & any source code contributions will be fed through Microsoft GitHub’s Copilot AI models to be sold back at developers).
Speaking of technical stuff… same criticism go towards Microsoft GitHub. Unnecessary social features, search doesn’t work if you’re not authenticated, can’t participate without an account, stuffed with upsells (with the latest being an ad for Microsoft GitHub copilot inside the code view), where the Copilot product is sold back to the users who worked (often for free) to create the code to train it, pushes to use Sponsors so Microsoft can take their cut of donations, custom proprietary Markdown fork that isn’t compatible with other platforms …and to top it off, the pull request model straight-up doesn’t scale for a lot of projects but it’s the only option unless the maintainers consciously decide to host another tool or mailing list outside the Microsoft GitHub forge which defeats the point of even using the code forge product.
I don’t have any off-hand. But anecdotally I know systems like Gerrit & mailing lists are used for very large and/or very rapid work flows. Nixpkgs has a lot of issues with thousands of open requests, not many reviewers, no way to understand the prioritization, required reviews even if you are the sole maintainer of a small package (so no other user to check the work), separate folks that do merging that are inundated with approved-but-unmerged changes who also… don’t know what to prioritize. This process alone can take weeks (I just now got a merge from 2023-09-29 just merged in) & that was only after having begged twice on the Matrix chat for someone to dedicate the time to do it. Traditionally bigger and/or distributed systems are used to help alleviate or add hierarchy to try to get pushes thru faster.
Another issue pops up with just the review process. You may have seen your favorite $PROG_X just released a new version. You have bumped the version + hash, & submitted a new request. The maintainer tells you all these little nits or stuff about how this package now breaks $PROG_Y & tells you to fix it… like it’s your problem when they are the maintainer. If I were to receive this as an email patch, I would just modify the patchset for you, reply with “Thanks. I made some small adjustments to fit match my style.” or whatever keeping the credit on them. You can amend a users repository iff they allow maintainer access, but adding new remotes is more cumbersome & it’s almost never done as we’ve decided now that the onus should be on contributors rather than helping them ship their changes faster.
Unironically the best thing about Hexbear is that it doesn’t blast you with pop-ups nagging you to make an account. Even Google on my phone will nag me to make an account when I pull up the webpage like I always have for almost two decades.
That applies to much of the Fediverse. It’s great to see a growing chunk of the web that’s genuinely free.
Also, consider switching search engine, you don’t want to be fueling an evil megacorporation and letting it know all about you, plus DuckDuckGo is probably even better nowadays.
Duly noted, but I’ve also heard a bit about ecosia. Is that any good?
EDIT: Pulled up the wikipedia page and was delightfully treated to this " the ads served on DuckDuckGo are based on keywords and terms of the search query."
How ‘targeted ads’ should be. “Hey, I see you’re looking for an item, here are some companies to consider for said item.”
It’s cool and all because you can passively plant trees, but really it doesn’t make much of a difference for the environment and you pay for it with your privacy. There are many better ways to help the climate, so I say nah.
Anytime a website forces me to turn off my adblock, I leave it and block it so it doesn’t show up again. If you force such predatory tactics, I am not interested in your website, and I’d rather look for another one.
I tend to do the same, also for those websites that come with a secondary pop up.
Makes me feel like they really don’t give a fuck, so why should i then and it’s easy to click back and try the next website in the rows of results.
The weirdest one i found was a couple days ago and i kinda give them props for it, as it made me go: “woooow almost had me.”
They had this whole standard wall of text with reasons to get you to accept and i didn’t see thr reject all button. It was a fairly lenghty wall too so i started scanning it for recognizeable words until my eyes passed: “reject” in the text. It was regular looking text but clickable.
Install once, go to a website, wait a few seconds, ans it rejects all those 1273 “partners” for you, together with clicking every hidden “reject” button, so you don’t have to
That doesn’t seem to be true. A lot of German publishers do not allow you to proceed without giving consent to cookies and profiling for targeted advertising. They consider this legal because they offer you the alternative of “opting out” by signing up for a paid subscription.
The EU does definitely not have an easy reject all button…it’s always a minefield to work out how to disable them. Most take over 30-60 seconds to find out how to disable everything
The EU does force the reject all button, however companies and websites often don’t care about the law; some newspaper in my country straight up ask for a subscription to let you have the privilege of disabling cookies on their ad-ridden dying websites, and many more don’t have a “reject all” button.
I try to report some of them but who knows if it does something.
Plus from personal experience; when you setup a GDPR button through Google, by default there is no “reject all” button. Or the equally mandatory “x” to close the popup, thus rejecting cookies. You need to tick a box to enable them.
Not in my experience. The reject all button is usually hidden behind the review your choices button. It’s fucking bullshit. Accept all is always visible tho.
If I block cookie banners, does that mean I reject cookies because I didn’t consent? Because if that’s the case, I’m gonna just start blocking them.
More patience than me. I don’t make it past Frame 2 unless I can keep scrolling, or there’s a ‘Reject All’ button. If anything else pops up, too many ads in the scroll, or paragraph three still says fuck all, I’m out
I was trying to read an article the other day and they had a reject all cookies button. When this is an option I always use it but this one redirected me to a page that told me they won’t let me view their articles if I don’t let them track me. It went on to talk about some bullshit sob story about how it’s the only way they can be profitable and that they pinky promise to be responsible with the data collected.
By that time the websites will use LLMs to weave all that shit into the articles you read. Perfecting the method of ever so slowly conditioning you after the vision of some coked up marketing exec marketing algorithm’s personalised hellhole, based on your very private and personal desires.
The average user will read about yet another school shooting and leave the article wishing for a delicious and refreshing coke to wash down the bad taste in their mouth, like only real coca cola can, which is now improved in flavour and available in a refrigeration section near your habitat. Because when the world let’s you down, coca cola will pick you up!
It’s working less and less though. You can’t do this on websites like Wall Street Journal or Bloomberg because the article doesn’t actually load more than the first paragraph without being subscribed.
You can use an add-on like this that will set your browser’s user agent to look like a bot. They allow Google to read websites for indexing, but not you humble user.
Of course they did. You can collect more data by forcing the user to create an account and circumvent most ad blocks in an app though! What incentive do they have to making a functioning site?!
Use a VPN like Mullvad that has an ad block built in. It doesn’t allow ads to load in any apps, it’s really nice. I’m sure they can still collect all kinds of data but at least the ads are taken care of.
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