- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
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Firefox + uBlock Origin + Reader View
Reader view is pretty good at decluttering the web and uses less power on laptop and phone as well.
I have an extension in Firefox (well, Librewolf but same difference) called Tranquility Reader that’s good for this too. Just strips articles down to plain text and relevant images, and you can save the article as a PDF for later too.
We have made mistakes.
We wanted it all to be free. It was free. I remember the early days of the internet, the webforums, the IRC, it was mostly sites run by enthusiasts. A few companies showing their products to would-be customers. It was awesome and it was all free.
And then it got popular, it got mainstream. Running servers got expensive and the webmasters were looking for funding. And we resisted paywalls. The internet is free, that’s how it’s supposed to work!
They turned to advertising. That’s fair, a few banners, no big deal, we can live with that. It worked for television! And for a while that was OK.
Where did it all go sideways? Well, it was much too much effort to negotiate advertisement deals between websites and advertisers one website at a time, so the advertisement networks were born. Sign up for funding, embed a small script and you’re done. Advertisers can book ad space with the network and their banner appears on thousands of websites. Then they figured out they can monitor individual user’s interests, and show them more “relevant” ads, and make more money for more effective ad campaigns.
And now we have no privacy online. Which caused regulators like the EU to step in and try to limit user data harvesting. With mixed results as we all know. For one it doesn’t seem to get enforced enough so a lot of companies just get away with. But also the consent banners are just clumsy and annoying.
And now we’re swamped with ads, and sponsored content written by AI, because capitalism’s gonna capitalism and squeeze as much profit as they can, until an equilibrium is reached between maximum revenue and user tolerance for BS. Look up “enshittification”
I wonder how the web would look like if we had not resisted paid content back then. There were attempts to do things differently. flattr was one thing for a while. Patreon, ko-fi and others are awesome for small creators. Gives them independence and freedom to do their thing and not depend on big platforms or corporations. The fediverse and open source are awesome.
There’s still a lot of great stuff out there for those of us who know where to look. But large parts of the internet are atrocious.
honestly heartbreaking in a lot of ways to see the current turn of events and how the web is today.
but what could we have done to prevent it? im not sure paywalls would’ve been feasible, i feel like most people would refuse to pay or just avoid your website all together. maybe a paywall network of websites of some kind could’ve worked? but its really hard to say.
i don’t even have a problem with ads on sites to an extent, as long as they aren’t overly obnoxious and don’t spy on you and track your every move. that shouldn’t be too much to ask, right? but alas, i guess it is in 2023. 🤷♀️
just such a sad state of things. the web is currently unusable without a content blocker or protection of some kind, which is insane to think about. this all really only scratches the surface too of the modern web’s issues. in general a lot of the individuality and freedom of the internet is just… gone. all completely corporate and shall now, so much seo spam and clickbait and other garbage, just for the most clicks or revenue possible. there’s little quality left for sure.
feels like we lost the internet in a lot of ways. i wonder what the solution is, if there even is one. i guess we just can’t give up fighting.
The comment was getting long and I didn’t want to get into socioeconomic side effects, mobile, or other factors.
It’s not all bleak. The internet is still built on a foundation of free and open technology. HTML, CSS, and JavaScript (aka ECMAScript), TCP/IP and DNS …
The best thing we can do is teach those things. Keep them accessible to as many people as possible and make sure they don’t become forgotten arcane voodoo knowledge. Anyone can set up a website and share it with others. We don’t have to depend on big social networks.
The biggest challenge is how do you get people to be curious about this stuff? Back in the day, we had to learn, we had to look under the hood, because half the time stuff just didn’t work and we needed to figure out how to fix it. But today everything is hidden behind a shiny UI and most things just work. There’s no need to look under the hood (if you even still can, and it’s not some encrypted blob or compiled binary webASM nonsense).
@Skimmer5728 I think what we’re doing right here in the fediverse is a good solution. We’re just building a parallel infrastructure to their dumb web3.0 garbage. Those who want a better Internet can come over here and those who want to stick with garbage can stick with it.
well said, i agree, the fediverse is definitely a good approach.
i think the only concern will be getting more people to move here and adopt it, it’ll be harder to convince and appeal to more mainstream people. but i guess that’ll be easier and easier as the web goes to shit and gets worse and worse over time than it already is, lol.
Fediverse is really still in its infancy. Its only just shifted from those with a lot of technical knowledge to those with a fluency of it.
It’s when the average person can create an account and start engaging that it will reach critical mass.
It’s not a bad thing that its taking a while to get there so that certain cultures, terms of engagement and stable/viable instances (each with their funding streams) can be established. If there were a sudden mass exodus from centralised systems to the fediverse, it would just mean a massive loss of the signal to noise ratio rather than a slow, measure integration of each wave of new users.
Eternal September. There’s no integrating the masses to a ‘better’ network. I think to some extent you’re going to get what the big names have now because it’s the people, not just the sites.
And the fediverse sign up is exactly as hard as an email sign up already. Idk how you make it easier.
The “web3.0” is also an attempt to escape the nightmare that “web2.0” has become, just centered on Blockchains and the technologies they allow. Technically, the web3.0 is not at odds with the fediverse, it might even be that some day both might end up working together.
For example, one of the alternatives to Reddit that’s being worked on, is a Blockchain + IPFS solution that already has some features like user migration between instances. It’s a bit hard to expect to onboard the average user to a full crypto experience, but things like Lemmy could be the “base service”, while someone looking for something more could look into integrations with other solutions.
There was the original idea of microtransactions, where you could buy some credit, say $10, and every time you read an article, the author would get fraction of a cent. Or you’d need to manually approve it, such as with a like.
Of course companies saw a good idea and ran it into the ground, so now microtransactions mean something very different, and in their stead there are subscriptions for everything.
feels like we lost the internet in a lot of ways. i wonder what the solution is, if there even is one. i guess we just can’t give up fighting.
You’re posting in the solution right now :)
Lemmy does give me a strong nostalgic feeling of old school forums. I think the Fediverse is going to give enthusiasts what they’ve been missing. I just hope it lasts and continues to grow.
That’s what pisses me off about Bluesky. Mastodon already exists, and is not for profit. We don’t need another “decentralized” platform that intentionally doesn’t talk to the Fediverse and is trying to create its own version. Yet my fear is Bluesky will end up being mainstream and those for-profit CEOs will continue running the internet into the ground. I hope people end up realizing Mastodon already exists, and is a better version of what Bluesky wants to be.
Running servers got expensive
No it didn’t. Running a server today is dirt cheap compared to the bad old days. So is registering a domain. Getting a TLS certificate doesn’t cost anything at all.
However, there are a lot more people here now. It used to be you could feasibly run a moderately popular website off a single server and it’d be fine. Now, with billions of people on the Internet, you need an army of servers distributed around the world if your site gets even remotely popular.
But also the consent banners are just clumsy and annoying.
That’s a feature, not a bug. Consent banners were manufactured as a way to turn public opinion against GDPR and generate political pressure to repeal it. “Look at how those Europeans ruined the web!” GDPR was supposed to pressure these unscrupulous advertisers into giving up their spooky tracking, but they did this instead. And it’s working—most people blame GDPR for ruining the web, not the sleazeballs who actually ruined it.
Sure, servers are cheaper now. Domains are cheap now. TLS certs are free now. But that happened after the advertising business model became dominant.
For a while, server power was barely keeping up with the rise in demand, and you couldn’t just add another cloud server or bump up the RAM allocation on the one you have, you had to physically install new hardware. That took a larger chunk of money than adding $5 to your hosting plan, and time to set up the hardware.
By the time the tech stack got significantly cheaper (between faster hardware and virtualization, not to mention Let’s Encrypt), advertising was already entrenched and starting to coalesce around a handful of big networks.
The first big problem was malware in ads (and web in general). This has caused people to install adblocks on their parents’ and friends’ devices.
Then there were the annoying ads: autoplaying videos, popups and other shit. This has caused a lot of normies to install adblockers themselves.
Then the privacy concerns, where even basic users notice that they look at a product on one store and now the recommendations follow them everywhere.
But the marketing companies keep pushing, and the OS providers like Google, MS and Apple keep restricting what you can install on your machine, this is a full-on war between users and the big tech.
Nobody was complaining about small banner ads. But they just have to keep pushing and break things. It’s like with banks, or mythological creatures - insatiable.
Nobody was complaining about small banner ads.
Everybody hated banner ads. The first adblockers were targeting banner ads, and they were the beginning of the arms race. Advertising? On the Internet? Not a chance!
How little we knew back then…
Maybe my memory doesn’t go quite as far. But still, I believe adblockers didn’t take off in such a huge ways until we’ve seen all those popups, malware and other shit on a massive scale.
I use uBlock Origin in Firefox, with all the boxes ticked. It’s not only adds it blocks also plentiful of trackers. Just to make my visits on today’s web usable. As a result, my laptops / smartphone resources are saved up, more battery time or cooler device as example.
Personally I like ads, totally ok for it - if informative, sharing some kind of relevant value with greater good. Companies should let the product or service itself advertise, not throw these on people constantly.
This is why I whitelist duckduckgo in firefox in my ublock extension. I will gladly look at the relevant ads at the top of the list, knowing they are just that. I glance at them, most of the time it’s a sales pitch, I go “not interested” and just move down the page to the results. 100% fine with that.
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I feel like that’s where online payment systems really let us down. If there was an easy universal way to pay a few cents to view content and it wasn’t a privacy and fee nightmare, I’m sure people would have no problem doing that. Digicash systems come to mind, I hope they could make a comeback one day.
But I also fear a lot of the damage could’ve been done already, kids who grow up with the internet now will probably only remember big tech platforms and may not be very eager to try out something more complicated.
I like your suggestion with easily payable small amounts. Because the way payment currently works is just not scale-able on an individual level. Sure, $20 per month for a technical news site would be worth it … if that was the only news site you are consuming. But it isn’t. I consume multiple tech news, local news, etc. I can’t get back my full worth of spent money per site, because my time is split between multiple sites; and my time is finite.
I also can’t just say “well, this month I consume only site A, next only site B, etc.”, because that defeats how “news” work. In the end I skim headlines (or even sometimes content) and THEN it shows what is actually of interest and where I stay longer/dig deeper/actually read full.
In a perfect world we probably could have a “tip jar” at the end of every article that people throw in digital cash when the article was worth it. Unfortunately too many people would abuse it and simply not pay at all, so authors will have to ask for payment upfront … but then I pay for something which I don’t even know will be good. Maybe after seeing the full article (not yet reading it in detail) I realize it’s not the kind of content I hoped for.
That thing was indeed easier with print media. You go to the store, flick through the magazine/paper and if you like it you pay for it and go read it.
I worked for a startup in the 90s, pre-enshittification, that wanted to empower micropayments on the web. Obviously, even when mostly “frictionless”, users rejected the concept. Capitalism is going capitalize, but this is also the fault of users who demand “free”.
this is also the fault of users who demand “free”.
This is in my opinion the crux of the matter. People want content for free: they won’t pay for it directly and they won’t watch ads (because they’re often much too intrusive.) Of course the root problem is the economic system, but barring a near global revolution that’s not going to change
Nowadays there is crypto, some of it is already perfect for micropayments. But it needs to be integrated into the browser/app to be truly frictionless, and there should be a “get your money back” option for the content that’s click bait and not worth the asking price. Unfortunately the largest browsers are Chrome and Edge, by companies who aren’t all that interesting in changing the way things are.
I am pretty convinced crypto as it currently is is 99% a scam or a way to waste a lot of money compared to a traditional financial transfer. It’s made worse by the environmental impacts of mining. Crypto would have to be something completely different before it’ll take off for any kind of traditional payment system. And I actually think we just need the government to mandate a better bank to bank payment system with no fees like they have in Europe. Anything else is too fragmented which means friction in use and higher fees converting between the competing systems.
You’re not wrong, but not all crypto is the same. Some have switched to “proof of stake” which removes all the energy wasted on mining, some allow to write programs into it that can execute automatically to do some interesting things, and some allow sending fractions (thousandths, millionths) of a USD with barely a transaction fee.
Even in Europe, free bank-to-bank transfers take a couple days to execute (there is a paid option for instant transfers), and have a minimum of 0.01€ which might or might not be what you want to tip/pay someone for their content.
Not sure where in Europe you’re referring to but I’d be surprised if there’s anywhere in the EU where you can’t access free open banking transfers.
I always forget how many intrusive ads are on the internet. One time I shared a link to one of my family members and they almost got a virus because of a pop-up ad. The web is actually unusable without uBlock Origin.
ublock origin is the best! I currently use it to filter out all twitter blue users :)
Why are you on the birdsite?
uBlock is terrible, use brave browser. I cant even use the internet with ublock or adblock plugins, the amount that leaks through is annoying AF.
uBlock Origin is not uBlock - uBlock was bought by some company that turned it to shit like many adblockers before it.
uBlock Origin is, IIRC, the open source superior product.
I shared a link from a movie streaming site not knowing that without uBlock Origin the page was covered in nearly pornographic mobile game ads.
… pornographic mobile game ads
… What? Jesus.
nearly pornographic, which describes pretty much all mobile game ads.
Ah the old scantily clad warrior woman being used to advertise… a match-3 game.
Road to hell being paved with good intentions and all, I guess. The reason sites all have the cookie permission dialog now is because of the GDPR, which has the right idea on data privacy, but the implementation wound up being so terrible that it winds up doing this. Prior to that dialog, they’d just store/read the cookies without permission (though lots of people would proactively sandbox browsers to make it a non-issue). I honestly can’t decide which is worse, at this point.
I like the ones that show the prompt for “we’ve detected an ad-blocker” with the option you can click for “continue without disabling and not supporting us”. Guilt trips work in human to human interactions, but not for random Internet prompts.
Of course I’d prefer the web simply not using cookies on every single site I visit (therefore not needing the prompt), but that’s not going to happen. Sites have to monetize somehow to stay alive.
The reason sites all have the cookie permission dialog now is because of the GDPR, which has the right idea on data privacy, but the implementation wound up being so terrible that it winds up doing this.
GDPR is not at fault here though, since it does not require asking for consent if the processed data is necessary for the purpose of the provided service. For example, a web shop usually wouldn’t have to ask for permission to store items in the shopping part because that is a necessary part of the online shopping process. In that sense, requiring the consent dialog for all unnecessary purposes is better as you can at least see who’s trying to screw you over. Don’t kill the messenger here.
I think it’s also important to remember that websites can only get away with these annoyances because it a) is easily automatable and b) has been the default mode of operation for decades. If restaurant waiters today started asking guests if they could sell info on what and when you ate, who you were with, and what you looked like, everyone would be creeped out. Before GDPR, it was pretty much normalized to do the same thing on the internet without even asking for consent.
Right; that’s actually what I was trying to say, just phrased differently. The majority of sites that prompt for cookie selection do so because they use the cookies for ad targeting, not for critical function of the actual site. They need to do that because it’s the only way for them to monetize, in most cases: by selling targeted advertisements.
Prior to the GDPR, this would just happen without the enduser’s consent. Now it’s prompted on every site, which is an annoyance. From an enduser’s perspective, it’s destroying the web. From the host’s perspective, using those cookies is the only thing keeping their lights on and creators paid (unless they’ve somehow managed to actually implement a successful subscription model, which is rare; so they often do both, like Wired here).
I’m glad that the GDPR rolled out for dozens of reasons. It’s a net positive. It’s undeniably also a pain in the ass for web UX, though, because now users need to deal with these crappy dialogs on each new site they visit. Which encourages users to avoid new sites, which also has a bad downstream effect on getting the web back to the glory days of thousands of independent and useful sites versus a small collection of giant corporation sites.
I think a decent solution would be for standardizing these kind of opt-in dialogs into browser settings, somehow, to automatically bypass them based on user profile preferences. That’s not a simple effort, obviously, though, and likely wouldn’t get site admins to be on board because the majority of users would simply disable cookie usage globally. Or we’re just back to the days of niche power users using noscript/ghostery while everybody less savvy continues to have a shitty web experience.
I don’t really have a solution to this problem, but I do know we need to get the web in a place where privacy is viable and usability on sites you may only visit once is enjoyable.
hey how to upload pic on comments section?
Alternatively upload the Image to an extern Imagesharer/host, vgy.me works fine, and insert the url with Markdown
Click the image icon. Use it wisely though as lemmy.ml servers are already under load with all the new users.
HOLY CRORP! THAT’S A THING YOU CAN JUST DO?
The fediverse is amazing
Enjoy it while you’ve got it. My guess is pedophiles are going to discover Lemmy at some point and spam it with child porn, and the admins will remove that feature in order to stop them.
My guess is pedophiles are going to discover Lemmy at some point and spam it with child porn
That already happened. Just not with child pornography AFAIK, but with gore, nudity and ads. That’s why many instances have an application process: to keep the bots and trolls out.
“Let us demonstrate”
Oh the irony.
I miss the old internet
Lemmy feels like the old internet IMO and I’m really enjoying it so far! :)
if you’re really missing it, there’s a new sub called [email protected] that is trying to compile websites that have the vintage feel to them.
That link didn’t work for me, so I’m trying this: [email protected]
The communists cut many internet cables for some anti-capitalism reason!
I made a blogpost about that, and I promise you’ll see no ads, no cookies, no JavaScript, just the blogpost.
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I’m gonna send you a reply to your article some time later. I am too tired right now.
My short review is that you want to separate the backend from the frontend. Backend processes your request and emits a JSON response. Frontend, be it CLI, web client or a smartphone app, just sends your request and shows the response in a human-friendly way. I did it in a similar fashion for my project.
I just looked up into my search history and saw I am either:
- not confident with the website address I remember;
- looking for an API documentation;
- looking for some real-world projects (when choosing one of several frameworks/ways of doing things);
- confused AF and needy for hints (especially for large problems or life/long-term choices);
- looking for images/visual ideas;
- looking for what my old friends do now (am I a boomer?).
Well, for the last two I cannot think of any solution. Problem (2) can be substituted with in-reference search (cppreference.com, lib.rs, docs.rs, developer.mozilla.org). However, sometimes I want to be sure that I am using the real link to the real thing, not the scam one. For example, I sometimes want to get access to the official latest GLSL specification, or sometimes overhyped people tend to name things by their marketing brands. Like, I ask ‘What is X?’ (WhatsApp, for instance) and I get a response ‘X is … just X, it’s really good’ and when I need to find what is X, I usually search on Wikipedia, because on the web search I would only see the promotions of X.
(I’m out, wait for chapter 2)
Full text RSS would make it even more readable!
Finally got it working, but it’s a little hacky. It works in my two RSS readers, can you confirm it works for you too?
Works great! Thank you!
Excellent post, and I love your sites minimal, old school design. I finally found the right corner of the internet where people actually think about this kind of thing! It’s so frustrating how over the years search engine results just give you bloated, pointless articles that exist only to rank high in SEO and get ad revenue.
I too have been using the site:reddit.com method, but it sucks to essentially only have one for-profit website as the one I use to research things.
Thanks! Stay tuned because I’ll probably add some kind of webring to the blog soon
I think we have 10-15 years or so left before the internet becomes totally unusable due to ads, paywalls and general bad design all over the place.
Yet I am somewhat optimistic that we can build our own communities that may work beyond this crap.
Not to mention AI bots using large language models spreading advertisements and misinformation.
A time will come where you cannot differentiate between real and generated content, the internet will be flooded with noise, and one can either stay in the illusion we call internet, or go offline and only believe their own physical senses.AI has the potential to be the most powerful propaganda machine the world has ever known. The ability to seamlessly jump into conversations and actively steer them towards the owner’s target position en masse is terrifying. Add to that the ability for the AI to swarm dissenters with dozens or even hundreds of sock puppet accounts, creating manufactured consensus is undoubtedly already being done by people on a smaller scale, and definitely being tested by state and corporate actors to use for a variety of targets and subjects.
2 years, optimistically. 1 year if you want to be a pessimist and realist like me. Current amount of content needs to exist on internet with the users hooked onto big sites. Content is being purged, users are going away.
Where are users going? Genuinely curious, as everything seems to be in the Internet nowadays
Some are quitting social media altogether. Others are gathering on fewer websites outside of Big Tech i.e. Fediverse. Some are using few platforms like Telegram and/or Discord. Some simply heavily restrict usage while sticking to big platforms. Many are simply social butterflies that love their Snapchat, Tinder and Instagram for hookups.
Tinder I get, but Instagram for hookups? Cmon now.
As true as it gets. FB Messenger and Snapchat also serve that purpose.
