💾 Archived View for gemlog.blue › users › Sardonyx › 1599371657.gmi captured on 2020-09-24 at 00:45:26. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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The small internet is an enjoyable place to spend time. Checking out the CAPCOM aggregator and the gemlog.blue/users folder is starting to become a habit.
ML joined gemlog.blue and has made some posts. Welcome! Thank you for reading and replying to my Sites I Want On Gemini post.
ML recommends Metamath Proof Explorer as a site that should be on Gemini. I took a look and I agree. Most of the proofs were hard for me to follow, but that’s due to my math skills, not the site. Proofs are laid out one step after another in a straightforward way. There shouldn’t be any trouble adapting that to text/gemini.
I love seeing gemini-space grow. When I open my Gemini browser (I’ve been using amfora) I know that everything will load instantly and nothing will interrupt my reading. I wish I could say the same for the web.
I pulled up an article from The Verge on my phone and my experience was the opposite. The first thing I noticed was that my phone got hot. Surfing the web used to be a task for old computers, slow machines that you would hand down to family members who didn’t need the gaming or multimedia abilities of the latest tech. Now, surfing the bloated web absolutely needs the latest and greatest.
(Incidentally, I was reading the following article about biologists who had problems with Microsoft Excel interpreting genes as calendar dates. Rather than stop using Excel, they decided to convince all biologists to rename genes! That sounds like Stockholm Syndrome to me.)
(Bloated WWW) The Verge: Human Genes Renamed
Atrocious. Reading that took too long to load, and once you start reading, you will lose your place because multiple video ads shift the text up and down as they load. It’s an awful experience, and it’s been that way for years.
Digging through my old bookmarks yielded a plea for The Verge to fix their site: a plea from 2015.
Les Orchard says what we’re all thinking in his detailed response The Verge’s web sucks:
> Calling out browser makers for the performance of sites like his? That’s a bit much.
You got that right. The blog post includes Twitter quotes from The Verge’s Nilay Patel. Patel acknowledges that The Verge takes a lot of your time to load ads and tracking scripts. But he throws up his hands when asked to stop, or make it less awful. Thems the breaks, kid. He says the web can exist as is, or it can not exist at all.
I emphatically reject that argument. Looking to Geminews (mentioned in my post Useful Links for the Small Internet) we find counter-examples.
These news sites have plain text versions of their articles. Quick-loading articles without modern web bullshit: it’s the exact opposite of The Verge. It looks like the “trend” (of three sites) began in 2017 after Hurricane Irma. Cell towers were overloaded and it’s bad PR to hold off giving vital information to hurricane victims until after their phone buffers a video ad.
(WWW) Poynter: Text-Only News Sites Are Making A Comeback
Naturally the text versions are hugely popular. They’re praised for their designs, which are noteworthy for what they *don’t* include.
No pictures, no video, no ads or tracking. Text files are good enough here. Anything else is just fluff.
The Poynter article points out that everyone benefits from these text versions.
Even in cities [it would be useful]. The Metro suuuuuuuuuuuuucks for this; I don’t even try to click links on it; I actually have a routine where I either get what I want to load before I get on the train, or move to stored content/text on my phone. There’s no point in even trying.
Why hasn’t text reclaimed its status as king of the web? Both the 2015 blog post and the 2017 news article point towards bureaucracy.
You realize that “bloat" pays the salaries of editorial, product, design, video, etc etc etc, right?
You have to want it. You have to have resources to do it. You have to institutional support. Without these, you can still do a lot, but in the end you won’t ever get the best optimization because somewhere along the line will be an obstacle you won’t have the authority to remove.
The only conclusion is that readers’ time and privacy are important if the readers cut a sympathetic figure. Hurricane victim? Screen-reader user? News sites will stop the madness for you. Once someone isn’t in one of those categories, the news sites (excluding those on Geminews) tell you to navigate their user-hostile site instead.
The Verge was pretty user-hostile in 2015.
I fear that if Nilay got his wish and mobile browsers made a quantum leap in performance tomorrow, the result would be even more bloated JavaScript for even more ads and trackers on websites like The Verge.
Five years later, I’m sorry to say this prediction was dead on. The Verge and sites like it are a swamp, sucking time and energy from their visitors. That’s why gemini-space is such a relief—why I want to see more sites on Gemini.
6 September 2020 by Sardonyx
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File under: small internet
File under: grumpy