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trvz 5 days ago

[flagged]

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dang 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

Please don't be a jerk on HN. You can make your substantive points without that.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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don_neufeld 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Oh we definitely were, I don’t know too many of the folks there these days, it’s been 12 years since I left.

Hostile? That’s definitely a take. Curious what you’re thinking there.

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aapoalas 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

I guess one possible avenue of thought is that when I opened the linked article, I had a few seconds to start reading before I got one full screen modal dialog, followed by another 1/5th height popup dialog on top of that to click away.

Not that most websites are any better. My favourites are basically the ones that just show a default "sorry but this content is blocked in your region" text.

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dkersten 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Just now I opened a medium site and before I could even start reading I was hit with a popup to download the mobile app, some other popup that I ignored (cookies I guess), and within a second or two, a full screen modal asking me to subscribe. Often I also get a pay wall. All within seconds of opening the site. If that’s not hostile, I don’t know what is.

Needless to say, I closed the tab. No content is worth dealing with that over.

Sure plenty of other sites do it too but “other people do it” doesn’t mean it’s not hostile nor does it excuse the behavior. Medium is and has always been one of my most hated sites because a lot of tech people post there, a lot of medium links are submitted to HN, yet it’s a horrible place for the reader.

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Silhouette 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Probably the most annoying thing on the web lately is Cloudflare and all the "mysteriously verifying that you're a real human" junk.

Probably the second most annoying thing on the web today is when you click a link that looks interesting but the page you land on almost immediately says you have to do or pay something to actually read the thing the referring page implied. I don't even start reading a Medium article now if I can see that pop-up below - it's just an instinctive reaction to close the tab. I wish people wouldn't link to articles in walled gardens and search engines would remove those articles from their index - or if that's not reliable then exclude entire sites. Those walls break the whole cross-linking model that made the web the success it is and they waste people's time on a global scale.

I recognise that my position may be somewhat hypocritical because I'd rank AI slop as #3 and maybe #1 and #2 are making some kind of attempt to avoid supporting AI slop. But then I'd propose a more draconian solution to that problem as well - one involving punitive penalties for AI companies that scrape others' content without permission to train their models and possibly for anyone else using models that are tainted.

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don_neufeld 5 days ago | parent [-]

“Probably the second most annoying thing on the web today is when you click a link that looks interesting but the page you land on almost immediately says you have to do or pay something to actually read the thing the referring page implied.”

If you feel you’re entitled to everyone else’s labor - I dunno what to tell you.

On the other hand, if you value your own time so little that the only amount you're willing invest in the quality of what you read is $0 - I also don’t know what to tell you.

Either way, I hope you figure it out.

Medium (at least what it is today) tries to bring down the friction of making valuable content available at a reasonable price.

The alternative solutions the web has been to come up with is to take the valuable content and lock it up in hundreds of silos (Substack, etc), leave residual low value content marketing available, and then cover most everything else with a browser melting level of “adtech”

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Silhouette 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

If you feel you’re entitled to everyone else’s labor - I dunno what to tell you.

You're perfectly entitled to keep your content commercial if you want. Just don't put it in the same place as the freely available material that everyone else was working with and then complain when people find you irritating. Some of us are content to share our own work for free on the web and to enjoy work that is offered freely by others. We're all doing it right now on HN and many of us run non-commercial blogs of our own too. And we made the web an interesting and useful place long before sites like Medium came along and tried to centralise and commercialise it.

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amanaplanacanal 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I remember a time when Google search would downrank you if you showed different content to the user then you showed to Google. I wish we had that functionality back.

	▲	Kye 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		Those were called doorway pages. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doorway_page

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tipiirai 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I'm pretty sure you know what "hostile" means in this context — and what has happened to Twitter after Elon bought it.

	▲	don_neufeld 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		I really don’t, no. I’m also not affiliated with twitter or Elon at all, so not sure what the rest is about.