I discovered you could find the very latest news by using, what else, a search engine!
https://search.brave.com/news?q=news https://duckduckgo.com/?q=news&iar=news&ia=news
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/426 seems to be the open issue for this. Other things took priority before federation but now /c/all is becoming unwieldy so it might be good to take another look.
How desperate are you? I’ve made a quick and dirty tampermonkey script to filter unwanted communities from the home feed in one click.
https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/426314-filter-lemmy-ml-communities
I just click the ‘[Y]’ next to the community name and it will filter that /c/ out forever more. It really should be server side though.
This video is a barely disguised nostalgia video with reverse psychology for engagement. I had to switch away tabs to digest the audio only of this empty carb’d meta-critique.
For sure:
- YTubers target impulsive viewers to hit ad money metrics, so do games/everything, the idea is to keep them emotional and impulsive too.
- YTubers today are phoney viewhackers and less passionate or inspirational people
- YT was better when it was less focused on engagement as the expectations where not widely known or set
- Reaction thumbnail baits are out of hand
- Instructionalism or guidance posting “DO THIS, NOT THIS” is out of hand
- “WILL THIS?” or mystery posting is out of hand
- The will to be considered and/or ridiculed at all costs is preferable to no clicks
But the reason for all the bait is that brand is the only defensible power available to the YTuber (read: youtube employee), so videos discreetly bury the lede and redirect expected satisfaction back to the experience of their safe approachable persona.
Multi-decade electric vehicle mandates are silly, why do governments demand to stagnate on this less than perfect efficiency platform of tech? If it is so great it will get there on its own without signalling no hope for efforts to surpass it. Genius pops up rarely but they seem sure it won’t happen in their lifetime.
I don’t set out to consume a thing specifically because of its newness. I recognize I can easily dismiss all other things previously considered. It just so happens that those old things out there, through no fault of their own, had time to age and be surpassed by other content… is this the hot take or new-to-me content that will help me improve my understanding and life? well, let’s find out, I got nothing better to do and deep diving into the source myself is a chore.
- Scroll Anywhere - hold right click to scroll, for ergonomics.
- BlockTube - one click and spammy clickbait channels are blocked forever
- Dark Reader - beautiful auto styling for dark mode normal web pages.
- EmailThis - sometimes you just want to read an article in its cleanest form on your other device without being signed in to both devices or whatever firefox makes you do. I just use my free temp email from https://emaildrop.io
honorable mentions to convert articles on annoying sites to nicer layout or TTS sound file:
Best to upgrade when the efficiency gains expected from the next generation are going to be insignificant. Which means technically now is a great time to upgrade as they are already talking about future proof, forever PCs. Windows is not even looking to surpass version 10 and is no longer the poster child of Microsoft.
However, smartphone and laptop manufacturers seem in cohorts to ensure their entire suite of products (even top end) leave you wanting for something (next year). Choice fatigue on the consumer side is a real thing, and it’s caused by choice maxxing from makers who all try to frustrate consumers into a more profitable tier but savvy consumers see the showstopping feature denial at the lower “fragile” tiers. It only takes one manufacturer to upset the space but it’s too tantalizing not to do the same once there (see Xiaomi).
They usually say “markets are efficient at serving consumer wants” and most of those desires are manufactured if you ask me. Markets have to be regulated to offset big companies that want to cruise on inefficient monopoly-stifle-everybody-else mode for as long as possible.
What you are getting at touches on the element of competition, which brings differentiation to products so that they can be made in ways you find ethical at the price you are willing to pay, in this case also zero. The Open Source replicas come with all the fragility and concern for future maintenance and churn that is unbearable to ponder for most, so they accept ads into their life until something really worth changing to comes along.
Got to remember too, it’s easy to copy design decisions after they’ve been thoroughly tested for user stickiness. Things that seems simple in hindsight probably required great insight and gusto to confirm with the angry market, who don’t even know what they want (you know the Faster Horses Henry Ford quote). I have to keep reminding myself that the underlying tech piping is usually secondary… facebook could have been built in 1999 with the same tech but the ubiquity of access at the timing of actual release was simply perfect.
Not just to see WHEN but WHERE in the market are the entry points, google can cross reference all the kids apps and user habits that are already formed and hijack away. It’s not a certainty but it’s like the ambulance driver who moonlights as a personal injury lawyer, instead of a heart monitor in the back of the van, it’s the victim’s favorite slot machine to decide the fee structure.
They say the newcomer needs to be 9x as good as the incumbent and to win you must make legacy users cycle through the old reward mission at a faster rate than before. So much for distraction neutral life furthering apps in the future.
Quality journalism and long-form seem to have died off together, or were they killed off by social media platforms monopolizing all our precious in-between times of life by burying flecks of gold so deep in our feeds?
On the flip side, us readers should have predicted that these digital editor algorithms have built-in disdain for human flourishing and we should have pledged to simulate a “magazine reading” browsing style i.e. limit ourselves to a certain number of headlines parsed, per quality articles read, per day. So if the quality drops, the interaction stops, like an exploitation stop-gap. Instead we let the algorithms alter us.
We often turn to long-form articles to escape from the endless headline scrolling. This piece is a reminder that the length of a piece alone isn’t an indicator of quality, and that unlimited web publishing still has some things to learn about the art of constraint…
10% set as another default is just to avoid the stigma of being 100% google pions.
I can’t wait until vivaldi introduces a random default search engine feature on each right-click search. The browsers for sure contributed to the search monopoly but now is as good a time as any to right that wrong.