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.
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.
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.
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).
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).
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.
Oh man, Medium sucks so much.
https://mioi.io/blog/posts/10-reasons-medium
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.
Very interesting: I didn’t know all this about GitHub ! Could you please share some refs about the pull request model not scaling up ?
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
$PROG_Xjust released a new version. You have bumped the version + hash, & submitted a new request. The maintainer tells you all these little nits or stuff about how this package now breaks$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.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. 🙃
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.
Because regular folks can’t or won’t host their own website
Neocities?
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).
A friend of mine uses medium, do you perhaps know a good alternative?
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).
WordPress remains the easy, flexible way of hosting a blog. You can self-host, or there are multiple cloud hosted services.
There’s blogger. And wordpress.com also has a free teir that has up to 1gb of storage.