Unbearable news
zainamro.com
zainamro.com
1. Loads in one request. Seriously, load it in your browser with the network inspector open. One request.
2. Is private. I don’t care who reads it. I provide this as a public service and have no interest in running targeted ads.
3. Links to source content. This is the worst thing about news websites today: the articles summarize complex issues and rarely link to source documents because they want to keep you on their website and pump you full of more ads. I joke that “you might accidentally learn something if you click one of the links” because it loads Wikipedia articles.
I get why people read paper news. It’s private, no pop-ups, and is fast. Legible News is as close as I could get to that. I hope you enjoy!
- facts mixed with opinions - cherry picked and maliciously re-ordered facts
The first one you seem to have taken care of
The second one I’m thinking of some solutions:
- random order (per visit) of news item on the page - each news item focuses on one information at the same time - each news item comes with “context”. This is the hard part because context can be cherry picked and ordered.
There is a spectrum between difficult to consume raw news and completed digested news.
And this matters... why?
(I don't load the embedded third-party stuff)
In fact I think this may be a hint at making better link aggregate sites in general!
One thing I am seriously afraid of is that our tech dystopia will drive local newspapers out of business. I hate to think of what that will do for corruption, inefficiency, everything. Just awful. I dread the day my local newspaper announces they are ceasing publication. The reduction is staffing over the last 15 or 20 years is incredible. I think the San Jose Mercury went from 1800 to 35. That is depressing.
If you are trying to sell a whole paper, you need a mix of content to attract all the readers. Once you have all the sports fans in your area buying your paper, you aren't going to get more by adding more sports articles. You need to make sure all the areas are covered.
With individual articles being the unit of currency, you need every single article to generate as many clicks as possible. You can keep adding more of the same and getting more clicks.
This is the flaw that people ignore in all "unbundling" efforts. When things are unbundled, people will only make things that have huge audiences. Bundling allows niche things to be made.
This also depends on how much competition you have. If there are maybe half a dozen competing newspapers, outrageous gossipy headlines and perhaps the promise of a nude woman on page 3 will sell an entire newspaper to a specific target market towards which you can tailor your advertising. Another newspaper can make lots of money by targeting a different market segment.
This is how clickbait works, too. Buzzfeed, Huffpo, Brietbart, and the Daily Mail could have all been paper newspapers that someone would buy in a competitive enough newspaper market. One of them is!
But I acknowledge that paying per article could hurt the "subsidies" within a paper, for example the revenue from sports section readers helping pay for investigative journalism, leading to a race to the bottom as you point out.
This could still be the case, but it should work more like craigslist.
The old paper journalism business "prioritize[d] content that generates views, rather than good reporting" all the time. It was called "yellow journalism", it incited the Spanish-American War, and it was the business model of William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer. In other words, if you are an excellent journalist, you get a prize named after the guy who founded and ran the Gilded Age equivalent of Buzzfeed.
Each US city used to have maybe dozens of newspapers of varying quality and bias. (This is similar to the UK newspaper landscape--in fact, the lower end of that landscape includes the Daily Mail, which translated its tabloid journalism model rather seamlessly to the era of clickbait.) What started killing print journalism was radio and later TV journalism, which were far less substantial (because they lacked the information density of the written word) but far more appealing (because of the ease of consumption and the stimulation of sound and video). This is what culled the vast newspaper markets down to the city-wide monopoly or duopoly system. And because the remaining newspaper readership consisted of the more literate and invested members of the population, print journalism briefly had more journalistic value.
Then cable news disrupted the broadcast networks, talk radio disrupted the editorial oligopoly of the major newspapers and TV news, and finally the internet broke the whole thing wide open. Including the glorious period of time when "blogs" were considered a serious threat to "legitimate journalism".
People who were previously “engaged” with local newspapers are now the commenters on news sites.
Sorry, but it is. Functionally literate people can read and comprehend many more WPM than are typical for human speech. As a consequence, written media are fundamentally capable of much higher information density than visual or audial media, with the exception of certain types of visual or spacial information which can still be printed or included with the written word.
Any "persuasive" impact from video is lost on me because I'm bored and frustrated after about 30s of watching (and that's after skipping the first 30s of "welcome to my youtube channel, today we'll be doing what the title says we'll be doing, as you know because that's why you clicked on this link" waste of time).
IIRC, media studies consistently showed a weak positive effect of print news (the more consumed, the more people learned) on knowledge of current events and a stronger negative impact of both radio and TV news (the more of such “news” was consumed, the less people knew about actual events.) The idea that print is, in practice, a higher form of media with regard to news is pretty strongly substantiated.
Audio and, especially video are great for conveying emotion, but except for very specific kinds of information aren't a great vehicle for conveying complex information.
Is proven by causation, not correlation. There's a difference between "the consumption of media" and "media consumers".
Reuters and the WSJ are old proofs that people ARE willing to just pay for quality news.
Note also that national news is fine; it's local news that's in trouble.
I track 60 or so news sites (mostly US and EU based) and as of today:
On a "Fast 3G" connection
the average article takes 45 seconds to load
and is 3.8mb in size.
Data and Speed Tests: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1c1zhkdvWE0WvG84TT3Cz...
The Harry Potter ebook is 1.3MB in size yet we wrap 25kb text of a news article in all this unnecessary crap.
It is all avoidable, even without AMP.
p.s: HN takes 950ms on 3G with no cache.
The average load time is 102.127 seconds
431 requests"
Author is asking for "text-only"; this of course only requires one request.
curl -4o https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/05/25/high-gear-current-cinema-anthony-lane | tr -cd '\11\12\15\40-\176' | sed 's/</\
&/g;s// /g;s/ *//;' #tab |sed -n '/./{/sectionBreak/,/<\/div>/p;/figcaption/,/<\/figcaption/p;}' > a.htm
firefox a.htm
The time spent by the browser on those 431 requests is significant. What if a simpler client was used, e.g.,
time printf "GET /magazine/2015/05/25/high-gear-current-cinema-anthony-lane HTTP/1.1\r\nHost: www.newyorker.com\r\nConnection: close\r\n\r\n" |openssl s_client -connect www.newyorker.com:443 -ign_eof > /dev/null
curl -4o /dev/null https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/05/25/high-gear-current-cinema-anthony-lane
time tnftp -4o /dev/null https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/05/25/high-gear-current-cinema-anthony-lane
time links -dump https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/05/25/high-gear-current-cinema-anthony-lane > /dev/null
I can ignore ads, but what I find incredible on major (insert news/tech/whatever here) sites is the reflow from not properly reserving space for both ads and lazyloaded images. The following seems particularly to be a problem on mobile and in apps like Apple News: load a page, scroll to the meat of the article, then experience 1, 2, 3 page jumps as stuff loads in above your scroll position.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/info/series/digital-blog [1] https://github.com/guardian/frontend
I applaud their efforts, but am continually underwhelmed by the final result. Without an adblocker the website is simply too slow, jumpy and exhibits strange behaviours that I'm not sure the problem can be solved - as long as advertising pays (most of) the bills.
The vast majority of news sites were free from the get-go, with the NYT being one of the first major websites to put up a website [0]. That's roughly 20 years of giving free content out on the web. The author is (partially) right that "the article text is all anyone really cares about". The thing is, plaintext is absurdly easy to disseminate and copy.
for most of the history of newspapers, ads were themselves a reason to get the newspaper, especially for coupons and classified ads. Of course, print ads, like print pages, were much more deliberately and better designed than what we experience today online.
[0] https://www.niemanlab.org/2016/01/20-years-ago-today-nytimes...
The Mercury-News even had a selective email feed of wire service content called Newshound. For $5 a month, you got up to 5 "hounds" (sets of search criteria), and every article matching your criteria was individually emailed to you, whether a wire story, a syndicate story, or one internally generated within Knight-Ridder. This was in 1993 if not earlier yet.
It's hard to imagine now, but papers like the Merc News – thanks to basically having a virtual monopoly – were basically printing presses for money. They most definitely had the capital to fund ventures that could save the company, such as their own Craigslist or Groupon. And I believe they and other news companies did blow a good chunk of money on failed tech ventures. In hindsight, they should've continued throwing money at greenfield projects, since just about any longshot success would've been better than the current state of things. But it's too easy and reductive to say, "Well the news industry should've just invented Google/Facebook if it really wanted to survive".
NPR has http://text.npr.org
CNN has http://lite.cnn.io
I've created http://noslite.nl for Dutch news
The issue is that the value of the words themselves has changed, both in the economic sense as well as culturally, not to mention the problem of the erosion of trust.
Obviously I understand they need to make money, but at the same time most of the news articles even posted to HN have some limit to reading (even with JS blocked). Maybe a student pass would be good for students like me. I don't think I'll have a problem paying for them... but then I'll have to manage each of these subscription.
It would be nice to have a Netflix for news (to pay for all news subscriptions in one go).
I realize that this is a contradiction from me, a HackerNews reader, but I feel that part of the reason I come here is for inspiration - on new technologies, ideas, and new code (show HN). When I refer to news earlier, I'm talking about the stories and articles you might have found in a newspaper. They may contain inspiration but IMO are much more clickbaity and only written to fill space.
It used to be that I was just contemptuous of mainstream news and annoyed by bias. Apart from basic critical reasoning skills, back in 1998 I took a course on mass communication and learned a whole host of dirty tricks they use, and it's just gotten worse sense then. Now it's gotten to the point where it's maddening to see brazen deceptions promoted by mainstream sites, and just absolutely sickening and not a little bit terrifying to see this huge push toward "authoritative" news sources by the likes of YouTube and Facebook.
So, given that there's so little I can do to stop the onslaught of deceptive, grossly misleading propaganda, I try to ignore it for the sake of my own emotional health. (That includes Hacker News, which I rarely visit anymore)
Print newspaper subscription revenues were pretty much a break-even with the costs of delivery. That does not include the costs of paper, ink, printing press and associated personnel, or the cost of actually staffing and running a newsroom. A large part of both their revenue and audience attraction was the classifieds section, which was killed off by craigslist.
Whether using it via browser or dedicated apps, it's as close to reading a real newspaper as can be. I particularly like the low-noise way of aggregating comments on articles. If there is comments with an article, a little indicator with the the number of comments is shown which can be clicked to read or ignore as desired.
But to get to that paltry amount of data we actually need, we have to sift through 50, 100 times as much garbage, all of it related to engagement or advertising.
For people who have transfer caps or end up in "jail" when they use too much internet, it puts them in a really odd place. We're charging them to pay for us to do things we want to do, not things they want to do on their own. Then, when we charge them, if we're lucky we reach our goal: more usage of our site or the user buying something they normally wouldn't, both of which involve spending even more money. This seems a bit like the old "heads I win, tails you lose" joke. There is an illusion of choice, but not really.
I wonder if this could be the endgame state of all add-related tracking, heavy ads, etc on the web.
... and I failed. I was not able to find one or several such news sources.
The nearest thing that I was able to find was 'In Other BSDs' series from https://www.dragonflydigest.com/ page, but it is very limited and small.
In all that I decided to create my own 'Valuable News' series, with latest (weekly) episode available here: https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2019/12/16/valuable-news-2019...
It may sound as shameless self promotion, but I really was not able to find such news source ...
Regards.
The article already mentions that.
Until we stop visiting these places their business model works and they are doing what they should be doing. There might even be an advantage in filtering out low end machines.
A more constructive idea imho would be to fix it with more sensible implementation of the circus. Like the article in the link demonstrates you can append an entire book to an article. You can also progressively load images and videos for dozens of advertisements without turning the page into a tragedy of bloat. 20 assets??? More like 200-500!
It isn't that what they want is so ridiculous, it is the way it is implemented. You should have one analytic implementation producing data used by all 50 advertisers in stead of each having their own combined with additional 3rd party ones for each.
Advertisement providers should deliver a usable product for their client where usable doesn't refer to ease of implementation for the news agency. They should make an effort to promote in stead of bothering people.
For what it's worth, this was Adsense back in the 2000s. At a time where banner ads were characterized by obnoxious "smack the monkey" flash games, Google's ads were clean, fast-loading, and un-obtrusive. They looked different enough from normal text to be clearly recognizable as an ad, but otherwise plain and tasteful.
However the sad truth is that, to some extent, bothering people is the desired goal of advertisers. Their goal is to get the attention of a customer and if they annoy some others in the process, it doesn't matter because the one customer they did get is worth it.
How much is the author willing to pay? He is going to subscribe to "every news site"? That seems like it could get costly. Chances are, he can only afford to subscribe to a few newspapers. If he provides a list of those sites, maybe someone would help him get the "text-only" reading experience he wants.
"Text-only" is within the user's control, not the website's. It matters what software the user chooses to use to retrieve and view the text. If the software is financed indirectly or directly by ad revenue, then "text-only" is likely to be more difficult.
This is why the author is complaining. He is using a browser funded directly or indirectly by advertising. He is therefore at the mercy of the browser authors and the website operators.
Bloated websites are horrible, but they are a symptom, not a decease. There is not point in complaining about symptoms.
The comparison with newspapers is good. This is what news websites would have looked like if the decease had been cured.
Further offer good coupons based on the users location and offer more coupons if they register for $3 / month subscription
They should easily be able to make decent money this way.
I have a good experience reading news and blogs via links.
Example:
links -dump "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/13/science/hermit-crabs-weal... | less
How do you get rid of that?
Which sites?
But it is true - they have had decades of experience crafting good headlines.
It's also really clear what the news of the day is. I can't think of a news site that has "front page news".
All of them today are lists of headline news, and prolonged exposure to clickbait makes headlines less appealing. It's the main reason I've never done a paid subscription to one; I just don't know what to read.
I also don't want videos or sound playing. I hate it when an article goes into a video without text; I'm here to skim something in 15 seconds, not 3 minutes. I'm glad Firefox blocks autoplay videos.
Ya got me :-) Very clever way to make the point.
> If news companies believe their core purpose is the dissemination of valuable information, it would make a lot of sense for them to provide a text-only static version of their website.
I think most serious news companies think they have an important democratic mission. But at the end of the day, the economics have to make sense in order for quality journalism to exist in the first place.
So why do we let people tell us it can’t be done on the internet?
Computers can cut ads that do tracking out of the page with the same effort they can cut out anything else from the page.
The difference is that ads without tracking remove the incentive for the user to block them. This is why people don’t cut ads out of the newspapers before reading. If the ads in newspapers were cameras, analogous to the tracking used in online advertising, you’d see people expend that effort. Just as you see people blocking ads online.
Precisely.
There is an entire multi-billion dollar industry built upon instilling fear in advertisers that their ads might not be fully "optimized," whatever that means these days. Google is at the head of this list.
Amazingly, Coca-Cola, McDonald's, Pepsi, Boeing, and every other large non-tech company managed to become enormous companies by advertising in significantly less targeted ways through newspapers, television, radio, billboards, magazines, etc...
The notion that ads not targeted by Google or Facebook are wasted money is a lie invented by the targeting industry to keep itself in business.
Companies want to optimize their marketing dollars, so they’re going to pay pennies if you don’t track users.
Nope, it's enough. News is just not what you think, it's far from simple business. The biggest value news outlets provide to people who own them is the value of influence and controlling the narrative. So they are deliberately chasing after the eyeballs to spread their influence and no business model that narrows the audience much is even considered.
It's kind of like how Bell Laboratories did some unprofitable and groundbreaking basic research back in the heyday of the AT&T monopoly. The lack of competition in AT&T's main line of business inflated prices but also let executives choose to fund a few unprofitable ideas that they considered worthy.
Now competition is fiercer and prices are lower. We're also not getting the positive side effects from monopolies that people had conceptualized as natural features of "the telephone business" or "the newspaper business."
I guess the real question that we have to answer as a society is: what's more important: democracy or an unfettered free market economy.
If the answer is democracy, the economics of our society can be changed to make it work for journalism. Maybe those changes will mean some Chicago-school economist's equation won't yield the highest value for some term, but that's perfectly fine. Despite some popular misconceptions, modern economic theories do not communicate the true, revealed nature of human society. The economy needs to serve society, not the other way around.
Most of those also work outside of adblockers, so, even when an adblocker is detected, the news/text reader displays the article text when the adblocked page won't (examples include Wired and the Los Angeles Times).
There is probably still some significant overhead in loading and parsing the original page, but, as some have pointed out, the lag is usually "acceptable" even on the original page.
There appears to be some added value in using these various strategies in multiple browsers.
If I can't drag the scroll bar to the bottom, what other ways are there to scroll all the way down fast?
(Other than using another browser of course.)
- Space scrolls down several lines.
- Scroll wheel
- Up and down arrows scroll down a line at a time.
- Page up and page down scroll down almost an entire page leaving what was the bottom-most section previously now the topmost section so that readers aren't disoriented or lost. Some apps let you configure this overlap size.
- If you like vim you can add extensions to your browser and use j and k. - Home and End keys go to the very top and very end respectively.
- Windows you can hold down middle mouse and drag to scroll. This isn't common in linux where people rely on middle mouse paste but is possible to configure
https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/101867/make-mouse-m...
On Mac this is apparently called "smart scroll"
https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/64115/enable-mouse...
If you just want it on chrome there is an extension
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/autoscroll/occjjkg...
In general however you do it grabbing the scrollbar in chrome is inefficient. You must grab a smallish UI element on the side of your screen. Your keyboard and mouse are always at hand.
Scrollbars back in the day were large and thick.
It’s just absurdly expensive compared to a streaming service. This is partly due to legacy pricing (I don’t think the price of a movie or TV show has gone down in many years, and all the providers charge the same) but also because I’m sure a lot of revenue for subscription services comes from people who buy the subscription but don’t use the service.
Paying per article may make sense for in-depth analysis, investigative journalism and other large pieces. But for the daily news it's probably just too small a unit.
P.S. I've been working around building an app for this for a while now.
Even if you removed all friction from the system, and had the government mandate every citizen of the United States 18 years or older automatically has $12 per month taken from their pay (a typical content service subscription cost) and put in a microtransactions fund to distribute to the sites you read, you'd only be covering about 20% of what US advertisers currently spend. An 80% revenue cut would put most newspapers out of business: it certainly wouldn't let them remove their ads while operating as they currently do.
The reason micropayments will never add up is that advertisers have more to spend than consumers. They have more to spend because a portion of every purchase consumers make is funding that advertising. When you pay your car loan, buy groceries, fill your prescriptions, you're giving advertisers money to spend. And you're giving them a lot more per month than you have left over to fund your own microtransaction pool for the month.
Ctrl+Alt+RFor further reading, see this one: (I presume this is a classic in HN circles, not sure) https://stratechery.com/2015/popping-the-publishing-bubble/
It was a delight.
ps: not only web based newspapers goal aren't aligned with users, I feel an unbearable hypocrisy of internet being passed as the disruptive revolution of the old world when in fact it's exactly the same (text, ads, survival, bias) but coated in even more fallacies. At least newspapers have a price tag somewhere.
I still use log parsers (awstats and matomo) .. really am just interested in number of unique/non-crawler visitors and don't care about the rest really.
That’s the only way it’s going to work.
I think news is negative and by and large news organizations serve elite interests. In the USA this is mostly to make democrats hate republicans and vice-versa (the slave class, formerly known as the 'middle class', is thus easier to manipulate and control). Since I like to keep my news ingestion to 5 or 6 minutes a day, I use The Guardian's (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news) free morning email of top stories. Really a nice service.
Also compared to corporate/elite lacky news sites like MSNBC, Fox News, CNN, ABC, etc., I find Democracy Now (https://www.democracynow.org/) to be a breath of fresh air.
I contribute to The Guardian and Democracy Now.
Edit; I also like The Drudge Report and RealClearPolitics because they're kind of just raw feeds of a bunch of articles that may not surface on choosier aggregators.
Is it?
You can access some 10 stories, not much more. There is no apparent functionality beyond that.
At least for NPR, their text interface is a step in the right direction - but a slap in the face at the same time.
I agree that too many people are overly devoted to either Fox News or MSNBC. Just my opinion but these two “news” services seem to care most about fracturing US civil society. We need more acceptance that in fundamental ways most Democrats and Republicans want the same things: opportunity for their children and themselves, security of our country, etc. It does not make money to run news stories that bring people together.
They never were; subscription prices never paid the bills for most publications, they just provided “paid circulation” numbers to support advertising sales, since paying subscribers were an indicator actual readership as opposed to copies printed that no one actually read.
This may be true of you individually, but not you statistically. We used to have more minimalist news sites, but they were outcompeted by sites heavy with trackers, banners, ads, and all the other cruft we love to hate. This is largely because, given the option between paywalled quality and free crap, most consumers end up choosing the latter.
I find this statement truly idiotic. The last time I checked almost all legit newspapers, that support quality journalism, are financially struggling, experimenting with paywalls and desperately looking for a business model that could support real journalism in this "everything is free on the internet" era.
We know that the market isn't perfect from Economics 101. Public goods, free rider problem, and other basic issues show us that market forces and rational players alone will NOT provide the best outcome for society.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_goods_game https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-rider_problem
We currently have three systems of distribution in our society - pure capitalism / globalism, regulated capitalism, and government run programs:
1. pure capitalism is where there is very little regulation or market intervention
2. regulated capitalism is where policies, penalties, or subsidies exist to shape behavior of companies in ways that market forces wouldn't
3. government run programs (or other similar programs) receive funding and try to deliver a service for free or heavily subsidized at cost
There are some markets / areas of consumption that are running well in our country (that we as a society are happy with the cost and quality of service provided). These include:
- Food, clothing, most consumables, physical goods, hobbies / activities, recreational media, etc.
Some markets that are not running well are:
- Housing, education, transportation, news media / information dissemination, health care, etc.
Now, there's 3 ways of affecting change:
1. Add in policies, penalties, or subsidies to an existing market to enforce specific behaviors
2. Reduce or modify policies to revert specific behaviors or combat inefficiency
3. Create a sustainable fund / program to allow the service be delivered without market forces attached
Unsurprisingly, these all require government intervention. It's why most people are so vested in the political situation of the present, because our government is the only power that can shape markets and solve these problems.
There is one other route - the public comes together does #3 - creates a fund / organization that is meant to provide the good and service without market forces attached. Now, unfortunately the public lacks a huge factor to sustainability - the ability to tax. So whereas funds from government can be sustaining because of taxes, funds from the public have to rely on a large endowment or other such thing in order to be self sustaining.
Local news, news reporting, and social media currently exist under system #1. But they need to move to #2 or even #3 if it turns out we really don't like giving the market what it values - our time on ads and our data for ads. Or even worse, giving the market the ability to shape our thoughts and public discourse.
That's known for at least a century. If you look carefully, it's know in some form for as long as people has talked about markets.
It wasn't for lack of knowledge that governments abandoned market intervention. People (as a collective) have some funny ways to form their opinions, they some times become radicals, moving from one kind of extremism to another, without stopping for a second to think they may be wrong before completely changing their opinions into the opposite of what they just were. If anybody has a good idea why this happen, it would be interesting to listen.
Because of this, many people don't actually know how the market shapes industries. We have so many activist conversations and so few policy conversations in public discourse, it reflects what people, even smart people, think about their ability to affect change.