This site is now a “shinobi website” | Hacker News Reader

This site is now a “shinobi website”

tdarb.org

55 pointsbradley_taunt54 comments

Having no URLs clickable as hyperlinks is the literal antithesis of the web.

You're consuming the content in a browser, when it's supposed to be consumed by an RSS reader.

The page published to HN is meant to be viewed on a browser, as it is the introduction for the website, explaining its intended use.

Also, I'm sure many RSS readers do not automatically recognise URLs and make them clickable.

Edit: Another point being they're literally calling it a website.

In today's modern age of always-active surveillance, cancel culture and advertising, clickable URLs seem harmful. They can be logged, tracked and profiled. And most URLs are spam anyway, meaning most clickable links on the web are actively malicious. Just observe how few people on HN are even willing to click on links submitted to HN. At worst, you're taking your life into your own hands, at best you're probably just wasting your time on clickbait.

Making links clickable also forces the user to use browser or browser-adjacent tools of near infinite complexity, all of which are owned by surveillance and advertising megacorps associated with the American military industrial complex. By only having bare URLS in plaintext, I can use any tools I want to process them in any way I choose. Those tools can all be simple and free.

Maybe it's best that we be done with hypertext altogether. Clickable links were the original sin of the web. Maybe they were a good idea decades ago, in the naive cypherpunk days of the early web, but now they just provide another way to feed the panopticon, and form the basis for all of the unnecessary complexity, dark patterns and bloat in the modern web. Maybe we should just go back to plaintext and open directories.

So instead of banning dark pattern you'd rather turn the web into a stack of papers?

What better way to ban dark patterns than making "patterns" altogether infeasible? Why assume trust in a model already proven untrustworthy? Too much of the web is built on an honor system as it is.

Structure begets hierarchy begets conformity begets tyranny. Eliminate structure from the web and tyranny over the web can't emerge.

I have a solution to our expensive computer problems! Blow up all of the computers! Boom. No more computer problems.

Welcome to the Gopher/Gemini mindset, thinking technological restrictions can solve a policy problem.

With what magic wand do you propose to enact this ban?

Wait until you find out about IP addresses.

Unfortunately, IP addresses are unavoidable but we can at least minimize the damage they do to privacy.

Fancy words, but would it even be...an open, accessible web making differences in the lives of billions?

All mobile carriers in my country (or any, I'm guessing) go to great lengths to extract every last penny from my call plans. Should we go back to letters then?

What difference has it made in the lives of billions, other than inciting hatred and addiction? Indoctrinating the masses with disinformation and propaganda? Eliminating our attention spans, reducing our literacy and regressing us culturally to the level of spoiled children? I mean sure, maybe here or there one or two people have something interesting to say, or there's something worth watching or listening to, but the vast majority of it is at best objectively garbage and at worst actively malicious and harmful.

Maybe we should go back to letters. Physical, hand-written letters. A world in which everyone is forced to deliberate over their words and where the pace of information and progress is slowed down to what a human can comprehend, as opposed to the schizoid mania of constant noise we have now, seems objectively better.

We could go back to letters. And then scientific findings will be silos, our medical progress would be in the stone age, people would find out their loved one is sick after they've passed, and so on. There are wonderful things technology has enabled us to do.

But the sampling of the internet we're exposed to is heavily biased to hate speech and nonsense - the internet is pretty much social media for many. Looking through that lens, I'm leaning towards your view.

But there's also that other side.

> Clickable links were the original sin of the web. Maybe they were a good idea decades ago

Clickable links are literally the foundation of the world wide web...

It's a good thought experiment, but just that. The world isn't going to go back to text documents and rss for everything or give up the internet willingly. To make this happen we would either need to make this law (worldwide) or suffer some kind of unthinkable event that damages humanity significantly.

I have never understood or found a rss reader.

I assume the tech will die before it ever becomes an imperative.

Hipsters gonna hipster

Well, website is a wrong name, the correct would be RSSSite, something easy to follow from a personal aggregator, witch happen to be a classic feed reader.

Doing so means:

- you can select a moderately large set of sources (depending on how much posts are published and how much you read) and see the aggregated by YOURS criteria on YOURS own local machine, no propaganda from some giant can tweak your sources hiding something or pushing something in your "view";

- you can keep anything you feel relevant locally, depending on your reader with a single click and full contents, fully searchable/tagable/sharable etc no dependence on "web archive services" that might disappear or even get silently tweaked to change the history;

- you can organize your view of human information depending on your tastes, run your own statistics, analysis etc to form your own personal knowledge out of someone else published ones.

The above is the key toward a free information for a free society, depending on third parties doing something equivalent, like Google News, means being at the third party mercy since such hoster can push you toward certain contents hiding certain others with criteria you do not control. At a scale means classic full-fledged dictatorship propaganda because while freedom of publishing is still there nearly no one can reach "unwanted by big&powerful contents" since access is via aggregators and search engines.

That's why we need classic mail, usenet and RSS: because no one can control them at a whole level. They are decentralized services anyone can control just a personal slice.

Whilst i like the sentiment being a massive fan of minimalism i don't understand why Markdown to HTML with an ultra-simple stylesheet would not be a better solution. Trivial to strip Markdown to plain text and easy to convert to HTML, best of both worlds. Let the user choose how they want to consume the content either via RSS, markdown (or plain text) or formatted HTML.

I'm on the same page with you, but everybody's journey on a subject carries them to different points about a given idea.

I'm glad that some person has a more hardcore view on something than me, so I can see how it looks without exploring it.

As a person who's interested in minimalism and applying to its life in an increasing manner, I can see how one might want to explore a concept this deep. I also respect the website owner a lot for trying something different.

If you've got a script to generate well formed RSS from plain text it's almost zero extra effort to generate HTML from that same source text. Then you get all sorts of hypermedia features like hyperlinks. This plain text page has a bunch of links and footnotes that are not being well served by the medium.

RSS is fine and dandy but a majority of your audience may not even have a feed reader. Most readers will detect a site's feeds from metadata pointing to feeds. They won't be able to do that with plain text.

Even if you just stick with default user agent styling, a viewport meta tag can make content far more readable. There's no need to do anything more complicated than unstyled HTML with a few meta tags to get a much richer experience than plain text.

Literal plain text is an aesthetic but a readability problem on modern devices. No one is primarily reading on 80 character terminals. Unless your plain text has hard line breaks to enforce a column size it's going to break at a browser's viewport boundaries. On wide screen displays you end up with uncomfortably wide column width and on mobiles you'll get odd text sizes because the browser's viewport is virtual pixels that map is varying ways to screen pixels.

Completely agree. And if that doesn’t count as “shinobi” then who cares? Just invent your own thing and will likely take over shinobi since it’ll be way more reader friendly and still minimalist for the writer

I feel like something along the lines of Gemini would be most appropriate here.

You'd still have the minimalist approach (and I am sure that you could create a shell script to help you manage it as well) but you have the benefit of a minimal smattering of formatting to help the user - so e.g. actual links, headings etc.

This feels a little too far gone in my opinion - copy-pasting URLs etc is a step too far for me.

This is really cool. It's "Bauhaus as hell".

However, plaintext is painful to read in the browser. Painful. Pain which could be alleviated with 4-5 lines of CSS and still maintain it's shinobi status.

I totally get the minimalist approach to websites, but using plain text instead of semantic HTML elements means giving up accessibility. People who rely on screen readers will not be able to read your content in a pleasant way.

Accessibility is “bloat” to these people. The only thing that matters is the page loads via telnet on an 80 character terminal. Anything else is allowing the corporate overlords control your computer.

About "shinobi website".[0]

[0] https://shinobi.website/index.txt

While the idea is interesting enough, the name itself seems less-than-ideal due to cultural appropriation and all that. Especially when names like "anti-site" or similar would communicate the idea better.

Adding a XSLT stylesheet to that XML feed, will make it also readable inside browser.

Interesting idea to go full plaintext. Especially the commenting idea sounds wild.

While I'm generally all for minimalism and like reading plain text documents that follow some simple formatting scheme, the one thing that annoys me about it is links not being clickable, at least on mobile. I think on desktop there's actually a "visit url" Item in the right click menu, but no such thing on mobile (Firefox). You long-press the url, then it selects part of the it, manually fiddle with the markers left and right to get the full url selected, Copy, tap into address bar and paste. Is there a better way?

You're consuming the content in a browser, when it's supposed to be consumed by an RSS reader.

I just tried to fetch TDARB.ORG's RSS-feed[0] with RSS Guard[1] app (via development "nowebengine" AppImage build), but for curious reasons it shown empty (even XML-file include some posts data).

UPD: It's working now, after switching RSS-feed "Type" to "RSS 2.0/2.1" (by default RSS Guard set "ATOM 1.0")

[0] https://tdarb.org/feeds/posts.xml

[1] https://github.com/martinrotter/rssguard/releases/tag/devbui...

Which makes your content unlinkable in a way, since there is no way to link to a news item in an RSS Reader. So you can only ever send links to the version you're not supposed to read. :-)

The lack of URLs also means it's impractical for a reader of your feed to ever share your content. There's no real mechanism to link to any particular item in an RSS feed. There's also no guarantee any particular item in a feed will persist any length of time.

So if someone's feed extols the virtues of RSS feeds the only option for sharing that is to share the whole feed. If someone checks the feed a month later that great point made may no longer be in the feed. Since it doesn't exist as a post on a website it's just lost. No no one will ever be convinced RSS is the end-all be-all of blogging.

Just seems like a RSS fetish.

I don’t want to come across as an apologist for the author, but I can imagine him replying that this is an intentional trade off, and that for a larger-scale conversation about the work, the mailing list is a better option.

I’ll concede that at that point, a mailing list may be preferable to the RSS feed in the first place. Or Usenet.

I'm all for this, but a problem is that it doesn't play at all well with text based browsers either.

Without wrapping it's just a collection of very long lines that won't display nicely in something like w3m.

Maybe calling a "web* site is a mistake. Why not proudly announce it as an RSS site and mark the feed protocol accordingly?

That doesn't change the validity of their point. One could respond: "why are you generating html content when it's supposed to be consumed by an RSS reader?".

It's not HTML content.

Minimalism is a good thing, I like it. But the invention of hyperlinks is also a good thing. I think making urls clickable would be a nice improvement.

Bad idea, I will like to be able to click on links, and see pictures. ASCII art is fun, but cannot be a staple.

> ASCII art is fun, but cannot be a staple.

FTR, ASCII art on avaialble only inon https://shinobi.website frontpage ("index.txt"[0]), but not in introducing article ("introducing-shinobi-website.txt"[1]).

[0] https://shinobi.website/index.txt

[1] https://shinobi.website/posts/introducing-shinobi-website.tx...

Yeah, and there's no way to insert a picture except for ASCII art. Sounds like a really bad idea.

Well you could host it somewhere, and then link to it. Maybe you'd want it inline though so I guess we could wrap it in some text that tells the browser to show it. Come to think of it, some text like headers could so with a similar treatment. Now we have text but like, more, hyper if you will.

> link to it

Not possible in text-only Shinobi websites.

> Maybe you'd want it inline though

Yes absolutely.

> so I guess we could wrap it in some text that tells the browser to show it.

You must use HTML to "tell the browser to show it". Shinobis are text-only. So you're out of luck.

I believe you may have missed the joke, allow me to be clearer. I agree you must use text, but with those tags to allow that functionality (showing images and such), wouldn't it be better, or, hyper? A from of "hypertext" written in a markup language. Perhaps we should use an abbreviation to refer to it?

Pardon my tiny brain, your joke is one league above mine.

this is how i prefer to consume content (minus the non-clickable link stuff) but realize i am in the minority.

Now, one could find some middle ground by making the bare text function as an org-mode[1] outline.

Then, client code could make the content more navigable.

[1] https://orgmode.org/

To try this, are there any webapp RSS readers besides tt-rss.org that can be used without registration?

I have never found anything that reads RSS

Can we get like a super-shinobi-version with links or markdown ?

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