[HN Gopher] Keep stuff linkable
___________________________________________________________________
Keep stuff linkable
Author : animaomnium
Score : 134 points
Date : 2023-04-17 11:47 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (animaomnium.github.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (animaomnium.github.io)
| ericyd wrote:
| > Linkoln, no pun intended
|
| This seems disingenuous - clearly a pun is intended
| leephillips wrote:
| I agree about the importance of links. In fact, when I come
| across an article about something that many others have written
| about, and it has no links or references, I often just don't read
| it.
|
| But the links in this article, the ones generated by a script,
| are worse than useless. Meaning, they're a waste of time that
| makes the text worse.
|
| First of all, they are set to open a new tab. Rude. Second of
| all, a link to a wikipedia page for a term, for example, is just
| stupid noise. If I want to know what wikipedia has plagiarized
| about a certain topic I can go there and look it up.
|
| Links are not an afterthought, something that can be usefully
| tacked on to the finished text. Each link should be genuinely
| helpful, or back up an assertion. Ideally, each one should be
| non-obvious.
| animaomnium wrote:
| Thank you for taking the time to read the post and write a
| thoughtful reply. You make a good point: it is hard to find
| good links. These links suck. I apologize for this poor first-
| order approximation: I want to link to stuff interesting enough
| to merit a post or two in their own right.
|
| To that end, I keep a list of every interesting thing that I
| read. I plan to index that list, and make it searchable.
| Reliance on a search engine is a stop-gap to keep scope
| sensible at this point. There's nothing stopping other people
| from taking this idea and running with it.
|
| Given your personal involvement in this area, I understand your
| apprehension. Like you, I want to see a denser, more
| interesting web. But without tools to overcome the static
| friction of linking things together, I don't think we'll see
| density and utility of links increase any more than it already
| has. That's what I hoped to highlight in this piece.
| cratermoon wrote:
| > I plan to index that list, and make it searchable.
|
| You could do that, or you could use one of the reference
| managers that already exist and do this for you. At the very
| least, try out a few and see what features they offer. If
| none of them work for you out-of-the-box, perhaps try out
| what extensions and customizations exist, or create your own.
| EndNote, Mendeley and Zotero are popular. EasyBib.com and
| RefWorks also come to mind. Most of these work with browsers
| and website to make adding and cataloging references easy.
| leephillips wrote:
| Well, I appreciate that you're thinking about the problem of
| linking in general and writing about it. If finding and
| inserting appropriate links is laborious--well, so is
| writing. Linking is part of the process--part of the content.
| You can't automate it away.
|
| Like most HN readers, I've written my own content/information
| management system, and this makes keeping track of sources
| and inserting/formatting links much easier. Almost a
| pleasure, in fact. But there are plenty of open-source and
| other products out there designed to help with this task.
| joelfried wrote:
| > Almost a pleasure, in fact
|
| Could you elaborate a bit on your workflow that makes it
| almost enjoyable? My personal workflow can always use an
| upgrade and I'd love to hear what works for you!
| leephillips wrote:
| Very briefly, it depends on Pandoc with citeproc, and vim
| (lately nvim) with the vim-markdown plugin, which adds
| hiding to citeproc links, making the text easier to read
| in the editor.
|
| Next I have bibliographic information on every source
| that I use stored in a postgres database. I have a
| collection of scripts (in lua, python, bash, ...) so I
| can do what I want within the editor: supply a URL and
| have some information scraped from the page and stored in
| a note, one file per resource, with bibliographic
| information in YAML blocks and anything else that I want
| to add. Another script stores the important information
| from the YAML blocks into the database. I have a script
| that builds a bibtex file from the citeproc links in my
| document, for formatting bibliographies in the final
| version. I can generate HTML, PDF, DOCX, or plain text
| from the same source.
|
| The pleasure comes from having a set of keyboard
| shortcuts that let me jump instantly from a citeproc tag
| to my notes file, a local copy of the resource, or the
| copy on the web; also to search for notes with keywords,
| and a few more things. I can select part of my text and
| hit two keys to transform it into plain text or HTML with
| properly formatted links and references.
|
| For each notes file corresponding to a resource another
| keyboard shortcut brings up the list of articles
| referring to it, and I have a script to draw a graphviz
| graph of this reference network.
|
| I've built this up over the years; it's a mess and no one
| else should use it. Maybe I'll clean it up some day. It's
| really paying off now for me though: I'm writing a book
| with about 50 references for each chapter; it would be
| unmanageable without some kind of system.
|
| I know that there's Zotero and other systems out there.
| But I prefer that this work in the peculiar way that I
| like; these systems tend to become brain extensions and
| are somewhat personal.
| joelfried wrote:
| It's definitely personal, and hearing what you prioritize
| and why helps. Thanks!
| twic wrote:
| I wonder if you could change the tool to search your browser
| history, rather than the web. That way, it's more likely to
| pick up the things you actually read before writing the post.
| blitz_skull wrote:
| Why is it rude to open a new tab? I truly hate when I'm trying
| to view a link and it navigates me away from what I'm reading.
| IMO new tabs should always be the default.
| kevincox wrote:
| People have different preferences.
|
| Personally I have set `browser.link.open_newwindow = 1` in
| Firefox to force all links to open in the same tab, then I
| can middle-click to open in a new tab. This way I can do what
| I want without worrying about what the website author thinks
| I wanted.
|
| It does have some downsides though. Some sites don't use <a>
| tags but instead <div> with JS to open the link, then you
| can't choose to open in a new tab (on the other hand they
| can't force you to open a new tab so it is sort of even on
| average). Some sites break because they are trying to launch
| a new window that communicates with the parent. But overall I
| think it is a big improvement to the web.
| circuit10 wrote:
| I don't mind new tabs but what really annoys me is when
| things are set to open in a new window, and you have to
| fiddle with it to get it to merge back into the window you
| already have open
| twic wrote:
| Browsers could do two little things.
|
| Firstly, when mousing over a link which will open in a new
| tab, show a different pointer. I get a hand with the index
| finger extended when hovering over a normal link; it could
| be that but with a diagonal arrow, like the common "open in
| new window" badge, for a link which opens in a new tab.
|
| Secondly, in the context menu for a link which will open in
| a new tab, replace the "open link in new tab" option with
| "open link in this tab".
|
| As long as links are real links, and not JavaScript
| devilry, this would 85% fix it for me.
| circuit10 wrote:
| I'm surprised that someone downvoted this, I thought this
| would be very uncontroversial. Is there someone who
| actually likes this for some reason?
| dalmo3 wrote:
| I didn't downvote, but links opening a new browser
| window, except for the occasional auth pop-up, hasn't
| been a thing since... 2008? What browser still doesn't
| use tabs by default?
| nunuvit wrote:
| It overrides the user's browser settings. As a user,
| technically you can override the override, but it's only
| accessible sometimes through hidden settings or user scripts.
| leephillips wrote:
| The reader should decide. It's usually trivial to hold down a
| modifier key to open a link in a new tab or window, but if
| the `target` attribute is set in the link it's not as easy to
| override it.
|
| This debate raged in the early days of the web: what is the
| better practice? A consensus emerged among web designers that
| leaving it to the reader makes more sense. I'm proud that I
| convinced J. Zeldman that his early practice of using
| `target='_blank'` hurt the user's navigation, and so played a
| minuscule part in nudging designers in general away from
| this.
| zo1 wrote:
| Unfortunately, with the advent of SPAs, Web3.0 and the
| takeover of the web by Angular and friends, we can no
| longer rely on "links" behaving that way. For the time-
| being, we've lost that battle and the web is worse-off as a
| result.
|
| I.e. A lot of the time, links are actually various DOM
| elements that have onclick handlers and various JS-fuckery
| meant to obfuscate true behavior from the user and make it
| more difficult for the user to control the browser. Worse
| still, how about the user-hostile behavior of browsers that
| now allow JS to takeover and disable right-click, select
| and copy functions.
| cratermoon wrote:
| Yes, deep-linking with SPAs is mostly broken. This came
| up here a few weeks ago.
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34896472)
|
| Someone defended SPAs by pointing out that frameworks
| like React use Javascript and browser APIs to fake paths
| and history, and another noted that reimplementing basic
| browser functionality was madness.
| ElectricalUnion wrote:
| Worse than that, even if you somehow try to force onclick
| handlers to not obfuscate true behavior, most truly bad
| SPAs don't even have valid intermediary states accessible
| thru URLs; the only way to navigate the "application" is
| sometimes by changing the state with interactive SPA use.
| kroltan wrote:
| Middle mouse button (or control+click) in any browser opens a
| new tab (as long as you're using actual links, don't get me
| started on the morons who think "span with a onclick handler"
| is an acceptable substitute)
|
| Forcing to open on a new tab breaks conventional behaviour,
| it should be left as the user's decision (either explicit
| every time, or a setting in their browser. This setting
| already exists btw, if you like more tabs you can enable it
| in your browser).
|
| (Maybe a case could be made if the website is actually an
| application and there would be data loss if not for the new
| tab, but I would argue design your application so as data
| loss is not possible in that case)
|
| ---
|
| As for myself, the browsing history is something very useful
| to have, I like keeping the amount of tabs down to near one
| per activity, so I regularly use the history to go back to
| what I was reading before. Forcing new tabs means I have to
| reach for more advanced tools like tab trees, which are often
| not worth the cognitive effort.
| Phurist wrote:
| [flagged]
| crazygringo wrote:
| Because if the link is a normal one, the user can _choose_
| whether to open it in same tab (regular click) or a new tab
| (lots of UX shortcuts for this like Ctrl+click).
|
| But if the link is hardcoded as a new tab, the user has no
| choice. There's no way to open a new-tab link in the same
| tab. :( Not to mention that there's generally zero indication
| it's a new-tab link anyways, so not only does it take away
| choice, but it does so non-predictably. Ugh.
| horsawlarway wrote:
| Yeah - I'm glad I wasn't the only one who found the sentiment
| behind this article, and the technical article itself, so very
| much at odds.
|
| - links aren't dead: they're vitally important. Links lend
| authority. [...] Don't link to stuff you don't trust, SEO or
| otherwise.
|
| - Linkoln normalizes the post, replacing each wikilink with the
| best corresponding hyperlink it could find on the web, using
| Google
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| > _Second of all, a link to a wikipedia page for a term, for
| example, is just stupid noise._
|
| I sometimes link to the Wikipedia article when there are many
| things by a certain term, or when I'm using terminology that
| doesn't show up in search results (but is common in colloquial
| use). Should I do this a different way?
| leephillips wrote:
| You're using links to disambiguate your terms; it makes
| sense. My unpopular opinion would be to keep linking as
| you're doing, but find better sources than wikipedia.
| Something reliable and, if possible, authoritative, and
| that's more likely to have stable content--where you can be a
| bit more sure that what your readers will see when they
| follow the link is what you saw.
| [deleted]
| kris-nova wrote:
| Wow. I thought this was going to be a big rant piece on why we
| should all go back to dynamic linking again and I was so ready to
| start my Monday off with a spicy take.
|
| But yes we should all also be adding links in our writing and
| publishing on our own platforms.
| lordgrenville wrote:
| Here's a snippet I use for this kind of thing:
| (defun my/org-insert-wikipedia-link () (interactive)
| (apply-to-region (lambda (string)
| "Convert a string to a link to English Wikipedia"
| (concat "[[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/" (subst-char-in-string
| ? ?_ string) "][" string "]]"))))
|
| I imagine you could do something similar for the other examples
| in the post. Makes adding these links pretty painless.
| otterpro wrote:
| I want to implement this in my Hugo blog build process.
| Initially, I thought it was ironic that there was not a single
| link to Linkoln, until I realized that code is on the article and
| there's no code in github. > The script itself
| is... pretty dumb.
|
| Actually, simple code is the best code.
| mgaunard wrote:
| It's 2023. People (re)discover that the web is about hyperlinks.
|
| Incredible.
| tester457 wrote:
| I think the recent popularity of Obsidian, Roam and Logseq has
| something to do with it.
|
| People enjoy the power wikilinks have and love sharing their
| knowledge graphs[0].
|
| [0] https://preslav.me/2022/09/01/logseq-come-for-the-graph-
| stay...
| packetlost wrote:
| I love Logseq. I just wish it had a reasonable hosted backend
| so I can get my company to use it for their wiki software
| instead of Confluence.
| nesarkvechnep wrote:
| The amount of self proclaimed REST API devs who haven't heard
| of hypermedia is at an all-time high.
| expertentipp wrote:
| Creating CRUDs has been so degraded that entry level to work
| on them is none. Unaware yet candidates don't even have to
| create a PDF. Companies recruit CRUD devs from Instagram and
| Twitter.
| cratermoon wrote:
| Do most people write stuff and then go back and search for links
| to relevant content?
|
| As a writer, I'm continually inspired by things I read or watch,
| and when I find something, I add it to my references. I use
| Zotero[1], but it's not the only solution. When I start writing,
| I already have my notes and the links to sources and related
| content. I don't add in links as an afterthought, the writing is
| informed by the related material.
|
| Maybe, once in while, when I've done a couple of drafts and am
| getting close to the final version, I'll go back and add in
| links, but rarely do I spend time poking around on the web. I go
| to my references. Granted, the reference database takes effort to
| create and maintain, but the end result is far better than what
| I'd get just doing a web search for a term.
|
| 1 https://www.zotero.org/
| martin_a wrote:
| I'm not very convinced by the results of this "Auto Linker". I
| find most of the links in that article are rather useless,
| linking only to have a link to something.
|
| IMHO links should be chosen "wisely", with the intent of helping
| the reader to find more information on important parts of the
| article or referencing other work etc.
|
| Linking to the definition of rabbit holes is not really useful,
| if I'm not talking about varying sizes and depths of rabbit holes
| due to different breeds of rabbits and their prefered style of
| rabbit hole digging.
| truculent wrote:
| How much of this is down to the examples chosen? It seems to me
| that in practice you would generally use it with a specific
| link in mind (like the "Rust prehistory" or "notes on a smaller
| rust") ones; although I can see that those might be a bit more
| cumbersome to show in the post, given that they might use
| longer queries.
| martin_a wrote:
| Wouldn't it be easier to place specific links at that point?
| If you know what you want to link to...
| gavinhoward wrote:
| I am a blogger, and I'll stay a blogger even with GPT stuff.
|
| I agree. As bloggers continue to link only to good stuff between
| them, those blogs will become infinitely more valuable than the
| flood of trash that people will post from GPT.
|
| It seems hopeless that people will find that good stuff, but word
| of mouth will do it, I think.
| vanilla_nut wrote:
| The internet seems ripe for the return of a service like
| StumbleUpon. I used to find all kinds of great niche content
| through that service. A much better way to kill time than
| endlessly refreshing a feed or shitposting -- it feels more
| like exploring the internet.
| naravara wrote:
| I know of a couple:
|
| - https://indieblog.page/
|
| - https://cloudhiker.net/
| nwoli wrote:
| Basically what people who went against the "we won't be able to
| tell what's real and not" deepfake narrative even 5 years ago
| predicted. Ie a web of trust will still keep up paths of
| believable high quality content etc
| LinuxBender wrote:
| I am waiting for the day that GPT can _show it 's work_ so to
| speak. _i.e. "Debug last results"_ and get a list of all the
| trained input data including any URL's, books, text input and
| who performed the input, where the data came from. I am told
| this will never happen but I think courts will disagree once
| enough big mistakes and/or potential malfeasance or fraud
| occurs and people try to blame GPT. Or when GPT repeats the
| unsavory behavior we have all witnessed with social media
| algorithms leading to highly divisive outcomes.
| softfalcon wrote:
| I think this is a good idea. When we disagree about things in
| conversation, we as humans ask "where did you hear that?" and
| from there, we dig into the source of the thought process.
|
| Unfortunately, a lot of what folks are saying to you is true.
| It's very hard for GPT to cite its results because the way it
| is trained it is by design made to garble the inputs down
| into a simplified concept of guessing the next words given
| some input.
|
| It essentially just has a procedural generator for words that
| is seeded by your prompt. If you give "alfalfa" it will head
| off in a direction towards "farm", "hay", and "grazing" along
| with other connective words to form sentences. Because its
| concept of data is all around just word spaces, it can't
| really go "oh, I read about alfalfa on a Wikipedia article
| with x sources". It just knows "alfalfa is like the word
| grazing". I am simplifying to make a point, but this is in
| essence how these algorithms work, directions of traversal,
| guided by probability, towards word clouds floating in a
| grouped space.
|
| This is sort of changing though. Bing and Google (as well as
| many other researchers) are using specialized databases to
| provide further context that is fed into your prompts that
| come from real search results. Theoretically, they could get
| this tuned enough that GPT and other LLM can have the right
| data to provide a connection to cited facts alongside the
| hallucinated glue language.
|
| I feel like what you're asking for is valuable, but might
| take a bit before we really get it relatively accurate.
| kiachnish wrote:
| Blog post curation services like Thinking About Things are
| great for finding the best of the internet without the hassle
| of wading through the cruft. Anyone know of any others?
| kerkeslager wrote:
| This is one of the main reasons I think advertising is harmful
| and all ads should be blocked. We don't have a problem with
| shortage of content, we have a problem with filtering out all
| the bullshit where they've put all the effort into search
| engine optimization and ad monetization, and no effort into
| creating content.
|
| Ad apologists will claim "but how will we fund content
| creation!" and the answer is, if the content is actually good,
| people will be willing to pay for it--probably even if not
| forced to do so: lots of content creation is being funded by
| donations right now. "But that doesn't scale!" cries Hacker
| News. But what you mean is, it doesn't scale for a centralized
| entity that wants to collect rent on other people's work, and
| frankly, fuck those centralized entities. They're the ones
| creating the filtering problem. Paid, quality content creation
| inherently doesn't scale because it's inherently serial: a
| person/team creates one piece of content at a time. You can
| scale _distribution_ , but you can't scale quality creation.
|
| And the fact is, people will create _because they want to
| create_ , even if they aren't paid to do so. Maybe they _are_
| paid, but that 's secondary to the human need to create. As
| Quincy Jones said, "When you chase music for money, God walks
| out of the room."
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > "But that doesn't scale!" cries Hacker News. But what you
| mean is, it doesn't scale for a centralized entity that wants
| to collect rent on other people's work, and frankly, fuck
| those centralized entities.
|
| The problem is, payment is hard.
|
| For authors:
|
| - Micropayments are still ridiculously expensive
|
| - Users want it to be as simple and hassle-free as possible,
| which means you're stuck with Stripe, Ko-Fi, Patreon or
| PayPal as that is what people have, and they don't want to
| trust Joe Random Blogger with their credit card information
| or their real name
|
| - PayPal has been known to randomly close down accounts and
| hold your money hostage for months and years, especially if
| you're dealing with "morally grey" content (e.g. if you write
| about sex or anything related to crime)
|
| - Accounting is annoying because each micro-donator needs a
| formal invoice, you have to deal with dozens to hundreds of
| micro invoices at tax time
|
| - You're virtually stuck with credit cards and their
| limitations (again, see above, most of PayPal's ridiculous
| policies comes from the big CC networks) if your audience is
| international, but guess what, less than half of Germans have
| one [1], and outside of Europe the situation is even worse.
|
| For users:
|
| - Fuck no I don't want to fill out a form with CC number, CVC
| code, my real name and my address just to give a dollar for
| Joe Random Blogger's coffee cash
|
| - Fuck no where did I just put my phone for 2FA
|
| - Why is Joe Random Blogger now blasting my email address
| with newsletters?
|
| - Uh, I did not consent Joe Random Blogger to suddenly draw
| in 20$ a month instead of 5$
|
| The centralized entities (Paypal, Stripe, ko-fi, Patreon,
| whatever) take care of a ton of the associated bullshit, but
| they are expensive and, as I wrote, prone to randomly ban you
| without recourse - and not just ban your commercial entity
| but also your personal account - for life.
|
| In contrast, ads are easy: you embed some piece of code on
| your website (or set some identifiers in your WordPress
| theme/plugin) and get a check or bank transfer every month.
| That's it.
|
| [1] https://kreditkarte.net/zahlungsverkehr/
| kerkeslager wrote:
| > The problem is, payment is hard.
|
| Ehhh, it's not _hard_ , it's just _centralized_ , with the
| associated problems of a few entities having an oligopoly.
| I can have Stripe and/or Patreon integrated with a site in
| a few hours of work. PayPal isn't hard to integrate either,
| they just suck. (I have no experience with Ko-Fi).
|
| > Micropayments are still ridiculously expensive
|
| So don't do micropayments. Payments in the range of $5-$10
| are less expensive, and it makes you more dependent on
| loyal fans rather than generous drive-bys. It's harder to
| get loyal fans--you have to produce quality content--but
| when you get them it's a more stable source of income. And
| from the perspective of content consumers, that's exactly
| what I want: higher quality content. Larger payments also
| means your account doesn't get used as often by hackers
| testing out credit card numbers they bought off the
| darkweb.
|
| > - PayPal has been known to randomly close down accounts
| and hold your money hostage for months and years,
| especially if you're dealing with "morally grey" content
| (e.g. if you write about sex or anything related to crime)
|
| Yeah, that's a real problem, and one of the reasons we need
| legally-mandated payment-neutrality if we're going to give
| so much power to credit card companies.
|
| You'll rarely hear me say anything positive about
| cryptocurrency, but this is a rare exception:
| cryptocurrency is a viable workaround for content creators
| that need a workaround (which isn't most content creators).
| But to be clear, I'm not talking about crypto-bro flavor of
| the week: USDC is pretty ideal for this, or the two popular
| zk-Snark/ring signature privacy coins[1] if privacy is
| desirable. Variable value is a problem, not a feature, so I
| don't see a reason to accept that unless you have a need
| for privacy: paying with Bitcoin is dumb.
|
| > - Why is Joe Random Blogger now blasting my email address
| with newsletters?
|
| > - Uh, I did not consent Joe Random Blogger to suddenly
| draw in 20$ a month instead of 5$
|
| Again, these tend to be problems with lower-quality
| content. If you're trying to build a loyal fanbase you do
| that by providing quality content, not by spamming or
| stealing.
|
| [1] I'm not naming these coins by name because that tends
| to get flagged.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > Ehhh, it's not hard, it's just centralized, with the
| associated problems of a few entities having an
| oligopoly.
|
| It's hard to pull it off _without_ relying on the
| oligopoly entities. Like, I can publish my SEPA banking
| information on my blog, but that would just invite
| scammers. And it 's not real-time which means I have to
| manually process payments.
|
| And that's just dealing with the _payment itself_ and not
| solving the problem of accounting and taxes. It 's a
| difference if I go to my tax preparer and hand him twelve
| advertising revenue bills or if I'm handing him a wad of
| receipts by individual people.
|
| > Payments in the range of $5-$10 are less expensive
|
| They are, but good luck getting people used to free
| content to pay that range. Even 99.9% of Onlyfxns models
| rarely make a single subscriber above that. Cheap mass
| content is what the market wants (no matter if in porn or
| blogs), you got to fulfill a _very_ specific niche if you
| want to lure in some whales.
|
| > You'll rarely hear me say anything positive about
| cryptocurrency, but this is a rare exception
|
| Cryptocurrencies bring in their _own_ host of problems:
|
| - people will automatically discard your opinion simply
| because you offer crypto - the NFT and shitcoin crazes as
| well as the environmental issues crypto has (e-waste, CO2
| footprint, ...) have burnt so many people that offering
| crypto acceptance these days outside of anonymity context
| (e.g. VPNs, piracy) is just as negative on your brand as
| paying for Twitter Blue is (which is why Musk decided to
| not show any more if an account is legacy-verified or
| Twitter Blue subscriber).
|
| - can't do KYC any more so you have a harder time doing
| taxes (may be more of an European problem, given the IRS
| seems to even allow you to enter crime proceedings - if I
| would do that on my taxes here in Germany, I'd get the
| cops knocking on my door)
|
| - your whole infrastructure will now be targeted by
| sometimes highly sophisticated attackers going after your
| coins
|
| > Again, these tend to be problems with lower-quality
| content. If you're trying to build a loyal fanbase you do
| that by providing quality content, not by spamming or
| stealing.
|
| As a user, all I have _at a moment_ is to look how the
| content currently is. I have no recourse when the author
| decides to sell out, similarly to what happened to MANY
| Chrome extensions that suddenly went and embedded malware
| (e.g. [1]), or when they / their database get inevitably
| hacked.
|
| [1] https://www.theverge.com/2021/2/4/22266798/chrome-
| blocks-the...
| kerkeslager wrote:
| > It's hard to pull it off _without_ relying on the
| oligopoly entities.
|
| Right--as I said, that's a problem, and I'd actually say
| it's hard enough to be effectively impossible.
|
| Then again, I'm not sure how this is an objection to
| donation-based monetization of content creation as
| opposed to ads, given the average content creator isn't
| running their own ad network.
|
| > It's a difference if I go to my tax preparer and hand
| him twelve advertising revenue bills or if I'm handing
| him a wad of receipts by individual people.
|
| I'm not sure I understand this. It's not a wad of
| receipts, it's a single spreadsheet of receipts with a
| total at the bottom if you've set it up at all
| reasonably. I'm not convinced this is a real problem.
|
| > They are, but good luck getting people used to free
| content to pay that range. Even 99.9% of Onlyfxns models
| rarely make a single subscriber above that. Cheap mass
| content is what the market wants (no matter if in porn or
| blogs), you got to fulfill a very specific niche if you
| want to lure in some whales.
|
| I'm not sure where you're getting your data here. I had a
| Substack and was able to get a number of $100/year or
| $10/month subscribers within only a few posts, by
| providing well-thought-out educational content for an
| audience with disposable income. A commitment to posting
| weekly ended up being stressful so I ditched the
| Substack, refunded where it made sense, and am slowly
| working toward publishing it as a book. This is probably
| a less-profitable route, but it's more conducive to my
| mental health.
|
| I'm not saying it's easy, but it's not _that_ hard.
|
| > people will automatically discard your opinion simply
| because you offer crypto
|
| The sorts of content which I would recommend using crypto
| for as a workaround for centralized payment processors
| tends to not be reputation based. If you're writing a
| blog about permaculture, sure, people might discard your
| opinion because you accept crypto, but you also probably
| aren't likely to have your blog payments canceled. If
| you're writing a smut blog that might have credit card
| processing revoked nobody was reading it because they
| cared about your opinion.
|
| > - the NFT and shitcoin crazes as well as the
| environmental issues crypto has (e-waste, CO2 footprint,
| ...) have burnt so many people that offering crypto
| acceptance these days outside of anonymity context (e.g.
| VPNs, piracy) is just as negative on your brand as paying
| for Twitter Blue is (which is why Musk decided to not
| show any more if an account is legacy-verified or Twitter
| Blue subscriber).
|
| If you respond to what is actually in my post, you'll
| note that privacy is _exactly_ the context I was
| suggesting cryptocurrency for.
|
| > - can't do KYC any more so you have a harder time doing
| taxes (may be more of an European problem, given the IRS
| seems to even allow you to enter crime proceedings - if I
| would do that on my taxes here in Germany, I'd get the
| cops knocking on my door)
|
| There's nothing stopping you from doing KYC in addition
| to accepting USDC if accepting cryptocurrency is merely a
| workaround for having your payment processor canceled.
| Accepting anonymous payments is obviously off the table
| where KYC is required.
|
| > - your whole infrastructure will now be targeted by
| sometimes highly sophisticated attackers going after your
| coins
|
| There's very little reason to actually ever hold coins
| for a significant amount of time, so losses if they occur
| should be minimal.
|
| "Infrastructure" in this case can be generating a memo ID
| to associate transactions with KYC before they are able
| to view the payment address, which can be the address of
| a paper wallet. This doesn't require a sophisticated
| knowledge of crypto.
|
| > As a user, all I have at a moment is to look how the
| content currently is. I have no recourse when the author
| decides to sell out, similarly to what happened to MANY
| Chrome extensions that suddenly went and embedded malware
| (e.g. [1]), or when they / their database get inevitably
| hacked.
|
| Sure. When you buy a book, you're worried that the author
| might write a bad book in the future? If so, I don't
| suspect your concern is shared by most content consumers.
|
| I'm not sure the risks of running code that can auto-
| update itself are really relevant to content. So far I
| haven't heard of anyone figuring out how to go into my
| brain and auto-update my memory of blog posts I've read,
| and I'm quite happy to pay for things if I've already
| learned from them.
|
| A lot of these objections are a bit odd. What's your
| reason for preferring ad-supported content?
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > A lot of these objections are a bit odd. What's your
| reason for preferring ad-supported content?
|
| I don't like ad-supported content and hate tracking with
| a passion. However, it's reasonable to say that, at least
| at the moment, advertising is
|
| - easier (and not just technically, but also from the
| bureaucratic side!) to implement than donations or "real"
| payments, and note that some countries like Germany make
| a legal distinction between these when it comes to taxes,
| and mis-classifying income as donations comes with severe
| penalties
|
| - guaranteed, predictable income for authors
|
| - zero effort for the reader
|
| - zero direct, financial risks for the reader
|
| The result of this is the current, mostly ad supported
| crap infrastructure we currently have on the Internet.
|
| Personally, I'd advocate for drastic banking regulation
| and tax code changes to make paying for online content
| easier so that regular people can take advantage too,
| without going through middlemen extracting rent
| everywhere:
|
| - for clearly non-commercial content which most personal
| blogs/vlogs/podcasts fall into, completely exempt
| donations from tax and other bureaucratic (AML, KYC,
| invoices) requirements
|
| - create a globally usable (!) financial network with no
| censorship other than what's illegal in the recipient's
| country, low caps on transfer fees (0.1%), real-time
| transfers and "deposit only" accounts, so that
| transferring money across countries actually gets
| realistic, and I can offer my bank account number without
| having to fear someone draining my account. SEPA gets
| pretty close to that, but it's not joined with the US,
| Australia or Asia so at the moment there is no
| alternative for cross-continental donations other than to
| rely on PayPal and friends.
| nicbou wrote:
| Leaving all of this aside, people _just don 't donate_.
| They'll watch 100 hours of a YouTube channel and eagerly
| await new videos, and still not donate a cent. Donors are a
| very small fraction of the audience.
|
| I get 1 donation per 14,000 visitors. Even among the people
| who email me with complex questions, and get detailed
| answers that no one else offers, only a few donate. The
| link is not hidden or anything; people just expect content
| to be free.
|
| Just consider how much content you voluntarily consume, and
| how much of it you paid for.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| You are wrong on many points and right on many.
|
| - Apple Pay, Google Pay and Stripe Link will remember your
| CC details - so no need to fill them in again and again.
| This is as smooth as can be.
|
| - Micropayments are expensive. Forget about it. Creators
| need to come together under common umbrellas to get paid.
| That's what traditional publications were in the end. If
| people could put their egos aside a little, they could
| start making some good bundles.
|
| - You are dead wrong on accounting. Nobody has to make
| formal invoices for all their subscribers.
|
| - It's easy to accept SEPA payments and many other payment
| forms without credit cards through Stripe. Those germans
| who don't have credit cards have debit cards and they work
| the same.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > - Apple Pay, Google Pay and Stripe Link will remember
| your CC details - so no need to fill them in again and
| again. This is as smooth as can be.
|
| Yes, yet another middle man, doing exactly the same as
| PayPal - and at least Google is known for banning people
| for having too many refunds or tripping some anti-fraud
| ML model. Not something I'd trust either as an user or as
| an author.
|
| > Creators need to come together under common umbrellas
| to get paid. That's what traditional publications were in
| the end. If people could put their egos aside a little,
| they could start making some good bundles.
|
| Again, middle men. Middle men that are going to censor
| you for whatever reason - no matter your political
| direction, by the way.
|
| > You are dead wrong on accounting. Nobody has to make
| formal invoices for all their subscribers.
|
| I'm German and I'd prefer to _not_ have my donations re-
| classified as taxable commercial income. Our government
| 's interpretation on what defines "gewerblich" can be
| pretty insane - you have to provide a full imprint with
| name and address on your stupid cat photo blog if you're
| reaching more people than your family. There have been a
| number of people in my Twitter feed who got into serious
| trouble for anything from running donation pools for
| their pets, beer money-style donations, and most recently
| Onlyfxns.
|
| Our government is braindead when it comes to realities of
| digital life, and so are many others. Too many people
| just rely on never appearing on the government's radar.
|
| > It's easy to accept SEPA payments and many other
| payment forms without credit cards through Stripe. Those
| germans who don't have credit cards have debit cards and
| they work the same.
|
| As said in the first point, you're again at the mercy of
| a middle man that's hard to hold accountable. My local
| bank I can at least file a complaint at the banking
| regulator, good luck with any of the US institutions.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Yes, of course you are at the mercy of a middle man.
| That's been the reality since credit cards where
| invented. Literally every business online or offline has
| to accept this. The price is cheap considering what these
| middle men provide.
|
| You don't have to use a US card processor, there are
| European options. The fact is that these processors have
| millions of companies using them, handling probably
| billions of transaction every year. They are much more
| reliable than European banks, who will close the bank
| accounts of sites and journalists writing things the
| banks don't agree with.
|
| As for donations, fair enough. Why not get your donations
| to an account outside of Germany to escape that headache?
|
| > Again, middle men. Middle men that are going to censor
| you for whatever reason - no matter your political
| direction, by the way.
|
| I'm aware of the censorship concern. Still it's worth a
| shot to try to bundle your content with like minded, you
| don't necessarily need middle men for this.
|
| All in all, something will have to change with the way
| online content is consumed and produced - at least if we
| want to take full advantage of the blessings of the
| information age instead of rotting at the mercy of a
| media oligopoly.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > You don't have to use a US card processor, there are
| European options.
|
| You're still at the mercy of what the US networks deem
| acceptable. Even if you are German residing in Germany,
| have a German bank, your customer is German residing in
| Germany and has a German bank... say, you're a sex worker
| which is completely legal in Germany. And yet, you'll get
| booted off of _anything_ where the US card networks are
| involved.
|
| > As for donations, fair enough. Why not get your
| donations to an account outside of Germany to escape that
| headache?
|
| Still tax evasion. Yes, I could create something like a
| Maltese shell company, but that is even more of an effort
| to set up and maintain.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Either pay the taxes your lords demand or don't pay them.
| You can't have it both ways. You don't need to set up a
| shell company, you can set up a bank account and never
| declare.
|
| As for Visa/Mastercard - yes you are at their mercy. They
| are not perfect, but what are your options right now,
| realistically? Except for manual verification of
| payments?
| dfxm12 wrote:
| _" but how will we fund content creation!"_
|
| If I'm being honest, most "content" I've come across on the
| web doesn't deserve to be funded and its creators are better
| served creating something else if they're looking to be
| compensated.
|
| _people will create because they want to create_
|
| What great content I have come across is usually created
| within a similar ethos to FOSS. People know they've learned a
| great deal from others in the past and want to pay it
| forward, or they want to share something with the world to
| see how others might iterate upon it.
|
| _if the content is actually good, people will be willing to
| pay for it--probably even if not forced to do so: lots of
| content creation is being funded by donations right now_
|
| I've also seen great content from people connected to a
| patreon, so there is definitely room for compensation, if the
| content is good enough.
| nicbou wrote:
| There is a class of content that is not interesting enough
| and requires too much work to be maintained by hobbyists.
| Perhaps you will always find people willing to write
| interesting content about vintage computers, but you won't
| find many people who want to write about the intricacies of
| local bureaucracy, the tax system, and other boring-but-
| necessary topics.
|
| Donations just don't work, and people should stop
| pretending they do. I make literally 100 times more from
| affiliate marketing than I do from donations. If I had no
| integrity, that multiple would be even bigger.
|
| Let me put this another way: the bare minimum level of
| affiliate marketing covers all my expenses. Donations don't
| ever buy groceries. I could not put this much effort into
| my work if I had to get another job to put food on the
| table.
|
| More in a previous comment:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35522059
| kerkeslager wrote:
| > Perhaps you will always find people willing to write
| interesting content about vintage computers, but you
| won't find many people who want to write about the
| intricacies of local bureaucracy, the tax system, and
| other boring-but-necessary topics.
|
| > Donations just don't work, and people should stop
| pretending they do.
|
| ProPublica and Mother Jones are doing just fine on
| donations.
|
| But more to the point, these are absolutely not topics we
| want advertisers to have control over. I'll admit that
| donations leave many important forms of content
| underfunded, but the alternative you're proposing is a
| well-funded fox in charge of the henhouse.
|
| > I make literally 100 times more from affiliate
| marketing than I do from donations. If I had no
| integrity, that multiple would be even bigger.
|
| You might have integrity but you're a stopped clock: even
| when it's right it's never useful. The only means your
| customers without expert knowledge have of distinguishing
| your motivations is by looking at your funding, and as
| long as you accept incentives to lie, you can't be
| trusted.
|
| > Let me put this another way: the bare minimum level of
| affiliate marketing covers all my expenses. Donations
| don't ever buy groceries. I could not put this much
| effort into my work if I had to get another job to put
| food on the table.
|
| That's not evidence that donations don't work. That's
| just evidence you've built your business around
| advertising and not donations.
| saghm wrote:
| > You can scale distribution, but you can't scale quality
| creation
|
| I'm going to have to start quoting this; it's a much more
| succinct argument than I've heard before, and it captures the
| essence far better than I would be able to do even with many
| more words.
| kerkeslager wrote:
| It's not my first try: I've had years of having this
| discussion to improve its communication. I'm glad I've
| improved it enough that somebody thinks I'm doing it well!
| [deleted]
| diabolique_2 wrote:
| Just a word of writing advice, if you link content inside the
| text it should be first or last word, never in the middle. It
| just takes a lot of effort to know what the link in the middle of
| the text is about.
| JasonFruit wrote:
| I don't agree with that at all. For example, if I refer to
| violinists like [Oscar Shumsky] and [Yehudi Menuhin], and I
| create links from their names to relevant articles about them,
| I don't think you'd have any trouble figuring out what it's
| about. I think this article did a good job of that, linking
| from relevant text that clearly indicates the topic of the
| destination, except maybe for "Writing consistently...".
| diabolique_2 wrote:
| Personally it constrains my eyes if the link is in the middle
| of article. It simply takes an extra effort. However, its not
| just me. You can find online a bunch of research on the
| topic.
|
| ps. no need to downvote, its just an advice :)
| zztop44 wrote:
| Can you share the research on this topic? If I understand
| you correctly what you're saying is very different to my
| experience (and how popular sites like Wikipedia etc work).
| So I'd like to read the research. I've tried to google a
| bit but can't find anything yet and not 100% sure what
| keywords to search for.
| diabolique_2 wrote:
| sorry it was weeks ago, And by spending 5 minutes
| googling i couldn't find it. However I can summarise the
| point of that article. It basically says since links
| stand out, first thing you read from paragraph are links.
| If the link is on the beginning of the article, you
| naturally read the link and continue reading it. If it's
| on the end of the article, you'll first read the link and
| after it go back to begging of reading paragraph. If it's
| in the middle, you'll wonder what the paragraph is about,
| so your eyes will naturally read the first few words of
| paragraph and after it a couple of end words of
| paragraph. Before continuing to read article.
|
| The author that wrote that article was obviously an
| expert in UI/UX and has spent a great deal thinking/doing
| articles.
|
| An example that you've mentioned, Wikipedia, it doesn't
| have such huge contrast between link and text, and I'm
| expecting it to be full of links.I suppose thats the
| reason why but I don't do the described behaviour on it.
| However I often find myself doing the described behaviour
| when reading blogs, making me ignore/stop reading the
| blogs that do a lot of linking.
| zztop44 wrote:
| Thanks for taking the time to summarize it. Sounds like
| interesting stuff
| Karellen wrote:
| I'm still having trouble picturing how to actually
| implement the suggestion.
|
| Could you, as an example, rewrite the first paragraph of
| the fine article, so that the 3 links are either at the
| start or end of the paragraph (as suggested), in a way
| that makes the contents of the paragraph and/or the link
| context clearer?
| gnulinux wrote:
| > ps. no need to downvote, its just an advice :)
|
| Looks like you're misunderstanding. There _is_ a need to
| downvote because you 're projecting your opinion (that some
| people strongly disagree with) as "advice", as if it's a
| fact. It's correct to downvote imho, which is what I did.
|
| Similar to Wikipedia, it's ok, if not preferable, to link
| words in the middle of a sentence. I prefer it, some people
| I know prefer it. It's ok to give advice, but when the jury
| is still out, it's crucial to be humble.
| diabolique_2 wrote:
| my bad, i thought it was common knowledge but it appears
| it is not.
| Karellen wrote:
| > It just takes a lot of effort to know what the link in the
| middle of the text is about.
|
| How does specifically linking the first or last word (of ...the
| sentence? paragraph?) make things any clearer?
|
| Wouldn't it be best to just link the words that most describe
| what the linked-to page is about (maybe even the linked-to page
| title?), no matter where they appear?
| joseph_grobbles wrote:
| Here's a better approach - never, ever include a link unless it
| is important and cogent to the topic. Humorous or casual linking
| is just noise, and it can shroud actually useful links. We all
| can find information, so it isn't valuable linking to the
| definition of phrases or words, etc.
|
| If you're referencing a study, link to the study. If you're
| citing a tweet, link to the tweet. Otherwise save spurious links
| as they add zero value and are a distraction and an unnecessary
| decoration making text less readable.
|
| As an aside, I chuckled seeing the link to Atwood's "be a bigshot
| blogger" post where he recommended that people blog constantly
| about everything. For those who haven't kept track, that was a
| failure model. It made people basically give up on "blogs"
| because there was so much low value content, with people writing
| on a schedule rather than because they had actually interesting
| content. Now everyone just hopes that the rare useful post
| appears on a social news or media site.
| [deleted]
| CM30 wrote:
| I 100% agree with this, and I try to stick by it for just about
| every article I write now. Does someone I'm interviewing talk
| about a game or movie they enjoyed as a kid? It'll get linked to
| the Wikipedia page for said work, or if possible a place the user
| can (legally) buy or experience it for themselves. Reference
| something I made in the past? That'll get linked where relevant,
| and the same goes for anything mentioned by a source too. And
| I'll always link to the original source if possible too, not the
| random reprint/paraphrased version from whatever popular news
| site or service covered it this time.
|
| Love the idea of using a script to help with this too, though
| it's usually the harder to find stuff that's more valuable to
| link to, not things you ca immediately find with a quick Google
| search (like the Google home page).
| slushh wrote:
| >I have so many linkless posts waiting to be published: I could
| go ahead and publish them as-is, but by doing so I feel as though
| I'd be treating you, dear reader, unjustly.
|
| How about allowing the readers to participate? Posts could be in
| a pre-publish state and the community could add link suggestions
| and annotations.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| That sounds excellent! Thank you very much for this blog post.
|
| https://example.net/my-first-blogospam
| mschuster91 wrote:
| As a political blogger and upcoming author, links to sources are
| damn important for me, for a multitude of reasons:
|
| - they allow me to back up claims with cold, hard facts instead
| of "pure hearsay"
|
| - they defend me from getting held liable... say someone files a
| libel suit/C&D order against me. If I have a link to a proper,
| accepted medium (e.g. a newspaper or a TV station), I can defend
| my claim by pointing to the original source(s).
|
| However, it is becoming increasingly difficult to link to stuff:
|
| - publishers decide to put interesting content behind paywalls,
| leading to a constant noise of "can't read, paywall"
|
| - publishers decide to re-launch their website, but not set
| proper redirects so all my archives are dead now
|
| - German public TV/radio has to take web articles and TV/radio
| archives offline after a few days or months, because private
| media got a court decision and then a legal provision forcing
| them to take down content [1]
|
| - some media absolutely LOVE live tickers, but you can't directly
| link to posts in these for posteriority
|
| [1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depublizieren
| dingosity wrote:
| I love the concept of getting links "out of the way," though I
| did it slightly differently. Instead of having links in the body
| of the text, links in the text of my docs tend to be links to
| citations in a reference section on the same page.
|
| https://meadhbh.hamrick.rocks/v2/design/why_is_my_web_site_s...
| montebicyclelo wrote:
| I think it's a cool idea. What would be even cooler would be if
| it would do a content based search of your browser history, and
| suggest the most relevant pages for the thing you want to link.
| So, ideally it would be finding the pages you actually looked at.
| (Although, in practice it becomes difficult when you use all
| kinds of different devices to browse with, plus whether there's
| enough information to search with to retrieve the page. But I
| imagine something could be thrown together that does work a
| decent percentage of the time.)
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-04-17 23:01 UTC)