The content here varies from philosophy to poetry to programming to prosaic FAQ. It is everything I felt worth writing for the past few years that didn’t fit somewhere like Wikipedia or was already written - "…I realised that I wanted to read about them what I myself knew. More than this - what only I knew. Deprived of this possibility, I decided to write about them. Hence this book."2 I never expected to write so much, but I discovered that once I had a hammer, nails were everywhere, and that supply creates its own demand3. I believe that someone who has been well-educated will think of something worth writing at least once a week; to a surprising extent, this has been true. (I have added ~130 documents to this repository over the past 3 years.)
You can find the Cleckley book in question online in various places like http://libgen.info/view.php?id=23550 ; even if you aren't that interested in psychopathy per se or judging how well the OP person fits Cleckley's characteristics, it's still a fascinating & worthwhile read, I think (my review: http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/373031205 ).
I think the word "rewrite" is misleading in that context. ABP does not rewrite existing referrers (which would in fact be "mafia style"), instead it adds its own referrer when correcting/rewriting links with a typo:
amazon.com/?tag=someReferrer will not be changed
amazon.comm will be rewritten to amazon.com/?tag=uf024-20
Not much better, arguably worse. If my intention was to go to Amazon.com, they're now "helping" me and writing a cookie that wouldn't have been there, and earning $ in the process. A bare WWW request should never result in affiliate income.
I tend to agree with you, but I'd be happy for Pinterest to convert any non-affiliate links to affiliate links. They'd need to make it very clear what they were doing before doing it.
I get value from Pinterest's collection, so I'm happy for them to skim a little bit of money from my purchase. Shopping is hellish, and Pinterest makes it easier for me.
I am aware that they got into trouble for using skimlinks to convert links. (I think they were converting affiliate links to their affiliate links which is pretty dodgy.)
It shows several stories at once, not just the google brainteasers stories.
2. In general, people would rather read the real article instead of a summary of the article. When someone submits a summary of an article to a site like HN or reddit, it is usually flagged as blog-spam because we'd rather read/support the original content than a summary with questionable value.
3. For long form articles, nothing beats reading the print-preview page to get rid of all the sidebars, comments, ads. Look at the print preview page: it is not possible to get less distraction free than that. Any other format has more distractions.
Even aside from that, the New York Times has some of the best information architecture in the business. These are the guys who did NYTProf. Their web team is awesome.
4.2: I see a vertical scroll bar in the middle of my screen on Firefox.
4.3 The black header bar which is fixed and stays on the screen all the time even though it conveys no useful information to me.
4.4: A bunch of text blurbs on the left side of the screen that convey no useful information to me.
You say you're trying to be as distraction free as possible, but that's not actually true because it isn't possible to have your business model and be as distraction free as possible. The print preview page is as distraction free as possible.
1. ... It shows several stories at once, not just the google brainteasers stories.
It shows one article initially. It will load the next one as you scroll down and approach the end. This is not counted as a Page View unless you actually continue down into it - you'll notice the URL change at that point)
2. In general, people would rather read the real article
instead of a summary of the article.
I would argue that this is a "real article". The NYT piece were 8 questions and answers. This article is based on just one of those questions - and expands on it. I'm not an editor/write so I'll avoid going deeper but thats my take-away.
3. For long form articles, nothing beats reading the print-preview page...
Tru dat.
Even aside from that, the New York Times has some of the best
information architecture in the business. These are the guys
who did NYTProf. Their web team is awesome.
I used to work there :)
4. Some visual issues I had with quartz:
4.1: No left/right whitespace around images.
The Featured Image (between Headlines and Text) is meant to be full-width to a max. Inline images should have left/right whitespace
4.2: I see a vertical scroll bar in the middle of my screen on Firefox.
Can you email me a screenshot (email in profile)? There are a few Firefox specific bugs we're working on this week. This may be one of them.
4.3 The black header bar which is fixed and stays on the screen
all the time even though it conveys no useful information to me.
True. Intentional. It can be expanded which reveals the large site map. There are big pros and cons to hiding it. Its an on-going conversation.
However we used to have it disappear altogether and people complained about that too....
4.4: A bunch of text blurbs on the left side of the screen
that convey no useful information to me.
Its a list of Headlines - thats all that is meant to be conveyed.
You say you're trying to be as distraction free as possible,
but that's not actually true because it isn't possible to
have your business model and be as distraction free as possible.
The print preview page is as distraction free as possible.
I'm confused. That doesn't make much sense to me. Yes, I am saying that we intend to be "distraction free as possible" - I'm not sure that I have to add a big asterisk * that covers "within the confines of an ad based business model" any more than I should also add "within the confines of a browser running a web site thats not a book" - I'm not trying to be snarky, just hard know what to make of what you said exactly..
Also - take a look at the ads... do we have them all over the place? Nope - we have them at the end of an Article - not in-between, not embedded, not inline. Thats important.
We are not perfect, but we aspire to continuously improve. Focus is on the user and the reading experience but with recognition that we have to pay the bills for 20 or so editors and journalists across five (maybe more?) countries. (I'm not counting devs, sales, hr etc in that)
Black Mirror S01E03: The Entire History of You was a pretty decent episode of a Twilight-Zone-like show about the dark side of having a video recording of your entire life.
Never heard of this series before so I googled it. Fun fact: according to a source on wikipedia Robert Downey, Jr. has optioned the episode The Entire History of You, to potentially be made into a film by Warner Bros. and his own production company Team Downey.
