TODAY it's no longer a holiday, so it's officially the first working day of 2020. Having explained earlier on why social control media can be a waste of time [1, 2], this coming year we'll try to be a lot more productive and publish more articles, even if some will be relatively short (but still have a lot more substance in them than mere "tweets"). A decade ago we published, on average, about ten posts per day. That was before social control media came along (and had gained so much traction, taking up so much time).
"A decade ago we published, on average, about ten posts per day."Today we publish 20 posts in 24 hours and wholeheartedly welcome feedback from regular readers. We're going to assess the response to today's 'experiment'. Some have already suggested that we should flag posts that are only memes, but the main question then becomes, what would be the most suitable way to flag them? In the past we preceded with "[ES]" all of our Spanish translations (of Techrights articles). ⬆
Comments
Canta
2020-01-02 22:34:54
The main (only?) problem I see with this is the relation between post pace and post size, in relation to the screen and scroll size.
I mean... this single "/?stories" page is actually working as a social media page: you get random-but-personalized stuff (the "personalization" here is the Free Software thematic), you scroll a lot, and when you get to the bottom you press F5 in order to see if there's anything new. One does that when there are lots of new stuff constantly coming, otherwise refreshing has no sense. And so nasty people had put the the infinite scroll in order to (successfuly) stimulate it.
On the other hand, if one stops to actually read a post slowly and with attention, one also knows that there are lots of other posts coming, even when you're still scrolling for your single post. And I use Techrights as a source of news, so I very much care for new posts. So at this pace I kinda hurry to scroll the longer posts.
Then theres the number of posts per page. As it's static, and has nothing to do with post pace, posts get down there in the "title only" section pretty fast. Today I found that I've missed lots of posts because I didn't saw them in "/?stories" by scrolling. So now I think I better spend a lot more time checking out older posts on order to see if I didn't missed anything. Which kinda sounds like a social network main page.
I'm not forced to do any of that. And I have the tools for not doing it. But I also believe all that is consequence of the post pace AND post size AND scroll size.
I believe that the meme/just-a-single-image-with-a-comment posts should not occupy the same scroll space as the text ones, and also neither should have the same weight in terms of "number of posts in this page". I don't mean treat them as second class citizens, but as different kind of contents that imply different phenomenons and interactions with them.
Just my 2 cents.
That said, BTW... what's wrong with the flag "MEME"? You seem to have doubts about it, when it seems pretty straightforward.