-
9 votes
-
Safari 13 Release Notes
4 votes -
How to Feed a Mars Colony of 1 Million People
7 votes -
How to grow as a game designer - What to read, where to get ideas, and knowing thyself
7 votes -
Automattic (owner of Wordpress) raises $300 million at $3 billion valuation from Salesforce Ventures
5 votes -
Hot Lava | Launch trailer
5 votes -
We need an alternative to Medium, and it’s not Wordpress
Introduction I hate medium and I think it should die a slow death. I tried to get some information on the subject to substantiate my belief. What Medium Does Bad Medium is slow On Gmetrix,...
Introduction
I hate medium and I think it should die a slow death. I tried to get some information on the subject to substantiate my belief.
What Medium Does Bad
Medium is slow
On Gmetrix, medium.com has a
F PageSpeed Score
, with a 11.8MB Total Page Size and a Fully Loaded Time of 12.4s . A random article got a little better, with aD
scorePingdom gives Medium a
B
score, with a page size of Page size 12.4 MB and Load time 2.15s (much better). This is from San Francisco, USA.Probably because I’m closer, the results for São Paulo, Brazil, are marginally better. The
B
score remains, but Load time dropped to 1.68s.Tildes gotta a
C
on GTmetrix and anA
on Pingdom. On Google, Tildes got a98
and medium.com got a48
.What is probably more concerning is that builtwith.com’s lists 106 different technologies at use on a single Medium page, ranging from AngularJS to Subversion, Wordpress Grid (aren’t they competitors?), Microsoft Azure and AliExpress. Tildes list only 13 technologies.
Medium is annoying
I’m sick and tired of opening a random Medium article and being bombarded with an immediate call to action for me to subscribe or to sign into a useless mailing-list. No: I do not pardon the interruption.
It’s 2019: I don't wanna sign-in just to read a free fucking article.
Medium weakens your brand
On Medium, you’re not a content maker. Your a Medium contributor. There’s a great difference. There are little customization options, but you’re encouraged to strengthen the Medium brand instead of your own.
Medium does not support Markdown
In 2019, this is utterly ridiculous. I should be able to write my posts in Emacs, Vim, VS Code, whatever. Markdown is a universal format that simply works and not supporting it natively is unacceptable.
The Default Editor Sucks
It forces you to write in a certain (clunky) way and it doesn't work at all.
Too Much White Space
Medium uses space poorly.
Not FOSS
Wanna host your own? No can do amigo.
Your content is not (really) yours
Wanna export your Medium posts? Should be easy, like a single button, right? NOPE. And it can stop working at any time.
Most Content is Shit
I don’t wanna generalize, there are some good things on Medium. But most Medium articles are bellow 300-words, full of unnecessary subtitles with nothing more than obvious statements I could easily get from Google. Most Medium articles are from developers trying to leverage their status by showing knowledge of trivial technologies.
What Medium Does Right
A Social Network With Content Instead of Content With Social Networking
This is something no amount of Wordpress widgets will ever top. Medium is a social network. It gets views, it gets you “applauses”, it gets you validation. It’s the Instagram of text content. Medium makes you feel good about yourself, and give you the shot (illusion?) of exposure. Maybe you can be in a publication, which is just an assortment of posts within Medium itself! See, you’re growing! You’re reaching a larger audience! They might even read your stuff!
The Alternative
It is obvious that Medium does a lot of things right. It is an actual social network that engages people like no other current blogging tool. People that know better use Medium to their advantage. People use Medium to talk trash about Medium. So we need another Medium. One that is just as social, but that is faster, less annoying, less of walled-garden and respects your content. I’m not in a position to do such a thing yet. But I certainly wish it existed.
35 votes -
Modern games look amazing on CRT monitors
23 votes -
Some NASA contractors appear to be trying to kill the Lunar Gateway
4 votes -
We replaced sixty-eight Tube adverts with cats
13 votes -
US drone strike kills thirty pine nut farm workers in Afghanistan
8 votes -
Closing the gap: cross-language LTO between Rust and C/C++
6 votes -
Anderson .Paak - Old Town Road in the Live Lounge
5 votes -
Just watched 'Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia' (1974). Any fans of Sam Peckinpah in the house?
Some of the works of Peckinpah had been on my watch list for months, sitting there in a subfolder of a subfolder. From the choice of Straw Dogs and Cross of Iron, I chose the aforetitled, liking...
Some of the works of Peckinpah had been on my watch list for months, sitting there in a subfolder of a subfolder. From the choice of Straw Dogs and Cross of Iron, I chose the aforetitled, liking the idea of embarking on a bit of a journey through Mexico with a gritty protagonist as we experience splatterings of violence and negotiate the thoughts of a down and out vagabond making a ran for his riches.
The film left me with mixed feelings. I enjoyed the path of Benny, experiencing how his character is unwavering in his desire to take that last lucky ticket out of debauchery street, but didn't care much for his journey's partner. While I appreciated the dynamic of the relationship, the understanding they both had that they weren't in love with each other, but all they both had, the chemistry and dialogue didn't really resonate with me at parts. I actually was rather glad when this relationship came to its abrupt end as the film entered its final 3rd.
On top of that, there was major issues with the sound which made it difficult to fully immerse myself in the journey at times. I found myself feeling I was watching a caricature of a 70s movie now and again, as opposed to be engrossed in a gritty noir-esque adventure.
But all in all, an enjoyable film which has left an impression. I always appreciate watching unpolished characters navigating circumstances plotted outside their usual courses, then watching how they deal with the inevitable implosion. From what I've read since, the film was one which perhaps accurately portrayed the director's life at the time of filming; dealing with various booze-infused demons. That rawness definitely shows, as does the inevitable imperfections in this movie's execution.
7.5/10
5 votes -
Huawei’s flagship Mate 30 Pro has impressive specs but no Google
4 votes -
Let’s go further and hope for every last drop of joy to be drained from the world
11 votes -
New DDoS vector observed in the wild leveraging WS-Discovery for amplification, attacks hitting 35 Gbps
11 votes -
What would a climate crisis doomsday bunker need?
I have been thinking recently, if a climate crisis is almost inevitable at this point what actions could an individual take to stay safe? I'm thinking some kind of underground bunker able to to...
I have been thinking recently, if a climate crisis is almost inevitable at this point what actions could an individual take to stay safe? I'm thinking some kind of underground bunker able to to sustain life. The main things you would need is power, water and food. The power is fairly simple since you could set up solar and wind generation and probably use that to grow food underground but I'm wondering what you would do for water. How possible would it be to collect barrels from the sea and have a personal desalination plant.
10 votes -
Rockstar releases their own game launcher, which is now required to play some of their Steam games like GTA5 and Max Payne 3
15 votes -
Viva New Vegas: A Comprehensive 2019 Fallout New Vegas Modding Guide
11 votes -
Popular Podcasts app Pocket Casts goes free, web & desktop app now subscription-based
22 votes -
How to save a glacier – Iceland's scientists offer hope with carbon capture technology
4 votes -
11 Forgotten Books of the 1920s Worth Reading Now
6 votes -
The tiny algae at ground zero of Greenland's melting glaciers
6 votes -
Dark crystals: The brutal reality behind a booming wellness craze
8 votes -
Babies born by Caesarean section have different gut bacteria, microbiome study finds
18 votes -
Erling Haaland, the Norwegian beast ripping up the record books
6 votes -
TinyGo - A Go Compiler For Small Places
9 votes -
Inside the little-known story of the socialist Green Corn Rebellion, which blazed through Oklahoma a century ago
6 votes -
Vadim Kazachenko - Yellow Night (1994)
5 votes -
Colorado town offers 1 gbps for $60 after years of battling Comcast
11 votes -
Too Much Dark Money in Almonds
9 votes -
iphone 11 pro camera review: china
7 votes -
The battle to rewrite Texas history
10 votes -
The disappearing schools of Puerto Rico: The island's vicious cycle of poor governance, neglect by Washington, and environmental catastrophe
5 votes -
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau wore brownface makeup to a party at the private school where he was teaching in the spring of 2001
15 votes -
The skills that helped Adam Neumann fuel WeWork's breakneck growth are piling up as potential liabilities as the company prepares to go public
7 votes -
New groups added, more work still happening on rearranging, moving topics, etc.
Alrighty, after the discussion last week, I've finally added the new groups, and everyone will have been mostly auto-subscribed to all of them. I'm still working on some of the details like adding...
Alrighty, after the discussion last week, I've finally added the new groups, and everyone will have been mostly auto-subscribed to all of them. I'm still working on some of the details like adding descriptions, and there will be some awkward pieces and interface aspects since we're still in the transition phase before I get those larger changes to subscriptions/etc. in (which I really hope will be soon), but it should mostly be fine.
If you want to change your subscriptions quickly, use this page: https://tildes.net/groups (linked from a button at the bottom of the home page's sidebar)
First, here are the new groups:
New top-level groups (everyone auto-subscribed)
New sub-groups (auto-subscribed only if you were subscribed to the parent group)
- ~games.game_design
- ~games.tabletop
- ~hobbies.automotive
- ~science.formal
- ~science.social
- ~science.natural
Some of this will be a little experimental and I'm not totally sure how it's going to work out (splitting ~science into the branches of science especially), but we'll see what happens. The names and such aren't necessarily 100% final either.
Since we now have some real sub-groups that people other than me can post in, I made a small behavior change to how sub-groups work until those larger changes are ready. Previously, subscribing to a group would automatically include all posts from its sub-groups in your home page as well. That is, if you subscribed to ~tildes, you would also see all posts from ~tildes.official, regardless of whether you subscribed to it or not.
Now, your home page will only include posts from groups (and sub-groups) that you are specifically subscribed to. So if you want to see topics from ~games but not ~games.tabletop, you should subscribe to ~games and unsubscribe from ~games.tabletop. However, if you visit ~games directly, posts from ~games.tabletop will still be included in the list there, regardless of whether you're subscribed or not. I know this isn't ideal, but it's not permanent and should be fine for now.
I'm going to get back to working on updating these groups and moving some of the older topics around now, but let me know if you have any questions or thoughts.
And as usual, I've topped everyone's invites up to 10. You can get your invite links here: https://tildes.net/invite
51 votes -
Patrick Street - Music For A Found Harmonium
3 votes -
A second chance - Twelve years ago, forty-seven dogs were rescued from Michael Vick’s dogfighting operation and allowed to live
7 votes -
Hodinkee's review of the Apple Watch Series 5 Edition in titanium
7 votes -
The new Steam Library
17 votes -
How Chagall’s daughter smuggled his work out of Nazi-occupied Europe
6 votes -
Productions that could have taken advantage of Swedish locations and craft expertise continue to run away to foreign locations for lower costs and tax incentives
4 votes -
Mike Pompeo calls attacks on Saudi Arabia ‘act of war’ as Donald Trump tightens Iran sanctions
6 votes -
The problem with sugar-daddy science
11 votes -
The Sojourn - Introduction to game mechanics
3 votes -
Astronomers detect the most massive neutron star yet
11 votes -
ActivityPub: The “worse is better” approach to federated social networking
10 votes -
Why rigged capitalism is damaging liberal democracy
5 votes