mrbig's recent activity
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Comment on We Need An Alternative To Medium, And It’s Not Wordpress in ~tech
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Comment on We Need An Alternative To Medium, And It’s Not Wordpress in ~tech
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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 aDscorePingdom gives Medium a
Bscore, 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
Bscore remains, but Load time dropped to 1.68s.Tildes gotta a
Con GTmetrix and anAon Pingdom. On Google, Tildes got a98and 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.
10 votes -
Comment on Who is "John Smith" in your country? in ~talk
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Comment on What creative projects have you been working on? in ~creative
mrbig (edited )LinkI decided to write a novella. 17500 words is enough for me, I’m basing myself on the minimum length from both the Nebula and Hugo awards. Not that I have any shot, it’s just a baseline. A short...I decided to write a novella. 17500 words is enough for me, I’m basing myself on the minimum length from both the Nebula and Hugo awards. Not that I have any shot, it’s just a baseline.
A short story doesn’t motivate me enough and a novel is too daunting. I already have the screenplay so it’s easier.
It’s a horror story but there’s some beauty into it. It’s about the rise of the shadows that spent millennia in the mantle core after mankind ignored them after the invention of writing.
Before writing came along the Shadows had a symbiotic relationship with pre-humans, providing the storytelling we could not make. They used to draw energy from humankind’s love and now they’re pretty pissed to say the least. And after thousands of years, the last solar eclipse provides an opportunity for them to rise again.
There’s a whole prelude that is largely based in the first 40 minutes of The Exorcist.
It will not be a peaceful encounter.
The protagonist is a badass female sheriff based on my badass cousin.
I’d love to share a bit but it’s still in Portuguese.
2 votes -
Comment on Richard Stallman resigns as president of the Free Software Foundation, and from his position at MIT in ~tech
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Comment on Who is "John Smith" in your country? in ~talk
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Comment on What are you doing this weekend? in ~talk
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Comment on What are you doing this weekend? in ~talk
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Comment on Disney+ Reportedly Will Carry All That ’90s Marvel Animated Goodness Including ‘X-Men,’ ‘Spider-Man’ & More in ~tv
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Comment on What are you doing this weekend? in ~talk
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Comment on Disney+ Reportedly Will Carry All That ’90s Marvel Animated Goodness Including ‘X-Men,’ ‘Spider-Man’ & More in ~tv
mrbig LinkI said it before on /r/Netflix and obviously got tons of downvotes: unless they make some catastrophic mistakes, 5 years from now Disney+ will be the top streaming service in the world. They have...I said it before on /r/Netflix and obviously got tons of downvotes: unless they make some catastrophic mistakes, 5 years from now Disney+ will be the top streaming service in the world. They have the money and the catalog to pull that off.
3 votes -
Comment on Unofficial Weekly Discussion #4 - What is your most "thinking outside the box", "pie in the sky", and/or "out there" idea for Tildes? in ~tildes
mrbig (edited )LinkI wish we had a lot more mods and moderation was less stringent as a result - or at least less personalized. I also wish users could create groups and Tildes were less of a Usenet 2.0 And that...I wish we had a lot more mods and moderation was less stringent as a result - or at least less personalized.
I also wish users could create groups and Tildes were less of a Usenet 2.0
And that Tildes were more comedy friendly
3 votes -
Comment on Methods to sustain productivity. in ~creative
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Comment on How to build a desktop computer (tower) for Linux with pieces that are easily available worldwide (most especially South-America)? in ~tech
mrbig (edited )Link ParentSince I won't use it for games, there won't be a dedicated GPU. So I suppose there won't be a problem there. Wifi cards are a common issue with some distributions, but MX Linux seems to work with...Since I won't use it for games, there won't be a dedicated GPU. So I suppose there won't be a problem there. Wifi cards are a common issue with some distributions, but MX Linux seems to work with all of them.
1 vote -
Comment on [Request] Emacs/readline-like keys on text fields in ~tildes
mrbig LinkThanks. I already do that (atomic-chrome... it's great). But sometimes I need to perform quick edits and it doesn't make sense to open Emacs. I also use Grammarly on Chrome (English is not my...it's easier to just type messages in your favorite editor and copy-paste them to the textarea.
Thanks. I already do that (atomic-chrome... it's great). But sometimes I need to perform quick edits and it doesn't make sense to open Emacs. I also use Grammarly on Chrome (English is not my first language and it helps me a lot), and it's nice getting instant feedback instead of switching between Chrome and Emacs. There's also little synchronization bugs. That's the main reason for my request.
There are also people that are familiar with Emacs/readline, and prefer to type in the text field 100% of the time.
2 votes -
This should be simple fairly simple to explain: Even though the Vim front is well covered by things like Vimium, Vimium+ and qutebrowser (and it would probably be too much trouble to create a Vim...
This should be simple fairly simple to explain:
Even though the Vim front is well covered by things like
Vimium,Vimium+andqutebrowser(and it would probably be too much trouble to create a Vim mode for Tildes' text fields - especially when wasavi exists), Emacs-like keys might be a great addition for some people. Tildes seem to have a high number ofEmacsandcommand-lineusers right now. I frequently find myself hitting keys such as:C-pprevious-lineC-nnext-lineC-mfor returnC-ato move cursor to the start of the lineC-eto move cursor to the start of end lineM-dto kill wordC-kkill lineC-ukill backwards lineC-bto backward charC-fto forward charC-bto backward charM-fto forward wordM-bto backward wordC-wdelete-backward-word- not a default Emacs keybinding but it's on readline and I think it makes sense
And so on.
There are, of course, alternatives such as Emacs Anywhere and Atomic Chrome, but they require an Emacs daemon to be running and are not a good alternative for quick edits since which switching to another editor is not practical.
So here's my suggestion!
3 votes -
This post is related and in some part a repetition of my other topic on how to buy a laptop for Linux. Because I'm in Brazil, many brands and stores that do not ship to my country are out of the...
This post is related and in some part a repetition of my other topic on how to buy a laptop for Linux.
Because I'm in Brazil, many brands and stores that do not ship to my country are out of the question, and even the ones that ship usually cost more than I can pay due to currency exchange rate and shipping costs themselves. What are some universal stores, brands and models that I can probably find on my location, that won't give me much trouble running Linux?
I don't require playing games or top performance (8GB RAM and i5 processor would be the minimum requirements). And SSD would be nice, but, for my budget, it's a plus.
I just need something that is durable and works reliably under Linux, especially when it comes to audio and HDMI output, video graphics adapter support, booting from USB, hibernating, sleeping and power management.
Thanks!
6 votes -
Comment on What's a cheap laptop that works well with Linux and is available wordwide? in ~tech
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Comment on What's a cheap laptop that works well with Linux and is available wordwide? in ~tech
The problem is that these alternatives lack the social-networking part that is essential to Medium's success and is not inherently bad.
I would like to have a social-networking blogging platform that didn't suck.