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The main reason reader mode is "underused" is that for a substantial fraction of pages, it does not work. Because of the way the human motivational architectur

The main reason reader mode is "underused" is that for a substantial fraction of pages, it does not work. Because of the way the human motivational architecture works, if there were a reader mode that always worked, its rate of usage would be many times higher than the usage rates of the current crop of reader modes. But of course, there is no way to create a reader mode that works for all web pages -- and that fact is one of the main arguments for competing with the web rather than trying to improve or fix the web. By "competing with the web", I mean creating online services that take the attention of users away from the web for some subset of things the web is used for, e.g., consuming static textual content, also known as reading. Gemini would be an example of an attempt to compete with the web, and it has the property that every page is essentially automatically in reader mode. The trick is to find some desire that the web is currently bad at satisfying, then improving Gemini to cater to that desire. For example, TOR was created (many years ago) by the US military to give its employees a way to browse the web without revealing their browsing history to the spy agencies of the US's enemies. But maybe Gemini's much greater simplicity would enable it to make a stronger guarantee of user privacy than the web is able to guarantee. (The more complicated a web browser gets, the harder it becomes to make privacy or security guarantees -- particularly guarantees of interest to only a small fraction of the web's users.) If that were the case, then whoever needs that stronger guarantee would tend to become avid users and proponents of Gemini. Getting very small numbers of avid users is considered an effective way to start increasing the number of users of a new online service. The idea I just described is probably a bad idea: there are probably other desires that Gemini or some other non-web service could cater to that are much more effective ways of creating avid users of that non-web service. (For example, the idea I just described has the disadvantage that even if the proposed improved version of Gemini could make stronger privacy guarantees than the web can (which seems unlikely to me) good luck convincing the average user who is not a security professional of that fact.) Finding them is hard! But trying to find one is a more potent way to try to improve things IMO than trying to fix or improve the web is.

kixiQu 5y ago
https://gemini.circumlunar.space/docs/faq.gmi https://gemini.circumlunar.space/docs/faq.gmi > Gemini is not intended to replace either Gopher or the web, but to co-exist peacefully alongside them as one more option which people can freely choose to use if it suits them. In the same way that some people currently serve the same content via gopher and the web, people will be able to "bihost" or "trihost" content on whichever combination of protocols they think offer the best match to their technical, philosophical and aesthetic requirements and those of their intended audience.
zzo38computer 5y ago
Depending what you are making, different protocols can be good (Gemini may be good for some things, NNTP may be good for some things, IRC may be good for some things, etc). Gemini file format also could be usable independently of the protocol, although I do not know of any implementations. I think that sometimes you might want to use Gemini without TLS (it is good they have it, but I am not sure that requiring it is so good), so my proposal is to make the new URI scheme "insecure-gemini:" for this purpose. In this mode, client certificates won't work, so TLS will still be required if you want to use client certificates. Also, unfortunately curl is not implementing Gemini protocol; adding that might help to increase its usage too, since then you can at least download files from it easily. However, I have seen discussions and some of them are valid concerns. For example, I think -k should not be the default; doing it different for different protocols doesn't seem like good to me. You can still specify -k yourself if you want to do. Also the patch does not implement redirects, even if -L is specified; it ought to be fixed to allow -L to work. Allowing longer URLs might also help. Furthermore, a better web browser will need to be made, excluding half of the stuff and implementing the other half of the stuff differently, before adding some more.
spideymans 5y ago
>But of course, there is no way to create a reader mode that works for all web pages -- and that fact is one of the main arguments for competing with the web rather than trying to improve or fix the web. Web developers go out of their way to break Reader Mode. What incentive would they have to create content for a platform that competes with the web, which actively limits their ability to deliver ads and degrade the reading experience? In any case, I imagine that a ML powered Reader Mode engine would perform significantly better than a semantically powered engine. It should be fairly straightforward to train a ML model to make a visual distinction between the actual content, and the ads and other garbage that pollutes webpages. Crowdsourced training data would increase the accuracy even further, while limiting the ability of developers to defeat the reader mode.
- hollerith 5y ago
  >Web developers go out of their way to break Reader Mode. What incentive would they have to create content for a platform that competes with the web, which actively limits their ability . . . ? It is unrealistic to expect most publishers of web pages -- or even most publishers of mostly-static text-heavy web pages -- to put their content on a competitor. It is still worthwhile IMO to try to steal from the web 1% or 2% of the web's user-hours ("person-hours"?) and that can probably be done (over say 5 years) with a small fraction of the web's static textual content (plus a little content that is not available on the web). My guess is that the largest beneficial effect (on the world) of doing that will be to convince more people that the web is a mess (by showing them a less messy alternative even though they will continue to spend most of their online hours on the web). Technically inclined people and people who used the web (or maybe Usenet) in the 1990s either already know that or cannot be persuaded of it regardless of what we do, but perhaps the most important effect of stealing 1% of the web's user-hours is convincing more people outside of those 2 groups of it. P.S. I have already noticed the potential for machine learning to help users of the web: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27856814 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27856814

kixiQu 5y ago

https://gemini.circumlunar.space/docs/faq.gmi https://gemini.circumlunar.space/docs/faq.gmi > Gemini is not intended to replace either Gopher or the web, but to co-exist peacefully alongside them as one more option which people can freely choose to use if it suits them. In the same way that some people currently serve the same content via gopher and the web, people will be able to "bihost" or "trihost" content on whichever combination of protocols they think offer the best match to their technical, philosophical and aesthetic requirements and those of their intended audience.

zzo38computer 5y ago

Depending what you are making, different protocols can be good (Gemini may be good for some things, NNTP may be good for some things, IRC may be good for some things, etc). Gemini file format also could be usable independently of the protocol, although I do not know of any implementations. I think that sometimes you might want to use Gemini without TLS (it is good they have it, but I am not sure that requiring it is so good), so my proposal is to make the new URI scheme "insecure-gemini:" for this purpose. In this mode, client certificates won't work, so TLS will still be required if you want to use client certificates. Also, unfortunately curl is not implementing Gemini protocol; adding that might help to increase its usage too, since then you can at least download files from it easily. However, I have seen discussions and some of them are valid concerns. For example, I think -k should not be the default; doing it different for different protocols doesn't seem like good to me. You can still specify -k yourself if you want to do. Also the patch does not implement redirects, even if -L is specified; it ought to be fixed to allow -L to work. Allowing longer URLs might also help. Furthermore, a better web browser will need to be made, excluding half of the stuff and implementing the other half of the stuff differently, before adding some more.

spideymans 5y ago

>But of course, there is no way to create a reader mode that works for all web pages -- and that fact is one of the main arguments for competing with the web rather than trying to improve or fix the web. Web developers go out of their way to break Reader Mode. What incentive would they have to create content for a platform that competes with the web, which actively limits their ability to deliver ads and degrade the reading experience? In any case, I imagine that a ML powered Reader Mode engine would perform significantly better than a semantically powered engine. It should be fairly straightforward to train a ML model to make a visual distinction between the actual content, and the ads and other garbage that pollutes webpages. Crowdsourced training data would increase the accuracy even further, while limiting the ability of developers to defeat the reader mode.

hollerith 5y ago
>Web developers go out of their way to break Reader Mode. What incentive would they have to create content for a platform that competes with the web, which actively limits their ability . . . ? It is unrealistic to expect most publishers of web pages -- or even most publishers of mostly-static text-heavy web pages -- to put their content on a competitor. It is still worthwhile IMO to try to steal from the web 1% or 2% of the web's user-hours ("person-hours"?) and that can probably be done (over say 5 years) with a small fraction of the web's static textual content (plus a little content that is not available on the web). My guess is that the largest beneficial effect (on the world) of doing that will be to convince more people that the web is a mess (by showing them a less messy alternative even though they will continue to spend most of their online hours on the web). Technically inclined people and people who used the web (or maybe Usenet) in the 1990s either already know that or cannot be persuaded of it regardless of what we do, but perhaps the most important effect of stealing 1% of the web's user-hours is convincing more people outside of those 2 groups of it. P.S. I have already noticed the potential for machine learning to help users of the web: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27856814 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27856814