4 ms·

The age of this post really drives home the inevitability of software enshittification. > Unroll.me The same Unroll.me that was found to be selling customer p

by rchaud 3y ago

The age of this post really drives home the inevitability of software enshittification. > Unroll.me The same Unroll.me that was found to be selling customer purchase data (because users gave it access to all emails) [0] > Pocket Used to pull full-text articles from interesting sites for offline reading, now defaults to content mill sites and sends you to the live web page unless you have airplane mode on. > Quora Genuinely a wonderful site to be on circa 2012, it had the "old internet" feel where knowledgeable people would write detailed answers. Now it's been completely gamed and become an SEO channel for SaaS companies, lazy answers from content writers trying to get visibility. [0]: https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/17/21027159/unroll-me-email-privacy-ftc-settlement https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/17/21027159/unroll-me-email...

CommieBobDole 3y ago
> Pocket That's the one that fascinates me - the Mozilla folks really shouldn't have the bigcorp "let's eat our seed corn today because nothing except this quarter matters" motive or even really a profit motive at all. It was a perfect opportunity to add a neat feature to their browser and maybe make a little money with high-quality promoted articles. But no, it pretty much immediately turned into a pipeline to shovel the largest possible quantity of garbage into in pursuit of whatever pittance they make from it, and the only downside is that anyone who opens their flagship product is immediately overwhelmed with a page full of internet barrel-scrapings. Which, you know, couldn't possibly be bad for the product, could it?
- rchaud 3y ago
  I don't blame Mozilla for this, although I do think Pocket doesn't fit in with their ethos so I was surprised when they bought it. Pocket's changes happened because of paywalls going up everywhere circa 2018. Before that, you could get a great selection of articles from top publications. After the changes, 90% of the material they could legally scrape without getting into trouble were the ad-funded content mill blogs, fluff like Inc.com, Entrepreneur.com and FastCompany.
- basch 3y ago
  I sort of feel the same way about Microsoft and MSN/Edge Home. You’re this giant enterprise conglomerate, and the page you first open on people’s computers is ad ridden credit card offers, and weird clickbait where thumbnails don’t match headlines. The sheer power of being the default home page on millions of business computers, and using that eyeball attention for such shitty purposes and a cheep buck is disappointing.
darreninthenet 3y ago
Any decent alternatives to Pocket?
- themadturk 3y ago
  I'm experimenting with Raindrop.io both as a replacement for the (long dead) Delicious and for Pocket, which I use for long-term bookmarking. I'm not happy with Pocket's shortcomings as far as organizing, despite my use of tags, and I really need a way of preserving bookmarks across systems and browsers. I also wish Pocket had a way of exporting my data (though maybe I just haven't found it yet). Raindrop allows me to take notes on websites and gives me a more structured way of organizing things, but moving stuff from Pocket is a royal pain.
  - darreninthenet 3y ago
    I've been looking at Raindrop as well, thankfully I don't have much to move from Pocket at the moment... might give Raindrop a go... big thing for me is that opening a bookmark needs to be as easy and upfront as opening a browser bookmark is
  - darreninthenet 3y ago
    There appears to be a Pocket export function here: https://help.getpocket.com/article/1015-exporting-your-pocket-list https://help.getpocket.com/article/1015-exporting-your-pocke...
    - themadturk 3y ago
      Nice, thanks!
  - toomuchtodo 3y ago
    This comment pushed me to pay for and switch to Raindrop from Pocket and I love it. Thank you!
- dctoedt 3y ago
  > Any decent alternatives to Pocket? I've been reasonably happy so far with Readwise. https://readwise.io/ https://readwise.io/

by rchaud 3y ago

CommieBobDole 3y ago

> Pocket That's the one that fascinates me - the Mozilla folks really shouldn't have the bigcorp "let's eat our seed corn today because nothing except this quarter matters" motive or even really a profit motive at all. It was a perfect opportunity to add a neat feature to their browser and maybe make a little money with high-quality promoted articles. But no, it pretty much immediately turned into a pipeline to shovel the largest possible quantity of garbage into in pursuit of whatever pittance they make from it, and the only downside is that anyone who opens their flagship product is immediately overwhelmed with a page full of internet barrel-scrapings. Which, you know, couldn't possibly be bad for the product, could it?

rchaud 3y ago
I don't blame Mozilla for this, although I do think Pocket doesn't fit in with their ethos so I was surprised when they bought it. Pocket's changes happened because of paywalls going up everywhere circa 2018. Before that, you could get a great selection of articles from top publications. After the changes, 90% of the material they could legally scrape without getting into trouble were the ad-funded content mill blogs, fluff like Inc.com, Entrepreneur.com and FastCompany.
basch 3y ago
I sort of feel the same way about Microsoft and MSN/Edge Home. You’re this giant enterprise conglomerate, and the page you first open on people’s computers is ad ridden credit card offers, and weird clickbait where thumbnails don’t match headlines. The sheer power of being the default home page on millions of business computers, and using that eyeball attention for such shitty purposes and a cheep buck is disappointing.

darreninthenet 3y ago

Any decent alternatives to Pocket?

themadturk 3y ago
I'm experimenting with Raindrop.io both as a replacement for the (long dead) Delicious and for Pocket, which I use for long-term bookmarking. I'm not happy with Pocket's shortcomings as far as organizing, despite my use of tags, and I really need a way of preserving bookmarks across systems and browsers. I also wish Pocket had a way of exporting my data (though maybe I just haven't found it yet). Raindrop allows me to take notes on websites and gives me a more structured way of organizing things, but moving stuff from Pocket is a royal pain.
- darreninthenet 3y ago
  I've been looking at Raindrop as well, thankfully I don't have much to move from Pocket at the moment... might give Raindrop a go... big thing for me is that opening a bookmark needs to be as easy and upfront as opening a browser bookmark is
- darreninthenet 3y ago
  There appears to be a Pocket export function here: https://help.getpocket.com/article/1015-exporting-your-pocket-list https://help.getpocket.com/article/1015-exporting-your-pocke...
  - themadturk 3y ago
    Nice, thanks!
- toomuchtodo 3y ago
  This comment pushed me to pay for and switch to Raindrop from Pocket and I love it. Thank you!
dctoedt 3y ago
> Any decent alternatives to Pocket? I've been reasonably happy so far with Readwise. https://readwise.io/ https://readwise.io/