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Another: "Related" interstitial elements scattered within an article. Fucking NPR now has ~2--6 "Related" links between paragraphs of a story. I frequently r
by dredmorbius 2y ago
Another: "Related" interstitial elements scattered within an article.
Fucking NPR now has ~2--6 "Related" links between paragraphs of a story. I frequently read the site via w3m, and yes, will load the rendered buffer in vim (<esc>-e) to delete those when reading an article.
I don't know if it's oversensitisation or progressive cognitive decline, but even quite modest distracting cruft is increasingly intolerable.
If you truly have related stories, pile them at the end of the article, and put in some goddamned microcontent (title, description, publication date) for the article.
As I've mentioned previously, my "cnn-sanify" script which strips story links and headlines from CNN's own "lite" page, and restructures those into section-organised, time-sorted presentation. Mostly for reading from the shell, though I can dump the rendered file locally and read it in a GUI browser as well.
See: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42535359 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42535359>
My biggest disappointment: CNN's article selection is pretty poor. I'd recently checked against 719 stories collected since ~18 December 2024, and of the 111 "US" stories, 54% are relatively mundane crime. Substantive stories are the exception.
(The sense that few of the headlines really were significant was a large part of why I'd written the organisation script in the first place.)
- nayuki 2y ago> put in some goddamned microcontent (title, description, publication date) for the article Do you mean metadata?
- dredmorbius 2y agoNo. Microcontent, a copywriting concept, not an information architecture one. "Well-written, short text fragments presented out of supporting context can provide valuable information and nudge web users toward a desired action." <https://www.nngroup.com/articles/microcontent-how-to-write-headlines-page-titles-and-subject-lines/ https://www.nngroup.com/articles/microcontent-how-to-write-h...>
- tomjakubowski 2y agoSee also HTML microformats: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/microformats https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/microforma...
- dredmorbius 2y agoA fascinating and useful concept, but not what I'm referring to. Microformats are more a semantic-web type thing. I'm talking of information presented to a non-technical reader through the browser.
- layer8 2y agoAnd the interstitials tend to break reader mode.
- pabs3 2y agoUse their text mode site: https://text.npr.org/ https://text.npr.org/
- dredmorbius 2y agoThat's actually what I'm referring to. Go ahead and load that up, then start reading articles. From the current headline set, there's "FBI says suspect in New Orleans attack twice visited the city to conduct surveillance" <https://text.npr.org/nx-s1-5249046 https://text.npr.org/nx-s1-5249046> That has three occurrences of: Related Story: NPR Which is specifically what I was criticising.
- dekhn 2y agoThose are placed on the side in the full version of the site (presumably using some styling that can't be rendered in text). The side article title is there, along with a photo. (I gave up on any sort of "text mode" of a site a long time ago)
- mrweasel 2y ago> Fucking NPR now has ~2--6 "Related" links between paragraphs of a story. Some sites even have media, like videos or photo carousels in or before an article, the content of which isn't related to the article at all. So you get this weird page where you're reading an article, but other content is mixed in around each paragraph, so you have no idea what belongs where. Then add to that all ads and references to other sections of "top stories" and the page becomes effectively unreadable without reader mode. You then left with so little content that you start questioning if you're missing important content or media.... You're normally not. I don't believe that these pages are meant for human consumption.
- eviks 2y agoIndeed, they is as though they don't want you to read the content they spend their whole professional life writing, just click on it...