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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   3322 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for February 21, 2024

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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What are your must-have browser extensions?

Mine are the following:

  • Search by Image - Right-click and get a list of multiple reverse image searches to search an image with. I mostly use Yandex, ime it's the best general reverse image search.
  • Vimium - Keyboard-only navigation for browser. It comes with Vim actions as well if you are into that. Using a mouse is a huge impediment if you want to be fast with a computer and my nontech coworkers think I am a wizard.
  • Grammarly. I might get some hate for this. But I just write out some shitty text without regard for punctuation or grammar and just click on all the red words until they are gone. Allows me to spit out passable text FAST. I wrote this comment in around a minute. Including looking up and embedding the URLs.
  • TamperMonkey, to run miscellaneous short JS scripts here and there. For example, turning all www.reddit URLs to old.reddit URLs.

Don't accept webp

What's wrong with webp?

Compatibility issues aside (which are ridiculous because the format is more than a decade old), .webp is actually a good format on its own merits. Far better compression and quality than JPEG, and quite close to PNG in terms of the latter.

It's funny/sad the creator actively participates in Twitter threads trying to clear his name when it's being maligned, but it's not really his fault that software devs are too lazy to implement it. It makes for massive savings in image size for hosts, and for little loss in quality, you'd hope they'd have picked up on that by now.

WebP wasn't awful for 2014 -- though it wasn't as clearly beneficial as Google tried to argue, the major alternatives were either obnoxious to implement (JPG2k/JPGXR) or had annoying licensing issues (HEVC) -- but it's since been badly outmatched by more focused variants. Google has been pushing AVIF as the next step, with good reason, and while JPEGXL isn't without its downsides (how many fucking flags can the example implementation have?!), if you were building a new project from the ground up (or especially with a lot of pre-existing jpgs to transcode) and didn't absolutely need motion video support, I'd almost always recommend it.

And it does have some obnoxious limitations. Pixel size is the one that's bitten me in the butt the most often -- yes, 20k+ pixel dimension images probably should be done in a mipmapping/tiling format like JPG2k, yet there's a surprising number of use cases it still comes up -- but the fixed chroma subsampling is the most incomprehensible.

I think WebP gets more of an unfair rap than format deserves, largely downstream of how aggressively Google pushed it and the extent it's been used as justification to cut off support for other formats in Chrome- and Chrome-derived browsers. But it's really frustrating what Google and Chrome developers have done as a result of the format.

It's often incompatible or partially compatible with other programs and websites.

For firefox and not mentioned by others: old reddit redirect.

Man, I just don't understand why everyone likes old reddit so much, maybe because I didn't get into reddit until after old reddit was over and done with. Why do people like it?

It has custom CSS for subreddits, so each of the most popular subs felt like a different site, making “reddit” more of a genre than a free forum.

It has a granular interface with the ability to customize the sorting and time range, and even the depth of replies viewed. I would often set Askreddit to two replies deep for fast browsing of the most interesting replies. Yet if I wanted to dig down in a fascinating thread of replies, I could.

It has massive amounts of info per page, reminiscent of the old web, where you can fill your eyes with as much as you want.

To this day, I use old reddit manually on my iPhone, making up over 80% of my daily web consumption.

New Reddit’s design has more white space and shows less content. It also requires you to load a new page in order to read comments that are more than a few levels deep, whereas old Reddit just requires you to tap a [+]. And as No_one said, Reddit requires you to log in to view some content, including sometimes perfectly innocuous content. Really the only downside to old Reddit is that it doesn’t have a dark mode.

Oh, and like you, I didn’t start browsing Reddit until after old Reddit had been replaced, so I don’t say any of this out of nostalgia for the old days.

IDK, for some reason I like the white space. Less congested. It's just like if someone dumps a lot of text without using paragraph breaks, I find it much harder to read.

I find it fascinating that I would encounter someone who likes it here. I find new reddit to be so thoroughly infuriating and unusable on every level that I truly can't empathise with how someone could stand it, and until now it seemed that nobody I could actually talk to did either - its fans, I thought, would perhaps be found among the same zoomer shadow-people who find longer stretches of text easiest to consume when they are overlaid piecemeal on an unrelated 5x speed video of someone running around a parkour circuit in Minecraft or Roblox.

How do you deal with the circumstance that it defaults to hiding everything? Do you just make a habit of clicking to expand the picture, text and comment section repeatedly? Do you not bump into the more aggressive child filters (new reddit straight up blocks guests from "nsfw" forums, while old reddit just requires you to click "I'm 18") or are you just constantly logged in? Do you not run out of RAM,/CPU if you have more than a handful of tabs with it open?

its fans, I thought, would perhaps be found among the same zoomer shadow-people who find longer stretches of text easiest to consume when they are overlaid piecemeal on an unrelated 5x speed video of someone running around a parkour circuit in Minecraft or Roblox.

Well, I'm definitely not one of those people. I rather dislike that kind of weird zoomer tendency. But I'd say that the desire to have proper whitespacing is less like this sort of weird zoomer multitasking trend, since it's a desire for a simplistic and clear mechanism for consuming text. What you're describing sounds to me like it has more in common with old Reddit, since it lumps everything together into an information overload.

Do you not bump into the more aggressive child filters (new reddit straight up blocks guests from "nsfw" forums, while old reddit just requires you to click "I'm 18") or are you just constantly logged in?

Well, the "I'm 18" filters are annoying, but until just now, I didn't know it was only a new reddit thing.

Do you just make a habit of clicking to expand the picture, text and comment section repeatedly?

I'm not clear on what you mean by this. Can you elaborate?

Do you not run out of RAM,/CPU if you have more than a handful of tabs with it open?

No

Well, I'm definitely not one of those people. I rather dislike that kind of weird zoomer tendency. But I'd say that the desire to have proper whitespacing is less like this sort of weird zoomer multitasking trend, since it's a desire for a simplistic and clear mechanism for consuming text. What you're describing sounds to me like it has more in common with old Reddit, since it lumps everything together into an information overload.

To be clear, I'm talking about this stuff (Googling revealed the term is apparently "sludge content"). I would have considered it less of multitasking/information overload thing and more of one where the user has trouble pacing their own information intake, with the Minecraft videos' most important aspect being that they convey the text a few words at a time at a fixed pace rather than presenting an overwhelming wall of everything at once. In other words, the users require something that's more IV and less pill (with the Minecraft video in the background being the saline in the metaphor). New Reddit seems to go in exactly that direction, as there is less on the screen at a given time, you have to take delaying actions to "advance", which results in a new morsel of information being displayed, and there is a lot of "incidentals" (whitespace, "designer" UI elements) to make it go down more smoothly.

I'm not clear on what you mean by this. Can you elaborate?

Comparing new [edit: themotte seems to autoedit new.reddit links into old.reddit...?] to old, for example, the latter immediately shows all of the discussion under /u/HyperConnectedSpace's post. The former is first gated under a "(+) 3 more replies"; when you press that, it still doesn't expand fully, but instead leave you with a "(+) 1 more reply", which, when pressed, sometimes (I still can't figure out what the conditions are) takes you away from the rest of the thread to a "you are looking at a single comment's thread" page. I've also seen a scenario in different threads where you have to press the (+) repeatedly for it to show even one additional comment; this may have to do with comments that were downvoted.

I don't know where I saw the picture thing (might only be some subs), and I also am failing to rediscover another obnoxious pattern where a small slice of a post's comments were expanded inline in the subreddit view instead of on its own page. In general, there seem to be a lot more distinct mystery interactables resulting in subtly different behaviours on a new reddit site, with the boundaries of each of them being unclear.

No

Superior hardware, I guess

takes you away from the rest of the thread to a "you are looking at a single comment's thread" page

Yes, I do find this annoying. I don't mind so much the "(+) 3 more replies", when it actually does work and when it also doesn't direct me away from the page.

It's far less shit. New reddit is less usable and looks worse.

You also avoid log in necessity for some content.

Higher information density mostly.

uBlock Origin. For my personal systems I also install SponsorBlock, I Don't Care About Cookies, and a script that removes Shorts from all the YouTube pages that have them.

Mostly, it's all just anti-ad (things I want to buy are never advertised) and anti-frustration stuff. Most of my interactions with computers these days are inherently mouse-driven anyway so having to use one doesn't bother me, and I buy laptops that have the mouse in the middle of the keyboard rather than having to remember keyboard shortcuts that were out of date 40 years ago so all the ostensible benefits of "you don't have to leave the home row" extend to every application I use passively.

For Firefox:

Foxy Gestures, Context Search, uBlock Origin (of course)

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