I like ArchiveBox, but in my experience, it kept on running into issues saving pages, and stopped functioning after it worked the first few times. I really wish there was a more streamlined application that did a similar thing somewhere out there.
I’ve been looking at Linkwarden’s page archiving solution, but it crashes whenever I try importing any large number of links, so that’s a bust too.
There is one service that was created by the people who do jetlag I might give them a try at this point.
Nebula is pretty good, and has a lot of creators on it, but I personally have had issues with videos buffering or not being playable until 5-10 seconds after clicking on them. It might just be my browser (I use Firefox with a ton of various extensions and settings changes that affect rendering and content loading), but it’s something to note depending on how much you care about the user experience.
I think they let you view a video or two for free though, so you can test that out beforehand if you wanted to.
Just like how the moment their videotape rental history was exposed, that was when privacy became an absolute must in the case of video rental services.
I completely get your point, and to an extent I agree, but I do think there’s still an argument to be made.
For instance, if a theme park was charging an ungodly amount for admission, or maybe, say, charged you on a per-ride basis after you paid admission, slowly adding more and more charges to every activity until half your time was spent just handing over the money to do things, if everyone were to stop going in, the theme park would close down, because they did something that turned users away.
Websites have continually added more and more ads, to the point that reading a news article feels like reading 50% ads, and 50% content. If they never see any pushback, then they’ll just keep heaping on more and more ads until it’s physically impossible to cram any more in.
I feel like this is less of a dunk on the site by not using it in that moment, and more a justifiable way to show that you won’t tolerate the rapidly enshittified landscape of digital advertising, and so these sites will never even have a chance of getting your business in the future.
If something like this happens enough, advertisers might start finding alternative ways to fund their content, (i.e. donation model, subscription, limited free articles then paywall) or ad networks might actually engage with user demands and make their systems less intrusive, or more private. (which can be seen to some degree with, for instance, Mozilla’s acquisition of Anonym)
Even citing Google’s own research, 63% of users use ad blockers because of too many ads, and 48% use it because of annoying ads. The majority of these sites that instantly hit you with a block are often using highly intrusive ads that keep popping up, getting in the way, and taking up way too much space. The exact thing we know makes users not want to come back. It’s their fault users don’t want to see their deliberately maliciously placed ads.
A lot of users (myself most definitely included) use ad blockers primarily for privacy reasons. Ad networks bundle massive amounts of surveillance technology with their ads, which isn’t just intrusive, but it also slows down every single site you go to, across the entire internet. Refusing that practice increases the chance that sites more broadly could shift to more privacy-focused advertising methods.
Google recommends to “Treat your visitors with respect,” but these sites that just instantly slap up an ad blocker removal request before you’ve even seen the content don’t actually respect you, they just hope you’re willing to sacrifice your privacy, and overwhelm yourself with ads, to see content you don’t even know anything about yet. Why should I watch your ads and give up my privacy if you haven’t given me good reason to even care about your content yet?
This is why sites with soft paywalls, those that say you have “x number of free articles remaining,” or those that say “you’ve read x articles this month, would you consider supporting us?” get a higher rate of users disabling adblockers or paying than those that just slap these popups in your face the moment you open the site.
I mean, there are definitely people in the government working on it, but those often require much more substantial reforms and systemic changes before the changes could functionally work. (i.e. banning data brokers would kill off most free services, or banning targeted ads would kill most ad-funded news networks)
If you haven’t already, I recommend using the EFF’s Action Center to let your representatives know about specific changes you would and would not want made to our laws to protect privacy, free speech, and digital innovation, according to what they’ve found to be the most pressing issues at the moment.
“1 in 10 people believe they are not at risk when using illicit sources to watch TV, film or sports.”
ONE in ten? Man, they’re even bad at cherry picking statistics 😂
They even cite a study with only 1,000 participants for their statistic that “32% OF PEOPLE HAVE BEEN VICTIMS OF FRAUD”
In the title, at least. The body of that claim’s card says that it’s the people, or someone they know that have been victims of fraud.
Gosh, I hate dishonest scare marketing campaigns.
Just because an LLM sounds smart and human-like doesn’t mean it will magically solve climate change after being directly implicated in resource consumption we know from actual scientists, today, will make the problem worse.
They don’t believe it.
They just think their investors will.
It’s mildly effective in the sense that it will decimate click-through rates, but if enough people did it, they would start filtering by IP, and you’d need to change how many ads it clicks on so it looks more human.
It also still gives advertisers your data, since it still has to load the ads on your system to click them, so it’s not as privacy-preserving as a full-on adblocker that outright blocks every advertisement and tracker related network request in the first place.
Better than completely allowing capital to do whatever it wants without even attempting to push back.
As Cory Doctorow put it, “An app is just a web-page wrapped in enough IP to make it a felony to add an ad-blocker to it.”
Just keep in mind the possible cons of using AdNauseam.
With traditional adblockers like uBO, the ad content never gets loaded. With AdNauseam, it does, it’s just not shown to you.
That means the ad network is likely to get:
And it also makes you heavily identifiable, because to any ad server, a single user mass-clicking their advertisements by the thousands is going to make you very easy to track across sites, just by behavior alone.
So while it’s good if you just want no ads and to do a little monetary harm to surveillance advertising, it’s not good if you want privacy. (Unless you set it to show ads, but still click on all of them, and you’re the type that does sometimes click on ads, then it does become good for obfuscation)
I’d definitely recommend the same team’s other work: TrackMeNot, as it does a decent job of obfuscating your search queries. (Just make sure that if you use a privacy-focused search engine like DuckDuckGo, you disable any auto-searching on Google, since that just gives them your IP, without obfuscating the searches you aren’t making there anyways)
The highest usage of ad blockers happens within the age range of 18-24, which categorically includes Gen Z.
The second highest age range is 25-34, and the third highest is 12-17, which is also included in Gen Z.
That said, I would argue that, while knowing how to use a smartphone doesn’t make you tech savvy, knowing how to use an ad blocker doesn’t either. It’s as easy as installing an extension.
I suppose they could, but even cold storage has a cost, and with the scale Discord’s operating at, they definitely have many terabytes of data that comes into the CDN every day, and that cost adds up if you’re storing it permanently.
I also think the vast majority of users would prefer being able to upload much higher resolution images and videos, to being able to see the image they sent with their messages a year ago. I don’t often go back through my messages, but I often find myself compressing or lowering the quality of the things I’m uploading on a regular basis.
They could also do the other common sense thing, which is to, on the client side of things, compress images and videos before sending them.
The thing is, I did have encryption keys set up. The problem was that Element would repeatedly forget the very encryption keys passed by the other user, and would then have to request the keys again. Any historical message history would be permanently encrypted forever, and wouldn’t decrypt with the new view key.
After this happened about 4 times, I stopped using it, because it was impossible to maintain conversations for longer than 1-2 weeks before they’d inevitably be lost, and I’d then have to spend about an hour waiting for Element to receive the new encryption keys from the people I was contacting, even when they were already actively online.
I have no clue what was causing it, but it happened on multiple accounts, on multiple devices, all the time, and there was no conceivable fix. I’m not sure if this is fixed now, but I haven’t had a good reason to go back, especially with other encrypted messaging options out there.
Look, I’m as upset as you are about the enshittification of everything, but this is a bit too far.
There was always legitimate issues with Discord’s storage management, and they at least seem to be taking it seriously now.
I’m not a massive fan of Discord, but this is a bit of an overreaction.
For real.
I emailed them once asking about how they were complying with GDPR regulations if they didn’t allow users a way to delete all their message details, and didn’t even have a procedure for GDPR requests, only their standard, much worse privacy-wise account deletion process. They claimed it was because they had a legitimate interest to keep any messages not individually deleted, so the chats would still look coherent after an account was deleted.
They only delete your message if you delete it individually, so naturally, I was concerned, since you can’t delete messages in a server you were banned from, or left, and Discord provides no way for you to identify old messages in servers you’re not currently in.
They eventually, supposedly, sent my concerns to their data privacy team.
They were then sued for 800,000 euros about a month or two later.
They still don’t allow you to mass delete your message data. They really want to hold onto it for as long as they can.
Matrix is nice, but it’s still very bad UX wise.
I’ve used it on and off for years now, and about 2-4 times a month it loses my chat view encryption keys, and loses me my entire chat history. It also regularly has sync issues between devices signed into the same account, and is relatively slow sometimes to send messages.
Of course, that’s just my anecdotal experience, but I’ve tried many messaging platforms over the years, and while Matrix (and multiple of its clients, primarily Element) is the most feature-complete compared to Discord, it’s nowhere near properly usable long-term for a mass-market audience.
Same here, honestly. I would have thought they’d say something like “hey, we’re going to delete anything 1 year or older starting next month, and reduce that amount slowly down to 6 months with time” just to give people a general warning in case there was anything they were storing through Discord that they wanted to keep.
There’s also just a ton of optimizations they could have done. Are people repeatedly uploading the same file, with the same name and contents? merge them into one CDN link. They’d probably save hundreds of terabytes of data just from reposted memes alone through a hash matching algorithm.
IPFS seems similar to what you’re looking for.
(See: A copy of Wikipedia on IPFS being censorship-resistant, and globally distributed)