Why do I need an "app" to browse a website?



  • So apparently there's this guy who goes by the name Cmdr Taco who was a co-founder of Slashdot** and having sold the website a few years ago has moved on to bigger and better things. The latest project is something called Trove which claims to be a user-powered and curated stream of newsAccording to their blog post announcing the launch, it is availale "free on the web, iPhone, and iPad" and you can download their iPhone / iPad app at the Apple App Store. I'm pretty sure the iPhone and iPad both have web browsers (as do every phone and tablet produced in the last few years). So why would you need an app to browse a website?

    Extra bonus, despite being "free" it appears you can't even see what's on Trove without registering first.

    My favorite comment is "It's a clone of Reddit, which is a clone of Digg, which was cleated as an alternative to Slasddot to "give the power back to the people".

     

     

    ** Yes, I know, you stopped reading as soon as you saw "Slashdot".



  • @El_Heffe said:

    So why would you need an app to browse a website?

    You don't, but some things are easier to pull off if you have an app rather than working with the shitty moble browsers (plus it can help with lock-in).



    1. Offer free app for service
    2. people download app, as it's free
    3. People use app, to justify having it
    4. Site/service gets traffic

    I mean, it's stupid, but it's probably pretty easy to get some traffic from it, and depending on how you develop the site / apps, you can probably recoup the added cost.

    My big question is why a slashdot person (slash shipper?) would cater to the iCrowd…



  • @locallunatic said:

    @El_Heffe said:
    So why would you need an app to browse a website?

    You don't, but some things are easier to pull off if you have an app rather than working with the shitty moble browsers (plus it can help with lock-in).

    I'm not well versed in apps. I know that Apple Browser = Safari = Shit. How does an app solve that?

     



  • @El_Heffe said:

    I know that Apple Browser = Safari = Shit. How does an app solve that?

    As the app is something that needs to talk to your website (or alternatively some other portal for content) to pull data you don't solve all of the problems, but you can avoid fighting with javascript to get the shitty browser to do interesting ajax things.  So it's a poor solution, but depending on what you are doing and how much money you have to throw at problems it could make sense (like some of google's things for gmail or drive).



  • @El_Heffe said:

    So apparently there's this guy who goes by the name Cmdr Taco who was a co-founder of Slahdot** and having sold the website a few years ago has moved on to bigger and better things. The latest project is something called Trove which claims to be a user-powered and curated stream of newsAccording to their blog post announcing the launch, it is availale "free on the web, iPhone, and iPad" and you can download their iPhone / iPad app at the Apple App Store. I'm pretty sure the iPhone and iPad both have web browsers (as do every phone and tablet produced in the last few years). So why would you need an app to browse a website?

    Extra bonus, despite being "free" it appears you can't even see what's on Trove without registering first.

    My favorite comment is "It's a clone of Reddit, which is a clone of Digg, which was cleated as an alternative to Slasddot to "give the power back to the people".

     

     

    ** Yes, I know, you stopped reading as soon as you saw "Slashdot".

    Yes, I too stopped reading the post when I got to the end.



  • Doesn't 80% of mobile apps consist of one-site browsers?
    Btw, what's wrong with Slashdot? I find it a pretty good source of tech/science news. And don't say the commenters are the issue because that's true everywhere.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @Ben L. said:

    @El_Heffe said:

    So apparently there's this guy who goes by the name Cmdr Taco who was a co-founder of Slahdot** and having sold the website a few years ago has moved on to bigger and better things. The latest project is something called Trove which claims to be a user-powered and curated stream of newsAccording to their blog post announcing the launch, it is availale "free on the web, iPhone, and iPad" and you can download their iPhone / iPad app at the Apple App Store. I'm pretty sure the iPhone and iPad both have web browsers (as do every phone and tablet produced in the last few years). So why would you need an app to browse a website?

    Extra bonus, despite being "free" it appears you can't even see what's on Trove without registering first.

    My favorite comment is "It's a clone of Reddit, which is a clone of Digg, which was cleated as an alternative to Slasddot to "give the power back to the people".

     

     

    ** Yes, I know, you stopped reading as soon as you saw "Slashdot".

    Yes, I too stopped reading the post when I got to the end.

    TL;DR: TLDR's should be at the start, not the end, of the text in question....



  • @El_Heffe said:

    ** Yes, I know, you stopped reading as soon as you saw "Slashdot".
    I stopped reading as soon as the disclaimer told me to. That's the kind of guy I am.

     



  • @veggen said:

    Btw, what's wrong with Slashdot?

    Ok I won't say commenters.

    1) News is always stale by at least 2 days. Always.
    2) There's no editorial department whatsoever-- oh Slashdot pays people they call "editors" but those people never fix any errors in the post and frequently add new ones. (Recent example: this post that mentioned CLAs 45,000 times but never defined the term or linked to a definition. Now fixed.) (My personal favorite example: Draconian DRM Revealed in Windows 7.)
    3) It's built on a horrible Perl codebase which is in desperate need of major fundamental fixes, but which never actually gets fixed-- instead it just gets reskinned every few years. Despite being a site for/by geeks and programmers, they sure seem hesitant to ever do any programming.
    4) Each skin is worse and less usable than the last.
    5) Ancient crappy codebase doesn't support Unicode.
    6) If you ever criticize ancient crappy codebase, the editors say "we have a public bug tracker, enter bugs." Bugs are 100% ignored. (Out of 13 I put in, I think only one was even triaged, none were fixed.)
    7) The moderation system is awful and prone to abuse, there are "secret" moderation options that can change the score of a post without adding any descriptive flag to it. Especially embarrassing, because Slashdot often promotes how they invented moderation (undoubtedly untrue).
    8) The meta-moderation system is so terrible it's become completely unusable in recent years, so abusive moderation is never addressed/fixed.
    9) Even if the meta-moderation UI worked, they've never described exactly what it does or how-- nobody is sure whether it changes the scores that are meta-moderated, or simply affects the karma (reputation score) of the moderator. (Note: karma score is useless anyway. You get nothing for it, except an automatic +1 moderation-- but that goes away the instant any user moderates you! Also, building full karma from a new account takes like maybe 5-6 days. So every account is karma level 20,000,000 or whatever.)
    10) Slashdot runs by far the WORST April Fools Day pranks/articles on the entire Internet, and that's fucking saying something.
    11) Owned by the same company that runs that abomination of web design SourceForge.

    I could add probably another 5-10 items if you let me say "commenters".



  • @blakeyrat said:

    10) Slashdot runs by far the WORST April Fools Day pranks/articles on the entire Internet, and that's fucking saying something.
     

    The kind where you can't tell if it's hyperbole or just the usual nonsense?


  • Trolleybus Mechanic

    @veggen said:

    Btw, what's wrong with Slashdot? I find it a pretty good source of tech/science news. And don't say the commenters are the issue because that's true everywhere.
     

    Pretty much what Blakey said, but as far as commentors go, it's usually the opposite of what you'd find elsewhere. The content is fairly shit, but the comments are the most valuable part of any article.  This is said, of course, with caveats.  Comments are basically -1 to 5-- -1 being "pure shit", 1 being "default", 2-4 being "someone thought this was worth reading" and 5 being "almost certainly worth reading".  I tend to let an article sit for a few hours, then browse at whatever level gives me 20-40 comments. Boom, reasonable, sometimes informative discussion.

    It is far from perfect-- you still get plenty of idiots, incorrect facts, paranoid-linux-schizo-M$-Swampies-- and some legitimate comments get buried by people with way too much time on their hands who abuse the moderation system-- but it is way better than any comment section on almost any other news site. The majority of the trolls, bile and crap gets pushed down to -1, so you don't instantly get brain damage from looking at the page.

    Unfortunately, whoever owns Slashdot these days seems to have forgotten that the one and ONLY reason they have any traffic is because a bunch of geeks want to quickly and easily read a few articles and throw their comments into the ring. The UI changes have been absolute shit, making it difficult if not impossible to read and comment-- at least not without restyling the page with custom CSS, using NoScript, ad blocking tons of shit elements, and following hidden links to the "old" comment system.  So, basically, undoing everything they've "improved".

    Now, you COULD in theory argue that geeks who want an interface like the old ones are the minority in the Web world, and most people don't care about trivial problems like getting used to infinite scrolling, etc. I think you're wrong and stupid, but it is a valid argument-- except on a Slashdot, where the MAJORITY of your userbase are exactly those people. Other sites can get away with pissing off the vocal minority of "computer geeks". Slashdot can't, and they're hemorrhaging their userbase. Which is leading to a decline in comments. Which is destorying the one feature their userbase likes. Etc.


  • Considered Harmful

    @Lorne Kates said:

    incorrect facts

    Those are the best kind of facts.



  • @blakeyrat said:


    5) Ancient crappy codebase doesn't support Unicode.
    Now, that's just not true. Their codebase supports Unicode... internally. Externally they restrict you to an inconsistently-enforced arbitrarily-chosen subset of Latin-1 because it's "too difficult" to just whitelist the known-harmless parts of the BMP.



    You see, if their codebase didn't support Unicode at all that'd be weak but... okay, in 2014 it'd still be unacceptable. But as it is they went out of their way to break their Unicode handling in a moronic fashion because, well, reasons.





    I still go there because between the stale stories, farcically bad editing and mediocre comments you sometimes find extremely interesting posts that make it worth the hassle – if you're willing to sift through all the junk. And if your concept of text handling is stuck in the 1990s.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @blakeyrat said:

    1) News is always stale by at least 2 days. Always.

    I guess this is important if you read lots of other sites that cover similar things in more timely ways. Two days is pretty fresh for me for the topics that show up on slashdot. I basically treat slashdot as an aggregator that comes across some interesting stories on occasion. I rarely go deeper than the summary (like any good slashdot reader) because it's more about being generally aware of things rather than keeping up on the details. And the comments tend to provide a rough reality check on topics I'm not so familiar with.

    @blakeyrat said:
    4) Each skin is worse and less usable than the last

    I wouldn't say I was ever a regular commenter there, though I used to read comments more in the past than I do now. The hidden comments by default stuff makes reading comments suck. I preferred the old days of long page loads.

    I think my favorite thing about slashdot comments has always been that no matter which side of an issue anyone was on, everyone bitched that slashdot was dominated by morons taking the opposite side.



  • @Lorne Kates said:

    Pretty much what Blakey said, but as far as commentors go, it's usually the opposite of what you'd find elsewhere.

    Bullshit.

    Check this post again. Notice how all the +5 posts are rants about how awful the DRM described by the summary is and virtually none of them (except my own and a couple far down) point out that the DRM described by the summary only exists in the feverish imagination of the submitter.

    The only thing worse than Slashdot editors are Slashdot readers.



  • @dhromed said:

    The kind where you can't tell if it's hyperbole or just the usual nonsense?

    No, just the unfunniest shit imaginable. The kind of wit that makes people who do nothing but quote Monty Python movies from 30 years ago look like comedic geniuses.



  • I couldn't care less about Slashdot's code base, but I find myself agreeing with Blakeyrat.

    OMG.



  • Ok, I now understand the hate. Still, almost none of the reasons apply to me. I couldn't care less about the comments, never read them. Two days old is perfectly fresh for me. Theme might as well not exist, I just don't notice that stuff. Infinite scroll is an abomination in my opinion. Codebase? Not my concern.
    So, yeah, I can now see where you're coming from, but for me it works quite well for reading science related abstracts.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @blakeyrat said:

    @Lorne Kates said:
    Pretty much what Blakey said, but as far as commentors go, it's usually the opposite of what you'd find elsewhere.
    Bullshit.

    If only. Most online comment systems are full of awful shit; there's a significant minority of people who are prolific, noisy, very argumentative, can't write, and simultaneously are absolutely stupendously stupid. The stuff that floats to the top with Slashdot tends to at least be mostly fairly well written (or failing that, have a very interesting point or make a decent-ish joke).
    @blakeyrat said:
    The only thing worse than Slashdot editors are Slashdot readers.

    The editors are a running (butt of a) joke.

    Still, if you really want to see what “worse” really means, check out the low-scored stuff on youtube videos, social networks or online newspaper comment pages. Oceans of moronic drivel and crappy trolling, punctuated by the odd turd of incoherent spite. Slashdot, for all its faults, is better than that.



  • I read slashdot in threaded view, minimum 1. My favourite feature of that for literally the last dozen years is that if a first-level comment has enough replies, sub-replies, sub-sub-replies, etc, then that comment, and all its replies, will be at the top of next two or three pages. I guess real pagination is for the muggles. 



  • @Ben L. said:

    @El_Heffe said:

    ** Yes, I know, you stopped reading as soon as you saw "Slashdot".

    Yes, I too stopped reading the post when I got to the end.

    Funny how that works.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    @Lorne Kates said:
    Pretty much what Blakey said, but as far as commentors go, it's usually the opposite of what you'd find elsewhere.

    Bullshit.

    Check this post again. Notice how all the +5 posts are rants about how awful the DRM described by the summary is and virtually none of them (except my own and a couple far down) point out that the DRM described by the summary only exists in the feverish imagination of the submitter.

    The only thing worse than Slashdot editors are Slashdot readers.

    Woah.  I just realised reading that, that I posted in support of a blakeyrant 5 years ago. I am the other person calling everyone an idiot in that thread.

     



  • @Kyanar said:

    Woah. I just realised reading that, that I posted in support of a blakeyrant 5 years ago. I am the other person calling everyone an idiot in that thread.

    Everybody supports Blakeyrants. The only reason they pretend not to is so they can read more of my writing.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    @Kyanar said:
    Woah. I just realised reading that, that I posted in support of a blakeyrant 5 years ago. I am the other person calling everyone an idiot in that thread.

    Everybody supports Blakeyrants. The only reason they pretend not to is so they can read more of my writing.

    I don't support Blakeyrants and I think your hypothesis is full of holes. I bet you can't back it up.


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