Why do some news websites make random words links to lists of articles on the topic of that word? Does anyone ever intentionally click these, or is this just some weird form of SEO?
I was told on Twitter that this boosts PageRank of each individual article because articles link to each other. Otherwise only those articles that have many links from the outside would rank high.
I want to wish VK developers for everything in their lives to require a pointless extra action to see all available options.
In a restaurant, they bring you a menu on a single sheet. There's 1 dish and 1 drink, and "Show 54 more? Ask your waiter".
In an elevator in a 25-story building, there are buttons: 1, 2, and "show 23 more". The latter opens an additional panel with the remaining 23 floor buttons.
In a shopping mall restroom, there's 1 stall, and a door with a sign on it: "show 5 more".
In case someone wants possibly the longest thread on the fediverse for testing purposes, here you go: https://mastodon.social/@brownpau/112322747861701800 With the way I store replies in #Smithereen, this will soon exceed my limit of 256 levels ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
What will happen when this limit is exceeded? The "reply key" field will get truncated. It's 1024 bytes and stores the IDs of all parent posts as 32-bit integers, always starting from the top-level one. So essentially, all further replies will be erroneously considered replying to the 256th reply in the thread.
Now I don't think this is a problem in any real-world use cases, but yikes
Kinda tempted to buy a Rabbit R1 just to jailbreak it to run regular Android apps. The only thing stopping me is that it's $200 + reshipping, feels kinda expensive for a reverse engineering curiosity project.
Reposts are now done in #Smithereen. You can only make "quote-posts", not Announce reposts because Announce is too confusing and doesn't fit my vision. However, Announce reposts are no longer this half-assed thing like they were before. They now show up in people's profiles and use a different icon from my native reposts.
FOMO in tech is a disease and is working against anyone who wants to tackle hard & important problems. I don't know any other sophisticated/technical industry where trends matter this much, and have this level of impact. We routinely force people to drop what they do and pivot to catch a bus they already missed.
@rakyll I had this happen to me recently when I decided to show the Android developer community how I build small and fast Android apps. It broke many people's logic because "your code is so simple and straightforward, really refreshing" but "you aren't using the best practices which means it's an unmaintainable mess in case a team of 50 developers (49 of them junior) needs to work on it".
Only recently did I realize that https://vk.com/live, a page that existed since 2011 and painstakingly documented all VK updates in extreme detail, is invaluable for me as a reference for #Smithereen UIs. Much better than hunting for screenshots of obscure things on Google or Yandex.
Here's one version of the reposts UI I'm currently working on:
I'm looking into how various social media services provide embeds and there's either an <iframe> or a some sort of inline preview (makes sense so far) and then... a <script>? That renders the actual embed? Mastodon and Pixelfed do it like this too. Is this how it's always done? Feels odd that people just add these scripts to their websites.
Since reposts/boosts are now stored as actual posts, albeit with a bunch of special-case handling in many places, they now appear in profiles too.
Smithereen's native type of repost will be the "quote-post", the one that creates its own separate comment thread. All this is specifically for compatibility with the rest of the fediverse predominantly using the Announce activity for reposting.
Сферический ВК в вакууме
I was told on Twitter that this boosts PageRank of each individual article because articles link to each other. Otherwise only those articles that have many links from the outside would rank high.
So yes, a SEO technique.
https://twitter.com/Niketas/status/1788680216304382186