Quo Vadis Lifehacker?
When I started blogging in 2005 Lifehacker was one of the two blogs that I read regularly (the other was Download Squad). Back then, it offered a mix of tech and non-tech articles and guides that made it one of my favorite sources for information.
It was one of the first blogs that I added to Netvibes, my first RSS reading and management service, and was carried over to Google Reader, the Firefox extension Brief and my current RSS reader RSSOwl.
For the past year or so I have read less and less posts on Lifehacker. I usually only look at the headlines and mark the articles as read. It is not because the authors at Lifehacker produce less content, quite the contrary.
The core reason is my impression that Lifehacker has reduced the tech article output. Now, this may be my impression and I have no idea if this is true or not. What I do see is an increase in mobile and cell phone related contents, and non-tech related contents which seem to have replaced much of the old tech related articles on Lifehacker.
Even worse in my opinion; The tech articles that get posted are often old news, at least for me and users who follow other tech news sites. Lifehacker is not the site anymore that discovers new and exciting applications for desktop operating systems.
Those tech articles are usually rehashes of other site's findings, often no longer than 150 or so words long.
Maybe that's life, that the mobile crowd has exploded and that apps and stuff are the new tech news. Don't get me wrong. There is certainly a market for mobile apps and news, but it is unfortunately not something that I'm interested in.
As a consequence, I have made the decision to remove Lifehacker from my RSS feed. I will still stop by the site occasionally to see what's going on. Important or interesting tech news on Lifehacker are covered by many sites that I'm subscribed to in my RSS reader, which means that I will still be able to read them.
For me personally, Lifehacker feels a lot like Digg. A site that I once used on a daily basis turned into something that I have little or no interest in anymore.
Are you a Lifehacker regular? What's your impression then?
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Doesn’t Windows 8 know that www. or http:// are passe ?
Well it is a bit difficulty to distinguish between name.com domains and files for instance.
I know a service made by google that is similar to Google bookmarks.
http://www.google.com/saved
@Ashwin–Thankful you delighted my comment; who knows how many “gamers” would have disagreed!
@Martin
The comments section under this very article (3 comments) is identical to the comments section found under the following article:
https://www.ghacks.net/2023/08/15/netflix-is-testing-game-streaming-on-tvs-and-computers/
Not sure what the issue is, but have seen this issue under some other articles recently but did not report it back then.
Omg a badge!!!
Some tangible reward lmao.
It sucks that redditors are going to love the fuck out of it too.
With the cloud, there is no such thing as unlimited storage or privacy. Stop relying on these tech scums. Purchase your own hardware and develop your own solutions.
This is a certified reddit cringe moment. Hilarious how the article’s author tries to dress it up like it’s anything more than a png for doing the reddit corporation’s moderation work for free (or for bribes from companies and political groups)
Almost al unlmited services have a real limit.
And this comment is written on the dropbox article from August 25, 2023.
First comment > @ilev said on August 4, 2012 at 7:53 pm
For the God’s sake, fix the comments soon please! :[
Yes. Please. Fix the comments.
With Google Chrome, it’s only been 1,500 for some time now.
Anyone who wants to force me in such a way into buying something that I can get elsewhere for free will certainly never see a single dime from my side. I don’t even know how stupid their marketing department is to impose these limits on users instead of offering a valuable product to the paying faction. But they don’t. Even if you pay, you get something that is also available for free elsewhere.
The algorithm has also become less and less savvy in terms of e.g. English/German translations. It used to be that the bot could sort of sense what you were trying to say and put it into different colloquialisms, which was even fun because it was like, “I know what you’re trying to say here, how about…” Now it’s in parts too stupid to translate the simplest sentences correctly, and the suggestions it makes are at times as moronic as those made by Google Translations.
If this is a deep-learning AI that learns from users’ translations and the phrases they choose most often – which, by the way, is a valuable, moneys worthwhile contribution of every free user to this project: They invest their time and texts, thereby providing the necessary data for the AI to do the thing as nicely as they brag about it in the first place – alas, the more unprofessional users discovered the translator, the worse the language of this deep-learning bot has become, the greater the aggregate of linguistically illiterate users has become, and the worse the language of this deep-learning bot has become, as it now learns the drivel of every Tom, Dick and Harry out there, which is why I now get their Mickey Mouse language as suggestions: the inane language of people who can barely spell the alphabet, it seems.
And as a thank you for our time and effort in helping them and their AI learn, they’ve lowered the limit from what was once 5,000 to now 1,500…? A big “fuck off” from here for that! Not a brass farthing from me for this attitude and behaviour, not in a hundred years.