URL appraisal feature/mechanism needed; alternative link support needed
The web is so thoroughly enshitified that authors of new posts cannot be trusted to select public-worthy sharable links. Someone running all the latest mainstream Windows junk is oblivious to the UX of others.
There needs to be ways to tag the almost countless varieties of web enshitification. I have been doing this tagging manually by posting a comment describing the forms of enshitification an article has as a warning to others. Given a socially on-the-ball crowd, these comments would be upvoted to rise to the top so those who enter the thread can see the warning before clicking. But that’s not reality. What happens in reality is people down-vote enshitification warnings which suppresses the warnings from benefitting others.
That hack is not the way forward. We need a way for the crowd (not just the author) to tag shared URLs as follows:
- cookie wall
- CAPTCHA
- paywall
- walled-garden exclusivity (Cloudflare, Sucuri, etc)
- privacy abuse (Cloudflare)
- autoplay ← important because those on limited connections can have their credit sucked dry just be visiting one of these inconsiderate shit-show sites. And both browsers (Chrome and Firefox) are incapable of disabling autoplay.
- popups and banners that consume ⅓+ of the screen
It cannot be down to just the author to convey these warnings. Even when an author tries to do the right thing, it can still be a shit show. In my case uMatrix automatically blocked the inc.com URL. But then the alternative URL was shit too because archive.is is in Cloudflare’s exclusive walled-garden, thus blocking. That author knew about the paywall, but not about CF or archive.org (archive.org is accessible to everyone).
So in addition to the tags, we also need a feature where other participants can give alternative links, and those links should also be taggable.
