Most new books I find are books I check out from my local library. While the library did pay for a copy, so it’s not quite the same, as a reader I didn’t pay anything for it. The barrier to trying the new book is very small, and if I don’t like it I haven’t lost anything.
Readers finding your book online for free are having the same experience. Maybe not everyone who reads it will want to buy copies, but some will. Just like how some who find your book in a library would want to buy their own copy.
The problem they’re addressing is that some sites they were scraping from have begun instituting measures to stop them. The site went from working beautifully to working barely at all, with most sources either loading incredibly slowly or failing to load at all. I followed the discussions a bit on their discord, and it seems like the first recommendation was for users to host their own proxies. From what I see on the site’s initial splash, that still is one of the recommendations. I’m guessing they also rolled out the browser extension as an alternate method for users who don’t want to set up a proxy, since they were getting tons of people on thsir discord complaining about it being too hard or whatever.
But yeah, who knows if the extension is safe. The project is open source, so you can always examine it for yourself. But at that point you may as well just host your own proxy.
Edit: looked into it a bit more; the extension’s originally proposed purpose seems to be to get around CORS restrictions on certain sources. Seems the original proposal was here: https://github.com/movie-web/movie-web/issues/581
First 1/3rd is a bit of fluff but after that, good article.
Ah yes, the Wadsworth constant.
I think you’re spot on. It fits right in to the whole “enshittification” topic that Doctorow wrote about. Everyone started using streaming services like Netflix because it offered such a great user experience; now that they have the user base, unfortunately we are now at the point where Netflix has every motivation to make the platform as shitty as possible to milk as much money from their users as they can.
I’m a bit confused about the premise of the article. Does anyone assert that typing speed is a bottleneck at all? I’ve been in the industry for years, and have never heard that claim.
I do agree about the whole “less code is not always more”, but I get confused when the author keeps bringing it back to typing speed.
Any context on him “trashing his reputation”?