USA Today made a version of their site for EU visitors that's compliant with the GDPR
Without:
- ads
- tracking
- personalization
- javascript
It seriously makes me want to check that site from time to time for news. If their point was "see how bad it would be if we didn't do all this stuff?" it's doing the opposite of what it wants because yes, I love this website, that's how I want it and every other one to be like
@Sir_Boops @Siphonay one forgets how fast websites can load D:
It's so lightweight pages load almost instantaneously
It's such a huge relief to visite a news website knowing it's not collecting any data on me
@Siphonay it redirects you to the "real" one if you're not in eu, afaict. and then asks you to enable push notifications.
Software Archaeologist
@Siphonay NPR have done something more brutal https://text.npr.org/
@Siphonay This is awesome. This is basically all I want out of a news site.
apparently you can't access it from the US, it redirects you to the normal website?
Here's how it looks like, CW for politics, pres45 and the usual violent stuff you see on news websites
@Siphonay i fucking wish i could get the "EU Experience" as USA Today puts it. gimmie that on every site also gimmie yr general protections and rights and like, health insurance. their "punishment" is just another perk.
USA Today's news coverage tends to be shit tho
@Siphonay how good it that as a news source?
@meena not sure. Not very good according to some people.
@pea not only it's accessible on mobile, but it's also responsive and adapted for it. It also have the advantage of being very lightweight, that's very good for people with a limited data plan.
@Siphonay correct, i was unable to access it without an eu proxy.
@Siphonay idk how similar the american one it redirects to is, but their site gives me way less anxiety
i also visciously try to avoid news sites
@Siphonay The closest us yanked Yanks can get is with a selective JavaScript blocker extension. :<
The only thing it's missing is a search function, and the ability to see older articles.
All the other features than these two and the core news site features this website has, every other stuff you see on news sites is created from artificial end-user needs
If anything it is proof that you can make modern-looking websites without it being overloaded by heavy technologies, a ton of animations and stuff
@Siphonay I'm in the U.S. and it just redirects to the regular non-GDPR-compliant homepage for me. I guess I'll need to use an EU proxy.
@metapianycist https://octodon.social/@Siphonay/100091503691124135 check this screenshot out
@Siphonay Looks like NPR went for a split strategy - you can disagree with their tracking, and get a plain text, unstyled site, per this tweet: https://twitter.com/AlecMuffett/status/999616307241906176
Honestly, we could do something to encourage a newfound popularity for static websites. Maybe people who aren't in Europe and who have a Twitter account can nag USAToday on it so they make their EU site available for everyone?
Maybe us EU residents can nag websites that now block access to us to do a similar thing that USA Today did?
That could be the start of something
should I make a change.org petition about this?
I don't think they would consider it though because ad revenue and user data selling is how they make money
@Siphonay you can put ads on static sites, theres no reason in fact that your newspaper cant just run the exact same ads it runs in the physical version (and if you were hosting ads yourself as still images imbedded in articles I’m betting most adblockers wouldn’t block them)
But people are too lazy for that, and would rather just let a passel of datacorps pay rent on tracking pixels than do anything actually useful for once
@Siphonay Going to static and stripping out the bullshit would also make #fuckgoogle's AMP project irrelevant.
@Siphonay hack and this site is so much better than the original one
@Siphonay shouldve bene heck but. same
@Siphonay wow am i bad at typing today lol sorry
@MightyPork It's okay, it happens to everybody
@Siphonay not without JavaScript (take a look at the HTML HEAD), but indeed very clean and *works without JavaScript.*
And I fully agree: that's how a news site is readable :)
@Siphonay I also like lite.cnn.io and thin.npr.org - soooo much better than their bloated original sites...
@Siphonay @MightyPork Jesus this is fast
Now
Imagine every page loading like this
Or at least those where it makes sense
@Siphonay Thus begins the bulkanization of the Internet.
@Siphonay I just jumped on a Swiss VPN to test and it's glorious!
@Siphonay annoyingly, they appear to redirect non-EU users (or at least me) to a different, JS-laden site that my phone couldn't finish loading in a full minute over WiFi...
@Siphonay I don't see where people get the idea that they were trying to make a point against it. If anything, with how it's gated off to anyone outside the EU, it looks like they are pushing for this sort of legislation.
@Siphonay Omg it loads almost instantly