Read Something Wonderful

(readsomethingwonderful.com)

176 points | by snorbleck 20 hours ago

9 comments

  • egypturnash 19 hours ago
    I am amazed at this page's CSS. The body text is small so I hit command-+ to make it bigger... and it gets smaller instead. Reset and hit command--... and it also gets smaller. And reader mode's broken.
    • pards 12 hours ago
      Yeah, really bad UX. Unreadable.

      I zoomed on Firefox on MacOS and the two finger scroll stops working. The scrollbar appears momentarily so I grabbed it but it jumps to the next article and scrolls left, which pushes the next article off the page to the right.

    • m463 35 minutes ago
      i got a blank page
    • vee-kay 17 hours ago
      Pinch-to-zoom works on mobile (Android) for this site, since each post/article is just an image with a heading.

      Swiping up to see the next post/article also retains the zoom, but the fonts & sizes in the posts/articles are not consistent, so we may need to zoom again to make the content fit better on the screen or to make it more legible.

      The site reminds me of one of the glorious tools of the old Web - StumbleUpon (integrated as a browser toolbar) - which allowed to jump to random sites upvoted/liked by users. During its heydays, it even allowed users to host their own webpages, and interact in community forum, so like-minded strangers could discuss their fave topics and share nice new finds (websites, tools, etc.).

    • crooked-v 19 hours ago
      It's because the "body text" is actually a screenshot of text, for some bizarre reason.
      • askew 12 hours ago
        Heh, and as the real text in the left and right sidebars scales, the article preview shrinks. Needs some constraints on the centre column.
      • wormpilled 18 hours ago
        [flagged]
        • manuelmoreale 17 hours ago
          I’m not sure why people are downvoting you. The site is a collection of links to other written pieces posted on other sites. To make it visually interesting they decided to add screenshots for each entry which is an entirely reasonable thing to do.

          It’s what every single gallery site does.

          What would a better alternative be? Adding iframes?

        • Timwi 13 hours ago
          I'm downvoting because of the insulting addendum.
          • mainmailman 10 hours ago
            Brave
          • efilife 10 hours ago
            he was downvoted before editing it in so it still makes no sense
      • egypturnash 19 hours ago
        hahaha wtf
  • yd4hn 18 hours ago
    If this collection of articles would get updated in the future, I hope there is a rss feed for it. But it seems that the site is just a promotion for this Matter app...
  • nilirl 19 hours ago
    Beautiful UI.

    What's the criteria for pieces promoted?

    • layman51 18 hours ago
      Same here. I'm really curious about this too. What do they mean by "wonderful"? I suppose some of the pieces here might not be very well-known or popular, but they are inspiring, or maybe they are a good resource for learning something. All I can see is they are maybe associated with a read-later app?
    • mentalfist 18 hours ago
      At a quick glance, the main criteria seems for it to be libertarian and anti-socialism.
      • snorbleck 18 hours ago
        not quite. it's random selections every visit to the site.
    • photios 17 hours ago
      Wondering about that too. What are the "wonderfullness" criteria?

      For example, the first article I clicked on: https://juliagalef.com/2017/08/23/unpopular-ideas-about-soci...

      has some pretty vile stuff:

      > Non-offending pedophiles should be more widely accepted by society. It’s unfair to ostracize someone for a desire they were born with, and integrating them into society makes them less likely to cause harm.

      • sambapa 16 hours ago
        Whats vile about that?
        • IAmBroom 10 hours ago
          Amorality.

          There's no evidence that anyone is born with particular sexual deviations. It attempts to simultaneously absolve and normalize attitudes that ideate rape of children, so long as they don't act on it. That's a pretty thin and permeable line to draw.

          • efilife 6 hours ago
            were you born with an attraction to women or is there no evidence to support it?
        • efilife 10 hours ago
          The truth
  • gcr 11 hours ago
    Links to some articles are broken, eg. https://www.mikkelaaland.com/sweat-bathing-and-the-body.html gives a cert error on iOS
  • peterlada 11 hours ago
    This needs a subscribe or RSS feed
  • vaylian 14 hours ago
    I recognize many of these, because I've found them through hacker news before. There's probably a lot more treasures on that list.
  • nicbou 16 hours ago
    I have been following that website a while. The curation is great, but the UI is annoying. I can’t easily right click or long press to share with Instapaper. I can’t scroll past the ones I have already seen. A list of links would be much better.
  • greenfields3 12 hours ago
    Sorry but two of the top 3 articles were “Friday Night Meatballs: How to Change Tour Life with Pasta”, “The Real Heroes are Dead” and “Wealth: The Toxic Byproduct”.

    None of those are wonderful to me.

  • est 19 hours ago
    what am I looking at?

    Cards of text that I have to click to further read?

    • listic 19 hours ago
      Apparently, yes. Apparently, they present a curated set of texts.
    • ThrowawayTestr 10 hours ago
      A curated list of links, yes. These have been around since the Internet was created.
    • curtisblaine 15 hours ago
      It's not a bad concept. Seeing the first paragraphs of an article helps me decide quickly if I want to invest time on it or not. I would like to do that with books, if there was a reliable way to get the first page of a large number of them.