The 'Man-Eater' Screwworm Is Coming (theatlantic.com)

I find myself going weeks without opening facebook. I still enjoy the occasional doom scroll, but it feels better when I know I'm doing it and not accidentally getting sucked in.

sneak · 2h ago

Obvious, but worth repeating: it goes away when you delete your facebook account. Stop using gmail.

You cannot control others. You _can_ control yourself.

Don’t be the honey in the trap of big tech surveillance platforms. Being on these platforms legitimizes and encourages their use for your friends and family.

Delete your facebook and instagram. Sell or trash your oculus. Buy a domain and email hosting and migrate off your gmail.

sureIy · 2h ago

Unfortunately some people want to have some semblance of social life and in some circles dropping Instagram means decimating your pool.

aleph_minus_one · 2h ago

> in some circles dropping Instagram means decimating your pool

Rather: dropping Instagram means improving the (average) quality of the people in your pool. :-)

djaychela · 2h ago

But that definitely isn't everyone and the more people who reject your normalisation of this, the less strength there will be to it. And social life certainly doesn't look like Instagram statistics monitoring to me.

robertlagrant · 2h ago

That's a conflicting requirement. You can't want to be free of drugs and also keep doing heroin because all your friends do it.

sneak · 2h ago

This doesn’t get better by ignoring the problem.

This is the social equivalent of just throwing your hands up and saying “it can’t be helped”.

I cannot stress this enough: it _is not_ true. Deleting your IG will not cause your friends to stop being your friends.

Being on these platforms legitimizes their use. It makes the situation _worse_. It is a vote for surveillance and censorship of your most intimate personal connections.

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JimDabell · 7h ago

In several mail clients, for multipart emails, the snippet is taken from the plaintext part while the email is rendered from the HTML part. So if you see something in the snippet that you don’t see when you read the email, then it’s possible it’s only in the plaintext part.

iamacyborg · 2h ago

Email preview text is very well documented at this point.

https://www.litmus.com/blog/the-ultimate-guide-to-preview-te...

mcintyre1994 · 9h ago

A bunch of places do this! Audible does “top picks for you”, LinkedIn does “recommended actions for you”

I remember at an old company downloading email templates and loads of them would have some kind of preview text field that used this trick.

nilirl · 3h ago

This is not a spoof?

Previews are an optional protocol that email clients have followed for a while now.

See: https://react.email/docs/components/preview

iamacyborg · 2h ago

Referring to them as a protocol is misunderstanding how these things are created, imo.

It’s not unlikely that inbox providers will just use AI to generate these based on the email content in the near future.

nilirl · 2m ago

You're right. It is not a protocol.

Each client implements previews differently and they don't specify how.

eimrine · 4h ago

If you will mark as spam those messages, Gmail will return them after few months.

lysace · 1d ago

HTML email was a mistake. I believe the guilty party is Microsoft with Outlook 97.

https://winworldpc.com/product/microsoft-outlook/97

pwdisswordfishz · 6h ago

Well, HTML e-mail arbitrarily stylable by the author was a mistake. This could have been avoided by a profile of HTML that removes presentation markup and CSS, leaving only pure semantic markup that a client can render in a "reader mode" equivalent.

lproven · 4h ago

> HTML e-mail arbitrarily stylable by the author was a mistake.

No, I agree with the original comment.

Formatting is bad for accessibility, bad for spoofing and spamming, bad for quoting and highlighting, and more besides.

It is bad in general. Always was.

https://useplaintext.email/

diggan · 41m ago

Well, except for the case when you want a unique-looking email, with your own style, then plaintext kind of sucks :)

Sure, we could argue that people shouldn't want that, but then reality tends to be somewhat annoying like that.

superjan · 7h ago

In my recollection it was Netscape, this appers to confirm it:

https://www.jwz.org/blog/2017/09/html-email-was-that-your-fa...

weinzierl · 7h ago

From my recollection Microsoft pushed their own RTF like rich mail format hard for a while and did support HTML only reluctantly.

account42 · 2h ago

They still support HTML only reluctantly.

donnachangstein · 6h ago

Thanks for linking to a picture of testicles.

stickfigure · 5h ago

That particular blog author displays special content if the referrer is HN. It's embarrassingly juvenile for someone that must be in their 50s by now.

opello · 4h ago

Having had that a few times, and recently relaxing Firefox's referer policy for some other site compatibility which had avoided it before, I came to this workaround with uBlock Origin:

    jwz.org##^responseheader(set-cookie)
    jwz.org##^responseheader(location)

Hopefully documenting it doesn't perpetuate the arms race.

k4rli · 5h ago

Some sites don't even bother anymore and just send the contents as a multi-MB image. Sort of "pdf as email" to not bother checking if the template works for all sorts of mail clients.

macguillicuddy · 4h ago

I wonder if, in the pipe dream that email were magically replaced by something more modern, we'd use something like markdown instead.

zzo38computer · 7h ago

I use a email client without HTML email. I have not had problems with this.

ninjin · 7h ago

You are not the only one and whenever there is no text/plain there is webdump:

https://codemadness.org/git/webdump/file/README.html

sureIy · 2h ago

HTML was a mistake.

What if browsers just returned texts with links and auto-linked and auto-embedded them like markdown does? Only on request. A true user agent.

Well, I would have settled for HTML 1 for the forms.

scarface_74 · 1d ago

I think Apple is the guilty party of starting it first with OpenDoc based CyberDog released in 1996.

kyralis · 8h ago

Can we really blame OpenDoc for anything, though? It seems more sad than impactful, honestly.

robocat · 2h ago

https://wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDoc

Interesting because everybody was competing: but competing for a concept that is now largely obsolete because it failed?

Some modern competition (e.g. AI) has a similar feel.

sokoloff · 2h ago

OpenDoc did at least provide part of the question’s premise for one of my favorite Steve Jobs answers:

https://youtu.be/oeqPrUmVz-o?si=1n-rkSke_ezLcidn

axegon_ · 3h ago

Disclosure: I do not have a facebook account and I am not a lawyer. But... I am pretty sure that's in breach of several EU regulations if this is happening to EU citizens and EU residents: DSA, GDPR, ePrivacy directive, consumer protection and possibly misleading advertising and unfair commercial practices.

tomnipotent · 6h ago

This is called preview text/preview header and is even supported by email service providers like Mailchimp or Klaviyo. It's been common practice for going on fifteen years.

gwd · 5h ago

I was going to say, when you send bulk mail with Brevo, they explicitly prompt you for what the "preview text" should look like, and show how it might look on an iPhone Mail or desktop Gmail.

nokun7 · 6h ago

I have seen Nextdoor also do the same and I had alway wondered. I believe it uses the same mechanism. Quite interesting.

slater · 1d ago

She did say something about you, but she wrote it in white text

mometsi · 7h ago

  .happiness {  
    color: #FFF;
    background-color: #FFF;
  }