Full article text in first post on a thread

[jzw (Jolin)]

I’ve noticed that recently the full article text is included in the first post of each Article Comments thread. Previously it was only a summary. I was wondering if @ace is willing to share what lead to this change philosophically or technically or both? Not a big deal, just curious

[Shamino (David C.)]

In what context? I haven’t seen this.

I’ve looked:

• In an “Article Comments” page on TidBITS Talk (e.g. https://talk.tidbits.com/t/does-limiting-an-iphone-s-battery-charging-to-80-increase-lifespan/29005), which begins with whatever the author of the comments page wrote as an article summary.
• In an article’s comments RSS feed, (e.g. https://tidbits.com/2024/09/25/does-limiting-an-iphones-battery-charging-to-80-increase-lifespan/feed/), which always seems to be empty
• On the Article’s page (e.g. https://tidbits.com/2024/09/25/does-limiting-an-iphones-battery-charging-to-80-increase-lifespan/). The first comment is the first comment, not a copy of the article.

Can you share a link to what you’re seeing?

[Simon]

Try this one and compare to the charging to 80% article you linked to.

As @jzw, I’m curious what prompted the change and why only some articles appear to be going this new route (latest articles only?).

A couple of other recent articles show the same.

Guided Access Turns Your iPhone or iPad into a Sharable Single-App Tool

Originally published at: Guided Access Turns Your iPhone or iPad into a Sharable Single-App Tool - TidBITS Most people seem happy to pass their phones around so dinner companions can look at pictures, for instance. However, many would not be comfortable lending their phone to someone for a lengthy period of time. Our iPhones are just too personal, and while iPads may not trigger quite such separation anxiety, you probably don’t want to let someone poke around in Messages, Mail, or Photos. …

California Moves to Regulate AI by Signing 18 New Bills Into Law

Originally published at: California Moves to Regulate AI by Signing 18 New Bills Into Law - TidBITS At TechCrunch, Maxwell Zeff writes: In September, California Governor Gavin Newsom considered 38 AI-related bills, including the highly contentious SB 1047, which the state’s legislature sent to his desk for final approval. He vetoed SB 1047 on Sunday, marking the end of the road for California’s controversial AI bill that tried to prevent AI disasters, but signed more than a dozen other A…

Discussing the Value of the iPhone’s 80% Charging Limit on CCATP

Originally published at: Discussing the Value of the iPhone’s 80% Charging Limit on CCATP - TidBITS In episode 800 of the Chit Chat Across the Pond podcast, Allison Sheridan and I enjoyed delving into the topic of whether it’s useful to limit your iPhone’s maximum charge level to 80%, as I wrote about in “Does Limiting an iPhone’s Battery Charging to 80% Increase Lifespan?” (25 September 2024). After Nick Heer of Pixel Envy collected more data, Allison applied a pivot table to his spreadshe…

[Shamino (David C.)]

I see. I assume @ace chose to do this. I don’t think it’s a technical issue. At least I don’t see how it could be, since TidBITS and Talk are different apps on different servers.

[dianed143 (Diane D)]

I noticed it as well, and like it!

Diane

[ace (Adam Engst)]

Yes, sorry, I should have said something. It’s an option in the WordPress/Discourse integration. Previously, we had just been doing very short excerpts as the first post, but after a recent conversation with @jcenters, I decided to try posting the full text as the first post.

The reason, and he’s still going to look into this for me, is that changes in the way Google ranks page utility have radically increased traffic to TidBITS Talk, to the extent that it’s either similar to or significantly more than the main TidBITS site. These Google Analytics charts show TidBITS Talk on the left and TidBITS on the right for all of 2024. As you can see, TidBITS Talk is going up and TidBITS is going down and they’re relatively comparable.

According to Google Analytics, TidBITS Talk received about 268K pageviews from June through September, whereas Discourse’s internal stats suggest the number should be 440K. (Discourse didn’t have earlier data for reasons.) I don’t really know who to believe, but regardless, it’s clear that TidBITS Talk is becoming more and more important from the perspective of bringing more people to TidBITS.

We don’t earn any money from pageviews, but I do want our content to help as many people as possible, so I figured it was worth seeing if putting the full text of articles in TidBITS Talk improved their Google juice even more.

[jzw (Jolin)]

Makes sense, and thanks for the explanation. This is the kind of insider info I was hoping for!