Bigger league doesn’t imply that they need to be annoying to use – look at google, I get all the features of the search engine without having to sign up for an account. Youtube is the same way, I can watch vidoes without needing an account. Why do we need to sign up for a service to view other user’s content? Instructibles went for a paid model, and it must work for them, but for people who expect free content (a lot of people, since most content nowadays IS free) it isnt up snuff. On that note, thank you, hackaday, for not requiring registration to view your posts, or even to comment on the posts. Thats a huge plus in my book :-D

Hackaday and Instructables. The best two hacking sites on the web, bar none.

^

I appreciate what Instructables started out trying to do. However, what guaranteed my eternal non-participation was how they added the signup walls after there were already thousands of projects uploaded to their site. Everyone who uploaded a project did so thinking it was going to be visible in a certain way, and then Instructables changed it all. It would be just like if WordPress decided that people could view only a small portion of blogs they host, like Hackaday, unless they created an account and logged in.

@catzburg: Firefox + Adblock Plus = Ad Free HAD!

I’m not even complaining about the cost.
The fact that they require me to log in to view images _ALONE_ is enough to make me loathe Instructables. The fact that anyone who isn’t a subscriber has to deal with that atrocious mutli-page structure they enforce is stupid.

They’re profiting from other people’s work, not their own services. They don’t simply add a few advertisements or charge posters a small fee, they restrict access to the very content these people wish to share. It’s a backwards model. Yes, it’s been around for a long time in one form or another, but it’s never been any good for anyone but the publisher.

And, on the issue of “bigger leagues”:
Look at what popularity has done to digg. It was a decent site at one time. After it went non-strictly-tech, it’s become the same asinine pseudo-political ragefest that saturates the rest of the blogs and forums on the internet.

There is a reason I read Hack a Day and I don’t read Instructables. I don’t care about how large a site is or how much content it produces. On a big site, I’ll only see a small fraction of it anyway, so what does it matter? I read HaD because it’s relevant to me. HaD fills a very specific niche that _no other site_ on the entirety of the internet fills. Not even Instructables.

Instructables is very arts-and-craftsy. It’s form over function in the truest sense. Gluing a few brass doodads to a computer peripheral will never impress me. I can find something to like if I try really, really hard (forging swords, etc), but most of it is just knitting novelty socks or painting Nerf guns.

Hacking is on the opposite end of the spectrum. It’s doing some herculean task with absolutely nothing or with (seemingly) the most inappropriate tools. RFID with an ATTiny chip and a single inductor (no supporting circuitry or power source), using the PWM of a power indicator LED to enable rapid-fire on an XBox controller, or probing BGA pads with some thin enameled wire and toothbrush fibers or fishing line. Possibly even designing a huge, ugly, loud, inefficient, and impractical (yet totally functional) computer using nothing but a few thousand electromechanical relays.

i’ve been a member and user of hackaday AND instructables for years now and i have 1 complaint with instructables
1 thing that they USED to allow
you should be able to enlarge ANY picture without registering, maybe not to FULL resolution but atleast give us a little bigger than the damn thumbnail without logging in!
who cares about ads?
ads pay for the internet!
if i didnt want ads i would install ad block plus or something similar
but not being able to enlarge pictures without registering/logging in ruins the user experince, not everyone wants to sign in every single time they view a site, the only time i log in to instructables is to post comments or submit content, i dont want to login just to view somone’s submission, we get ads either way(or maybe adds) so its not like a few extra k of bandwidth is going to kill the site because we arnt logged in

Thanks, but no thanks. Give the freaking pdf away you glutton.

@Haku:
“one minor thing that bugs me about HAD is that when you click links in the article writeup or the comments, it replaces the HAD page you’re viewing, I’d prefer it to open in a new tab”

right-click -> “Open Link in New Tab”
or, simply:
middle-click

This is the behavior I expect of links. I’d rather HaD didn’t change it.

@r_d, I know about “open link in new tab”, middle click and ctrl+left click to open in a new tab, but I have my browser configured so that the browser doesn’t automatically go to the new tab, this behaviour is preferred for me so that when I’m searching for something and get a slew of links I can middle-click on several links all at one go and then go through the newly opened tabs at my leisure instead of having to constantly go back to the original search results.

Did you also know about middle-clicking on the Reload, Prev & Next navigation buttons in Firefox? (and presumably IE), now those are some useful functions.

I hate Instructables. Email harvester in my opinion. Intentionally holds back content until you give in. Steer clear of them. Instructables would get far more hits and make more ad money if would they stop harvesting email addresses and let you actually view the content on their site that was put there by others for free.

HAHAH What a gesture from Instructables

It’s like some old perv that comes up in a van to offer you one free candy, in a non-standard packaging. Then he asks you to go in his van if you tell him your name and other login info.

Instructables died when 50% of the content was Knex guns. Seriously, they saw the end coming and decided to cash in while they could. They took a good place and ran it into the ground, then shit on it.

The Instructables pay-wall for user-contributed content was ill-conceived, no doubt.

Still, once it was implemented, if they had only hired more programmers to fix the weird bugs and screwups (forum), pop-up ads they claimed they would never host, etc., I’d have gladly paid. Simply because I had found a stable, persistent home for my projects.

Instead they doubled the programming staff–to two. For a site that’s pretty much all custom code, and a large database.

I’m not paying for someone to make money off my projects–unless the freaking thing works seamlessly. It’s simple consumer issue for me–don’t pay for crap.

@Jimmy you’re exchanging your project for their platform – that’s how the site works. Paying is optional.

It’s like renting a lemonade stand, it will cost you something, but you’ll get something in return.

Jimmy was is in the past, and a lot of the bitching and crying seems to be about today irrelevant stuff (and mostly by people who are too lazy to log into a site, so who cares as if they were going to do anything anyway)

oh boo hoo hoo, I ASS U MEd that this commercial site would be free and open until Jesus returned, your naive

but last year boo hoo hoo, so what, last year HAD’s parent company took my video off of their own website and filed a DCMA takedown, shit happens, its fixed move on

But I dont want to log in whaah, really? it takes seconds to make an account, and you can click the little box (unless your some tinfoil hat cookie nut that thing stays around for months)

But its a email farm get your guns!, as you enter an email address into a worpress blog to bitch about harvesting emails

Seriously people? you don’t have to use it if you don’t want, but almost every complaint against the site is down to lazyness, stupidity, or ghost’s from the past

and its just brilliant

Osgeld: A lot of us won’t touch instructables with a ten foot pole after our previous experiences. A lot of us really have no idea if they’ve changed their ways.

Tell me, if you sign up for a free account, do you get ALL the features? Ability to view all steps on one page? Ability to view all the pictures, all the tooltips on those pictures, and view the pictures at full resolution? The ability to download as a PDF?

If that’s the case, then what exactly, do you get from the “pro” membership? Why would anyone pay then?

It’s been a good six months since I’ve been there, but the last time I went, none of the articles I read made any sense at all. Most people were including vital steps in their pictures, making it completely impossible to follow them, as unregistered users can only view one picture per page. I forget what I was reading at the time, but I recall it was a dangerous project, and all the safety warnings were on pictures 2 through 8, making this not only a stupid business model, but completely and utterly irresponsible.

Oh, and when I did sign up for a free account, maybe a year and a half, 2 years ago, I did in fact get a lot of spam. Just an anecdote, but I’m pretty sure they sell your info. How else would they benefit from registration?

jimmy, I was referring to the users here, they will never post an instructable and therefore are irrelevant to that site, I dont know why that was so hard for you

“Osgeld: A lot of us won’t touch instructables with a ten foot pole after our previous experiences. A lot of us really have no idea if they’ve changed their ways.”

Thats fine, but dont go screaming over stuff that is just not true today

No you dont get all the features, you do get to view all of the pictures, all of the tooltips and the pictures at full resolution, crap you can view them at the size they were uploaded at

http://www.instructables.com/files/orig/F5K/H5S6/GGPF3YKC/F5KH5S6GGPF3YKC.jpg

click the little I(nfo) box in the image and it gives you direct links, to whatever was uploaded. I am not sure what counts as “full resolution” but there you go, you have thumbnails, big pics, and 2 clicks away from (in my case) a 2mp image

no to steps on 1 page no to pdf files

“If that’s the case, then what exactly, do you get from the “pro” membership? Why would anyone pay then?”

I dont know I got mine for being featured on the front page, you get less ad’s but so does using adblock, you get 1 page and PDF’s but I never use those, the only advantage I see is a much more featured editor, but if you dont want to pay, thats 3 whole features and a little icon next to your name

“It’s been a good six months since I’ve been there, but the last time I went, none of the articles I read made any sense at all. Most people were including vital steps in their pictures, making it completely impossible to follow them, ”

when your asking for free content it sometimes sucks

“I forget what I was reading at the time, but I recall it was a dangerous project, and all the safety warnings were on pictures 2 through 8, making this not only a stupid business model, but completely and utterly irresponsible.”

thats not my place to say

“Oh, and when I did sign up for a free account, maybe a year and a half, 2 years ago, I did in fact get a lot of spam. Just an anecdote, but I’m pretty sure they sell your info. How else would they benefit from registration?”

funny I receive like 3-12 spam messages a year on that email account, maybe your email service is just shit? as far as benefit, maybe they are trying to build a community of regular readers?

whether its working or not is another debate

It’s really rather funny hearing the same half-baked responses to criticism here, rather than at Instructables, where there is always a cheering section.

If the users at HAD are irrelevant, why respond at all? Alternate views have been suppressed at Ibles, but I doubt you’ll succeed here.

Go back to the fold, Osgeld. Return to Instructables. Sink into the warm embrace, where everything is golden and there are no dissenting voices…

Don’t leave the orange-tinted fantasy world, Osgeld, it’s much more comfortable…

omg what a bunch ” well most of you ” of moanin fucks,

End of the day if you want to use them then doso, if you dont then bloody don’t, NO ONE is forcing you to use them by holding a gun to your head.

Shit some of you just need to grow up and get a life and perhaps even a girlfriend.

Rant Over

Wolfy

It’s not that readers demand an “ad-free” environment, but it sure would be nice if it wasn’t and “ad-saturated” one.

Sadly, Instructables seems tone deaf to complaints from its readers. Even civil comments or criticisms are met with snarky replies from a gang of “PRO” users, which appear to be employees (posing as outside users), that spend most their day defending Instructables poor decisions.