A new app, HyperTexting, turns the open web into a scrollable social media-like feed
A new app, HyperTexting, turns the open web into a scrollable social media-like feed
一款名为 HyperTexting 的新应用，将开放网络变成了可滚动的社交媒体式信息流
A new app called HyperTexting is making it as easy to surf the web as it is to scroll through a social media feed, like Facebook or X. The app, newly available for iOS, also aims to make updating your own personal website as simple as sending a text message. 一款名为 HyperTexting 的新应用让浏览网页变得像刷 Facebook 或 X 等社交媒体信息流一样简单。这款刚在 iOS 上线的新应用，还旨在让更新个人网站变得像发送短信一样容易。
This algorithm-free vision for the future of the web was built by Caleb Hailey, a 20-year tech veteran who still remembers the internet’s early promise, where everyone would own their own domain and publish content on their small slice of the wider web. That, of course, changed with the arrival of social media. “Somewhere along the way, social media came, and it was easier to make a page and post to your page than it was a website,” Hailey explained in a recent interview. “And the rest is history.” 这种无算法的网络未来愿景由拥有 20 年经验的科技老兵 Caleb Hailey 构建。他依然记得互联网早期的承诺：每个人都拥有自己的域名，并在广阔网络的一隅发布内容。当然，随着社交媒体的出现，这一切都改变了。“在某个阶段，社交媒体出现了，创建一个页面并发布内容比维护一个网站要容易得多，”Hailey 在最近的一次采访中解释道，“剩下的就是历史了。”
Beyond centralizing access to the personal connections and conversations that take place online, the shift to social media also established norms in a consumer app’s user interface, including a scrollable feed, user profiles, and other elements, like buttons for following, liking, and commenting. Those concepts form the basis for HyperTexting, which has been built to make the majority of the web available in this same format. 除了将在线个人联系和对话的访问权限集中化之外，向社交媒体的转变还确立了消费类应用用户界面的规范，包括可滚动的信息流、用户个人资料，以及关注、点赞和评论按钮等元素。这些概念构成了 HyperTexting 的基础，该应用旨在以同样的格式呈现大部分网络内容。
On the app, users can follow people and their websites, news outlets, blogs, newsletters, and more with a click. Users can then scroll through their articles, essays, and multimedia-filled posts in what feels very much like a modern-day social media feed. 在应用中，用户只需点击一下即可关注他人及其网站、新闻媒体、博客、时事通讯等。随后，用户可以像刷现代社交媒体信息流一样，滚动浏览他们的文章、随笔和多媒体帖子。
Hailey was inspired to build HyperTexting after seeing Twitter lose its way over the years, he said. “[Twitter] used to be a good place to discover things and share things, before they were chasing growth, and no longer reverse chron,” Hailey told TechCrunch, referring to the way the main Twitter timeline is now algorithmic, instead of displaying things in reverse chronological order. Plus, he adds, “links got deranked” on Twitter, which was another change that made the app worse than before. Then, during the COVID era, the concept of “doom scrolling” emerged, and Hailey found that social media was beginning to make him feel badly about the world. Hailey 表示，他在看到 Twitter 多年来逐渐迷失方向后，萌生了构建 HyperTexting 的想法。“（Twitter）曾经是一个发现和分享事物的好地方，但在他们追求增长并放弃反向时间轴之前，”Hailey 告诉 TechCrunch。他指的是现在 Twitter 主时间轴采用算法推荐，而不是按时间倒序显示内容。此外，他补充说，Twitter 上的“链接权重被降低了”，这是另一个让应用体验变差的改动。后来，在新冠疫情期间，“末日刷屏”（doom scrolling）的概念出现，Hailey 发现社交媒体开始让他对世界感到悲观。
“I basically uninstalled all the social apps from my phone,” Hailey said, noting that he found his way back to an old RSS news reader app, NetNewsWire, as a way to keep up with the flow of news and information online. Around the same time, he began working on another passion project — a way to make it easier to post to the web via a static website generator built for iPhone. “But then I started to realize that all these different things that I was passionate about could potentially be packaged up into something that looks and feels really familiar to more people, and [could] solve that problem that has bothered me for so long about RSS — like, why don’t more people care about this?” Hailey said. “我基本上卸载了手机上所有的社交应用，”Hailey 说。他提到自己重新用回了一款老牌 RSS 新闻阅读器 NetNewsWire，以此来跟上在线新闻和信息的流动。大约在同一时间，他开始着手另一个充满热情的项目——一种通过为 iPhone 构建的静态网站生成器，让发布网页变得更简单的方法。“但我后来开始意识到，我所热衷的所有这些不同的东西，或许可以打包成一种让更多人感到熟悉的东西，并解决那个长期困扰我的关于 RSS 的问题——比如，为什么没有更多人关注它？”Hailey 说道。
That led to HyperTexting, an app that leverages RSS under the hood but doesn’t promote the protocol in its marketing, while also providing a way to easily post to your own website. 这促成了 HyperTexting 的诞生。这款应用在底层利用了 RSS 技术，但在营销中并未刻意宣传这一协议，同时还提供了一种轻松发布内容到个人网站的方法。
“It’s trying to combine that publishing and subscribing experience, and really, it’s almost like a viewer to the discourse that already happens in the open web,” Hailey noted. RSS, for context, is an open protocol that is still very much a part of the web’s underpinning, powering products like WordPress blogs and podcast feeds. While adding your own list of RSS feeds to an app like NetNewsWire or Feedly is arguably a better way to follow website updates — especially for those who spend a lot of their day reading, like journalists or researchers — it’s not the format that everyday web users have gravitated to. Most prefer a scrollable feed — the kind that social media sites use. Over the years, attempts to drive mainstream consumers to RSS readers have fallen short. Google shut down its own app in this space in 2013, Google Reader, and no other tools have gone mainstream since. “它试图将发布和订阅体验结合起来，实际上，它就像是开放网络中现有讨论的一个查看器，”Hailey 指出。作为背景，RSS 是一种开放协议，至今仍是网络基石的重要组成部分，为 WordPress 博客和播客订阅源等产品提供支持。虽然将自己的 RSS 订阅列表添加到 NetNewsWire 或 Feedly 等应用中，对于那些每天花费大量时间阅读的人（如记者或研究人员）来说，无疑是跟踪网站更新的更好方式，但这并不是普通网络用户所青睐的格式。大多数人更喜欢可滚动的信息流——即社交媒体网站所使用的那种。多年来，引导主流消费者使用 RSS 阅读器的尝试都以失败告终。谷歌在 2013 年关闭了其在该领域的应用 Google Reader，此后没有任何其他工具能够成为主流。
In addition to being able to explore and follow websites and their content, read articles without ads, and listen to podcasts, HyperTexting lets users add their own website, like a WordPress blog, Ghost newsletter, or other site built with open source static site generators like Hugo or HyperTexting’s own product, HyperTemplates. That way, if a user wants to join in the conversation, they can post on their own website instead of a centralized social media platform. The post is then linked to the original website or article and will be surfaced in the feed for those following that same site. 除了能够探索和关注网站及其内容、阅读无广告文章以及收听播客外，HyperTexting 还允许用户添加自己的网站，例如 WordPress 博客、Ghost 时事通讯，或其他使用 Hugo 等开源静态网站生成器或 HyperTexting 自家产品 HyperTemplates 构建的网站。这样，如果用户想要参与讨论，他们可以在自己的网站上发布内容，而不是依赖中心化的社交媒体平台。该帖子随后会链接到原始网站或文章，并出现在关注该网站的用户的信息流中。
The app also includes an “Explore” section that points users to trending content across the web. (For those who remember it, this is like a rudimentary version of Nuzzel, which once surfaced what people were talking about on Twitter.) An optional Safari extension also lets users add new websites to follow on HyperTexting as they browse the web. 该应用还包含一个“探索”部分，向用户推荐全网的热门内容。（对于还记得它的人来说，这就像是 Nuzzel 的初级版本，Nuzzel 曾经展示人们在 Twitter 上讨论的热门话题。）一个可选的 Safari 扩展程序还允许用户在浏览网页时，将新网站添加到 HyperTexting 中进行关注。
“My experience in tech over the last 20 years is that things have just gotten so complicated. And to some degree, there’s this urge — this irresistible urge — to reinvent the wheel. Part of my experiment with HyperTexting is like, what if we didn’t?” Hailey mused. “Instead of chasing the platforms — the handful of websites we call social media today — and instead of trying to assert some opinion in this decentralized federated social networking thing that’s happening right now, my opinion is that the greatest decentralized social network ever created already exists, and it’s called the World Wide Web,” he said. “Like, let’s just use that.” “我在过去 20 年的科技从业经验告诉我，事情变得太复杂了。在某种程度上，人们有一种冲动——一种无法抗拒的冲动——去重复造轮子。我做 HyperTexting 的实验部分原因就在于，如果我们不这样做会怎样？”Hailey 若有所思地说。“与其去追逐那些平台——即我们今天所称的少数几个社交媒体网站——也无需试图在当前正在发生的去中心化联邦社交网络浪潮中发表某种观点，我的看法是，有史以来最伟大的去中心化社交网络已经存在了，它就是万维网，”他说，“我们直接使用它就好了。”
The app, built by Hailey’s Herd Works, is a free download on iOS. Over time, it may add premium subscriptions for extra features or include a single sponsored post per day to generate additional revenue to keep it afloat. 该应用由 Hailey 的公司 Herd Works 开发，目前可在 iOS 上免费下载。随着时间的推移，它可能会增加高级订阅以提供额外功能，或者每天包含一条赞助帖子，以产生额外收入来维持运营。