Back in the day, we called that "indexing" and it was fundamental to making the web in any way usable; without search engines, the whole thing was data with no ability to locate it.
I don't know precisely what changed that people decided that analysis is a bridge too far.
They're annoying clutter, but I don't think it falls under "dark pattern" because you can ignore it, there's no requirement to interact with it. Dark patterns guide you down a path you don't need to go.
This particular one on the Author Clock site is from monto.io > social-proof.
I've been pondering similar regarding data persistence. One half-assed idea I have is simply to prompt the user to save the data regularly. A reminder with a button/link which triggers data serialisation from storage and then triggers the save dialogue. The serialisation/save could be triggered manually any time. A reciprocal import would also be needed of course.
Another similarity half-baked plan is for a PWA to regularly post (encrypted?) data to a service I'd host that simply forwards the data to the user's choice of cloud storage. It would require initial setup and probably regularly refreshing token, but should be workable.
The self-hosted app Actual Budget [1] sort of takes the second approach, where each client maintains their own SQLite database in local storage. However, instead of just hosting a single file database, the server maintains a list of migrations and is able to resolve conflicts between multiple clients. Clients push/pull the migrations when syncing to keep their database up-to-date. E2EE is also supported. The original creator, James Long, has done talks about the architecture if you want to learn more [2, 3].
Because I've lost one laptop (RIP) to a crack in a motherboard brought on by repeated squashing and twisting, and my current notebook is creaking. Quite literally. Although I probably should simply stop tossing my laptop into a backpack, that's just how life goes. So something that absorbs that stress would be ideal!
You're describing self-publishing a business-related e-book. TFA describes the harsh reality of traditional paper publishing of fiction. It also has a section on self-publishing, incidentally.
I know "me too" comments aren't generally acceptable here, but I think the wholesale pillaging of the web for LLMs etc is way out of hand.
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