Ask HN: What's broken about the internet?

This is a regulatory capture problem, not a tech problem.

UI toolkits - Seems that all the highest quality UI toolkits (Ant, Material, Fabric/Fluent, etc) have way too much whitespace. It works for things that work well in "cards" but the low information-density is killing me personally. I think more developers would choose high-density UI toolkits if one was released by a major dev team and could be relied on to be maintained. Maybe Photon/Protocol could eventually fill this gap, I like them a lot more overall but they don't seem nearly as well-packaged for easy use, or at least don't seem to have a complete kit available at https://www.adobe.com/products/xd/resources.html or anywhere else really.

Walled gardens - not being able to build things that integrate multiple services. Instagram live videos, combining amazon and walmart listings, google places "here now", or unified client for iOS/SMS/Discord/Slack/Teams are all off limits to ambitious developers.

Centralization - Seems like home email servers are increasingly being ban-hammered by the major providers like Gmail, ProofPoint, etc so you have to have your mail sent by a hosted server. CloudFlare is also seemingly becoming a single point of denial/failure. Chromium can now effectively dictate W3C standards because whatever they implement instantly becomes the ground truth for web dev.

DNS/BGP - Sorely in need of a major update.

IoT - It's shockingly difficult to find IoT devices which can compute locally/privately/on-the-edge. Everything sends all the data back home and stores/processes it there.

Tracking - If websites insist on having an OAuth or email verified signup, I'd like my browser to quickly and quietly create a new profile for every domain, or even every visit to that domain. And otherwise keep all tracking/fingerprinting down to effectively zero. I'm really tired of being tracked everywhere all the time.

My world view (or more like a cosmic view) is this: Space and matter are fascinating phenomenon but the truly fascinating things happen between the two. Empty space and time are quite boring until you put matter in it.

The "Let the output of your program be the input of mine." philosophy was really good. Web applications do the exact opposite. All of the interesting shit is missing.

Keeping parts of a thing in separate places can be necessary at times but it usually is not. There is the layout of an article website and there are article in it. The articles with their videos and images are separate things as much as browsers are separate things from web pages (perhaps even more so).

The article can be a separate file. Like an iframe but as inline text. No , no , no but if it has any of those they are ignored.

The other perspective also works. The data for a physical object could be a single file. One or more images, videos, docs, the meta data. Say a product, its price and description can be put inside the image file and be made accessible as a js object/json. Standards can be created, adopted and popularized. If the picture has one or more cars the meta data can have all the usual properties of a car with standardized key names. This seems chaotic and undesirable for large shopping platforms but if an object has a description, contact information and a price it can be sold. Setting up a small store could be as simple as dropping images into a page. One would want to parse out some of the meta data of course but there can be much more data available.

It makes reasoning about the website much more like we reason about the real world.