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Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web

neustadt.fr

21–30 of 531 posts

Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web

#21

Irony: The web page that rails about the web being user hostile is coded so that Safari's user-friendly reader mode is disabled.

Author here. Is it? It works on my end. Could you tell me which OS/Safari version you're using? Thanks.

Even on the latest Safari it doesn't work: 10.13.1 (17B48) with macOS: 10.13.1 (17B48)

Nothing about that page seems like it would stop Reader so I filed a Radar about it.

Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web

#22
post #8

This is a good an informative essay. However, there's another element of "user-hostile" that I didn't see addressed (maybe I missed it in my haste?) -- that is the websites trying to control exactly how the content is consumed by the user. It seems increasingly that web content is being delivered in video form. That itself is hostile to some people. Some of us want the freedom to read (or scan quickly). But many of t…

I’ve noticed this thing on social media lately where a single image is turned into like a 10-second video...of nothing but the still image (and sometimes stock background music). This is usually done by low-effort clickbait sites, but I don’t get why.

Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web

#23
post #7

The Web was doomed the moment we let Javascript initiate connections and (less significantly) modify form content.

Yes, it really has been downhill since then. I wish js apps just had their own protocol and port. js://js.server.tld could open up your js browser and you could use that when it was something you needed. Then you could just trust browsing around the normal web, knowing its just documents.

Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web

#24
post #7

The Web was doomed the moment we let Javascript initiate connections and (less significantly) modify form content.

I'm old enough to remember when our pre-bubble, pre-amazon "web"team found about javascript via the web monkey website with it's animated moving arms! Prior, all interaction was via CGI or SSI. I still remember a web teacher at a university teaching a side course, telling us never to use javascript, and showed the NBA site and others. Then a student raised his hand: NBA uses javascript. And the prof, said, "Oh, I have javascript turned off, so I didn't know".

Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web

#25
"For many of us in the early 2000s, the web was magical. You connected a phone line to your computer, let it make a funny noise and suddenly you had access to a seemingly-unending repository of thoughts and ideas from people around the world.

"It might not seem like much now, but what that noise represented was the stuff of science fiction at the time: near-instantaneous communication at a planetary scale. It was a big deal."

I kind of yearn for the pre-web days... when the primary means of communication was mailing lists and newsgroups, without any commercial interest.

The creation of the web was when it all started to go wrong. Corporations started to flock to it like flies and tried their best to turn it in to an ad-laden, spyware-laden, dumbed-down, one-way broadcasting medium not too far from television.

Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web

#26
The part where the author tries to tie Brexit and the election of Donald Trump to the user-hostile web is bonkers.

People, you have to understand this: There exists a large number of others out there who desperately want government reformed, want more localized control over their lives, and who voted accordingly. It wasn't some trick pulled on them by corporations or Russians manipulating social media. I realize that may be hard to understand, but it is the truth!

The rest of the article was well-intentioned, but somehow just a bit off. We can't go back to 1999 or 1993, but we can limit the walled gardens and censorship if we want to. But this is important: It's not the freedom-minded people who want to shut down free speech or filter and censor, it is the dyed-in-the-wool Marxist hardliners and the corporatists.

Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web

#27
post #7

The Web was doomed the moment we let Javascript initiate connections and (less significantly) modify form content.

I kind of think it has more to do with organizations like Facebook vs. some particular technology itself. It's the way corporatists want to control everything in order to create money rivers that flow only to them.

Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web

#29
post #8

This is a good an informative essay. However, there's another element of "user-hostile" that I didn't see addressed (maybe I missed it in my haste?) -- that is the websites trying to control exactly how the content is consumed by the user. It seems increasingly that web content is being delivered in video form. That itself is hostile to some people. Some of us want the freedom to read (or scan quickly). But many of t…

I’ve noticed this thing on social media lately where a single image is turned into like a 10-second video...of nothing but the still image (and sometimes stock background music). This is usually done by low-effort clickbait sites, but I don’t get why.

Videos might have more weight for the suggestion algorithms or other timeline filtering probably. (or at least they think it's otherwise effective)

Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web

#30
post #8

This is a good an informative essay. However, there's another element of "user-hostile" that I didn't see addressed (maybe I missed it in my haste?) -- that is the websites trying to control exactly how the content is consumed by the user. It seems increasingly that web content is being delivered in video form. That itself is hostile to some people. Some of us want the freedom to read (or scan quickly). But many of t…

I’ve noticed this thing on social media lately where a single image is turned into like a 10-second video...of nothing but the still image (and sometimes stock background music). This is usually done by low-effort clickbait sites, but I don’t get why.

Better "retention" metrics?
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