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Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web

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Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web

#71

Post by jccalhoun »

I use ublock origin and privacy badger not because I am worried about privacy but because the internet is basically unusable without it.

Because of this, I don't see many ads. But I have been an amazon customer since 1999 (according to what they say on their website when I'm logged in.) Looking at what they recommend for me, this personalization stuff is crap.

In music, Amazon recommends bands I never listen to like Montrose, Metallica, and the Doors (and to be fair, some people I've never heard of so I guess it is possible that I would be interested in them. Greta Van Fleet? William Patrick Corgan?)

In books, I do like scifi but they recommend a bunch of books with spaceships shooting each other on the cover - not what I have ever been interested in.

In the "humor and entertainment" section of books they do list some books that I would be interested in but, strangely, none of them are "humor" but are all academic books about videogames (which I am interested in). Even here the recommendation engine is very unsophisticated because in between academic books on videogames there are books on the art of Zelda and other coffee table books that I am not interested in.

And the first book in their recommended children's book section is 1984. (and I don't have any kids any way).

If this is the best they can do with 18 years of tracking my purchases then I am not worried.

Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web

#73

Post by paulddraper »

chrisseaton wrote: post #32
blunte wrote: 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…

> 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). And what if some of us want the freedom to watch? Maybe I'm illiterate? Just like you, I could say that putting something in writing instead of a video is 'hostile' if it doesn't meet my preferences. Talking about 'hostile' is hysterical.

Videos articles are far more difficult to make than text articles.

If you make a video, just include the transcript.

Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web

#74

Post by mikegerwitz »

kuschku wrote: post #46
chrisseaton wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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). And what if some of us want the freedom to watch? Maybe I'm illiterate? Just like you, I could say that putting something in writing instead of a video is 'hostile' if it doesn't meet my preferences. Talking about 'hostile' is hysterical.

You can always use a screen reader to automatically have it read the text to you, and it works well enough. I can’t have an OCR system automatically translate a video into text.

Even if you can have it transcribed (which is possible today), videos contain far more information than what is spoken: gestures, emphasis / how words are spoken, body language, objects, diagrams, etc. While skilled speakers may try to mitigate that so that the presentation degrades somewhat gracefully to a transcription, it's by no means a one-to-one translation, and it doesn't always make sense.

Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web

#75

Post by [deleted] »

blunte wrote: 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…

[deleted]

Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web

#76

Post by pmoriarty »

shangxiao wrote: post #60
pmoriarty wrote: post #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 b…

I love the fact that IRC is still alive and kicking. The #django channel on freenode is still pretty active as opposed other communities that flock to slack or gitter.

Technical chat on IRC is still alive and well on Freenode, but non-technical chat has mostly moved on from IRC to other media.

Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web

#77

Post by wtetzner »

throwaway2016a wrote: post #12
annabellish wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It always astonishes me how many people who are ostensibly against the webkit derivative hegemony won't even consider recommending Firefox. It's certainly a competitive browser, and personally my favourite, and Mozilla does fantastically important work balancing out an otherwise entirely corporate, ulterior-motive laden browser market.

My experience has been that Firefox was unusably slow on OS X and Linux for a long time and they lost a lot of users because of it. Now it is faster but it is difficult to woo people back. And even if it is faster, there track record shows that they found doing a release that slows down a large portion of users was acceptable. Granted I doubt they still have that attitude, and i think they are more performance based…

> and i think they are more performance based now, but a lot of us left for Chrome and never looked back.

And you don't have the same problem with Chrome? I've found Chrome to be a terrible resource hog lately, and sometimes I have to kill it to get my computer back to a usable state. And of course, I have to dig through all of the Chrome process and try to figure out which is the one that will take down the rest of them.

Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web

#78

Post by duxup »

blunte wrote: 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 read some sports related sites. Many have auto play video that seems to pop up just a bit after you've already started reading.

The video almost always is unrelated (different team, different story) to what I'm already well into reading. This is annoying 100% of the time. It's never useful to me.

Even worse. Some stories will be just a few words and a video. So I go to a site, read, play video.... and that same site's autoplay video will pop up and play ON TOP OF THEIR OWN CONTENT. I don't even know what to think about that, what could they possibly feel they're accomplishing?

Do they visit their own site? Do they feel like shotgunning content at me and having me fight to close different windows is a good thing?

Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web

#79

Post by leephillips »

I agree with this author and implemented all his suggestions years ago, both as a consumer and creator of web sites. But sewers like Facebook and ad networks are low-hanging fruit. Search for something on the once-indispensible Google, and, after five or six ads, you will likely see a Wikipedia link. On the fifth page of results will be the professor's .edu page that the Wikipedia article plagiarizes from.

Google succeeded because their pagerank algorithm discovered useful sites. But now those same algorithms promote popular (or Google-profitable) sites at the expense of higher-quality sites (that often carry no advertising). W3schools, anybody? It was probably a natural evolution: the algorithm ate itself, and results that might actually be useful are buried under sites that are popular. I think sites like Wikipedia and Google feeding off each other is a more insidious problem - one with no quick technological solution, like installing an ad blocker.

Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web

#80

Post by jjawssd »

noobiemcfoob wrote: post #64
hasenj wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which I think is a big mistake, because even if it ends up being used in a low traffic site, it ends up complicating the installation process. Where as a compiled language not only would run fast but also have a very simple setup: just copy over the exe and run it. Nothing to configure. No dependencies to install.

Many applications I've used that come as an exe are hardly that easy to install and configure. Inevitably, something breaks because of my machine's particular configuration. On the development side, building to that magical executable is an even bigger nightmare. Most packages in python or nodejs? Install and run through package managers just fine.

> Many applications I've used that come as an exe are hardly that easy to install and configure.

Python and Node interpreters are EXEs that are NOT easy to install and configure for 95+% of end-users

> Inevitably, something breaks because of my machine's particular configuration.

Indeed. Like a screwed up $PYTHONPATH

> On the development side, building to that magical executable is an even bigger nightmare.

I do not understand.

> Most packages in python or nodejs? Install and run through package managers just fine.

This implies you are familiar with WHICH interpreter you are calling and that you know where it is installed so you can call it.

None of this is easy for end-users.

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