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Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web

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Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web

#91

Post by tbirrell »

I agree with much of this article, but at this point I'm dangerously close to falling into the camp of, "is it even worth it?" I have been using google accounts for almost 10 years, I'm very much locked into that ecosystem. Even if there was a privacy issue, I wonder if it is worth the monumental hassle to leave and spin up my own versions of everything I use.

Thanks to equifax, all my most important information is probably already out in the wild, and thanks to the US government (and how they deal with replacing identifying information) I'm likely screwed for the rest of my life. In the face of that, the harm that google or facebook (which I'll admit to using less and less of) can do to me seems trivial.

Yeah, as a user, I'm a commodity online. But I'll be damned if I'm not enjoying the bread and circuses they use to keep me there. There is little to nothing I can do to prevent anyone from doing anything with my information, so I might as well take advantage of what I've already "paid" for.

Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web

#93

Post by DerfNet »

ducttape12 wrote: post #82

I've actually become a bit put off on a lot of "modern" technologies lately. Every website tries to keep you on as long as possible with click bait, every advertiser tries to track your habits, video games just try to upsell you to the season pass, and every webapp is just an upsell to the paid pro version. Heck, even our operating systems are nothing more than data collection points. In many ways, I feel like techno…

That's without even mentioning the "internet of things" phenomenon, standalone voice assistants, and so on. The advertisers aren't happy just collecting web usage data anymore and now they want into our actual homes.

Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web

#94

Post by hasenj »

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.

The more you depend on things to be right in the target environment, the more chances you have of breaking things.

Having a statically linked binary will not always magically solve this, but it's a great step in that direction.

The other step is not relying on any external servers or services, e.g. postgresql, redis, etc.

The rest just boils down to programmer discipline. Never introduce something that can potentially cause a headache to the end user.

If you're building on an interpreted language, you can't really do that. You will always at least require the user to have a specific version of python/node/whatever.

This can get complicated if the user has a different version, so now you have to introduce a virtualization layer that can manage several different versions of the environment. These tools are always annoying to use.

Not to mention that some packages could have native dependencies (e.g. a python library having a dependency on a c library) and this is almost always a source of headaches.

Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web

#96

Post by ntoe845noe »

pmoriarty wrote: post #49
amorphid wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never got into the pre-web stuff, so I don't know exactly what the differences are. Don't those things still exist? Isn't the comment section of this HN post a form of async, text-only communication?

It's still centralized, and owned and run by a commercial entity that uses it to further their own interests, with a record of its users' interests and opinions. The capabilities and features of web forums are also really dumbed-down and limited compared to what you could get with the mail clients and news clients of even 20 or 30 years ago.

Yeah, I'm really surprised that most web forum software doesn't even let you sort comments by author, date, subject (which most comments don't have), etc. There were all sorts of useful things that usenet provided. (Not the least of which is kill files for ignoring trolls.)

Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web

#99

Post by throwaway2016a »

wtetzner wrote: post #77
throwaway2016a wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> And you don't have the same problem with Chrome? I've found Chrome to be a terrible resource hog lately

I'm OS X and I've had some CPU issues lately if I have a lot of tabs open but overall not nearly as many issues as when I finally decided to give up Firefox.

I actually downloaded Firefox lately and it seems pretty nice. If Chrome gets works I may consider it.

Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web

#100

Post by pmoriarty »

DerfNet wrote: post #85
pmoriarty wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's still centralized, and owned and run by a commercial entity that uses it to further their own interests, with a record of its users' interests and opinions. The capabilities and features of web forums are also really dumbed-down and limited compared to what you could get with the mail clients and news clients of even 20 or 30 years ago.

Could you expand on that second line a bit? I'm curious what features we're currently missing out on compared to decades past.

From a recent thread on "Why kernel development still uses email": [1]

"This is one of the things that web-based forums have yet to get right. Email (and NNTP news) clients from 20 or 30 years ago are far superior in this respect, because they can intelligently deal with threading and folding. These features alone makes large conversations much easier to deal with than on web-forums.

To add to that, email (and NNTP news) clients even from 20 or 30 years ago have other powerful features that web forums have yet to catch up on:

- kill files[2] (which you can use to filter out unwanted articles/mails based on content or metadata such as subject, user, etc)

- scoring

- user-configurable anti-spam filtering or other "intelligent" filtering (such as bayesian filtering not just for spam/ham, but for interesting/unintersting content)

- tagging not just on a site-wide level but at the client level so each user can tag messages/articles the way they make sense to them

- other advanced filtering and scripting based on any of the above

Web-based forums are just incredibly primitive compared to this many-decade-old technology."

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15373179

[2] - https://wikivisually.com/wiki/Kill_file

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