Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web

neustadt.fr

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 531 posts

Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web

#171

Post by s73ver_ »

joepie91_ wrote: post #152
s73ver_ wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't, because they could just as easily not make the content, and then you wouldn't have it in any form. And the greater point there, that you appear to have missed, is that content creators don't really owe you anything, unless you've paid them. Thus, their actions are not hostile to you.

What? That's stringing together a bunch of things that have absolutely nothing to do with each other. The primary motivation of many "creators" is to gain more income; to that end, they do not need to produce user-friendly content, they just need to produce content that earns money . That doesn't even require maximizing readership. Aside from that, whether one person is being hostile to another person has absolutely…

No, the idea that something can be "hostile" hinges on the idea that you were entitled to it in the other form to begin with. Someone not providing content in the form you wish is an inconvenience at best.

Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web

#172

Post by cjhanks »

This strikes me as rant saying; "For years I loved eating spam. 7 months ago I stopped eating spam. Now I think spam is evil. You should stop eating spam."

The decentralized internet of anonymous chat servers, mail servers, and communication channels aren't dead. Most people simply do not like them.

Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web

#173

Post by DeusExMachina »

pera wrote: post #157
DeusExMachina wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If video content would be so "hostile", it would have failed on its own already. People would flock to other places where they can read instead. I don't buy this idea where everything is always imposed on us by evil corporations. More and more websites using video to me seems more like a proof that people prefer videos over written content. That's why videos usually autoplay, also on YouTube and Facebook: if a person…

I do agree that not everything is imposed by evil corps, but hostile products don't necessarily fail by their own: cigarettes and junk foods are just one example of this. In general I'm not against video content in a web page, as it actually can be a good source of raw data that we can use to understand something in great details, but I would argue that in many cases video is objectively inferior to text: texts are m…

Cigarettes and junk food are not hostile in this context. We are talking about things that people don’t like but are forced to get anyway.

Cigarettes and junk food are definitely unhealthy, but people love them. So much that it’s hard to take them away from them.

Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web

#174

Post by pjc50 »

ataturk wrote: post #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…

Well, it's both: people thought the whole "take back control" slogan was great, along with the "£350m for the NHS" slogan. It's just that the slogans are empty and there's no answer to the question "control of what, and by whom?" Or any other question related to how this is actually going to work.

The problem of unachievable slogans is hardly a new one but it has got much worse lately. Injecting more lies into the political process is not going to improve this.

Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web

#175

Post by iamcasen »

ataturk wrote: post #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…

"died-in-the-wool Marxist hardliners and corporatists"

You really trying to equate Marxists and corporatists??? Dude...

Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web

#176

Post by michael_fine »

bitshiffed wrote: post #38
dec0dedab0de wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I completely agree. I've seen similar ideas get shot down here on HN; but I think we need two separate protocols. One for purely documents, and a second for the universal application platform. Among other implications, it should be much easier for regular people to create content, and applications should be free of the document-focused legacy.

If we did that, how would you propose implementing upvoting in HN without js?

Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web

#177

Post by s73ver_ »

blunte wrote: post #127
DeusExMachina wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If video content would be so "hostile", it would have failed on its own already. People would flock to other places where they can read instead. I don't buy this idea where everything is always imposed on us by evil corporations. More and more websites using video to me seems more like a proof that people prefer videos over written content. That's why videos usually autoplay, also on YouTube and Facebook: if a person…

The videos that I speak of are ones that have replaced basic informational articles -- information that might only take a few paragraphs to disseminate, and which allow the reader to quickly glean the content. When given as video, they impose a time and data penalty just for the viewer to either get the nugget of information or to realize there's nothing of value for them. +Edit autocorrect

So write those articles yourself.

Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web

#178

Post by DeusExMachina »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #140
DeusExMachina wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If video content would be so "hostile", it would have failed on its own already. People would flock to other places where they can read instead. I don't buy this idea where everything is always imposed on us by evil corporations. More and more websites using video to me seems more like a proof that people prefer videos over written content. That's why videos usually autoplay, also on YouTube and Facebook: if a person…

It's easier to make money from videos than from text, and that's why websites would prefer that. There's not much else to it.

Maybe it’s easier to make money from videos because they people actually like them?

Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web

#179

Post by tzahola »

I’m more and more convinced of the profitability of this idea I have come up with recently: WebAssembly pages which render their contents via WebGL. Adblocking would become impossible; content providers could disable text copy/paste too!

Brave new world, huh?

Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web

#180

Post by insulanus »

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…

> dig through all of the Chrome process and try to figure out which is the one that will take down the rest of them

To kill: pkill "Chrome"

To suspend: pkill -SIGSTOP "Chrome" To resume: pkill -SIGCONT "Chrome"

Post reply on HN