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

181–190 of 531 posts

Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web

#181

Post by s73ver_ »

tomc1985 wrote: post #158
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.

> and then you wouldn't have it in any form. This would be a blessing for much of the "content" out there. Do they owe me anything? Of course not. But if they want my precious, precious attention and the opportunity to advertise to me then they need to play ball my way. Otherwise, fuck them.

So don't consume it, instead of complaining that they're being "hostile" to you. Or, even better, create your own content in written form to compete.

Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web

#182

Post by robin_reala »

tbirrell wrote: post #91

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 p…

You don’t have to do everything in one go; you can migrate out a service at a time and see how it works for you.

Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web

#183

Post by hasenj »

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #163
hasenj wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 potentiall…

I mean, have you tried running arc? You can fire up arc 3.1 via racket and it runs fine.

I remember playing with it many years ago when I was still naive and at the time had bought into PG's promotion of lisp.

Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web

#184

Post by giobox »

delecti wrote: post #118
nxsynonym wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apart from the normal Facebook detractors, this is big part of why I deactivated my account. 95% of content on facebook is now in video format. Aside from the reasons you mentioned, it's also a huge drain on battery and slows the responsiveness of the site down considerably. If I want to see videos, I'll go to youtube or vimeo. Don't force them on me when I'm trying to find quick info.

I cannot remember the last time I saw a video in my facebook feed (in the feed, not directly linked). Maybe your facebook friends were just particularly annoying.

You are exceptionally lucky then. As of several years ago, they autoplay in my and everyone I've seen using facebook's feed all the time, many (perhaps even most for some) of them are ads rather than friend posted content. Fortunately they appear to stay muted until selected, but it's still annoying none the less. This is both via the website and in app (iOS, I'm sure other platforms suffer the same).

Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web

#185

Post by robin_reala »

michael_fine wrote: post #176
bitshiffed wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Upvoting in HN works without JS already, it just has a page refresh.

Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web

#186

Post by baxtr »

_jal wrote: post #16
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'm with you on this. Honestly at this point, if the information is only contained within a video, I skip it and move on[1]. (I usually leave video in the browser crippled, only turning it on when I actually want to watch something.) [1] The trend of support docs for enterprise software going video is horrible, stupid, and a negative mark when I'm evaluating products. If someone has to spend hours of eyebleed rewindi…

Same here. I simply hate sites with videos and no related text content/summary. I’ve noticed that especially news sites are increasingly employing this “feature”. I assume the main reason for this is that can force you to watch the 20-30s video ad. There is no way of avoiding it other than opening a new tab and doing something else for 30s... what a waste of life time

Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web

#187

Post by jstewartmobile »

sctb wrote: post #135
jstewartmobile wrote: post #98

Talk about silver linings! Trump's victory certainly made the facebook/twitter/instagram liberals see what an obscenity this has all become. Of course if the dems make a comeback in the midterms, watch them all go into full-blown social-media relapse.

Please don't post this kind of partisan flamebait on Hacker News. We're here to try for better. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

my bad

Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web

#188

Post by hasenj »

tomc1985 wrote: post #159
hasenj wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only problematic licenses here are the GNU family of licenses. This is very unfortunate but there's no way around it. Luckily there are many many useful libraries available with very liberal licenses.

While GNU is restrictive it is an important bulwark against exactly the kind of corporate conquest that more liberal licenses have seen. Much of Amazon's unfortunate domination over cloud services couldn't exist without liberal open-source licenses...

How so? I think it's quite the opposite. The GPL allows you to run your code on a server that clients connect to without you having to give them the code to your server.

This is the only way to profit off of GPL licensed libraries.

Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web

#189

Post by hasenj »

jjawssd wrote: post #81
tomc1985 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only if they provide a statically linked binary, which is rare -- especially in open source, where such a thing generally has consequences with your license(s).

I think Golang has made significant inroads in this regard. For instance with IPFS and Minio. Very easy to just get started with minimal fuss.

I'm not sure what is IPFS or Minio, but as far as I know, the go compiler always produces statically linked binaries that have no external dependencies. This is the default out of the box behaviour.

Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web

#190

Post by s73ver_ »

tzahola wrote: post #179

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?

And accessibility would be a thing of the past.
Post reply on HN