A beautiful little tech-utopia where standards were open and everyone cooperated for the collective good existed for a few glorious years. The geeks had their way for a few years, but the show's over.
In my cynical belief there is nothing we can do practically to reverse the trends. Tragedy of the commons, greed, masses following the path of least resistance, etc. will assert themselves just like they do in all other spheres of human society.
Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web
191–200 of 531 posts
Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web
#192Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
the tl;dr is: The user controls the content, not the site.
One of the things we keep forgetting as we move forward is that client-control > server-control.
Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web
#193This 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…
Speaking as someone who works for a site who produces a lot of video content and is trending more that way I can give you a simple reason why. People consume it more. They stay on the site longer, they tend to watch more videos than read articles, and they share videos more. Now obviously the videos still need to be good content but the reason you’re seeing more video content is not because of some nefarious scheme:…
Well, of course people stay longer in the site. You're forcing us to, since skimming and searching is no longer an option.
It's a worse experience, and I avoid that sort of site if at all possible.
Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web
#194Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 0:00 - 00:10 Useless video animation I'm happy when it's only useless. It's often useless and loud.
That's because it's an unconditioned stimulus (classical conditioning theory). If you repeatedly watch their videos, and like them, you'll start to associate their intro animation with the content you like, and you'll like the intro animation. Later, you'll even come up with post-rationalizations for why it's not quite so loud or useless.
Unless of course you're so turned off by the intro that you bail out before giving their content a chance.
Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web
#195I’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.
WebAssembly + WebAudio speech synthesis ;)
Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web
#196Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
If I could make written content to compete then why would I be watching said video in the first place? The objective of consumption is to learn, but what you advocate only works if one has already learned something.
What about when the video contains exclusive, important trade-related info? Is dismissing someone to go create their own content on exclusive information really a coherent counterargument (or useful strategy)? Do you really want the internet to be even more polluted with more second- and third-source crap than it already is?
Video is creators stroking their egos. The creator is unimportant, only his/her ideas, which internally manifest as words and should be transcribed as cleanly and accurately as possible. Video is an extremely poor medium for most ideas.
Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web
#197Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
And it doesn't even need a page refresh; it could use a 204 No Content response. Potentially an yet-cleverer static browser system could also use 206 Partial Content to replace a portion of the page.
Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web
#198Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> We are talking about things that people don’t like but are forced to get anyway.
- Driving: a lot of people drive, very few of them like it or they would learn how to do it properly
- Public transport: 99,99% of people using public transport hate it
- Going to the dentist
- eating vegetables
- taking kids to the pool
and so on…
all of this things are incredibly annoying to many, yet they have not failed
Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web
#199Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
No, the videos are distracting and seize the user's attention for ad delivery.
Imagine that I followed you around all day bumping into you, waiting for you to drop some money and then walk away without noticing, so I could pick it up. That's annoying and hostile to you, but profitable to be with sufficient automation. That's the modern commercial web.
Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web
#200This 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.
This is the "it is this way; therefore people must want it this way" argument. It ignores the power of money to manipulate through advertising (or, in the general case, of power to coerce).
To take the specific example of FB, most people don't want to be tracked and advertised to, they just want an easy social space to interact with their friends and family. Sure, they'd probably prefer an ad-free, non-tracking version of FB, but not if it costs them much effort. So, FB's growth hacking, advertising, and critical mass have pushed millions of people into something they themselves would consider sub-optimal (assuming it was explained to them, ofc -- many are plain unaware).
On top of that, the average user simply does not have the knowledge to make an informed decision. Not about what's technically happening, and certainly not about what the long term consequences will be, although arguably no one knows about that.