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Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web

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Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web

#221

Post by guelo »

iamcasen wrote: post #175
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...

Especially when what they really voted for was cutting the corporatists' taxes and regulations. It is one of the greatest tricks of modern propaganda that the super-pro-corporate parties have turned around the hate of corporations onto the, umm, less-pro-corporate party.

Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web

#222

Post by ryandrake »

DeusExMachina wrote: post #111
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…

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…

Is this the media consumption version of the efficient market hypothesis?

The argument sounds like, "If Comcast was such a bad company it would have failed on its own already."

Could there other forces at play that would explain how video as a format might succeeding despite not being preferred by users?

Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web

#224

Post by knowaveragejoe »

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…

I think you are giving those folks too much credit. Few of the people who voted for Trump could coherently explain the problems you have mentioned, how they realistically impact their life, and how Trump and his ilk would plan to solve them. Instead, inch-deep reasoning and soundbites prevail, and much of it boils down to conspiracy theories. They are happy to wield the power of the state and employ centralized control of things when it suits their pet issues all the same. Donald Trump represents a net intrusion of government into our personal lives and businesses.

Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web

#225

Post by smhost »

DeusExMachina wrote: post #173
pera wrote: post #157

Earlier 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.

That's a very bizarre definition of love. Few people are happy about their addiction to an unhealthy habit. Don't you think it's disingenuous to talk about user preference without talking about reward hacking? I think the internet is actually worse in this respect because much of it is systematically designed to induce addiction with no upper limit.

Your evolutionary arguments are also pretty bizarre and reductionist. Maybe we did evolve using verbal communication, but we didn't evolve to be schizophrenic voyeuristic mutes without face-to-face nonverbal feedback.

Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web

#229

Post by sanbor »

One important factor of the success of Facebook/YouTube/etc. is that you have an admin every 10k people. Let's say instead of Facebook we have million of people hosting their websites. Then you'd need a lot more admins. A lot more of security issues. Facebook makes super easy for people to put content online and also interact between them. I wish setting up a server and securing a server to host your content would be as easy as creating a Facebook account.

Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web

#230

Post by jumpkickhit »

I've been active online since 1994. In my opinion, the start of the cellphone era (iPhone and up) was when the internet started it's way downhill.

All sorts of people who weren't online suddenly were there, and businesses took a lot more interest in the lest tech savvy types who've started to populate the internet.

At the same time, these same mobile users saw they could be anonymous and had no learned netiquette unlike so many others before them.

So because of this new-user saturation, the internet became no longer niche and now mainstream, to the detriment of everyone else online.

Yes yes, Eternal September and all that, but were they wrong about the similar assessment back then?

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