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Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web

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Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web

#231

Post by 1_2__4 »

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…

> 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.

That is not the slightest bit true and is in fact the entire basis for the conversation we’re having.

Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web

#232

Post by ChuckMcM »

I agree with the author, if people would pay for the information they got over the Web then the providers of that information would be open to not selling information about you to people who wished to exploit it.

The challenge though is trust, and of course transparency. Even if PrivacyBook (the mythical anti-facebook product) had paying customers and no tracking, how could you really verify that they weren't selling your information? And of course nation states always have a large hammer when they can put you out of business if you don't hand over data that they deem important.

In some ways DAO's are an interesting response to this, immune to pressure from nation states they may be able to provide a foundation for a distributed service that resists oversight. It might be a viable business plan if you could get more than the tin foil hat demographic to buy into it.

Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web

#233

Post by tomjen3 »

kfriede wrote: post #161
Thriptic wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But many of the providers of "content" know they have little to provide, so they drag it out in video form, saving the actual information for the last 10% of the video (if ever!) 0:00 - 00:10 Useless video animation 00:10-2:00 "Hey guys welcome to my channel. Make sure to like and subscribe and let me know how I'm doing in the comments. Also make sure to check out [sponsor] and use coupon code [code] for 10% off" 2…

I often feel this way about podcasts. Many great podcasts have a 0:30 intro, 1:30 of ads then 08:00 of random babble before getting into 5:00 of the meat of the podcast. The most recent one I can think of is 99% Invisible, though they're not even close to the only ones that do it.

There are podcasts like that, but I admit I am strange because all my favourite podcasts are multiple hours long, getting really deep into the content. Jocos podcasts, which doesn't really have ads other than for his own products, fx are often more than 3 hours, Dan Carlins Hardcore History is typically that long per episode, but often they are also part of a series, like his 5 episodes on the first world war (probably about 20 hours).

Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web

#234

Post by leepowers »

> the page is 3.1 MB in size, makes about 460 HTTP requests of which 430 are third-party requests (outside of its parent domain) and takes 20 seconds to fully load on a fast 3G connection

That's a lot of ad-tracking and ad delivery code. More than that, it's also remarkable that so much of this code is essentially duplicated. It's all user tracking and ad delivery but with each separate company loading it's own "stack" to accomplish the same thing.

It's part of a larger trend from content-centered and user-centered to advertising centered. The problem is not centralization per se but business built on advertising revenue. Facebook is an extreme example - the news feed algorithms are optimized for generating ad revenue and not necessarily favoring news reports that happen to be true.

Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web

#235

Post by eggpy »

_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…

My office provides a license for Pluralsight. I have found some courses with high quality content and interesting information, and it's really useful to have it all in one place. BUT, especially with programming, I find video to be a really challenging medium. It's so much more useful to scan for things you don't know or context of examples and spend some time digesting, or just playing around with sample code. Not everyone can learn at the same rate and text is great for allowing people to learn at their own pace. I really wish they provided a full text log of video caption instead of requiring the content to be consumed solely in video. Udemy suffers from this as well. I might as well look up the info on youtube.

Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web

#236

Post by hutzlibu »

mikegerwitz wrote: post #69
shams93 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah personally I learn much faster and better by reading than via most videos. You can't keyword search a video, with text documentation I can keyword search within the page to find out exactly what I'm looking for.

Another problem I have with videos is that I can't go at my own pace---I'm stuck at the pace of the speaker. Some videos I'll watch at 2.5x speed, but the speaker may speed up and slow down at times. With text, I can speed-read, slowing down at key points as needed. And if it's a text I want to devote more study/attention to, then can print it (which facilitates speed reading as well.)

Exactly. There are obviously use cases for video - which you can't present in text. Visual tours of architecture, nature, machines, etc. - or other kinds of visual information.

But for facts - reading is simply superior.

What sometimes works, if it is wellmade, is a mixed presentation: text, pictures and video, where you can controll the pace of information. But I seldom see something like this wellmade.

Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web

#237

Post by Chaebixi »

komali2 wrote: post #149
jccalhoun wrote: post #71

I use ublock origin and privacy badger not because I am worried about privacy but because the internet is basically unusable without it. Because of this, I don't see many ads. But I have been an amazon customer since 1999 (according to what they say on their website when I'm logged in.) Looking at what they recommend for me, this personalization stuff is crap. In music, Amazon recommends bands I never listen to like…

To be fair, you sound like one of the harder people to track accurately. However, I as well have been "disappointed" by the ability of websites to judge my interests. After reading about cases such as Target, who have "spooky" ability to gauge interest, I was expecting better. So I searched for a very specific motorcycle jacket with very specific features and now my page is inundated with every clothing item that has…

The impression that I got was that Target thing wasn't some spooky self-learning AI product recommender, but rather they had the data to write some special-purpose analytics to detect a specific but common purchasing pattern. Your motorcycle jacket example isn't the kind of thing that would get that kind of special attention.

Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web

#238

Post by mattmanser »

giobox wrote: post #184
delecti wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

There's an option to disable autoplay in the settings.

https://www.facebook.com/help/community/question/?id=1020263...

Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web

#239

Post by Joeri »

kfriede wrote: post #161
Thriptic wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But many of the providers of "content" know they have little to provide, so they drag it out in video form, saving the actual information for the last 10% of the video (if ever!) 0:00 - 00:10 Useless video animation 00:10-2:00 "Hey guys welcome to my channel. Make sure to like and subscribe and let me know how I'm doing in the comments. Also make sure to check out [sponsor] and use coupon code [code] for 10% off" 2…

I often feel this way about podcasts. Many great podcasts have a 0:30 intro, 1:30 of ads then 08:00 of random babble before getting into 5:00 of the meat of the podcast. The most recent one I can think of is 99% Invisible, though they're not even close to the only ones that do it.

This is why I stopped listening to back to work. There were useful tidbits, but I didn’t want to wade through an hour of random drivel to get to it.

Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web

#240

Post by tomjen3 »

jccalhoun wrote: post #71

I use ublock origin and privacy badger not because I am worried about privacy but because the internet is basically unusable without it. Because of this, I don't see many ads. But I have been an amazon customer since 1999 (according to what they say on their website when I'm logged in.) Looking at what they recommend for me, this personalization stuff is crap. In music, Amazon recommends bands I never listen to like…

I block far less than you do, but all recommendation engines appear to be crab: I brought a few books on Amazon that could be purchased by middle-aged women and now most of the books I get recommended are romance novels with a vampire, time travel or magic theme - meanwhile what I actually buy is mainly SciFi and a bunch of books about NK.

Come to think of it the recommended movies on Netflix is also crazy, but they may be screwing it towards their own selection.

But lets be honest even when I tell Facebook what my interests are, it can't give useful ads - and even mighty google assumed I was interested in Palaeontology at one point.

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