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Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web

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Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web

#341

Post by sctb »

s73ver_ wrote: post #177
blunte wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Can you please stop being personally thorny towards other users here, like we've already asked?

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web

#342

Post by akoncius »

walterstucco wrote: post #198
DeusExMachina wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

so watching ads is a job?

Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web

#343

Post by tomc1985 »

s73ver_ wrote: post #309
tomc1985 wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like I have the time or desire to compete with most of these yokels. We give in some areas and take in others, that's how the world works. Content creators are not some unassailable gift horse immune from inspection or criticism. People are free to criticize the things I contribute to this world; and my feelings will not be hurt if they do. Perhaps you could learn from this. Video needs smothering, not competition.

"Like I have the time or desire to compete with most of these yokels." Then stop complaining. "Content creators are not some unassailable gift horse immune from inspection or criticism. People are free to criticize the things I contribute to this world; and my feelings will not be hurt if they do. Perhaps you could learn from this." But you're not criticizing. You're getting all in a tizzy because others aren't doing…

So one should just be happy with everything they have, dislike, and cannot change or compete on? How is that a reasonable expectation?

"Vast amounts of people"? Vast amounts of people kill other vast amounts of people, are you ok with that? Vast amounts of people vote for laws that screw over other vast amounts of people, is that cool? A vast amount of people boarded the Titanic, look where that got them...

If some idiot Youtube personality wants to flap their jaws for an hour, droning on and on about whatever stupid pointless thing in their life is stuck in their craw or whatever, fine. But for information dispersal, unless the video is densely packed with visual content, it needs to be text. Doers all over the world will thank you.

Entitlement is, if anything, forcing poor viewers to sit through a 15-minute life-story-slash-prologue just so they can continue to participate in a Reddit discussion or finish their task or whatever.

Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web

#344

Post by sctb »

throw7 wrote: post #67

The "World Wide Web" officially died when they decided to bring DRM into the standard. There is nothing more user hostile then that. Very sad to see Sir Lee bend over and actually like it.

You can always make a substantive point (if there is one) without the distracting and uncivil snark, and the guidelines ask us to.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web

#345

Post by moises_silva »

gingerb wrote: post #243

I totally disagree. It is not the web or www that is hostile but many websites and services out there. I think no one will go back to the old web, although I agree it was an epic experience back then. For me it is totally logical that many people try to find a way to earn money on the internet, and in this economy there is in principle nothing wrong with that IMHO. No one forces you to use Facebook, Google or any of…

THIS I'm tired of people equating the web with facebook.

Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web

#346

Post by ravenstine »

alexandercrohde wrote: post #39

This is good, but simplistic. Firstly the downfall in the geocities-web came in many phases: 1. Spam Email Phase 2. Phishing / Nigerian phase 3. Popup phase 4. Autoplaying Flash/ActiveX phase 5. Pagerank phase (forums being ruined until rel=nofollow) Now google, previously the main gateway to discovery, is pretty much useless for discovering new non-commercial content. The way this could go away is only from a market…

A decentralized p2p search engine exists, though really nobody uses it.

https://yacy.net/en/index.html

Perhaps a bare bones donation-supported search engine could exist if it implemented the same protocol using WebRTC and served a single JavaScript-powered webpage from S3.

Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web

#347

Post by x0x0 »

ryandrake wrote: post #222
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…

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?

Comcast has a monopoly, or, at worst, a duopoly in huge swaths of the country. How is anyone being forced to watch web videos online? There are dozens of alternate entertainment sources, and several high quality news sources that don't use much video.

Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web

#349

Post by tqkxzugoaupvwqr »

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?

I felt a strong urge to downvote you to not give this idea any spotlight. (I didn’t though.)

If this ever happens I will disable WebGL, and if this won’t be possible anymore (corporate interests…), I will invent a web competitor where participants are legally bound to my terms. Terms that will forbid ads, spying and spamming. Misbehaving users will experience increasingly long cool downs for misconducts, which can end in quasi bans (cool downs longer than their life). … One can dream.

Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web

#350

Post by walterstucco »

akoncius wrote: post #342
walterstucco wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

so watching ads is a job?

In a way, it is.

But I don't understand the connection.

The core of the issue is the proverbial "worse is better"

All the walled garden on the web are optimising one particular feature - engagement - leaving behind many others that are equally important if not more, like user's freedom or privacy.

It's no wonder that investing so much money in getting users to subscribe and use the platform results in an increase of time spent by the users on the platform.

It is orthogonal to the problem highlighted in the original post.

The net effect is so strong that any other platform that tries to enter the market either has to waste a lot of money (if they have them) or use the same techniques that are already in place to sustain their businness

The choice is on the users, but for the majority of them it's not worth it until it's too late.

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