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Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web

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Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web

#351

Post by flukus »

CaptSpify wrote: post #192
pmoriarty wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> One of the things we keep forgetting as we move forward is that client-control > server-control.

I'm not sure if we're forgetting it, as an industry we seem hell bent on removing user control. SaaS, cloud hosting, software walled gardens, invasive automatic updates, hidden software in hardware, etc. We're losing more and more control all the time. Around here it's nearly heresy to suggest the companies run their own servers.

Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web

#352

Post by LambdaComplex »

coldtea wrote: post #280
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…

> 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. Cigarettes and junk foods are not hostile -- they are incredibly enticing. What they are is harmful (which is something different). Video, similarly, whether harmful or not, is very welcome by lots of people who strongly prefer it to reading.

What's enticing about cigarettes?

Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web

#353

Post by axedwool »

jdavis703 wrote: post #253
baxtr wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

What would be a better solution for ensuring the video's producers continue to receive funding to make more videos?

I don't want people who produce videos like that to continue to make videos. I want them to go out of business.

Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web

#354

Post by HelloNurse »

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…

There is significant subtlety involved in realizing that if you bought a motorcycle jacket you are very unlikely to need a second one, especially a very similar one, until it falls apart, while if you bought apples you are likely to eat more apples soon.

Similarly, Booking.com recommends hotel room offers in foreign cities where I've been on vacation: it doesn't have any tourism detection and analysis, it just thinks that I'm indiscriminately likely to return to the same places without realizing I visit one or a few major cities in a different country every year and then the museums and monuments are going to stay the same for a while. To be fair, they'd need data about my habits they (fortunately) cannot see to do a good job.

Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web

#355

Post by jakevn »

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 that’s true, doesn’t that mean that dark patterns would not exist?

Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web

#356

Post by tzahola »

tqkxzugoaupvwqr wrote: post #349
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 en…

I’m glad you didn’t downvote me! The faster we can get this thing going, the earlier we can get a tabula rasa ;)

Until then, keep riding the tiger!

Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web

#357

Post by hehheh »

bloaf wrote: post #308
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…

I think people don't want to admit that the reading experience on mobile is mediocre-at-best.

There are a lot of folks here on HN and around the web that are upset at Google's AMP cache system, and somewhat rightly so. But at least it is an attempt to make mobile internet less hostile -- at least less in-your-face hostile.

Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web

#358

Post by _jal »

fiddlerwoaroof wrote: post #274
jdavis703 wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would be a better solution for ensuring the video's producers continue to receive funding to make more videos?

Mining cryptocurrencies while the current tab is in the foreground. (supposing a suitable GPU/ASIC-proof cryptocurrency is available)

It is rude to use people's property without asking[1]. I blackholed DNS for two sites who do this.

[1] I'd be OK with it if they prominently indicated that, how and why they were being electricity vampires. I still wouldn't use them, but at least it wouldn't be dishonest.

Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web

#359

Post by QuadrupleA »

One factor that might be at play: the user base of the web has probably dumbed down considerably over time. In 1999 you had to have some technical chops to get your modem, PPP settings, ISP phone number etc. all sorted out, and know some arcane URLs to type into the browser to get started with (back when browsers didn't auto-complete the http:// for you). So it probably attracted more intelligent people on average, with nerdy/intellectual interests.

Better browsers, broadband, tech usability improvements, smartphones, easy-to-use websites like Facebook, etc. lowered the barrier considerably. So maybe a lot of this is the influx of "dumb" people who can't be bothered to learn HTML to put up a page, or understand the privacy implications of the 450 surreptitious HTTP requests streaming along as they read their news article. ("dumb" is a little facetious here - in other words just ordinary people not as tech savvy or focused on intellectual pursuits as the web's early adopters).

Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web

#360

Post by jccalhoun »

leeoniya wrote: post #336
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…

> William Patrick Corgan? Billy Corgan was the lead singer of Smashing Pumpkins. also has a lot of solo stuff. seeing the full names rather than stage names of artists can be weird.

apparently he has just released a solo album under his full name. weird. Smashing Pumpkins was never a band I was into but at least this recommendation is somewhat understandable
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