361–370 of 531 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I could be hostile to you right now, and you wouldn't have even requested anything from me. Hostility has nothing to do with what someone owes someone else. Have you ever seen the soup Nazi from Seinfeld? Would you say he's not hostile because no body is owed his soup?
I just cannot buy this argument. Comparing the Soup Nazi to someone who chose to make content for you, is just ludicrous. For one, the Soup Nazi actively berated people. Someone making videos because they want to make videos is not doing anything close to that to you. The worst you can claim a video is, is an inconvenience. That's it. Saying it's "hostile" because you'd prefer text is entitlement to the point of craz…
Speaking personally, when I find user-hostile content, I simply leave the page/close the window/throw away the magazine. I don't feel entitled to have the content in any way.
However, I do feel entitled to make an appeal to content producers that they try to come up with a way to make their content less hostile. It's just an appeal, though, and they are absolutely free to ignore it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not entitlement, it's just an opinion. OP said they move on to a different source with their preferred format.
Saying it's inconvenient, or that you'd prefer text is an opinion. But that's not what OP said; they said it's hostile. That is an entitlement.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
My experience has been that Firefox was unusably slow on OS X and Linux for a long time and they lost a lot of users because of it. Now it is faster but it is difficult to woo people back. And even if it is faster, there track record shows that they found doing a release that slows down a large portion of users was acceptable. Granted I doubt they still have that attitude, and i think they are more performance based…
My work doesn't allow the latest version of FireFox, so after months of crashes and general unbearably slowness on MacOS I switched to UnGoogled Chromium. I wish I could go back to FF because I like Mozilla as an org, but it's not in the cards for my day to day.
How so?
This 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 versi…
They seem fairly aware that Facebook and Google probably knows more about them than the NSA. And they don't care - because they can easily snap chat their kids or post pictures to their friends on pinterest. What's more, they sometimes even find the sales ads helpful.
Average users, in my opinion, are reasonably smart.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It always astonishes me how many people who are ostensibly against the webkit derivative hegemony won't even consider recommending Firefox. It's certainly a competitive browser, and personally my favourite, and Mozilla does fantastically important work balancing out an otherwise entirely corporate, ulterior-motive laden browser market.
I think trying to fight a browser engine monoculture is a lost cause. There is no money in building browser engines and it costs a lot of time and money to create one from scratch. The only reason Mozilla and Microsoft still use their own engine is for historical and technical reasons. The fact that we are down to just three implementations should tell you were things are headed.
Microsoft will likely always use their own engine, simply because they are obsessed with proprietary software.
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, w…
Maybe try to put yourself in the shoes of someone who works 3 jobs as a single parent and uses their phone to look for new housing when they get evicted or sign up for online classes, instead of claiming broadly that “they can’t bother to learn HTML”. Not everyone is as privileged as the millions of teenagers who have hours and hours of free time every night and access to a computer+internet to learn how to code or the privacy implications of surreptitious HTTP requests.
If developers had spent the past few decades thinking of how to make technologies understandable, open, democratic - instead of insulting 99% of the population like you just did - perhaps we wouldn’t be in this mess.
I am speaking as a former dumbass privileged teenager/engineer who thought he was smarter than everyone else.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The goal as always is to divert my attention, sell me something of dubious value or some other equally vacuous purpose.
If it pays the bills for worthwhile content producers to mine crypto currency as a form of micropayment, I think that's a better trade with lower psychic cost.
I have managed to make periods in my life completely free from unwanted content, and they are blissful compared to the never ending attention grabbing bs of the advertising and public relations engines of modern industry.
They are simply a waste of people's time and energy.
If crypto-mining is done openly, of course. It's certainly dishonest if it's not disclosed.
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.
Just as the Trojans how that big wonderful Horse statue worked out for them :p
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Mining cryptocurrencies while the current tab is in the foreground. (supposing a suitable GPU/ASIC-proof cryptocurrency is available)
What is with the huge percentage of users here that think this sort of thing is okay?