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Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web

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Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web

#401

Post by iamleppert »

Can we please, pretty please go back to using pages for the majority of web sites? There I said it. You have a web site, not a web app. At least most people do.

Remember the days of semantic markup and the CSS Zen Garden? When you could actually read and understand a web page's source? Now we have these javascript behemoths that are as clumsy as they are stupid.

I have a feeling we are in for a renaissance of simplicity, and its going to start with a page, and end with a page. Pages are scalable. Google has like 50 billion of them. Pages are nice. Now do me a favor and kill off react.js and every walled garden like Facebook.

Can we please just fix them from the inside? If you're an engineer at Facebook, why don't you take it upon yourself to actually do something about this mess?

Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web

#405

Post by gammarator »

weirdstuff wrote: post #380
tstactplsignore wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It wasn't some trick pulled on them by corporations or Russians manipulating social media. I realize that may be hard to understand, but it is the truth! Don't we objectively know this is false? You can dispute the size of the effect, but both Russians and corporations absolutely ran large targeted misinformation and propaganda campaigns for the 2016 election, taking advantage of what you could call the user-hostile…

Let's get real. They weren't large campaigns; Russian firms/orgs (RT, really) hardly spent anything! So far the disclosed numbers are less than a 1/4 million; as opposed to the roughly $6.8 spent domestically. Billions and billions spent by U.S. actors as opposed to less than a million spent by Russian actors! Russian efforts are immaterial and likely were intended for commercial reasons rather than political ones. (…

It's clear based on the content of the released ads that Russian goals included increasing the polarization of the US around issues of race, politics, gun control, etc. It's not necessary for these ads to have decided the presidential election for us to oppose that interference in our civic life. And it's made possible by the availability of highly targeted advertising.

Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web

#406

Post by bobajeff »

thomastjeffery wrote: post #366
bobajeff wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Mozilla is currently working hard on Servo, and regularly merging finished pieces into Firefox. Microsoft will likely always use their own engine, simply because they are obsessed with proprietary software.

Sure that's how it is today but what if Mozilla runs out of funds? Say they fail to get a lucrative search deal after the current one ends while Pocket fails to pick up the slack.

What if Microsoft doesn't ever get a significant number of users on Edge? Say websites and users alike treat it like Windows Phone.

Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web

#407

Post by mturmon »

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...

Indeed, the notion in 2017 of a significant set of "died-in-the-wool Marxist hardliners" seems like a fantasy.

Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web

#408

Post by philipps »

vog wrote: post #248
tomjen3 wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 (probab…

This. Exactly this. I don't get why anyone would listen to a podcast with ads and/or bad information density. I mean, the whole point (and value) of podcasts is to remove the private radio station crap, not to replicate it. BTW, the German podcast scene is a quite positive example of the directions podcasts can go.

What are some podcasts from Germany (in German or English) that you would recommend?

Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web

#409

Post by zdkl »

macdiddy wrote: post #394
axedwool wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That's not really fair. Those people are simply using the current rules to their advantage to help them make a living.

I don't like this stereotyped answer but isn't this what "move fast and break things" was supposed to be about?

Why did we become afraid to diverge from the norm and trends on the internet? From a consumer standpoint, uniformisation makes content parsing easier in the sense that you know what to expect and how to compare content more readily but why do people not go on a limb and take more "risk" in differentiating content? Why don't we have a glorious mess of different formats and the opportunity to choose medium?

At some point I believe A/B testing and optimising for reachability put a negative pressure on variation from the norm and platform standards, and that's a tragedy of the commons.

Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web

#410

Post by Spivak »

lern_too_spel wrote: post #262
gruez wrote: post #2

>If you use Chrome as your main browser, consider switching to Chromium, the open-source version of the browser. Consider minimalist browsers like Min (and choose to block all ads, trackers and scripts) to browser news websites. no love for firefox? or for that matter, any non webkit browsers? >HERE WeGo for maps (free) i'm not sure that's any better in terms of privacy

Also, FastMail isn't any better for privacy, and you have to pay for it to boot. The article was more or less reasonable until the nonsensical recommendations at the end.

No email solution will be better for privacy outside of hosting it yourself. I have it set up for my personal email because I thought it was a fun project, but there's no point in pretending that it's realistic for casual email users.

Email without outside encryption like PGP is fundamentally privacy by policy which lives and dies by the reputation and policy of the provider: it seems like Fastmail's is pretty good.

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