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Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web

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Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web

#481

Post by b0rsuk »

pmoriarty wrote: post #25

"For many of us in the early 2000s, the web was magical. You connected a phone line to your computer, let it make a funny noise and suddenly you had access to a seemingly-unending repository of thoughts and ideas from people around the world. "It might not seem like much now, but what that noise represented was the stuff of science fiction at the time: near-instantaneous communication at a planetary scale. It was a b…

I loved the nested discussion of mailgroups. Compared to message boards and forums of today (yesterday? I think they may be passe?) they enabled interesting, meandering discussions. It's the way discussion flows between two intelligent people. Forcing discussion into an arbitrary topic has 2 problems:

* some people are unhappy because they feel constrained * topics are an illusion anyway, people do post off-topic messages anyway, depending on strictness of moderation. People interested by the original topic are annoyed by the inevitable off-topic talk.

Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web

#482

Post by lovich »

s73ver_ wrote: post #329
lovich wrote: post #311

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…

To me, content creators using psychology tricks to try and get the value out of me, my eyeballs for advertisers, before I have the ability to evaluate their value to me, the actual useful part of their content, is hostile.

Maybe the soup Nazi was a bad analogy, but how about a car salesman who knowingly sells you a lemon? They could be nice and polite up front and do everything they could to make you feel comfortable with making the purchase. They are still knowingly doing something to benefit themselves at your expense. If it was a choice where one side got a benefit and the other remained neutral I would see it as not hostile, but when it's a benefit for one side at the expense of the other side, it's become hostile at that point

Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web

#483

Post by passwd »

rayalez wrote: post #412
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…

Wow, I'm very surprised by the amount of people here who dislike videos. I absolutely love video courses, and I have learned 60-80% of everything I know about programming through them. As a specific example, Stephen Grider's udemy courses took me through the process of learning full stack Node/React app development, and it was awesome. I find it much harder to focus and be productive while reading books, videos (espe…

I have no idea if it's actually majority - maybe there's just a lot of people here who share the discontent and wanted to add their two cents.

Video instructions are usually directed to people who are beginning their adventure, and in programming I usually need to just skim over some text these days to know what's relevant for me and what not. I guess many people have the same sentiment.

For me videos were insanely useful trying to get into Blender. Something that helped me a lot, but I guess mostly thanks to my 0% knowledge of the topic.

Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web

#484

Post by CaptSpify »

flukus wrote: post #351
CaptSpify wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ow…

It's increasingly frustrating too as we've shown over and over and over again at how bad the security, user-interaction, pricing and support is for all of those systems. Yet we don't care, because "it's easier".

There's a clear agenda to take back the power and voice that the computers are giving to the common man: http://opentranscripts.org/transcript/coming-war-general-com...

Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web

#485

Post by vvanders »

wrycoder wrote: post #399
vvanders wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh yes, I hate the implementation(love the tech) behind PACTOR. Of course there's also the really annoying symbol rate limit regulations as well. Thankfully K1JT via WSJT has been doing some awesome open source weak signal work. FT8 is pretty sweet and really exploded recently.

FT8 is remarkable tech, but it’s essentially computers talking to each other. Not the same as person to person through the static noises, which is the old ham way. Refer to the recent discussion/dismay on the Topband (i.e. 160 meters) mail list.

I think FT8 is just one aspect, I don't think you're going to see CW/SSB die off because of it. FT8 has some pretty strict timing requirements for instance that make it hard to use as a portable station.

I think ham radio is split between the people who like the social/contest aspect of it and those of us who like to tinker(and a subset that covers people who like both). 97.1b pretty clearly lays out a mandate to advance the state of the art and I think it's pretty incredible to pick out a message -20db below the noise floor.

Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web

#487

Post by pqh »

koyote wrote: post #453
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 have pretty much the same amount of history with amazon (2000) and it's even worse here. Most of the recommendations are items that I actually already purchased through them ("How about a second electric razor or some more batteries?") or items that I literally was just looking at while browsing ("We recommend these jeans that you just looked at"). Utterly useless.

It's hard to be worse than YouTube.

"Here are some videos you've already watched, mostly that you've already liked, but also a few from the same channel, and even a helping of some you've disliked but which other people have uploaded duplicates of."

And that's Google, the AI experts, with a crapload of data on my viewing and others' viewing habits, including in depth learning features such as length of time spent on videos, liked videos, playlists, etc.

Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web

#488

Post by QAPereo »

kagamine wrote: post #439
QAPereo wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“When did you stop beating your wife.”

I never beat her. The question you were aiming for is "Do you still hit your wife?" It demands a yes/no answer and thus always appears to be an admission of guilt. Your question leaves it open to answer any way you like.

Your answer still works for your formulation of the question, "I never hit her."

It's not that it's a true Catch 22, it's just leading and begs the question.

Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web

#489

Post by throwanem »

submeta wrote: post #470
throwanem wrote: post #464

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes it so good?

Whatever event happens right now (WhatsApp down? Elections in a country? A TV show running on TV [1]?) go to Twitter and search for it with relevant keywords and you'll find people writing about it. [1] at least in Germany

In my experience that's a firehose with no meaningful real-time quality metric available. Perhaps there's something I'm missing.

Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web

#490

Post by boomlinde »

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…

Maybe some of these things didn't engage us as much, but it is dubious whether that's for better or for worse. For what it's worth:

> listen music on youtube

True by definition, but listening to and distributing music via computer networks has been going on since the 80s.

> learn and use any programming language for free

There were plenty of resources on that on the web in the 90s and on bulletin board systems in the 80s.

> git

A complete side note since it has nothing to do with the web.

> open source

Many significant open/free software projects started in the 90s. NetBSD/FreeBSD since 93. GNU has been around since 83.

> read the latest news in online newspapers from remote countries

News websites surprisingly existed in the 90s as well. It is speculative to say that their increasing plurality owes anything to the current centralization trend.

> broadcast on twitter

Broadcast on your own personal website. Broadcast in a newsgroup. Broadcast by email. Broadcast on IRC.

> social networks

Bulletin boards. Email. Newsgroups.

> slack

IRC

> OS updates

Like, say, Slackware in the mid 90s?

> World of Warcraft/games

On-line, networked games existed before the web and don't really need to rely on it.

> crypto currencies

Again, not really dependent on the web.

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