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Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web

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Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web

#491

Post by godshatter »

fiddlerwoaroof wrote: post #370
na85 wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is with the huge percentage of users here that think this sort of thing is okay?

I think it’s ok because I think it’s unreasonable to expect site owners to provide content free of charge: people hate paywalls and ads/tracking because they prevent access to content, add unwanted content and/or infringe on the user’s privacy. An automatic cryptocurrency micropayment system (like the Brave browser’s BAT system, if I understand correctly) could be designed to address some or all of these problems wit…

Well, I'm entitled to use my processors as I see fit, which means not visiting sites that try to run bitcoin miners.

It's not my responsibility to make sure some website I go to gets monetized. It's especially galling to me because I spent many formative years providing content to people for free, just because I wanted to and because I had an interest in it. In my personal opinion, all the people trying to ride the wave of monetizing their content should go run off and jump on that "new thing", whatever it is, as long as it's not the web.

Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web

#492

Post by jthewriter »

na85 wrote: post #454
fiddlerwoaroof wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it’s ok because I think it’s unreasonable to expect site owners to provide content free of charge: people hate paywalls and ads/tracking because they prevent access to content, add unwanted content and/or infringe on the user’s privacy. An automatic cryptocurrency micropayment system (like the Brave browser’s BAT system, if I understand correctly) could be designed to address some or all of these problems wit…

So in other words, site owners are entitled to an income? Pish posh. Not everything on the web is worth paying for. The content that is worth money will draw subscribers, and content producers are going to just have to live up to the fact that not all of what they produce is worth paying for.

Amen. If people aren't willing to pay for your content, then it's literally not worth paying for. You're still welcome to create it and distribute it for free. If you don't care that much, others probably don't either and we'll all be better off with less crap content swirling around out there.

The ad model has left us mired in a suffocating heap of crap content people claim has "value" because they're able to hack the system and get ad revenue from it. But in reality the content is secondary and just an excuse for the ads.

Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web

#493

Post by sgslo »

the_jeremy wrote: post #418
rayalez wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 think there is a large difference between searching for key info you need and trying to learn a bunch of information through a course. If I want quick information on how to install or troubleshoot something that realistically should only be one or two lines of code, watching someone's youtube video is a very inefficient way to provide that content.

[Note: I am the aforementioned Stephen Grider]

This comment is on point. I am told that many students on Udemy use videos courses as a reference, where they skip through videos to find the exact content they are looking for. I'm sure people do this, but I don't think its an effective use of video teaching.

My goal with videos is to show the entire beginning to end process of building some arbitrary app. Many commenters here on HN are advocates of apprenticeships for learning tech; I view video courses as an easily distributable form of apprenticeship.

Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web

#494

Post by s73ver_ »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #441
s73ver_ wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I cannot agree with this sentiment. You're basically demanding that these creators work for you, for free. If you choose to skip the ads, then how should the creators be compensated for the content that you consumed? "With regard to quality, it is a huge jump upwards if a podcast has no ads at all, nowhere, not even hidden or implicit. It is a really noticeable difference if the whole audio simply doesn't care about…

Nobody is entitled to a business model. If ads don't work for your users, find one that does (I hear people have some success with Patronite these days, for example). If there is none, then maybe it isn't good to try to make a business out of it in the first place. There's way too much "content" these days anyway, and the worst of it is the one that is done to make money (as opposed to labour of love, or having exter…

You're saying this like you're entitled to the content, though. You're not. And quite frankly, I find taking the content without supporting the creator to be much, much worse than you consider ads to be.

Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web

#495

Post by s73ver_ »

lovich wrote: post #482
s73ver_ wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Your analogies are not working. They are not at all on point, and they are not at all relatable to the situation.

Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web

#496

Post by eggpy »

beobab wrote: post #465
eggpy wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My office provides a license for Pluralsight. I have found some courses with high quality content and interesting information, and it's really useful to have it all in one place. BUT, especially with programming, I find video to be a really challenging medium. It's so much more useful to scan for things you don't know or context of examples and spend some time digesting, or just playing around with sample code. Not e…

I love the transcripts that Pluralsight provides to go with the videos. I use them after I have watched the video to find the section I'm interested in. I only actually noticed them when another staff member pointed them out to me, but they're available from the course details page.

Oh wow, you're right! I hadn't seen that before, that's exciting. Thanks for the info!

Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web

#497

Post by dredmorbius »

Feniks wrote: post #456
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…

Sadly a lot of people these days are TERRIBLE at reading.

Consider that as of 1800 or so, perhaps 5-10% of the population were literate. That climbed to 90%+ throughout much of Western Europe and the US by 1900, but the level of education was still low: in the US, a high school diploma was an accomplishment only 6% of the population realised in 1900. That climbed to about 90% by 1950 or so. By contrast, more people have graduate degrees today.

Though the content and quality expressed by education ... has shifted. On the one hand, there's clearly been advances in knowledge and education, but at the same time, those are being presented to a much, much larger share of the population.

I've seen people (children, students, professionals) with widely varying levels of literacy and cognitive skills, ranging from frighteningly high to almost none at all. I think this may be underappreciated.

Or, TL;DR: yes, a lot of people are terrible at reading.

Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web

#498

Post by wrycoder »

vvanders wrote: post #485
wrycoder wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 adv…

Agreed. I have a foot in both camps myself.

But there are two issues: FT8 is just a contact, with maybe a 73, so it’s even more impersonal than contesting (which is extremely popular, of course). Breaking a pileup is pretty much left to the computer, rather than due to operator skill.

And the old timers on 160 who earned their DXCC (100 countries - very difficult on 160) certificates the hard way using CW / SSB aren’t happy with the relative ease of getting an FT8 DXCC award. The ARRL can fix that, however.

Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web

#499

Post by Pete_D »

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?

On the one hand, I'm afraid that what you describe will eventually become commonplace. On the other hand, I wonder why it didn't already happen during the Flash days.

Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web

#500

Post by [deleted] »

_jal wrote: post #16
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…

I'm with you on this. Honestly at this point, if the information is only contained within a video, I skip it and move on[1]. (I usually leave video in the browser crippled, only turning it on when I actually want to watch something.) [1] The trend of support docs for enterprise software going video is horrible, stupid, and a negative mark when I'm evaluating products. If someone has to spend hours of eyebleed rewindi…

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