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Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web

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Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web

#521

Post by TheRealDunkirk »

deong wrote: post #296
vog wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

To be fair, a lot of podcasts have ads, but ads aren't what I'm objecting to. The modern web doesn't suck because of ads. It sucks because of the technologies around ensuring you look at the ads, around sharing your behaviors as you look at the ads, etc. Any podcast player I can imagine anyone would ever use has a convenient way to skip ads, and the neither the presence of the ads themselves nor my decision to skip t…

> My podcast player doesn't demand I look at Forbes' "thought of the day" or disable my fast-forward button in order to play. It doesn't connect to 280 random third-party tracking domains as I listen to an episode.

Yet.

There's an easy-to-imagine scenario where advertisers bribe podcast playing software creators to embed these "features" for a cut of the money.

Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web

#522

Post by br0s »

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…

Dr

Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web

#523

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

bitshiffed wrote: post #38
dec0dedab0de wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it really has been downhill since then. I wish js apps just had their own protocol and port. js://js.server.tld could open up your js browser and you could use that when it was something you needed. Then you could just trust browsing around the normal web, knowing its just documents.

I completely agree. I've seen similar ideas get shot down here on HN; but I think we need two separate protocols. One for purely documents, and a second for the universal application platform. Among other implications, it should be much easier for regular people to create content, and applications should be free of the document-focused legacy.

So how about Gopher for documents, and HTTP(S)+HTML+CSS for apps? I think we have the tools already.

Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web

#525

Post by Feniks »

bobajeff wrote: post #54
annabellish wrote: post #9

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.

There are still browsers out there made with love and donations.

Just let Chrome be the browser for the masses.

Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web

#526

Post by ric2b »

rrix2 wrote: post #299
lern_too_spel wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

FastMail is much better than google mail because it's not fueling google's hegemony over the web. That you have to pay for it means their sustainability is not tied to abusing their users. If you want privacy in the way you seem to mean privacy (end-to-end no-trust async messaging) of course anything speaking SMTP isn't going to be "better for privacy", but those systems largely are incompatible with how 99% of the w…

> That you have to pay for it means their sustainability is not tied to abusing their users.

Modern capitalism means taking the money _and_ abusing the users, unless the users leaving from the abuse actually ends up reducing profits.

Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web

#527

Post by davesque »

throwaway2016a wrote: post #12
annabellish wrote: post #9

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.

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…

I tried using Firefox for a while recently (over the last month) and still found it unbearably slow as well as downright buggy in the way it handled and displayed certain pages. Was very disappointed by this since I really want to start using it again.

Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web

#529

Post by rusk »

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

I wholeheartedly agree. It's great as long as the keyword you're searching for is easily distinguishable. Whenever something happens and I want to find out ahead of the news-cycle it's my go to ...

Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web

#530

Post by rusk »

vvanders wrote: post #103
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…

Ironically the closest thing I've found to the hey-day of the internet(~'99) for me is Ham Radio. It's hard to explain but it's got the same feel of people who tinker and enjoy technology for the hell of it. With HF you get communication all over the globe. It's also explicitly non-commercial so it's stayed relatively undeveloped. Granted you'll never see the exponential of communication that the internet unleashed d…

I think this is to do with the barrier to entry. You have to have a certain level of sophistication to get into Ham, just like you did with Internet in the early days. Then came the long September ...

Facebook, twitter had the same feeling of "exclusivity" for a while. Twitter lasted a bit longer because the capability to compose your thoughts in These days I find as a developer even, as that segment expands there's an increasing amount of noise but I've gotten into emacs recently and can appreciate the marked increase in tranquility there. Nobody's trying to make a buck off my questions and answers. Nobody has a commercial (or other) interest in keeping me clueless.

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