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The Web Began Dying in 2014 (2017)

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Re: The Web Began Dying in 2014 (2017)

#141

Post by furyofantares »

kgersen75 wrote: post #50
mojuba wrote: post #33

In addition, what's changed between 2017 and now is that back then Google was still admired by the tech people. "Google is evil" sounded ridiculous only a few years ago. I've been ridiculed by my colleagues and fellow engineers every time I said it. But I think it began to change with the introduction of AMP, a growing list of products discontinued for no apparent reason, failures of some of the new products often pr…

"back then Google was still admired by the tech people" "Losing our support" why do you generalize 'tech people' as 'we' ? I'm in tech and I've been for 30+ years. I still admire Google. Sure some tech people don't like Google anymore or even never have. But I wouldn't generalize my case nor should you generalize yours. And it's not all or nothing: I want to believe most tech people are mature and educated enough to…

> DDG/Bing/Yandex will list the exact same pages that Google gives as a search result most of the time, and sometimes better ones.

I've switched to DDG about a year ago, and this just doesn't match my experience. Results are frequently worse. It's worth it to me but makes it hard to recommend to everyone still.

There's probably a wide range of how people use search; works for you doesn't mean works for everyone. As an example, your recommendation to use stackoverflow directly for programming queries works for you and is nonsense to me -- I basically never land on stackoverflow from my programming searches. The most privacy-conscious person I know continues to use google news search to his own dismay because he doesn't find anything else comes close for keeping tabs on what people are saying about products he works on. And my wife claims DDG is basically non-functional for her search needs, which have very little overlap with mine.

Re: The Web Began Dying in 2014 (2017)

#142

Post by marc_io »

Kye wrote: post #75
roenxi wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People who think carefully then call Google 'evil' may as well be the same people who used to call it 'good'. Corporations aren't good or evil. They are powerful. Being good is many things, but a key part of that is restraining the self from acting improperly. Corporations can't do that, they will sooner or later do whatever makes money. Or they get replaced sooner or later by a corporation that will. At best, there…

How about insidious? It's the banal sort of evil that doesn't realize the harm it's causing, or doesn't see a way to survive without causing that harm.

Well, maybe, but that's the human condition also. All of our actions — even the most well intentioned ones — can have unexpected and even disastrous consequences.

Re: The Web Began Dying in 2014 (2017)

#143

Post by nathcd »

d33 wrote: post #101
marcus_holmes wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm refusing to implement Google Analytics on my startup's product. Because it's slow, but mainly because I don't trust Google enough to let them put whatever code they like on my page. I'm running into serious flak from the marketing team because they don't know how to use any other tool. GA is the industry standard, apparently, and every site uses it, etc etc. They're even hinting that not using it could affect our…

Surprised nobody mentioned Matomo Analytics yet: https://matomo.org/ It's FLOSS, comes both self-hosted and as a paid service and it's pretty good. Perhaps good enough for your use case?

Or, we could stop sending people programs to track themselves on their own computers. Just use your server logs. I don't care how much of an inconvenience it is, you should never have started doing any client-side tracking in the first place.

Re: The Web Began Dying in 2014 (2017)

#144

Post by ci5er »

mch82 wrote: post #132
ci5er wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Ironically, the thing I would appreciate most is a manually curated, Wikipedia inspired, hierarchical directory. Yahoo?

Fun fact... This is how search engines started. One of the first steps in early SEO was to get your site listed on a manually curated web directory. VLIB, the first web directory, still operates at http://vlib.org/ . List of Web Directories, Wikipedia, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_web_directories

Uh, yeah. Jerry Yang when he was a VLSI student at Stanford, and I was a lowly semiconductor designer at Motorola Japan used to talk about these things, so ... yeah: I was being sardonic.

EDIT: He used to say to me: "[WhateverMyNameIs]! Nobody is going to pay a penny per newspaper article or a nickel for a song!". And I'd say: "Jerry! Nobody is going to pay to advertise on your personal curated bookmark list!". Turns out that one of us was right. And it wasn't me.

Re: The Web Began Dying in 2014 (2017)

#145

Post by mch82 »

na85 wrote: post #7

>Internet Service Providers (ISPs) are probably soon going to dictate what traffic can or cannot arrive at people’s end devices. This was the money quote for me. FANG may kill the web, but the idea that ISPs (in my opinion some of the scummiest corporations out there) get to decide what content they serve me and what they don't has the potential to kill the Internet as we know it.

Yes. The author of the article buried this point under all the Google, Facebook, Amazon commentary. Yet, it’s the key point.

Also, this article got me thinking that maybe public research should get to work on the AR/VR aspects of the web so the key infrastructure of the web continues to be publicly owned.

Re: The Web Began Dying in 2014 (2017)

#146

Post by majewsky »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #108
irrational wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is Windows OS these days? I haven't used it since the early 2000s. I think the last version I used was... XP? Everyone at my work uses a MacBook. Some of my children are in their early 20s now and have never used Windows. It has always been OSX/MacOS, iOS, Ubuntu, Android, or ChromeOS. I don't know if my kids are typical or not but if many of the rising generation don't grow up using Windows, will they want to us…

Windows still owns gaming which is going to keep it relevant to the youth despite anything it does poorly for some time to come. Just look how many front-page carousel blockbusters on Steam still only support Windows. I game on macOS and things are slowly getting better, but macOS is still mostly relegated to Aspyr ports. I'd be reluctant to claim that Windows is dying to youngsters until the state of gaming radicall…

Do you have Proton (Valve's supercharged Wine distro) on macOS? Here on Linux, Steam's game coverage has improved significantly because of Proton

Re: The Web Began Dying in 2014 (2017)

#147

Post by moron4hire »

gjm11 wrote: post #134
moron4hire wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's exactly how you have to read things to take posts in good faith, which is one of the few rules 'round these parts. Similarly, I'm trying to eliminate the "I think" prefix from writing. It shouldn't be necessary to write "I think Google is evil". Of course the writer thinks that. They wouldn't have written it if they didn't. They can very safely just write "Google is evil".

If I write "I think Google is evil", I mean: "I think Google is evil, but I acknowledge that it's possible for other fairly reasonable people to have a different opinion." If I write "Google is evil", I mean: "I think Google is evil, and I consider this an established fact that reasonable people shouldn't be disputing." These are different propositions, and I might want to say either of them. A policy of not using qu…

A reasonable lesson should already think it's possible for other reasonable people to hold different opinions, and not feel threatened by them. It's only in this bullshit really of the internet that we decided to start interpreting the things other people say as "potential facts in need of disputing" rather than just "the utterances of peers". The former mode implies a level of deference that we don't take on in public, face-to-face conversations.

Re: The Web Began Dying in 2014 (2017)

#148

Post by scarmig »

craftinator wrote: post #125
kgersen75 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"back then Google was still admired by the tech people" "Losing our support" why do you generalize 'tech people' as 'we' ? I'm in tech and I've been for 30+ years. I still admire Google. Sure some tech people don't like Google anymore or even never have. But I wouldn't generalize my case nor should you generalize yours. And it's not all or nothing: I want to believe most tech people are mature and educated enough to…

So, you don't happen to work at Google, do you?

The typical Googler would have a more cynical view of Google.

Re: The Web Began Dying in 2014 (2017)

#149

Post by octosphere »

mojuba wrote: post #33

In addition, what's changed between 2017 and now is that back then Google was still admired by the tech people. "Google is evil" sounded ridiculous only a few years ago. I've been ridiculed by my colleagues and fellow engineers every time I said it. But I think it began to change with the introduction of AMP, a growing list of products discontinued for no apparent reason, failures of some of the new products often pr…

> Google is not dying any time soon

One way to kill it is blocking all their domains either in /etc/hosts or using pi-hole. But I imagine using the web would be slightly broken as Google host various font libraries and javascript libraries which if blocked, could break many sites.

Re: The Web Began Dying in 2014 (2017)

#150

Post by Spooky23 »

blackflame wrote: post #9
na85 wrote: post #7

>Internet Service Providers (ISPs) are probably soon going to dictate what traffic can or cannot arrive at people’s end devices. This was the money quote for me. FANG may kill the web, but the idea that ISPs (in my opinion some of the scummiest corporations out there) get to decide what content they serve me and what they don't has the potential to kill the Internet as we know it.

Naw, with the coming of 5G it will destroy their monopolies on the communication lines which should open the door to more local competition.

Lol.

Over the air carriers have much broader latitude to block and prioritize traffic than the wired ISPs do. They also have an absurd national security justification to build out 5G local infrastructure without any input or regulation from local authorities.

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