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Web by Google (TM)

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431–440 of 496 posts

Re: Web by Google (TM)

#431
post #362

Well, the EU should just fork or support existing open source Mozilla projects and pay developers... but looking at the budget there seem to be a lot of... unnecessary... money sinks. 80 Mil for management... 200 for dev... but the security team had to be downsized... yeah right. https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2018/mozilla-fdn-201...

I don't get why someone would downvote your proposal funding Firefox directly.

Mozilla never provided a way of donating directly to Firefox.

Re: Web by Google (TM)

#432
post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think the author wants to do anything. It's a counter-factual to illuminate how central google is, not a proposal.

I still expect them to make a more coherent case, I still don't know what native means here, still don't know why existing solutions are different from what native means. It is not stated as a counterfactual either, it is stated as direct criticism, e.g. > The Web’s orignal architects were off base on hyperlinks; it turns out people just want to skip right to the answer they’re looking for. Who are the original archi…

Author here. The article is making a case that Google has in fact captured the Web, and secondarily that there are some clear reasons for it. I had no intention of writing a dissertation on the history of the Internet. Also, filling in the missing technical gaps would be several RFCs.

As for what would native payments look like:

1. I put the element $1.00 in my HTML 2. User clicks on Pay Me button in any browser and I get $1.00

Something like that. Anything more complicated and for most people it might as well not exist. Grandma isn't loading up a Bitcoin wallet.

Re: Web by Google (TM)

#434
Why is there so little interest in helping people self-host their own content? I know it wouldn't be a panacea, but it feels like at least a step in the right direction. This is a big part of the motivation for my side-project to help people run their own private blogs - https://simpleblogs.org/

Re: Web by Google (TM)

#435
post #382

I think the biggest failure of the open web is simply the lack of a "Publish" function. You can consume on the open web just fine, but for publishing you need to own a server, not just a client. That in turn gave growth to Youtube, Facebook and Co., as they allowed people to publish content with just a web client. Search and payment are important as well, but only really become relevant when the content is on the web…

It was called RSS, and there were plenty of free and paid providers who would host your feeds and even feed content (like podcast audio) for you. The most popular was called FeedBurner, and you can imagine what became of it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FeedBurner https://support.google.com/feedburner/answer/79408?hl=en

These are fine for techies. Non-techies prefer the Facebook “Post” button (or whatever it’s labelled today).

Re: Web by Google (TM)

#436

I think the biggest failure of the open web is simply the lack of a "Publish" function. You can consume on the open web just fine, but for publishing you need to own a server, not just a client. That in turn gave growth to Youtube, Facebook and Co., as they allowed people to publish content with just a web client. Search and payment are important as well, but only really become relevant when the content is on the web…

> I think the biggest failure of the open web is simply the lack of a "Publish" function. The simplest approach to something like this is Apache homedirs or finger plan files [0]: you write some text in a file in your home directory and a service makes it accessible to anyone who connects to your machine. Apparently plan files were somewhat popular thing at one point; you could finger the machines at id Software and…

I think this is where DAT and siblings come in.

If the network hosted “just your machine”, then your website (or whatever published content you have) would disappear when your machine shut down for the night.

Re: Web by Google (TM)

#437
post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was called RSS, and there were plenty of free and paid providers who would host your feeds and even feed content (like podcast audio) for you. The most popular was called FeedBurner, and you can imagine what became of it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FeedBurner https://support.google.com/feedburner/answer/79408?hl=en

These are fine for techies. Non-techies prefer the Facebook “Post” button (or whatever it’s labelled today).

You are comparing this frozen-in-time 2007 (pre-iPhone!) UX to your modern ideas of publishing workflows. The RSS ship has sailed, and that’s why I am explicitly talking about it in the past-tense here. It’s important to not forget the things that came and went, lest we convince ourselves that that’s how the world has always been and start mistakenly speculating about why a particular category of thing has “never existed”.

Re: Web by Google (TM)

#438
post #434

Why is there so little interest in helping people self-host their own content? I know it wouldn't be a panacea, but it feels like at least a step in the right direction. This is a big part of the motivation for my side-project to help people run their own private blogs - https://simpleblogs.org/

Hard to get paid for altruism. Who’s going to pay my rent for me if I want to help humanity?

Re: Web by Google (TM)

#439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And this is the problem for anyone outside of the CompSci field. To those it looks like URL non-sense but it's rooted far deeper then that. This isn't philosophical. By choosing to use AMP, you are ultimately choosing to destroy the internet. You're granting the power of one company to run and control what you visit, do, use. Your surrendering your data for them to make money off to use and abuse. Your supporting the…

This is an amusing bit of sci-fi. But it's just that, and it's got nothing to do, specifically, with amp. The rhetorical strategy used here was to make up a dystopian example of search being bad, and then say amp. Amp isn't more expensive, WordPress templates handle it automatically today. And the whole tangent about misinformation is interesting, but it's not how things really work. While speed is a signal, reliabil…

No, that was an explanation of my understanding of how google operates.

And now your introducing a sack of rubbish called WordPress. What if the site is not using WordPress, may do.

You work for google, so explain it to me, how do things really work?

Re: Web by Google (TM)

#440
post #303

Asking a rhetorical and irritating question - but one which web nerds need to be much better at answering: why, exactly does it matter? Don't get me wrong, I'm totally uncomfortable with a monopoly of this scale; I'm a Firefox user, a Pihole user, a non-FB user. But when people (non nerds) ask me why, it's hard to answer. They're all happy enough: Chrome is fast, AMP is faster, they get to find out the stuff they wan…

Amp is much worse for me. It makes pages wait seconds without displaying anything. I frequently visit an amp page by mistake and think it's broken and close it before it displays.

It frustrates me, why not just give me a link to an actual web page?

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