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Ask HN: If you could change one thing on the Web, what would it be?

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Re: Ask HN: If you could change one thing on the Web, what would it be?

#21

The day my mother can log on and do what she wants without instruction will be the next generation of the internet. We're nowhere close to that today. I want Star Trek for Baby Boomer moms : "Computer: send email to Gladys." "Computer: turn the channel to Polyanna" "Computer: calculate 2011 taxes paid to date and print results on the den" "Computer: show me favorite restaurant list with realtime estimated wait. Make…

This is isomorphic to artificial general intelligence, which will have implications way beyond making the Internet easier to use.

Re: Ask HN: If you could change one thing on the Web, what would it be?

#22

Only one, Webkit powered browser by Google.

I'm sorry, did you not see what happened when Microsoft effectively "owned" the browser market?

And even if you had to pick a single company to make a browser - why would you pick the one browser maker whose major source of income is whoring out your details?

Re: Ask HN: If you could change one thing on the Web, what would it be?

#29
I'd like to be able to browse my favorite sites with a browser as secure, stable and responsive as Emacs or Vim

-- even if this stable/responsive browser is unable to run 3-D immersive games and other desktop-like software

-- and even if this browser does not run Javascript very well. (Of course this last part would work only if my favorite sites do not rely heavily on Javascript, which is currently the case.)

Re: Ask HN: If you could change one thing on the Web, what would it be?

#30
When you visit a webpage to consume some content, such as a written article, a picture, or a video, that should be the main focal-point of whatever you're doing, and nothing else should be allowed to interrupt or delay you from consuming it. This includes pop-up/hover dialog boxes, advertisements which waist your time, webpages animating their skeleton while you're trying to read now-moving text, grouped-content unnecessarily split across multiple pages, etc...

All of these things annoy users, and introduce inefficiency to the entire internet race. How many trillions of seconds are lost every year because of this? Do you think in 2050 people will put up with 30 second commercials before watching a 1 minute Hulu clip?

Obviously a lot of these things exist to fund websites, and getting rid of them would destroy business models. There needs to be a way to de-annoy the internet, and compensate content providers for lost revenue.

The number of solutions are plenty, but finding the best one will be tricky. It would have to be adopted by most of the internet to succeed, after-all.

One idea might be to bill at the ISP-level. Each client pays ~$100/mo (made up number), where $50 of that goes to the ISP, and the other $50 goes into a bucket. Pending on what websites you visit online, and for how long, they earn a certain percentage of that bucket and get paid at the end of the month. Users who only want to pay $50/mo get the annoying internet.

How would you do it?

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