A clean start for the web (2020)

I definitely choose Safari even when on my computer I can use whatever browser I want. It’s a bit presumptuous to assign a reason for Safari popularity without evidence to support people don’t choose it. Not choosing a browser is also a choice. Safari does what they want so they don’t need Firefox.

still not easy to vertically center shit, especially variable sized shit. don't forget and finding ways to make text blink. and gaudy section separators. AND MUSIC. when you went to my geocities app you got the 'low ride er' mariachi theme. that was sweet. pissed off all of the kids in my class while i was developing it though because it would only get through the first few seconds before i was making changes.

> thinking people will go back to a world

it's not even going back. the main portal to the web is now apps on phones. the web will continue to evolve, but i can't imagine a scenario where it forks.

the anarcho liberal wild west days of the web are behind it, unfortunately. i lament its passing along with a whole host of others who grew up in the land of bbs, usenet, and the like.

I don't know if I really feel like there's anything wrong with the web. Sure its harder to make slick looking needlessly infinitely scalable socially addictive platforms, but nothing has undermined the ease of writing an html page. And its inarguably easier to find free and excellent resources for learning to develop fir the web. The problem I feel is a blocker for active participation of average citizens is the difficulty of starting / maintaining your own server. Domain name registrars and hosting services are idiotically opaque and difficult to use without giving in to ridiculous paywalls. Even Tim BL admits the domain registrar system was hugely flawed from the start in Weaving the Web. Im just pissed cause I was messing with cname and a records all day...

I share your views on the topic. Early days of web were amazing from the perspective of people trying to express themselves despite the technological limitations. and animated gifs, tables, CSS, not to mention Flash... Obviously romanticizing to an extent, but to me personally there was value in people striving to set their content and themselves apart - vs today when it's so much about "streamlining" experiences and conforming to current trends.

There is a fundamental conflict in human nature between the need for freedom of expression and need for structure - and a balance to be found. The latter won in Facebook vs MySpace, and while I liked the clean UI and structure to content that Facebook brought, today I would very much prefer to again see chaos of people's expression in MySpace pages than chaos of bland, ad-riddled, and structurally overpopulated Facebook profiles.

But in what I said above, the shift is actually between something else entirely - from web being individual, to being corporate. It seems to me that we got to where we are on the web solely because of hyper-capitalism seeping into it, like into all other pores of society. There is a string of reasons Slack is 440MB - it starts with it being pushed to use a combination of technologies that are deemed to ensure quickest iteration, time-to-market, interoperability with user tracking systems etc (in this case, Electron / JS for multi-platform coverage etc); then you have more and more people using those technologies because they are sought after; then companies want to use those technologies even more everywhere because it means you can grow your teams faster on the market. Btw, all exactly the same reasons as to why almost every "website" today is a React app. All the while, the more information you can collect on people, the more attractive you are, even if you have absolutely no need for it or way of using it in your product for now - so almost every website also comes with 50+ XHRs on load to every imaginable tracking service. All in function of marked words above - "growth", "market", "faster", "user tracking" since those are the ones that are exclusively rewarded (not even with actual money any more - with market evaluation and other perversed and illusory constructs).

So it's not the technologies or the "web" themselves that are the problem at all - it's that hyper-capitalism hijacks them, requires targeting widest market, being quick to monetize on it in any way etc - which means experimentation and individual expression lose value, and any benefits for the user that don't obviously result in benefits for the corporation (e.g. user's disk space usage for banal Slack example) are cut off from consideration. It's only expected then that, when you look from individual perspective, the web is not individual-friendly anymore.