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Why our website looks like an operating system

posthog.com

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Re: Why our website looks like an operating system

#161

Post by hliyan »

knuckleheads wrote: post #158
hliyan wrote: post #149

Why this feels so incredibly appealing compared to prevailing designs is probably something for a psychologist / cognitive scientist / neurologist (?) to answer -- there is certainly something here that warrants better study than what we in the software industry do in rushed blog posts. But I can personally speak to at least one aspect, having worked for a company that does high end web sites and strategy for large S…

If I recall right, they have most everything in the same CMS, in particular their discussion/help forum is integrated into their main site. To me, that's what the difference is, having done similar work in the past. They have a unified and singular control over the content on their front page. It's not a dozen groups obviously jockeying for control of who gets to be higher on the page or featured more prominently, or…

Yes. That reminds me of another thing: no landing pages for each level of menu. If I go to Docs > Surveys, I can skip the overview and go directly to Features > Conditional questions. I dont' need to load an entire page with a giant banner of people smiling, and a call to action button that wants me to contact them before I have read through the functionality.

Re: Why our website looks like an operating system

#162

Post by zejn »

rmunn wrote: post #47
Retr0id wrote: post #33

> Legally-required cookie banner > PostHog.com doesn't use third-party cookies, only a single in-house cookie You're legally required to let me opt out of that cookie. Unless it's essential to the site functionality, in which case you don't need the banner at all.

Considering they have a login system, I'm going to guess that the cookie includes your login (probably in JWT form), which automatically makes it essential to site functionality. Which means the banner is there just because if it was absent, someone would say "Hey, where's the cookie banner?" In other words, it's not actually legally required in their case, but it's practically required, because it lets everyone know…

It's not legally required in terms of law, but it is legally required in the way that the legal department will complain if the banner not there. Checklists and all that. ;)

Re: Why our website looks like an operating system

#163

Post by theshrike79 »

Doxin wrote: post #134
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The EU law is fine, the implementation used isn't. But never blame the EU laws for cookie banners; the law does not mandate banners at all, let alone the ones full of dark patterns to nag you into accepting anyway. That's all the industry. The industry could have come up with a standard, a browser add-on, respect a browser setting, etc but they chose the most annoying one to pester you, the user.

> let alone the ones full of dark patterns to nag you into accepting anyway. In fact the law pretty explicitly disallows dark patterns like that. Of course tech companies have a loosy-goosy relationship with the law at the best of times.

The #1 problem with the cookie law is that it's not enforced.

Start fining sites with dark pattern banners and they'll start going away.

Re: Why our website looks like an operating system

#164

Post by sylware »

ttiurani wrote: post #64
Retr0id wrote: post #33

> Legally-required cookie banner > PostHog.com doesn't use third-party cookies, only a single in-house cookie You're legally required to let me opt out of that cookie. Unless it's essential to the site functionality, in which case you don't need the banner at all.

Exactly. If they indeed only use the cookie for essential functionality, this kind of joke banner only makes their choice to respect visitors' privacy equally annoying. Even worse: because it makes it seem like the EU law is just meritless pestering of people, they are actually fighting for the right for worse sites to spy on their visitors. It's baffling.

"EU law"... you mean "regulation", that to prevent some "abuse".

Here, EU is not quite doing the right thing: the web need "noscript/basic (x)html" compatibility more than cookie regulation. Being jailed into a whatng cartel web engine does much more harm than cookie tracking (and some could use a long cryptographic URL parameter anyway).

Basically, a web "site" would be a "noscript/basic (x)html)" portal, and a web "app" would require a whatng cartel web engine (geeko/webkit/blink).

I do remember clearly a few years back, I was able to buy on amazon with the lynx browser... yep basic HTML forms can do wonders.

Re: Why our website looks like an operating system

#165

Post by odie5533 »

fmbb wrote: post #76
xp84 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> EU law is just meritless pestering of people It is that. It has done literally nothing to improve anything whatsoever, in any country. And most of the "cookie management" scripts that people use, barely even work. Both the law and the way it's complied with in practice are a dumb solution to a problem that the EU should have forced browser vendors to solve. Only the user's browser can choose not to send back cookie…

If you like things the way they were before the law, just answer yes to all cookie banners you see. It does not take time if you don’t care to read it. Yours click yes, and they will remember you want to be tracked.

How many billions of human hours of productivity have we collectively wasted with these cookie banners?

Re: Why our website looks like an operating system

#166

Post by spacedcowboy »

RadiozRadioz wrote: post #82

This must have taken them a really long time. That worries me, don't they have other things to do? If engineers have so much free time that they can work on nice & fun things like this that aren't totally necessary, they must have overhired (which is wasteful and a sign of impending layoffs) or they don't have enough actual work to do (which is a sign the company is stagnating). Or the time and money required to do t…

I threw a (much more limited) version of a "desktop" website together in about a couple of hours.

http://xgpu.net/ is about an ongoing project for an external gpu for the Atari range of 16-bit (and actually I even have plans to make it work on the 8-bit range) computers. It's somewhat in limbo at the moment because I just moved continent and most of my stuff is on a ship in the Atlantic. Once that arrives, and we start to settle in, I'll get back to it.

Re: Why our website looks like an operating system

#167

Post by ironmagma »

hliyan wrote: post #149

Why this feels so incredibly appealing compared to prevailing designs is probably something for a psychologist / cognitive scientist / neurologist (?) to answer -- there is certainly something here that warrants better study than what we in the software industry do in rushed blog posts. But I can personally speak to at least one aspect, having worked for a company that does high end web sites and strategy for large S…

This is definitely a surprising opinion to find on HN. Usually the prevailing thought is that anything that is even remotely heavy on JavaScript is bad design and therefore inherently unusable, unportable, etc. Whereas this is essentially JavaScript maximalism.

Re: Why our website looks like an operating system

#168

Post by odie5533 »

omnimus wrote: post #155
CamouflagedKiwi wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blaming the industry for it doesn't change the reality that the law has done very little to improve the thing it was aimed at and made the internet worse for users (and developers) with all the banners. By any objective measure its outcomes are terrible - lawmakers should do better than just throwing out things like that.

Very little? The norm used be to slap google analytics on everything. Suddenly everybody thinks about compliance — especially those who didn't even have idea there was something wrong. Many sites ditched tracking altogether so they don't have to have banners. Everybody is aware of GDPR so you can be pretty confident that when european site has no banner it doesn't track you. Could the law be better? Sure I would love…

The law has wasted billions of hours of human life and productivity. Was it worth it?

Re: Why our website looks like an operating system

#169

Post by coded_monkey »

Retr0id wrote: post #33

> Legally-required cookie banner > PostHog.com doesn't use third-party cookies, only a single in-house cookie You're legally required to let me opt out of that cookie. Unless it's essential to the site functionality, in which case you don't need the banner at all.

I’m interested to hear which country forces a cookie banner for any cookie, because the EU only requires it for tracking cookies and this website does net specify whether it’s used for that purpose.

I’ve created websites with a cookie banner “because it’s required” even though there were no cookies involved. The idea that every website needs a cookie banner is more hurtful than the cookie banners themself.

Re: Why our website looks like an operating system

#170

Post by ironmagma »

Twey wrote: post #3

I've always thought ‘multi-document interfaces’ as we used to call them are an anti-pattern. I have a perfectly good window manager; why does every app need its own incompatible, usually inferior window manager built in? (Mind you on mobile I very much don't have a perfectly good window manager, and indeed can't even open multiple instances of most apps…)

Nearly every UNIX command has its own way of formatting output, be it into columns, tables, lists, files, or TTYs (and windows, à la emacs, screen, other curses-based utils...). Even `ls` has a table formatting logic to it. This keeps the UNIX native abstraction relatively simple; everything is "just text." But the ecosystem, being quite rich, actually has a lot of divergent requirements for each utility. If that was avoidable, we probably would have seen some other abstractions appear on top of "just text," but we similarly haven't.
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