Ask HN: Can we transparently rid the web of crufty design? • Hacker News Board

Post by cxy7z » Sat, Dec 11, 2010, 10:44 PM UTC

Once I installed AdBlock a few years back, most ads went away and I never heard from them since. But afterwards I realized that third-party ads make up only half of web cruft. The other half is poor design and misguided self-promotion on the part of publishers. And while GreaseMonkey with its userscripts is a step in the right direction, there is still room for improvement.

GreaseMonkey as a form of web-design vigilantism has two problems: 1) The web is too large and too messy a place for GreaseMonkey's fix-the-web-one-site-at-a-time approach to be practical. We need an subscription-style approach à la AdBlock. 2) Multiple user-submitted redesigns exist for the same site. Yes, choice is great. Especially if you're a power user. But it's confusing for my grandmother who has neither the inclination nor the time to weigh the advantages of different mods to her favorite recipe site. Again, AdBlock has the answer with its you-don't-see-me-but-I'm-making-your-life-better mindset.

So what about this: create a collaborative community for web cleanup. Members with an interest in improving a particular site will act as curators, creating and maintaining a single, cruft-free redesign of that site. These redesigns will be transparently applied to sites of any end-user who chooses to subscribe to this service, thus requiring no effort beyond the initial installation of a browser plugin.

Playing devil's advocate here, I'm sure the top issue to be raised will be: What guarantees that sites won't be altered in an unfavorable or, worse, biased way. Technically: nothing. But then again, what guarantees that wikipedia articles stay accurate?

Thoughts?

PS: There's something called GreaseFire, but that only informs users that userscripts exist for the site currently being visited. The task of manually evaluating and then installing them is still left to the user.

Post by gdl » Sat, Dec 11, 2010, 11:08 PM UTC

I've never looked into GreaseMonkey so I might be missing some context here, but "cruft" sounds like it would be difficult to draw a clear consensus on.

Ads are relatively cut-and-dry. Wikipedia, at least as an ideal, is a collection of objective facts with citations. But "removing cruft"? I'm not saying it can't be done, but I think it would be tough to get a clear consensus within a community on what exactly that entails. Wikipedia itself has flame wars on half of its discussion pages over any details that are less than totally objective, and many that are. It works because the differences being argued about are usually small points that most users wouldn't really notice either way. If you're trying to get consensus on a hundred "bike shed" issues on each page... well, good luck.

It's a very cool and worthwhile idea though. I'd like to see whatever might come of this after a few iterations.