"A website on Doom level design on Geocities from 1999, accessed October 31, 20017 via Archive.org" Glad to know Archive.org will still be around in 20017.
Brewster Kahle is my hero!
Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web
101–110 of 531 posts
Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web
#102This is a good an informative essay. However, there's another element of "user-hostile" that I didn't see addressed (maybe I missed it in my haste?) -- that is the websites trying to control exactly how the content is consumed by the user. It seems increasingly that web content is being delivered in video form. That itself is hostile to some people. Some of us want the freedom to read (or scan quickly). But many of t…
> It seems increasingly that web content is being delivered in video form. That itself is hostile to some people. Some of us want the freedom to read (or scan quickly). And what if some of us want the freedom to watch? Maybe I'm illiterate? Just like you, I could say that putting something in writing instead of a video is 'hostile' if it doesn't meet my preferences. Talking about 'hostile' is hysterical.
There are certainly times when video is appropriate, but I feel like we can all relate to the times that it's not; when someone has a list of 6 things, and instead of just listing them, they make a snazzy video. The video is still text-based; maybe there's an image slideshow as well, but it's effectively the same information in the same format, just spread out over a 2 minute video.
Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web
#103"For many of us in the early 2000s, the web was magical. You connected a phone line to your computer, let it make a funny noise and suddenly you had access to a seemingly-unending repository of thoughts and ideas from people around the world. "It might not seem like much now, but what that noise represented was the stuff of science fiction at the time: near-instantaneous communication at a planetary scale. It was a b…
Ironically the closest thing I've found to the hey-day of the internet(~'99) for me is Ham Radio.
It's hard to explain but it's got the same feel of people who tinker and enjoy technology for the hell of it. With HF you get communication all over the globe.
It's also explicitly non-commercial so it's stayed relatively undeveloped. Granted you'll never see the exponential of communication that the internet unleashed due to limited spectrum but that might be in some ways a blessing.
Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web
#104This is a good an informative essay. However, there's another element of "user-hostile" that I didn't see addressed (maybe I missed it in my haste?) -- that is the websites trying to control exactly how the content is consumed by the user. It seems increasingly that web content is being delivered in video form. That itself is hostile to some people. Some of us want the freedom to read (or scan quickly). But many of t…
It doesn't help that Google (the owner of the biggest video platform) is giving videos increasingly more power in its search engines.
Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web
#105This is a good an informative essay. However, there's another element of "user-hostile" that I didn't see addressed (maybe I missed it in my haste?) -- that is the websites trying to control exactly how the content is consumed by the user. It seems increasingly that web content is being delivered in video form. That itself is hostile to some people. Some of us want the freedom to read (or scan quickly). But many of t…
I hate the trend to video as well (I can read and comprehend faster than any video can speak), but I wonder if it is just the inevitable result of the continued expansion of who is on the web. Many people in the world are not nearly as literate as HN readers.
I think it is the result of the reduced copyability of video compared to plain text. This makes it easier to monetize video. Since lots of writers don't have a secondary source of income and have to pay for housing/food/loans/etc, they have an incentive to spend the effort to write video scripts rather than essays/articles.
Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web
#106This is a good an informative essay. However, there's another element of "user-hostile" that I didn't see addressed (maybe I missed it in my haste?) -- that is the websites trying to control exactly how the content is consumed by the user. It seems increasingly that web content is being delivered in video form. That itself is hostile to some people. Some of us want the freedom to read (or scan quickly). But many of t…
I read some sports related sites. Many have auto play video that seems to pop up just a bit after you've already started reading. The video almost always is unrelated (different team, different story) to what I'm already well into reading. This is annoying 100% of the time. It's never useful to me. Even worse. Some stories will be just a few words and a video. So I go to a site, read, play video.... and that same sit…
In Firefox, in `about:config` you can set `media.autoplay.enabled` to false to permanently disable auto-play video everywhere. I love it. Now videos only play when I press play. A slight annoyance when watching netflix/etc, but well worth the price everywhere else. If I could whitelist a set of domains to allow autoplay it would be perfect.
Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web
#107I remember when even some corporate web sites often had a misc site somewhere with something about who built the site, even a picture of the server, a cat.... it was personal. It was very human.
Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web
#108Meet HN user megous, his fellow closed-source re-inventing co-conspirators (click a 'comments' link on the search results, then 'parent'), and potential open-source future fans:
λmegous(2016Dec): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13226170
For each use case that is not a free browsing I create an electron app, that never executes any code from the web or uses any external style. It only uses XHR to fetch html pages/json data/other static stuff and then transforms that data and uses it in the custom UI designed for the use case.
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=13226170&type=comment
Any references to similar projects (whether closed, commercial, or open-source) would be appreciated.
Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
I read some sports related sites. Many have auto play video that seems to pop up just a bit after you've already started reading. The video almost always is unrelated (different team, different story) to what I'm already well into reading. This is annoying 100% of the time. It's never useful to me. Even worse. Some stories will be just a few words and a video. So I go to a site, read, play video.... and that same sit…
In Firefox, in `about:config` you can set `media.autoplay.enabled` to false to permanently disable auto-play video everywhere. I love it. Now videos only play when I press play. A slight annoyance when watching netflix/etc, but well worth the price everywhere else. If I could whitelist a set of domains to allow autoplay it would be perfect.
Thank you. I hear chrome is going to or maybe has and is going to make a similar option more visible.
I agree, having to hit play is a small price to pay.
Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web
#110The part where the author tries to tie Brexit and the election of Donald Trump to the user-hostile web is bonkers. People, you have to understand this: There exists a large number of others out there who desperately want government reformed, want more localized control over their lives, and who voted accordingly. It wasn't some trick pulled on them by corporations or Russians manipulating social media. I realize that…
It is not as if forces hostile to Trump/Brexit were innocent of buying analytical data. The recent Senate hearings on Russian ad-buys were strangely incurious about, say, purchases from China. Were there any? Would they tell us?