201–210 of 496 posts
This 'Constitution' will give us the Web of a few giant tech companies, for those few giant tech companies, by those few giant tech companies.
Many here on HN, including me, wish we could have a Web of the people, for the people, by the people.
A lot of talk in this article about Google capturing the whole web, all valid points, but I find the Facebook walled garden even more terrifying. I see people now, often in online school parent groups I'm a part of, etc. who cannot even use email anymore, who don't use web pages at all, they get all their information through Facebook groups and Facebook, and only talk through Facebook messenger or sometimes SMS. E-ma…
Something we (people who work in tech) should be acutely aware of is causing unnecessary distractions from important issues. When there's a discussion about the Google very often the first few comments are about how some other tech company also does something unsavory. This is a thread about how Google's engineers are actively working to take over the web as we know it and become the gatekeepers to all the benefit (n…
The problem is that, IMO, centralization of the internet is simply the natural course. Especially when people seem to care so little. Centralization is cheaper, easier to monetize, easier to control, easier to update and upgrade. That's why people prefer Discord to IRC, that's why people prefer Slack to SMTP or Jabber, that's why for many people these days the distinction between git and GitHub is blurry. I suspect t…
Centralization is clearly bad in the private sector. I'm curious why people here don't see centralization of government as similarly bad. With 3.5T in revenue, the US federal government is the single largest entity in existence, and it's scope is vast, covering things as disparate as mail and health care. There are plenty of examples of them abusing their position (and occasionally their people...), yet this forum ra…
As a non-programmar, what are some web standards dictated by google that make it worse for me, the uninformed user? Im sure they exist, but I don’t know them.
Google Amp. Whenever you see the amp symbol, avoid visiting that site.
The main AMP concerns seem philosophical, which I don't think OP was asking about.
The problem is that, IMO, centralization of the internet is simply the natural course. Especially when people seem to care so little. Centralization is cheaper, easier to monetize, easier to control, easier to update and upgrade. That's why people prefer Discord to IRC, that's why people prefer Slack to SMTP or Jabber, that's why for many people these days the distinction between git and GitHub is blurry. I suspect t…
Here is a screenshot of my Cloudfront dashboard showing the breakdown of user agents into particular browsers when an article of mine reached the top of HN about two months ago:
Looking at the number of distinct IP addresses in Athena for that day, about 20,200 of those hits were distinct viewers:
This is not definitive, but it's something I guess. Here are a few observations based on that data:
1. On the desktop, it looks like Chrome and Firefox are at about parity for HN users. I kind of doubt this actually, and think it's more likely that Chrome still beats Firefox by a sizable margin. But even if this is off, it looks like HN users actually do use Firefox significantly more than the general population, which means the evangelization here isn't just a vocal minority among HN users.
2. On desktop Safari is a distant third. It would appear more people browse HN in any mobile category than browse HN on desktop using Safari.
3. On mobile, mobile Safari dominates. Then mobile Chrome has about half as many users as mobile Safari, and mobile Firefox again half as many as mobile Chrome.
EDIT: I pulled an Athena report of the referrer breakdown as well, if anyone's curious:
With our implicit mass approval, the 'Constitution' of the modern Web is being authored by a few giant tech companies. This 'Constitution' will give us the Web of a few giant tech companies, for those few giant tech companies, by those few giant tech companies. Many here on HN, including me, wish we could have a Web of the people, for the people, by the people.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
IMO one if the biggest blunders of Moz was not having had the vision to champion the open web by becoming an alternative monitization platform like Patreon. The biggest reason why the open web failed and will continue to fail is not because of aggregators like Google, Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter but rather because there's simply no way for people to vote with their wallets. Moz was uniquely positioned to drive such…
https://webmonetization.org/ https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/blog/introducing-our-exper... https://hacks.mozilla.org/2020/03/web-monetization-coil-and-...