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Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web

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Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web

#301

Post by vog »

deong wrote: post #296
vog wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. Exactly this. I don't get why anyone would listen to a podcast with ads and/or bad information density. I mean, the whole point (and value) of podcasts is to remove the private radio station crap, not to replicate it. BTW, the German podcast scene is a quite positive example of the directions podcasts can go.

To be fair, a lot of podcasts have ads, but ads aren't what I'm objecting to. The modern web doesn't suck because of ads. It sucks because of the technologies around ensuring you look at the ads, around sharing your behaviors as you look at the ads, etc. Any podcast player I can imagine anyone would ever use has a convenient way to skip ads, and the neither the presence of the ads themselves nor my decision to skip t…

> and the neither the presence of the ads themselves nor my decision to skip them degrades the experience of listening to the podcast

I beg to differ.

I see the ability to skip ads immediately, at any time, as a fundamental user right (and websites that try to deny this right should be prosecute by consumer protection). In other words, this is not the distinction between good versus bad quality. It is the distinction between merely acceptable versus totally inacceptable.

With regard to quality, it is a huge jump upwards if a podcast has no ads at all, nowhere, not even hidden or implicit. It is a really noticeable difference if the whole audio simply doesn't care about pleasing any stakeholder besides its audience.

Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web

#302

Post by anigbrowl »

pmoriarty wrote: post #25

"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…

I disagree slightly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurence_Canter_and_Martha_Sie...

I still remember the day that these assholes showed up and ruined a wonderful thing, and as you can see I'm not really over it.

Where things went wrong on the web, imho, was when business started leaning on people to put graphic corporate branding front and center, encouraging the abuse of things like tables and so on to create something that looked more like a magazine advert. Now, you could argue that such commercial pressures were got people to throw money at the WWW int he first place and rove technological development, and you'd have a point - the early web was pretty dull to look at. I wrote a book on how to use it for consumers around 1994 and every so often I take it off the shelf for a giggle at how primitive it looks in the screenshots. But at that time it was much better curated and the browsing experience was much more rewarding in many respects, although I'm obviously influenced by some nostalgia for a simpler era.

I really hoped to see the semantic web recapture some of the user-centric benefits of the early web, but development on that front seems slooooooow, and my ideas about a graph centric virtual space seem too sci-fi for me to even get meaningful answers from people I've asked.

Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web

#303

Post by syphilis2 »

I would love to use a search engine that allowed filtering results by categories such as: personal, unincorporated, forum, news, contains ads, page size, blog, video, slideshow, contains javascript. Search is so cluttered, it's difficult to find small pages with excellent content.

I mention this because it's what obstructs my access to the Web I enjoyed so much before. I don't like reading news from whatever bloated sites news.google links me to, I don't like being redirected 3 times just to read a recipe, or getting movie recommendations in aggregate rather than from a single reviewer that I trust. But search engines lead users to these undesired things, and companies compete to get top search results, and the best way I find good websites is ironically offline.

Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web

#304

Post by gojomo »

Two missing recommendations:

* for those concerned with abusive ads/trackers, try Brave web browser, the browser most committed to privacy

* for those concerned about central chokepoints, start experimenting with 'decentralized web' technologies - the 'Beaker Browser'/DAT ecosystem is doing lots of interesting things; the blockchain-anchored namespaces, storage, or services promoted by Blockstack, Filecoin/Protocol-Labs, etc may soon offer compelling alternatives

Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web

#305

Post by anigbrowl »

ntoe845noe wrote: post #96
pmoriarty wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's still centralized, and owned and run by a commercial entity that uses it to further their own interests, with a record of its users' interests and opinions. The capabilities and features of web forums are also really dumbed-down and limited compared to what you could get with the mail clients and news clients of even 20 or 30 years ago.

Yeah, I'm really surprised that most web forum software doesn't even let you sort comments by author, date, subject (which most comments don't have), etc. There were all sorts of useful things that usenet provided. (Not the least of which is kill files for ignoring trolls.)

I think this is deliberate. Have you noticed how google makes it...very very difficult to get results of things in date order? When I've asked people who work there why (often in relation to things where the date information is well-structured, like legal opinions or scientific papers) they always respond with some vague and very obvious bullshit.

Long story short, a lot of the large internet companies withhold or obscure functionality that users really want in order to keep them engaged and sell more ads. We have the technology to do a lot better than we are doing, but capital prefers to manufacture scarcity in the guise of abundance.

Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web

#306

Post by rackforms »

kfriede wrote: post #161
Thriptic wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But many of the providers of "content" know they have little to provide, so they drag it out in video form, saving the actual information for the last 10% of the video (if ever!) 0:00 - 00:10 Useless video animation 00:10-2:00 "Hey guys welcome to my channel. Make sure to like and subscribe and let me know how I'm doing in the comments. Also make sure to check out [sponsor] and use coupon code [code] for 10% off" 2…

I often feel this way about podcasts. Many great podcasts have a 0:30 intro, 1:30 of ads then 08:00 of random babble before getting into 5:00 of the meat of the podcast. The most recent one I can think of is 99% Invisible, though they're not even close to the only ones that do it.

If you're on iOS you should try my Podcast client, SkipCast. http://skipcast.net/ The marquee feature and indeed, the app's name, is for this exact reason. Large buttons make skipping much faster and accurate that other players, letting you get to the content you want faster. It's also got Skip Silence to eliminate extended moments of dead-air.

Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web

#307

Post by blurbleblurble »

QasimK wrote: post #155
blurbleblurble wrote: post #119

We need web browsers with good local & p2p indexing/search/bookmarking features. Before I ever touch google, I want my search/address bar to look thoroughly through well organized, locally bookmarked content indexes. The next stop before Google is indexes I've subscribed to. My friends, family, organizations, libraries, businesses, campaigns, wikipedia, etc. After that, duckduckgo. If I haven't found it by then, goog…

I’ve found Chrome/Chromium to be absolutely terrible at searching local history and bookmarks. It often fails to find even the simplest of pages which I know I’ve been to recently, while Firefox is capable of digging out pages that are barely in my memory. It’s one of the things that keep me on Firefox - it’s simply more usable! (Personally, I’m convinced Google does it deliberately to gain more user attention time o…

Yes, indeed, there is a strong risk for bubbles. In order to deter bubbles, there must still be a healthy social fabric and network applications that promote and incentivize cross-cultural interaction and knowledge sharing. That's a social, political, design & technical challenge.

Also...

I'm imagining the possibility "encrypted queries" between trusted parties. You could allow people to send you a search query that is encrypted in some way such that you couldn't read it, but you could still run it on your local index and send them back a result. Storing not only your own well-structured index but numerous other parties indices as well could be way too expensive. Instead, it makes sense only to maintain a relatively small local index for when you're truly offline. But to allow others to search your index anonymously, perhaps in exchange for the ability to search theirs anonymously. You could let trusted parties search your content without actually revealing their search terms, which may contain sensitive terms, like "cancer" or "schizophrenia symptoms". Maybe this could be done in a way that also obscures who actually ran the query. This sounds like a challenge for zero-knowledge proofs and some kind of anonymous traffic routing system.

In practice, it'd be like a hybrid of anonymous distributed routing and anonymous distributed search.

Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web

#308

Post by bloaf »

DeusExMachina wrote: post #111
blunte wrote: post #8

This 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…

If video content would be so "hostile", it would have failed on its own already. People would flock to other places where they can read instead. I don't buy this idea where everything is always imposed on us by evil corporations. More and more websites using video to me seems more like a proof that people prefer videos over written content. That's why videos usually autoplay, also on YouTube and Facebook: if a person…

I think people don't want to admit that the reading experience on mobile is mediocre-at-best.

Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web

#309

Post by s73ver_ »

tomc1985 wrote: post #265
s73ver_ wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All content creators are stroking their egos. I'm sorry, but I still see nothing "hostile" about them choosing one medium over the other. You might have a slight inconvenience, but that's it. If you don't like things being in videos, then write written content to compete with it. Otherwise, stop with the over the top exaggerations and feelings of entitlement from content creators.

Like I have the time or desire to compete with most of these yokels. We give in some areas and take in others, that's how the world works. Content creators are not some unassailable gift horse immune from inspection or criticism. People are free to criticize the things I contribute to this world; and my feelings will not be hurt if they do. Perhaps you could learn from this. Video needs smothering, not competition.

"Like I have the time or desire to compete with most of these yokels."

Then stop complaining.

"Content creators are not some unassailable gift horse immune from inspection or criticism. People are free to criticize the things I contribute to this world; and my feelings will not be hurt if they do. Perhaps you could learn from this."

But you're not criticizing. You're getting all in a tizzy because others aren't doing things exactly the way you want them. You're demanding that your entitlement be fulfilled.

"Video needs smothering, not competition."

Not according to the vast amounts of people who find it just fine. If you wish to prove that another medium is better, then feel free to create competing content in that medium to show it.

Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web

#310

Post by deftturtle »

Yelp is extremely hostile to web users on mobile and shoves their app at you, actively blocking mobile functionality. You have to spoof user agent or request desktop site to use their service. So after realizing how hostile they are, I stopped using their service. Wasn't aware of their shady business practices in the past, and I think they've improved somewhat? My main issue with them today is their subverting of mobile web usage.

Similarly, Square Cash hides their login page on the mobile cash.me site. You have to request the desktop site and actually go to cash.me/login to have any chance of using their mobile site. It's fucking crazy.

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