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A website to destroy all websites

henry.codes

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Re: A website to destroy all websites

#341

Post by pavlus »

CGMthrowaway wrote: post #41
Aurornis wrote: post #25

I think the comments here are a great example of why this idea always sounds better in nostalgic reminiscence than in practice: As I write this, nearly half of the comments here are complaining about this website. There are complaints about requiring JavaScript, the font size, the design, the color choices, the animations. Complaints about everything the designer did to make this site unique and personal, which was t…

The best design is invisible

The best design is not invisible, but unobstructive. When you have a destination in mind, it must not prevent you from reaching your goal.

Sometimes, you can go the scenic route, where the journey itself is the goal, not the place it gets you to.

Re: A website to destroy all websites

#343

Post by docmars »

panny wrote: post #66

>JavaScript is more progressively-ehanceable than ever, and enables interfacing with a rapidly-growing number of exciting browser APIs (still fuck Brendan Eich though). I think the author should take a step back. He's complaining about politicized brain rot while engaging in politicized brain rot. He ruined his entire plea in one sentence. I was skimming to see if I could find anything useful in his words before read…

Agreed. The very end of the article also names off all the usual cookie cutter nonsense as well.

These people just can't help themselves to inject activism in everything they do, and this is why so many people are turned off by otherwise great projects.

Tech as a whole needs to take a step back and stop preaching to people about things they probably don't agree with.

Re: A website to destroy all websites

#344

Post by bmacho »

bbor wrote: post #133

I love the design and the underlying message, but I just have to engage on the three examples of "radical monopolies". Most pressingly, I don't think any of the three show an example like that of the automobile, whose ubiquity is mandatory ! 1. Describing "proponents [of the industrial revolution]" as some external group seems pretty absurd, and gives the rest of the piece an unsettling Kazinsky vibe. Yes, of course…

> No. It can feel awful for one primary reason that dwarfs all others: advertising, which is of course just a wrapper over capitalism.

Huh, I wonder. What if we had a domain that is actively anti-capitalist. No ads, no products, no asking for financial support. Kinda like how GNU operating systems are hostile towards closed source software. (Tho I am AI-doomist and I don't think that online spaces can survive several billion new human-like agents that are trained to be as cunning and malevolent as possible.)

Re: A website to destroy all websites

#345

Post by palata »

IvanK_net wrote: post #59
palata wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> each year, a person spends more time on the internet (on average) than a year before, which shows that it is getting more and more useful for everyone. How in the world does that sound like a reasonable conclusion?

You choose to spend your time on a place A instead of the place B, it means that the place A is better than the place B. Why else would you do it, if B was better? It is a simple logic.

> You choose to spend your time on a place A instead of the place B, it means that the place A is better than the place B. Why else would you do it, if B was better? It is a simple logic.

Your logic seems to be wanting.

I choose to spend more time at work than on vacation. Do you think I like it better, or can you imagine one reason explaining why I work?

Re: A website to destroy all websites

#346

Post by eleventen »

fabianholzer wrote: post #289
eleventen wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IME, this is just about the opposite of true. I recently did a deep dive of an (allegedly) human-curated selection of 40K blogs containing 600K posts. I got the list from Kagi’s Small Web Index [1]. I haven’t published anything about it yet, but the takeaway is that nostalgia for the IndieWeb is largely misplaced. The overwhelming majority of was 2010s era “content marketing” SEO slop. The next largest slice was esot…

Do you intend to write it up? It would be interesting to get your take on how the classification works. And personally, as I know my feed is on the index as well, into which category my writing would be sorted.

Probably not. I lost interest when I figured out how poor the dataset is.

Re: A website to destroy all websites

#347

Post by palata »

signatoremo wrote: post #240
FeteCommuniste wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Each year the gambler spends more time, money, and energy on slot machines. Obviously his gambling habit is getting more and more useful to him. /s

Your comparison may be apt for Tiktok. The OP talks about the Internet. Researching, learning, communicating, paying, shopping, entertaining, via the Internet, have steadily increased.

People spend (on average) the vast majority of their time on the stupid addictive stuff, that's documented.

Re: A website to destroy all websites

#348

Post by gordian-mind »

Reading this, I kept wondering whether it would stay on the technical level or whether it would immediately start broadcasting the author’s cultural politics. It does, and the first giveaway is the kind of sentence you’ve seen a thousand times:

“These days, however, we write increasing amounts of complicated, unsecure code to express less and less meaning, in order to infinitely generate shareholder value.”

That line signals a tribe: “infinitely generate shareholder value” is the ritual incantation that turns every topic into the same morality play, with the same stock villain. It’s the worldview of someone who wants to live in a small enchanted technical garden, treating the economic world as a gross external thing, that you can blame whenever you need a cause.

And “unsecure code” in that context is part of the aesthetic: modernity is decadent, business is corrupting, therefore the code is “unsecure” and “meaningless.”

The Brendan Eich stuff is the same genre: petty culture-war residue kept alive long after normal people moved on.

So yeah, the internet continues, and until such artistic types learn to tamp down their own biases and refrain from injecting those into every word they write, I will keep away from their walled gardens.

Re: A website to destroy all websites

#349

Post by ljm »

hirako2000 wrote: post #298
bartread wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's an assumption, that people sometimes state explicitly, on HN that the discussion is more interesting or valuable than whatever's on the end of the posted link. Sometimes that's true - often even - but sometimes it's not. That's not necessarily a value judgement on the discussion though. From me, at any rate, it's more often a personal perspective: sometimes I'm just more interested in or charmed by the thing,…

To some it felt like nothing as they couldn't render the content. The challenge when tackling difficult problems is to bring in solutions to those problems. Subway offered an alternative to junk food. By offering custom flavors of choice, giving consumers more control over what they eat. I don't see any fresh food at subway. Does it mean what they did is futile? No. Can't we point out this is another type of junk ? W…

One of the most frustrating and perhaps thought-terminating clichés on the internet and social media at large is alluded to in this reply:

“I personally could not view this page [because I turned off JS], therefore I will dismiss it out of hand as it didn’t cater to my needs.” A choice made by the consumer somehow makes the author accountable for it.

Or more succinctly, “but what about me [or people I’ve anointed myself as spokesperson for]?”spoken by someone not the intended audience for the piece, trying to make the author responsible for their need.

The answer to which, I think, is either, “it’s not for you then so move on,” or perhaps even “misery is optional, just enable JS ffs.”

The idea that the creator of a work must bend to the will of those that consume it seems to be highly prevalent, and is pretty much at odds with creativity itself.

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