61–70 of 91 posts
Take a look at any shopping mall still alive today, and find pictures of it when it was first opened for example.
From beautiful waterfalls and fountains with foliage, to dime store prints and pastel color patterns. The internet is the same now.
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I don't like those things either. But a counter argument is that uBlock origin, Pi-hole, and Reader mode in Firefox go a long way to blocking those things and creating a nice reading experience.
Ublock Origin has no effect on email modals or cookie popups. Those have to be manually zapped.
Think about it twice :)
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I don't like those things either. But a counter argument is that uBlock origin, Pi-hole, and Reader mode in Firefox go a long way to blocking those things and creating a nice reading experience.
Ublock Origin has no effect on email modals or cookie popups. Those have to be manually zapped.
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Flash was a nice tool for creators and it enabled some interesting ways to present information. Flash gaming was a very interesting niche. But on the whole I think it made the web worse. Lots of sites had microscopic text that you couldn't enlarge, no bookmarking pages or maintaining state, no right click, never ending security holes, invisible to search, inaccessible to those with vision or hearing assistants. The l…
Plenty of websites have similar usability issues today. Most sites will refuse to load content without Javascript. I stopped keeping bookmarks because most pages I had went to 404 Not Found. For all these disadvantages, Flash had something modern webdev can only dream of: permanence. A Flash file from 2004 will work almost perfectly in Ruffle, 20 years later; video, audio, images, animation. A dynamic webpage or data…
It did have a certain (imo over hyped) DX that people had a fondness for & that the web wasn't catering to. This was good for users in that they got a lot of experiences they might not have otherwise had. But the experiences were 99% things the web could do, and the web experience as a user was better.
I'm not unsympathetic to the passing of the flash age (even given the treasonous un-webful proprietary closed app-like rot that it was). But I mostly wish we'd had more people writing competitive authoring tools for the web; we could have made a Flash timeline like editor, with svg and smil/svg Dom/css animations/css transitions. The DX was largely recreateable. I think it's somewhat over hyped, but I definitely see & am sorry that there haven't been successful popular web-targetting ways of doing similar.
I don't think the web is as impermanent as you project. Many sites will run fine from an archive. Sure, datavis sites not being able to get data you didn't fetch the first time is an issue, but flash dataviz's are just as liable to fetch data on the fly rather than bake it all in. Flash doesn't have an inherent advantage, more a happenstance one, and web archiving will take one far further than one might believe. Alas "save page as..." doesn't work; the promise of tech like http bundled seems high, but then the archival community groups went & did their own thing instead of joining up, and http bundles became another bland anti-Google rallying flag. Alas.
TikTok is where I find fun on the current internet. It's hilarious (Taylor Swift private jet memes), weird (grimace shake), surprising, emotionally moving (hopecore), educational (how to adjust a door closer), and always exposing me to things I've never seen (starting process for a diesel locomotive). It contains ads, but they're pretty easy to identify and very easy to skip.
The internet is still fun. I was on bulletin board systems pre-internet as a kid and spent too much time on the web in the late 90s. I've seen it evolve from java applets and flash to something better. Though I don't like social media much anymore and worry about the effect of screens on kids, I still love the internet and value what it makes possible. I don't buy into these arguments of things used to be better. It'…
EDIT: this was largely just to strengthen one of your points. Every single time something becomes big, the hardcore early fans of that thing will complain about the change. This used to happen with bands. Early die hard fans enjoyed having their own tribe or clique built around the band, and then when the band became too successful they'd say that the band "sold out" and that the newfound fans aren't really fans and…
With the internet, though, I think there's another factor that reduces its "fun level" -- the internet has also shifted to being a heavily commercialized environment, and commercialization has a very strong anti-fun effect.
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> I've seen it evolve from java applets and flash to something better. With the advances in technology I wish it had. However, we now have Material Design, oversized UIs, autoplaying videos when you are immediately on the site, anti-adblockers, "Please Subscribe" crap, the desktop being an afterthought (hamburger menus), etc.
I don't like those things either. But a counter argument is that uBlock origin, Pi-hole, and Reader mode in Firefox go a long way to blocking those things and creating a nice reading experience.
I can't help but observe that the majority of these sites linked are very ordinary looking sites. I don't see an abundance of "fun". In my opinion, if you don't think people are still out there having fun on the internet, you're looking in the wrong places.
Could very well be, but I find it very difficult to locate the right places, then.
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Plenty of websites have similar usability issues today. Most sites will refuse to load content without Javascript. I stopped keeping bookmarks because most pages I had went to 404 Not Found. For all these disadvantages, Flash had something modern webdev can only dream of: permanence. A Flash file from 2004 will work almost perfectly in Ruffle, 20 years later; video, audio, images, animation. A dynamic webpage or data…
Plenty of websites are implemented poorly, but 3/4 of the problems listed with Flash were inherent. Flash absolutely was a problem. It did have a certain (imo over hyped) DX that people had a fondness for & that the web wasn't catering to. This was good for users in that they got a lot of experiences they might not have otherwise had. But the experiences were 99% things the web could do, and the web experience as a u…