It's weird that the author mentions the 90s and how the web was not meant to be walled gardens, but then decided to omit AOL from the story. AOL was one big ass walled garden back in the 1990s. It was pretty popular back then. The funny thing is, back then, it was popular for 2 groups of people. First were younger kids who wanted to stir up trouble on the network (AOHell, etc.). The second were old people. My uncle i…
That’s a pretty US-centric take on things though. AOL didn’t exist in any great form in the UK certainly, and the walled gardens that did (BBSes, CIX, Compuserve etc) pretty much evaporated by the mid-90s.
It was interesting to see how it all panned out. A bunch of walled gardens, to openness, and now we're back to some form of walled gardens again.
One of the few times I’ve heard a counter to this was an old fisherman who took us out on a boat here in Melbourne, Australia. Proper bloke, skin like leather from the sun, done nothing but run fishing trips his whole life. He was lamenting the loss of a particular forum with one of the other guys. “All just on Facebook now”, he said, and he said it with sadness. He missed that old forum.
Actually that makes a lot of sense, it's not that we need to have RSS replace Facebook, we need a resurgance of forums to take back from Facebook. Perhaps if forums could talk to each other you'd have an experience more like mastodon, but in concepts that more people understand. Something like an open source Stack Exchange network. So you can log-in to one of them but then easily create an account using the credentia…
One of the few times I’ve heard a counter to this was an old fisherman who took us out on a boat here in Melbourne, Australia. Proper bloke, skin like leather from the sun, done nothing but run fishing trips his whole life. He was lamenting the loss of a particular forum with one of the other guys. “All just on Facebook now”, he said, and he said it with sadness. He missed that old forum.
Actually that makes a lot of sense, it's not that we need to have RSS replace Facebook, we need a resurgance of forums to take back from Facebook. Perhaps if forums could talk to each other you'd have an experience more like mastodon, but in concepts that more people understand. Something like an open source Stack Exchange network. So you can log-in to one of them but then easily create an account using the credentia…
One of the few times I’ve heard a counter to this was an old fisherman who took us out on a boat here in Melbourne, Australia. Proper bloke, skin like leather from the sun, done nothing but run fishing trips his whole life. He was lamenting the loss of a particular forum with one of the other guys. “All just on Facebook now”, he said, and he said it with sadness. He missed that old forum.
Actually that makes a lot of sense, it's not that we need to have RSS replace Facebook, we need a resurgance of forums to take back from Facebook. Perhaps if forums could talk to each other you'd have an experience more like mastodon, but in concepts that more people understand. Something like an open source Stack Exchange network. So you can log-in to one of them but then easily create an account using the credentia…
I do not get discourse. I've only ever come across it on Jeff's own blog, but it seems no different to Disqus. And both don't load with uMatrix without manually activating them. I don't want more Javascript in my life. I want more static forum posts.
> SPAs have made almost all desktop applications obsolete. Adobe, office for desktop, text editors, video games, my command line, iTunes, yada yada yada. Native applications are a hugely important part of my computer usage and I personally prefer to keep it that way.
Sure they are still important, but isn't everything that CAN be made into a web application made into one? Just because there are so many advantages: The applications travel with you, no need for manual backups, more secure (I try to completly avoid clicking on exe files on Windows), no installation/maintenance required. And don't young people use YouTube/Amazon Music/Google Play to listen to music these days? I'm a…
There are many disadvantages too: they're slower than native apps, they require an internet connection, someone else has all your work on their servers, your user experience is entirely at their mercy, you never really own anything, etc.
That's the narrative you get if you say that the internet, the web and its users are broken: "Does it affect me? No. Does it still work for me? Yes. Is the internet broken? For users who don't know how to use it, yes."
So, why even bother arguing? Everyone lives on their special little islands of some niche web/IP semi-commercial projects and do not particularly care about ads or cookies, because whatever.
Unfortunately removing the 'styling hacks and behavior' has split the pages up into many different components that all interact in quite complex ways. The HTML being 'purer' has not made things simpler at all. Now there are many places rather than just a few where style and functionality can be modified. And that can obscure intent quite quickly. As opposed to this is bold text which any fool (this one included) coul…
> Now there are many places rather than just a few where style and functionality can be modified. Styling is done in style sheets, functionality is done in JavaScript (with the exceptions already mentioned). Trying to create, say Hotmail in 2018 would result in a much better to understand and debug app than the 1998 version was.
It has only shifted the hacks out of sight into CSS/JS. Postulating "semantic" HTML and then invent a bunch of ad-hoc syntaxes (CSS) hasn't achieved anything in terms of expressibility really. The original purpose of markup attributes in SGML is precisely to represent presentation and other auxiliary properties in a uniform and manageable way. The concept of "semantic" HTML is, for me, just a rationalization of the HTML/CSS/JS trifecta after the fact. Instead of having presentation properties in HTML, now we have an incredibly complex rendering system that is almost infeasible to implement from scratch.
I agree that having a few walled gardens is a problem, but having more smaller walled gardens probably won't change much. Bad actors can still sign up, post, spam, harass, etc. on several small walled gardens. What we need is a way to better identify and handle bad actors. The internet in the 90s seemed more fun and more open. Perhaps it's because the only people really participating were not interested in abusing si…
> The internet in the 90s seemed more fun and more open. Perhaps it's because the only people really participating were not interested in abusing sites or people. It was mostly nerds sharing nerdy things. Once money got involved, and free everything was available, it turned into this soup of bots, trolls, AI, fake this and that, big money, swaying public opinion, and gross content. The 90s had fair share of the above…
There were some bad actors in the 90s, but the scale is different now. And the effect is now raised to the level of concern that elections are affected. Some people are even talking about how it is threatening democracy. We don't think an arms race of technology with the bots and bad actors is going to work long-term. We need to change the economics so that bad actors go broke trying to act bad, while real people have to pay very little and not have to give up privacy. Government regulation might solve some problems, but it might also just put Big Social Media in bed with politicians and then little guys will be prevented from playing, and/or the control over online speech will just flip back and forth between opposing ideologies every election.
When I ask friends and family who use Facebook daily, privacy and security never come up as pain points. Media is blowing everything out of proportion. Replacing Facebook with RSS or Feedly is nonsense. My friends and family have no idea what those are. Facebook makes it easy for people to connect with old friends and family members through active human interactions: like this, follow her, read that. By doing so you…
it's also a fault of the websites themselves. In the off chance that an average facebook user uses google to search and end up in a website outside facebook, they 'll be typically be pestered with signing up to a newsletter and then with a popup to get browser notifications (along with a cookie popup in europe). The User experience will be usually atrocious, with content hidden way behind the ads. At that point the u…
The huge number of forums which have that Tapatalk insanity pop up on mobile...
When I ask friends and family who use Facebook daily, privacy and security never come up as pain points. Media is blowing everything out of proportion. Replacing Facebook with RSS or Feedly is nonsense. My friends and family have no idea what those are. Facebook makes it easy for people to connect with old friends and family members through active human interactions: like this, follow her, read that. By doing so you…
>When I ask friends and family who use Facebook daily, privacy and security never come up as pain points. This scandal is so incredibly overblown it's crazy. I've been arguing this since the beginning. Media blew this up because it's loosley connected to Trump and because there's no better story than when you tear down a high flyer. Facebook was/is an American success story.
What is overblown is the "sudden realization" of facts the have been long known to anybody who cared.