6 ms·

> "web-hipster bullshit" Why so much negativity lately regarding new trends in the web?

by usaphp 10y ago

bordercases 10y ago
I can voice my perspective. Essentially: bike-shedding, bedazzlement, and bloat.
gue5t 10y ago
Because continued development of the Web is an obvious, user-hostile money-grab. If you only care about getting your software to users, you have a million choices for your application runtime. If you want to monetize every user by selling their privacy or headspace, you have only one: i.e., "pirating" Facebook is a logical impossibility. Communicative efficacy on the Web has not improved since the early 1990s--Javascript and its ilk have virtually no positive effect on the usefulness of Wikipedia, for example. We're converting what was intended to be a transport for communication into a framework for writing portable software. The thesis here is that there should be a digital way to share hypertext articles and other statically-described communication without pay the costs (privacy, rendering efficiency, security bugs, transport performance and uncacheability, accessibility) associated with a cross-platform sandboxed multimedia software runtime.
- usaphp 10y ago
  Weren't computers built at first to do completely different from what we are currently using them for? I don't get the negativity about new ways people try to use things we have. If we were always following guidelines and rules, we would be stuck in the past
  - Bromskloss 10y ago
    It's not "being new" that is the criticised activity here.
  - parennoob 10y ago
    Similarly, if we were never negative about things that sucked from our perspective, we would be stuck in a world where Internet Explorer was the only browser and everyone was using "Windows 2016". Negative feedback (preferably with suggestions for improvement) is just as important as imaginative new ways of using the web.
  - gue5t 10y ago
    I don't want to be rude, but I really don't understand your message. Computers have always been, and will always be, tools for automating away work. The specific nature of the work the user needs automated is in a constant state of flux. One particular kind of work that we've wanted computers to do for us since the 20th century is the sharing of written and visual information. Ostensibly, this is what the Web was written for, and though it wasn't perfect, it could have evolved into a simply, highly efficient tool for this purpose. Instead, it can be seen evolving into a sandboxed application runtime, a workload with vastly different properties. Good implementations of software for these two workloads would share little structure outside of that required for inevitable hardware access. Evolving the Web into an application runtime is possible, and well underway, but doing so still leaves the niche of software for an unfettered global commons of knowledge unfilled. By using the Web we're building for the latter purpose, we are met with drawbacks which include (as I mentioned): - lack of privacy - rendering efficiency - security bugs and malware - transport performance - uncacheability - accessibility We can attempt to address each of these piecemeal, and with sustained effort we're likely to make good progress on most of them, in due time. But a lot of these are really hard problems for an application runtime to solve. Conversely, these problems are a lot easier (where they exist at all) on a software platform designed from the ground up for hypertext-based, archivable communication, rather than as an application runtime.
    - wtbob 10y ago
      This is possibly the absolute best comment I've read in months. It puts into words why I dislike JavaScript 'web apps' so much: the Web was this really neat tool for sharing the written word, and it's turned into a virtual machine runtime. I don't mind the VM, but it's a hack, and I miss the tool for sharing information.
    - mikro2nd 10y ago
      And isn't it funny how many of those problems were reasonably well addressed (not all, not perfectly, but mostly better than current state-of-art) by a software platform designed from the ground up to be a sandboxed application runtime back in the 1990's... Java something something.
  - TeMPOraL 10y ago
    Nobody is complaining about people playing around and inventing new stuff. That's the hacking spirit, that's the essence of progress. I like browser experiments just like everyone else, even if half of them lock my computer up. No, we're complaining about those inventing new ways to make people's life much worse in exchance for the off chance that someone leaves them more money.
toyg 10y ago
One reason might be that, for anyone with historical perspective, a situation where our pipes can download hundreds of MB per second and still our browsers crawl like turtles is just shocking. Modern browsers are the most compatible ever and come with all sorts of bells and whistles baked in, and still people are using JS frameworks over JS frameworks over JS frameworks. Another reason might be that most of this website-fat is actively anti-users. It breaks the back button. It breaks bookmarks. It spies on you. It makes it impossible to interoperate/mash stuff, and it makes it incredibly hard to automate things (do you know that in the '90s you used to be able to download entire websites, so you could comfortably read them offline?). Another reason is probably that a lot of "mainstream web plumbers" (like yours truly) are now hitting late middle-age and feeling it hard. We used to be able to view-source and copypaste our way to image-rollover glory; we were breathing markup and feeds... now it's all tooling and frameworks and stacks, even http is going binary, and it feels like the loss of this innocence is not actually gaining anything for anyone except marketing people. Now get off my lawn.
- digi_owl 10y ago
  I guess its very telling that the terminology these days is not site, but app...
  - Klathmon 10y ago
    I think it's telling that some people don't seem to grasp that the terminology is app because they are applications. The web is no longer just html, they are full-fledged applications running in the browser.
    - myrion 10y ago
      Yes, and most of them shouldn't be.
      - enraged_camel 10y ago
        That's not the problem. The problem is that the frameworks developers use to make their content interactive and manage state are overkill. It's like needing to display today's date on the page and downloading an entire date library to do it when you can just do "Date();"
fucking_tragedy 10y ago
I paid close to $2k for a computer with 16GB of memory and can only have the same amount of tabs open as I did in 2009 with 4GB of RAM. My computer still slows to a crawl when on certain pages. These are the literal costs (for me) to be able to use the web nowadays for minimal usability and functionality 'increases'. For reference, the multiprotocol instant messenger client Meebo was a successful competitor to Trillian in 2005. It was a web application that used less memory and was more responsive than a desktop application. I used it on a computer with 512mb of memory just fine. Also, browsing the web on my phone is unnecessarily difficult and battery consuming.
protomyth 10y ago
ok.... Because it seems more and more of the trends are designed to target me for advertising and analytics while making the user experience worse. I look at one website and uBlock says it blocked 12 domains the page tried to connect to and allowed 13 domains. What the heck? I go to audible.com and it flashes after 2 seconds and redraws the page. Never mind the banner at the top of the page that says to download the app. All the while, I still have a data cap of 10 gigabytes on my cell. Simple pages are downloading 2 megabyte frameworks, custom fonts, and autoplaying video, and groups of megabyte images. Whole programs in the 90's fit in the space of one of these images (and they said Smalltalk program were too big). We aren't all browsing at wifi spots at some coffee shop. We have to pay for this overpriced bandwidth. I actually hope it gets worse and worse. I'm looking forward to what comes next after it all collapses. Perhaps we will get a medium that matches the app vision people are programming to. // I did up vote you, no sense in down votes for a simple question
yk 10y ago
Because most of the developments are a net loss for the user.^1 The most important benefit of an ad blocker is not that it blocks ads, the most important benefit is, that the web is a lot faster. I basically stopped surfing on my tablet, because after 2 seconds some ad network comes around to finally deliver an ad, and the entire site jumps around. I lose the place what I just read, and from time to time I actually click some ad by accident ( I wanted to scroll when the site suddenly jumped around, guess what if I want to play stupid reaction games I start Mario, not surf to the NYT.) and I have to click the back button and have a few seconds to curse all web designers while I wait for the same slow ad network to deliver the same ad. It is the same with analytics, JS to have 'nice' scrolling for galleries, and css. Analytics at best does not get into my way, when I notice it, then because it slows my experience to a crawl (another nice opportunity to reflect on the depravity of web designers). JS for galleries or blinking effects or 'improved' nagigation has the same characteristic, either I don't notice or it annoys me. (Nice thing about NoScript, it breaks nag walls by accident. So I get all the advantages of an ad blocker, without having to feel guilty for trying to break the revenue model of websites.) CSS, well the defaults of the browsers are pretty good, and in general browsers are very good at displaying easily readable text. So at best CSS looks slightly better than the original, however I just had to switch off Gnome dark mode because some sites only define the foreground of a text input field not the background, which ends as black text on a dark gray background. ^1 Don't get me wrong, I understand how that happens. I am currently working on my new blog and wanted an entirely static site, without JS. I almost managed to get there, but I do not have a good static replacement for MathJax, so now I am wondering if I should deliver MathJax myself ( and a site jumps from a few kB to more than a MB) or if I should use the hosting by MathJax, with all the downsides above.
- neves 10y ago
  Install Firefox Mobile with uBlock in your tablet. I'll discover a whole new Web.
vintermann 10y ago
Because even once respected outlets seem to be hiring people who have spent their entire childhoods on SA and 4chan, whose only real skill is gaining attention by negative social manipulation. Clickbait is more than sensationalized headlines these days. The entire media, regardless of place on the political spectrum - and much non-news media - seems to have embraced what was once the domain of talk radio hosts.

> "web-hipster bullshit" Why so much negativity lately regarding new trends in the web?

by usaphp 10y ago

> "web-hipster bullshit" Why so much negativity lately regarding new trends in the web?

bordercases 10y ago

I can voice my perspective. Essentially: bike-shedding, bedazzlement, and bloat.

gue5t 10y ago

Because continued development of the Web is an obvious, user-hostile money-grab. If you only care about getting your software to users, you have a million choices for your application runtime. If you want to monetize every user by selling their privacy or headspace, you have only one: i.e., "pirating" Facebook is a logical impossibility. Communicative efficacy on the Web has not improved since the early 1990s--Javascript and its ilk have virtually no positive effect on the usefulness of Wikipedia, for example. We're converting what was intended to be a transport for communication into a framework for writing portable software. The thesis here is that there should be a digital way to share hypertext articles and other statically-described communication without pay the costs (privacy, rendering efficiency, security bugs, transport performance and uncacheability, accessibility) associated with a cross-platform sandboxed multimedia software runtime.

usaphp 10y ago
Weren't computers built at first to do completely different from what we are currently using them for? I don't get the negativity about new ways people try to use things we have. If we were always following guidelines and rules, we would be stuck in the past
- Bromskloss 10y ago
  It's not "being new" that is the criticised activity here.
- parennoob 10y ago
  Similarly, if we were never negative about things that sucked from our perspective, we would be stuck in a world where Internet Explorer was the only browser and everyone was using "Windows 2016". Negative feedback (preferably with suggestions for improvement) is just as important as imaginative new ways of using the web.
- gue5t 10y ago
  I don't want to be rude, but I really don't understand your message. Computers have always been, and will always be, tools for automating away work. The specific nature of the work the user needs automated is in a constant state of flux. One particular kind of work that we've wanted computers to do for us since the 20th century is the sharing of written and visual information. Ostensibly, this is what the Web was written for, and though it wasn't perfect, it could have evolved into a simply, highly efficient tool for this purpose. Instead, it can be seen evolving into a sandboxed application runtime, a workload with vastly different properties. Good implementations of software for these two workloads would share little structure outside of that required for inevitable hardware access. Evolving the Web into an application runtime is possible, and well underway, but doing so still leaves the niche of software for an unfettered global commons of knowledge unfilled. By using the Web we're building for the latter purpose, we are met with drawbacks which include (as I mentioned): - lack of privacy - rendering efficiency - security bugs and malware - transport performance - uncacheability - accessibility We can attempt to address each of these piecemeal, and with sustained effort we're likely to make good progress on most of them, in due time. But a lot of these are really hard problems for an application runtime to solve. Conversely, these problems are a lot easier (where they exist at all) on a software platform designed from the ground up for hypertext-based, archivable communication, rather than as an application runtime.
  - wtbob 10y ago
    This is possibly the absolute best comment I've read in months. It puts into words why I dislike JavaScript 'web apps' so much: the Web was this really neat tool for sharing the written word, and it's turned into a virtual machine runtime. I don't mind the VM, but it's a hack, and I miss the tool for sharing information.
  - mikro2nd 10y ago
    And isn't it funny how many of those problems were reasonably well addressed (not all, not perfectly, but mostly better than current state-of-art) by a software platform designed from the ground up to be a sandboxed application runtime back in the 1990's... Java something something.
- TeMPOraL 10y ago
  Nobody is complaining about people playing around and inventing new stuff. That's the hacking spirit, that's the essence of progress. I like browser experiments just like everyone else, even if half of them lock my computer up. No, we're complaining about those inventing new ways to make people's life much worse in exchance for the off chance that someone leaves them more money.

toyg 10y ago

One reason might be that, for anyone with historical perspective, a situation where our pipes can download hundreds of MB per second and still our browsers crawl like turtles is just shocking. Modern browsers are the most compatible ever and come with all sorts of bells and whistles baked in, and still people are using JS frameworks over JS frameworks over JS frameworks. Another reason might be that most of this website-fat is actively anti-users. It breaks the back button. It breaks bookmarks. It spies on you. It makes it impossible to interoperate/mash stuff, and it makes it incredibly hard to automate things (do you know that in the '90s you used to be able to download entire websites, so you could comfortably read them offline?). Another reason is probably that a lot of "mainstream web plumbers" (like yours truly) are now hitting late middle-age and feeling it hard. We used to be able to view-source and copypaste our way to image-rollover glory; we were breathing markup and feeds... now it's all tooling and frameworks and stacks, even http is going binary, and it feels like the loss of this innocence is not actually gaining anything for anyone except marketing people. Now get off my lawn.

digi_owl 10y ago
I guess its very telling that the terminology these days is not site, but app...
- Klathmon 10y ago
  I think it's telling that some people don't seem to grasp that the terminology is app because they are applications. The web is no longer just html, they are full-fledged applications running in the browser.
  - myrion 10y ago
    Yes, and most of them shouldn't be.
    - enraged_camel 10y ago
      That's not the problem. The problem is that the frameworks developers use to make their content interactive and manage state are overkill. It's like needing to display today's date on the page and downloading an entire date library to do it when you can just do "Date();"

fucking_tragedy 10y ago

I paid close to $2k for a computer with 16GB of memory and can only have the same amount of tabs open as I did in 2009 with 4GB of RAM. My computer still slows to a crawl when on certain pages. These are the literal costs (for me) to be able to use the web nowadays for minimal usability and functionality 'increases'. For reference, the multiprotocol instant messenger client Meebo was a successful competitor to Trillian in 2005. It was a web application that used less memory and was more responsive than a desktop application. I used it on a computer with 512mb of memory just fine. Also, browsing the web on my phone is unnecessarily difficult and battery consuming.

protomyth 10y ago

ok.... Because it seems more and more of the trends are designed to target me for advertising and analytics while making the user experience worse. I look at one website and uBlock says it blocked 12 domains the page tried to connect to and allowed 13 domains. What the heck? I go to audible.com and it flashes after 2 seconds and redraws the page. Never mind the banner at the top of the page that says to download the app. All the while, I still have a data cap of 10 gigabytes on my cell. Simple pages are downloading 2 megabyte frameworks, custom fonts, and autoplaying video, and groups of megabyte images. Whole programs in the 90's fit in the space of one of these images (and they said Smalltalk program were too big). We aren't all browsing at wifi spots at some coffee shop. We have to pay for this overpriced bandwidth. I actually hope it gets worse and worse. I'm looking forward to what comes next after it all collapses. Perhaps we will get a medium that matches the app vision people are programming to. // I did up vote you, no sense in down votes for a simple question

yk 10y ago

Because most of the developments are a net loss for the user.^1 The most important benefit of an ad blocker is not that it blocks ads, the most important benefit is, that the web is a lot faster. I basically stopped surfing on my tablet, because after 2 seconds some ad network comes around to finally deliver an ad, and the entire site jumps around. I lose the place what I just read, and from time to time I actually click some ad by accident ( I wanted to scroll when the site suddenly jumped around, guess what if I want to play stupid reaction games I start Mario, not surf to the NYT.) and I have to click the back button and have a few seconds to curse all web designers while I wait for the same slow ad network to deliver the same ad. It is the same with analytics, JS to have 'nice' scrolling for galleries, and css. Analytics at best does not get into my way, when I notice it, then because it slows my experience to a crawl (another nice opportunity to reflect on the depravity of web designers). JS for galleries or blinking effects or 'improved' nagigation has the same characteristic, either I don't notice or it annoys me. (Nice thing about NoScript, it breaks nag walls by accident. So I get all the advantages of an ad blocker, without having to feel guilty for trying to break the revenue model of websites.) CSS, well the defaults of the browsers are pretty good, and in general browsers are very good at displaying easily readable text. So at best CSS looks slightly better than the original, however I just had to switch off Gnome dark mode because some sites only define the foreground of a text input field not the background, which ends as black text on a dark gray background. ^1 Don't get me wrong, I understand how that happens. I am currently working on my new blog and wanted an entirely static site, without JS. I almost managed to get there, but I do not have a good static replacement for MathJax, so now I am wondering if I should deliver MathJax myself ( and a site jumps from a few kB to more than a MB) or if I should use the hosting by MathJax, with all the downsides above.

neves 10y ago
Install Firefox Mobile with uBlock in your tablet. I'll discover a whole new Web.

vintermann 10y ago

Because even once respected outlets seem to be hiring people who have spent their entire childhoods on SA and 4chan, whose only real skill is gaining attention by negative social manipulation. Clickbait is more than sensationalized headlines these days. The entire media, regardless of place on the political spectrum - and much non-news media - seems to have embraced what was once the domain of talk radio hosts.