69 ms·

Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web

• gruez 9y ago
  >If you use Chrome as your main browser, consider switching to Chromium, the open-source version of the browser. Consider minimalist browsers like Min (and choose to block all ads, trackers and scripts) to browser news websites. no love for firefox? or for that matter, any non webkit browsers? >HERE WeGo for maps (free) i'm not sure that's any better in terms of privacy
  • annabellish 9y ago
    It always astonishes me how many people who are ostensibly against the webkit derivative hegemony won't even consider recommending Firefox. It's certainly a competitive browser, and personally my favourite, and Mozilla does fantastically important work balancing out an otherwise entirely corporate, ulterior-motive laden browser market.
    • throwaway2016a 9y ago
      My experience has been that Firefox was unusably slow on OS X and Linux for a long time and they lost a lot of users because of it. Now it is faster but it is difficult to woo people back. And even if it is faster, there track record shows that they found doing a release that slows down a large portion of users was acceptable. Granted I doubt they still have that attitude, and i think they are more performance based now, but a lot of us left for Chrome and never looked back.
      • saiya-jin 9y ago
        Firefox is OK these days. As a user I couldn't care less about Google offering, specifically because of google. That company is creepy and its core mission is to be even more creepy. On android, Firefox mobile is by far the best browser, since it allows (some) extensions, and you definitely need one - microBlock origin. No effin' way I am going to use their official browser, web is beyond useless with all the ads.
      • wtetzner 9y ago
        > and i think they are more performance based now, but a lot of us left for Chrome and never looked back. And you don't have the same problem with Chrome? I've found Chrome to be a terrible resource hog lately, and sometimes I have to kill it to get my computer back to a usable state. And of course, I have to dig through all of the Chrome process and try to figure out which is the one that will take down the rest of them.
        • throwaway2016a 9y ago
          > And you don't have the same problem with Chrome? I've found Chrome to be a terrible resource hog lately I'm OS X and I've had some CPU issues lately if I have a lot of tabs open but overall not nearly as many issues as when I finally decided to give up Firefox. I actually downloaded Firefox lately and it seems pretty nice. If Chrome gets works I may consider it.
          • leggomylibro 9y ago
            I usually have a few hundred tabs open in Firefox without issue; it seems to do a good job of putting unused/old tabs to 'sleep' until you come back to them.
        • insulanus 9y ago
          > dig through all of the Chrome process and try to figure out which is the one that will take down the rest of them To kill: pkill "Chrome" To suspend: pkill -SIGSTOP "Chrome" To resume: pkill -SIGCONT "Chrome"
          • wtetzner 9y ago
            Thank you!
      • intopieces 9y ago
        My work doesn't allow the latest version of FireFox, so after months of crashes and general unbearably slowness on MacOS I switched to UnGoogled Chromium. I wish I could go back to FF because I like Mozilla as an org, but it's not in the cards for my day to day.
        • deleted 9y ago
          [deleted]
        • thomastjeffery 9y ago
          > My work doesn't allow the latest version of FireFox How so?
      • davesque 9y ago
        I tried using Firefox for a while recently (over the last month) and still found it unbearably slow as well as downright buggy in the way it handled and displayed certain pages. Was very disappointed by this since I really want to start using it again.
    • bobajeff 9y ago
      I think trying to fight a browser engine monoculture is a lost cause. There is no money in building browser engines and it costs a lot of time and money to create one from scratch. The only reason Mozilla and Microsoft still use their own engine is for historical and technical reasons. The fact that we are down to just three implementations should tell you were things are headed.
      • thomastjeffery 9y ago
        Mozilla is currently working hard on Servo, and regularly merging finished pieces into Firefox. Microsoft will likely always use their own engine, simply because they are obsessed with proprietary software.
        • bobajeff 9y ago
          Sure that's how it is today but what if Mozilla runs out of funds? Say they fail to get a lucrative search deal after the current one ends while Pocket fails to pick up the slack. What if Microsoft doesn't ever get a significant number of users on Edge? Say websites and users alike treat it like Windows Phone.
          • thomastjeffery 9y ago
            > what if Mozilla runs out of funds? That is a very unlikely edge case. If it were to happen, Servo is an open-source project, and would likely still see development. > What if Microsoft doesn't ever get a significant number of users on Edge? That is somewhat more likely, but as much as I can hope, probably will not happen. At least Edge renders fairly correctly. > like Windows Phone. Windows Phone simply failed to get inertia. Inertia is imperative for proprietary projects to succeed.
            • bobajeff 9y ago
              I think Mozilla is already cutting projects because they know their next search deal won't be as lucrative as their previous ones. Software development costs money. Edge came out in 2015 if it doesn't have inertia yet then you have to at least wonder if it's another Windows Phone.
    • justinclift 9y ago
      > ... and Mozilla does fantastically important work balancing out an otherwise entirely corporate, ulterior-motive laden browser market. Mozilla seems to have become infected with the same ulterior-motive laden evil though. :( Example happening at the moment: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/10/09/mozilla_tests_cliqz_in_germany/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/10/09/mozilla_tests_cliqz...
      • sfink 9y ago
        I wouldn't go by the negative tone of that article. The whole point of the cliqz experiment is to try out a possible alternative to one part of today's privacy-destroying web. You are not going to tracked through an indirection through cliqz anyway, but if i understand correctly, even that is only a way to make prototyping feasible to see whether it's worth proceeding with a fuller, architecturally privacy preserving implementation.
  • Freak_NL 9y ago
    >> HERE WeGo for maps (free) > i'm not sure that's any better in terms of privacy Yeah, I would recommend at least checking out OpenStreetMap and any tools that derive their routing and tiles from it first. Of course its usability varies by country (and even by locality!), but that's no different from Google Maps or Apple Maps. At least with OpenStreetMap I know that my contributions benefit people in general (due to the free software licensing) and not mainly (the shareholders of) Google or Apple.
  • lern_too_spel 9y ago
    Also, FastMail isn't any better for privacy, and you have to pay for it to boot. The article was more or less reasonable until the nonsensical recommendations at the end.
    • rrix2 9y ago
      FastMail is much better than google mail because it's not fueling google's hegemony over the web. That you have to pay for it means their sustainability is not tied to abusing their users. If you want privacy in the way you seem to mean privacy (end-to-end no-trust async messaging) of course anything speaking SMTP isn't going to be "better for privacy", but those systems largely are incompatible with how 99% of the web wants to communicate with you.
      • ric2b 9y ago
        > That you have to pay for it means their sustainability is not tied to abusing their users. Modern capitalism means taking the money _and_ abusing the users, unless the users leaving from the abuse actually ends up reducing profits.
    • Spivak 9y ago
      No email solution will be better for privacy outside of hosting it yourself. I have it set up for my personal email because I thought it was a fun project, but there's no point in pretending that it's realistic for casual email users. Email without outside encryption like PGP is fundamentally privacy by policy which lives and dies by the reputation and policy of the provider: it seems like Fastmail's is pretty good.
      • flukus 9y ago
        > but there's no point in pretending that it's realistic for casual email users. Are there any technical reasons why we couldn't have an "email in a box" type setup with an easy gui configuration? I've though of setting up a personal email/dropbox/IM/youtube box and the biggest hurdles I could think of were domain registration, bandwidth (for the youtube clone) and firewall rules. Lack of static IP's is also an issue but that seems solvable.
• reaperducer 9y ago
  Irony: The web page that rails about the web being user hostile is coded so that Safari's user-friendly reader mode is disabled.
  • livatlantis 9y ago
    Author here. Is it? It works on my end. Could you tell me which OS/Safari version you're using? Thanks.
    • graeme 9y ago
      Didn’t work for me either. Ios 11.1.
    • Vinnl 9y ago
      In case you're getting unsure: it works fine in Firefox's reader mode.
    • d215 9y ago
      Works for me Firefox/iOS 11.0
    • caryhartline 9y ago
      Even on the latest Safari it doesn't work: 10.13.1 (17B48) with macOS: 10.13.1 (17B48) Nothing about that page seems like it would stop Reader so I filed a Radar about it.
      • dictum 9y ago
        Reader readies Radar regarding Reader regression. (Please don't continue this. I just had to get it out of my system.)
    • livatlantis 9y ago
      Ok thanks for the replies. I'll go troubleshooting!
      • 9y ago
• RightMillennial 9y ago
  -
  • Cuuugi 9y ago
    If that's NSFW for you, you need a new W
  • benbenolson 9y ago
    I'm going to assume that this is a joke.
    • deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
• ashark 9y ago
  The Web was doomed the moment we let Javascript initiate connections and (less significantly) modify form content.
  • dec0dedab0de 9y ago
    Yes, it really has been downhill since then. I wish js apps just had their own protocol and port. js://js.server.tld could open up your js browser and you could use that when it was something you needed. Then you could just trust browsing around the normal web, knowing its just documents.
    • bitshiffed 9y ago
      I completely agree. I've seen similar ideas get shot down here on HN; but I think we need two separate protocols. One for purely documents, and a second for the universal application platform. Among other implications, it should be much easier for regular people to create content, and applications should be free of the document-focused legacy.
      • michael_fine 9y ago
        If we did that, how would you propose implementing upvoting in HN without js?
        • robin_reala 9y ago
          Upvoting in HN works without JS already, it just has a page refresh.
          • zeveb 9y ago
            And it doesn't even need a page refresh; it could use a 204 No Content response. Potentially an yet-cleverer static browser system could also use 206 Partial Content to replace a portion of the page.
          • 9y ago
• blunte 9y ago
  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 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!) This I find incredibly hostile, and it makes me eventually abandon that source as a matter of principle. Then there are javascript-jacked sites, sites that are unbearably slow and clunky because of a mix of javascript/ads. I won't mention any specific sites, but I stopped reading one similar to Mired.com long ago for that reason. This problem isn't just limited to the web though. If you're unfortunate enough to see modern television (or movies, for that matter), it's clear that the amount of content has gone down, the noise has gone up, and the efforts to lock the audience in have increased. There are some people who advocate avoiding all news and media. I think it's a bit extreme, but it may be more beneficial than harmful.
  • _jal 9y ago
    I'm with you on this. Honestly at this point, if the information is only contained within a video, I skip it and move on[1]. (I usually leave video in the browser crippled, only turning it on when I actually want to watch something.) [1] The trend of support docs for enterprise software going video is horrible, stupid, and a negative mark when I'm evaluating products. If someone has to spend hours of eyebleed rewinding some bullshit video over and over while writing actually usable documentation for incident response, of course that cost is part of the cost of the product in question.
    • shams93 9y ago
      Yeah personally I learn much faster and better by reading than via most videos. You can't keyword search a video, with text documentation I can keyword search within the page to find out exactly what I'm looking for.
• dmitriid 9y ago
  This article nicely complements anither one: https://staltz.com/the-web-began-dying-in-2014-heres-how.html https://staltz.com/the-web-began-dying-in-2014-heres-how.htm...
• throwaway2016a 9y ago
  As a technical person I agree with a lot of this article. We were moving towards a data centric web for a while but now we're moving towards one where form is more important than function. But with that said, I would have liked to have seen an article about accessibility have more talk about how the web is not only less accessible now for regular users but also even less accessible than it was before for people with disabilities such as blindness, color blindness, and even hearing loss.
• kbuchanan 9y ago
  > Today, we are so far from that initial vision of linking documents to share knowledge that it's hard to simply browse the web for information without constantly being asked to buy something, like something, follow someone, share the page on Facebook or sign up to some newsletter. I'm a non-user of all things social media. My Twitter account is purely nominal (for pinging company support), and I don't have a Facebook account. As a business owner, my peers think it's bizarre that I don't have a LinkedIn account. The problems this author talks about are chains of our own making. Yes, corporations exploit us, but they exploit human frailties. This problem will not go away, and more "open tech" will not solve it.
  • alexandercrohde 9y ago
    It's not unsolvable though. HN is an example of a technology that shapes the rules of the forum in such a way that a top spot cannot be purchased. Forum design is the new frontier.
    • gruez 9y ago
      >that a top spot cannot be purchased. you can buy hn upvotes, which is the same as buying a top spot.
• pmoriarty 9y ago
  "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 big deal." I kind of yearn for the pre-web days... when the primary means of communication was mailing lists and newsgroups, without any commercial interest. The creation of the web was when it all started to go wrong. Corporations started to flock to it like flies and tried their best to turn it in to an ad-laden, spyware-laden, dumbed-down, one-way broadcasting medium not too far from television.
  • pingiun 9y ago
    Luckily mailing lists and newsgroups still exist, some newsgroups are even still active. (Mailings lists too of course, but they are generally created for a specific purpose)
    • pmoriarty 9y ago
      They exist, as do mechanical typewriters and bulletin board systems, but most people don't use them. The web "won" long ago, and newsgroups and mailing lists are now mostly a historical curiosity.
    • AstralStorm 9y ago
      Also forums for special interests. (Outgrowth of a bulletin board.) Some do not even abuse their data and users.
  • amorphid 9y ago
    I never got into the pre-web stuff, so I don't know exactly what the differences are. Don't those things still exist? Isn't the comment section of this HN post a form of async, text-only communication?
    • pmoriarty 9y ago
• ataturk 9y ago
  The part where the author tries to tie Brexit and the election of Donald Trump to the user-hostile web is bonkers. People, you have to understand this: There exists a large number of others out there who desperately want government reformed, want more localized control over their lives, and who voted accordingly. It wasn't some trick pulled on them by corporations or Russians manipulating social media. I realize that may be hard to understand, but it is the truth! The rest of the article was well-intentioned, but somehow just a bit off. We can't go back to 1999 or 1993, but we can limit the walled gardens and censorship if we want to. But this is important: It's not the freedom-minded people who want to shut down free speech or filter and censor, it is the dyed-in-the-wool Marxist hardliners and the corporatists.
  • lrc 9y ago
    It is not as if forces hostile to Trump/Brexit were innocent of buying analytical data. The recent Senate hearings on Russian ad-buys were strangely incurious about, say, purchases from China. Were there any? Would they tell us?
    • nielsole 9y ago
      Last time I checked, China was roughly following the policy of "leave our internals to us and we will leave your internals to you". Are there know cases where China recently meddled with foreign elections/governments?
      • Feniks 9y ago
        Taiwan maybe, but China focuses more on good trade relations than political ideology or ethics.
  • dudul 9y ago
    > The part where the author tries to tie Brexit and the election of Donald Trump to the user-hostile web is bonkers. I also thought it was pretty weak of the author to shoehorn these things in his essay. All politicians/parties use "big data" for their campaigns, don't you think the democrats were doing the same thing? And since he's from France, he conveniently forgot to mention the Macron campaign last spring. This topic is too important to point fingers like that. I agree with everything else in the post though.
• deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
• hasenj 9y ago
  I think the problem is one of economics. The SV culture made it valuable for startups to amass a large amount of users. Where as before this bubble started, it was more profitable for development shops to build (and sell) software that anyone can use to host their own site/forum/whatever. This might not be the entire solution, but I think it would be a step in the right direction: We need more products that are developed for people to deploy on their own private servers. They have to have some very compelling points that I think are still lacking in many existing solution: - They have to be really really fast. Nothing in "python" or "nodejs" or whatever. - They have to be really really easy to deploy. No requiring a separate database server such as mysql. Just use SQLite. Also, no copying over of tons of files. Just a single executable. All other data should live in the database (sqlite file). Maybe have two database files: one for user generated content, and one for bundling application resources (images, etc). I'm not exactly sure what's the best setup, but something along those lines. - They have to be profitable for people who develop them. This is more of a cultural issue. I love open source, but requiring all software to be "free" means that it's much more profitable to create a product for yourself only and try to lure as many users as possible, just like facebook. To this end, I think something like the physical source initiative makes a lot of sense: if you buy the software, you have the right to make changes to it. But you don't have the right to also copy it and distribute it.
  • wickawic 9y ago
    sidebar: lots of easy to enjoy things are implemented in 'slow' interpreted languages. This site, for one.
    • hasenj 9y ago
      Which I think is a big mistake, because even if it ends up being used in a low traffic site, it ends up complicating the installation process. Where as a compiled language not only would run fast but also have a very simple setup: just copy over the exe and run it. Nothing to configure. No dependencies to install.
      • deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
• alexandercrohde 9y ago
  This is good, but simplistic. Firstly the downfall in the geocities-web came in many phases: 1. Spam Email Phase 2. Phishing / Nigerian phase 3. Popup phase 4. Autoplaying Flash/ActiveX phase 5. Pagerank phase (forums being ruined until rel=nofollow) Now google, previously the main gateway to discovery, is pretty much useless for discovering new non-commercial content. The way this could go away is only from a market shift; deleting your facebook won't bring back geocities. The fact is, if I had a geocities page it'd be undiscoverable due to pagerank, so I have no incentive to publish unless I have another avenue of attention (resume, Hn profile). Can a non-commercial search engine ever exist? I suppose reddit/HN voting is one semi-successful method of content ranking...
  • seangrogg 9y ago
    I would not call content ranking semi-successful just because it isn't actively being gamed now - there was a time before Google served ads.
  • anigbrowl 9y ago
    Notice how these all have something in common...
  • ravenstine 9y ago
    A decentralized p2p search engine exists, though really nobody uses it. https://yacy.net/en/index.html https://yacy.net/en/index.html Perhaps a bare bones donation-supported search engine could exist if it implemented the same protocol using WebRTC and served a single JavaScript-powered webpage from S3.
• throw7 9y ago
  The "World Wide Web" officially died when they decided to bring DRM into the standard. There is nothing more user hostile then that. Very sad to see Sir Lee bend over and actually like it.
  • sctb 9y ago
    You can always make a substantive point (if there is one) without the distracting and uncivil snark, and the guidelines ask us to. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
• jccalhoun 9y ago
  I use ublock origin and privacy badger not because I am worried about privacy but because the internet is basically unusable without it. Because of this, I don't see many ads. But I have been an amazon customer since 1999 (according to what they say on their website when I'm logged in.) Looking at what they recommend for me, this personalization stuff is crap. In music, Amazon recommends bands I never listen to like Montrose, Metallica, and the Doors (and to be fair, some people I've never heard of so I guess it is possible that I would be interested in them. Greta Van Fleet? William Patrick Corgan?) In books, I do like scifi but they recommend a bunch of books with spaceships shooting each other on the cover - not what I have ever been interested in. In the "humor and entertainment" section of books they do list some books that I would be interested in but, strangely, none of them are "humor" but are all academic books about videogames (which I am interested in). Even here the recommendation engine is very unsophisticated because in between academic books on videogames there are books on the art of Zelda and other coffee table books that I am not interested in. And the first book in their recommended children's book section is 1984. (and I don't have any kids any way). If this is the best they can do with 18 years of tracking my purchases then I am not worried.
  • bambax 9y ago
    It's really amazing how bad those personnalisation engines are; AI seems pretty stupid for now. But as I was making the exact same point a few days ago here on HN, someone responded to say that maybe it was on purpose, that if recommendations were too good they would creep us out. Don't know what to think of it but I found the objection interesting...
    • black_puppydog 9y ago
      another point is that you (the recommender, and, incidentally, also the user) are happy if there is at least one novel and interesting item in the recommendations. This might apply less to music (list) recommendations, but in general that's how I (as a customer) also approach lists of recommendations.
  • komali2 9y ago
    To be fair, you sound like one of the harder people to track accurately. However, I as well have been "disappointed" by the ability of websites to judge my interests. After reading about cases such as Target, who have "spooky" ability to gauge interest, I was expecting better. So I searched for a very specific motorcycle jacket with very specific features and now my page is inundated with every clothing item that has the tag "motorcycle_jacket?" That's.... it? The same result I'd get for hitting google with "site:amazon.com 'motorcycle jacket'" ?
• agentdrtran 9y ago
  ah yes, this week's whiny essay about how the web sucks now. It's like clockwork at this point.
  • deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
• leephillips 9y ago
  I agree with this author and implemented all his suggestions years ago, both as a consumer and creator of web sites. But sewers like Facebook and ad networks are low-hanging fruit. Search for something on the once-indispensible Google, and, after five or six ads, you will likely see a Wikipedia link. On the fifth page of results will be the professor's .edu page that the Wikipedia article plagiarizes from. Google succeeded because their pagerank algorithm discovered useful sites. But now those same algorithms promote popular (or Google-profitable) sites at the expense of higher-quality sites (that often carry no advertising). W3schools, anybody? It was probably a natural evolution: the algorithm ate itself, and results that might actually be useful are buried under sites that are popular. I think sites like Wikipedia and Google feeding off each other is a more insidious problem - one with no quick technological solution, like installing an ad blocker.
• ducttape12 9y ago
  I've actually become a bit put off on a lot of "modern" technologies lately. Every website tries to keep you on as long as possible with click bait, every advertiser tries to track your habits, video games just try to upsell you to the season pass, and every webapp is just an upsell to the paid pro version. Heck, even our operating systems are nothing more than data collection points. In many ways, I feel like technology doesn't work for us anymore, we work to serve technology.
  • DerfNet 9y ago
    That's without even mentioning the "internet of things" phenomenon, standalone voice assistants, and so on. The advertisers aren't happy just collecting web usage data anymore and now they want into our actual homes.
    • ZenoArrow 9y ago
      I honestly don't get it. Some tech-savvy people I know are hyped up about Alexa and technologies like it, speaking to them about it it's like we live in a world where the Snowden leaks never happened. Either that or the interest from exploring new technology is hiding the downsides.
• throwme211345 9y ago
  This article is gold. The web is dead and infested with maggots.
• profalseidol 9y ago
  In an increasingly capitalist world.
• interstitial 9y ago
  I feel this thread is an example of the broken web. Instead of conversations taking place on the original website, it takes place here on "social media" -- albeit a much more benign version. This robs the original creator in many abstract and concrete ways.
• tbirrell 9y ago
  I agree with much of this article, but at this point I'm dangerously close to falling into the camp of, "is it even worth it?" I have been using google accounts for almost 10 years, I'm very much locked into that ecosystem. Even if there was a privacy issue, I wonder if it is worth the monumental hassle to leave and spin up my own versions of everything I use. Thanks to equifax, all my most important information is probably already out in the wild, and thanks to the US government (and how they deal with replacing identifying information) I'm likely screwed for the rest of my life. In the face of that, the harm that google or facebook (which I'll admit to using less and less of) can do to me seems trivial. Yeah, as a user, I'm a commodity online. But I'll be damned if I'm not enjoying the bread and circuses they use to keep me there. There is little to nothing I can do to prevent anyone from doing anything with my information, so I might as well take advantage of what I've already "paid" for.
  • robin_reala 9y ago
    You don’t have to do everything in one go; you can migrate out a service at a time and see how it works for you.
• draw_down 9y ago
  I used to have a boss who lived his whole life in Russia, and then moved here after his nominal retirement. He used to say this to me, often: "That's capitalism, baby."
  • jwilk 9y ago
    Here?
• starshadowx2 9y ago
  "A website on Doom level design on Geocities from 1999, accessed October 31, 20017 via Archive.org" Glad to know Archive.org will still be around in 20017.
  • jstewartmobile 9y ago
    Brewster Kahle is my hero!
• jstewartmobile 9y ago
  Talk about silver linings! Trump's victory certainly made the facebook/twitter/instagram liberals see what an obscenity this has all become. Of course if the dems make a comeback in the midterms, watch them all go into full-blown social-media relapse.
  • sctb 9y ago
    Please don't post this kind of partisan flamebait on Hacker News. We're here to try for better. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    • jstewartmobile 9y ago
      my bad
• duxup 9y ago
  I remember when even some corporate web sites often had a misc site somewhere with something about who built the site, even a picture of the server, a cat.... it was personal. It was very human.
• j_s 9y ago
  Meet HN user megous, his fellow closed-source re-inventing co-conspirators (click a 'comments' link on the search results, then 'parent'), and potential open-source future fans: λmegous(2016Dec): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13226170 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13226170 For each use case that is not a free browsing I create an electron app, that never executes any code from the web or uses any external style. It only uses XHR to fetch html pages/json data/other static stuff and then transforms that data and uses it in the custom UI designed for the use case. https://hn.algolia.com/?query=13226170&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?query=13226170&type=comment Any references to similar projects (whether closed, commercial, or open-source) would be appreciated.
• mortenjorck 9y ago
  Exploring the early WWW of 20 years ago, I recall a cautionary sentiment to the effect of "This is all free today, but eventually, they'll charge for everything." It's funny how that came true in a way we never predicted: Everything is still "free," and yet everything is also monetized. Rather than a paywall in front of every website, a hidden "spywall" extracts payment in other forms. They ended up charging for everything after all, only through an indirect and vastly more complex, opaque, and far-reaching system.
• macawfish 9y ago
  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, google. This kind of browser feature could make DAT/ipfs hypertext much more useful.
  • QasimK 9y ago
    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 on their search service.) The idea of having subscribed indexes is interesting! I often just want to search Wikipedia. The idea of indexes from friends or family sounds more like “trusted sources”, or the web of trust, or even GPG key verification. You’re saying I trust these sources more because I trust these people more. I think doing this slightly in the background automatically (vs actively asking your friend for recommendations, or looking at a bloggers recommended materials page) could make the internet safer. It risks creating “bubbles”, but these should be a lot less significant than your own personal (Google) search bubble.
    • macawfish 9y ago
      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.
• deleted 9y ago
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• platz 9y ago
  Consumer's can't solve this from the ground up. What's needed is to prevent certain kinds of key acquisitions. The law around acquisitions is too permissive in an age of network effects; acquisition laws were fine pre-internet but don't solve their intended purpose anymore. Normally, the market corrects against the biggest players because the biggest players are slow to change culture and their business. But, acquisitions are the mechanism by which the big players are preventing themselves from being disrupted by smaller, more nimble players. If the big players can simply buy up any new comers (who will want a deserved pay-out for their efforts) on the scene, they maintain complete control regardless of what consumers want. Otherwise, any "alternative practices" you try to foster will simply be crushed, if they ever become a large enough threat. Facebook acquiring Instagram is a perfect example.
• Animats 9y ago
  It's all about me, Me, ME! The entire first screen is some guy blithering about himself. Cory Doctorow says all this, better. Diaspora would be a good idea if it had any traction. Until then, we're stuck with Facebook. Google, not so much. Most of Google's services have quite good alternatives. I don't use any service that requires a Google account. With Google reading and censoring what you put in Google Docs, that's probably a bad idea anyway.
• titzer 9y ago
  FTA: "...we have faster connections, better browser standards, tighter security and new media formats. But it is also different in the values it espouses. Today, we are so far from that initial vision of linking documents to share knowledge that it's hard to simply browse the web for information without constantly being asked to buy something, like something, follow someone, share the page on Facebook or sign up to some newsletter. All the while being tracked and profiled." The author is absolutely right that the _values_ of the web have changed. IMO this is due to the much more vast penetration of the web and the bubbles which have been birthed as a result of attracting very aggressive profit-driven actors. Rebasing the web's economic model on advertising has fundamentally changed the conception of users, and the expectation of enormous profits has steamrolled the egalitarian principles of early web citizens. I kind of hope that the web will reboot itself in dark corners, away from the mega actors, away from the tracking and surveillance, and the torrent of the current web can keep on going for the masses.
  • greenscale 9y ago
    I think you're right, but one issue is keeping the problems of the "web of the masses" from spreading to our secluded dark corners once they pick up traction.
  • DontTrustOver25 9y ago
    After reading this essay I actually share the sentiment. With progress in blockchain technologies and ideas like Blockstack I'd love to see that rebirth come in the form of a decentralized internet.
• yosito 9y ago
  > You become a manipulable data point at the mercy of big corporations who sell their ability to manipulate you based on the data you volunteer. This might be the best summary of "why the world is fucked" that I've seen.
• partycoder 9y ago
  I am ashamed of my generation. We took a decentralized web full of potential, and we are leaving a wasteland of corporate garbage to our kids. If you used the web in the 90s you know what I am talking about.
• cjhanks 9y ago
  This strikes me as rant saying; "For years I loved eating spam. 7 months ago I stopped eating spam. Now I think spam is evil. You should stop eating spam." The decentralized internet of anonymous chat servers, mail servers, and communication channels aren't dead. Most people simply do not like them.
  • jonahx 9y ago
    This is the "it is this way; therefore people must want it this way" argument. It ignores the power of money to manipulate through advertising (or, in the general case, of power to coerce). To take the specific example of FB, most people don't want to be tracked and advertised to, they just want an easy social space to interact with their friends and family. Sure, they'd probably prefer an ad-free, non-tracking version of FB, but not if it costs them much effort. So, FB's growth hacking, advertising, and critical mass have pushed millions of people into something they themselves would consider sub-optimal (assuming it was explained to them, ofc -- many are plain unaware). On top of that, the average user simply does not have the knowledge to make an informed decision. Not about what's technically happening, and certainly not about what the long term consequences will be, although arguably no one knows about that.
    • cjhanks 9y ago
      I use the "mom and dad test". My parents are completely non-tech savvy... by no means luddites... but they know very little of the details. They seem fairly aware that Facebook and Google probably knows more about them than the NSA. And they don't care - because they can easily snap chat their kids or post pictures to their friends on pinterest. What's more, they sometimes even find the sales ads helpful. Average users, in my opinion, are reasonably smart.
      • jonahx 9y ago
        1. Your parents are outliers, ime 2. That wasn't my point. The question isn't: "Will they put up with sacrificing their privacy in exchange for the value they get?" We know the answer is "yes" to that. The question is: "Would they prefer to get the same service for the same amount of effort and not give up their privacy?" And I believe the answer to that is also "yes." And there is really no reason why that couldn't be the case. FB is not solving a technical problem that only they can solve.
• tzahola 9y ago
  I’m more and more convinced of the profitability of this idea I have come up with recently: WebAssembly pages which render their contents via WebGL. Adblocking would become impossible; content providers could disable text copy/paste too! Brave new world, huh?
  • s73ver_ 9y ago
    And accessibility would be a thing of the past.
    • tzahola 9y ago
      WebAssembly + WebAudio speech synthesis ;)
  • tqkxzugoaupvwqr 9y ago
    I felt a strong urge to downvote you to not give this idea any spotlight. (I didn’t though.) If this ever happens I will disable WebGL, and if this won’t be possible anymore (corporate interests…), I will invent a web competitor where participants are legally bound to my terms. Terms that will forbid ads, spying and spamming. Misbehaving users will experience increasingly long cool downs for misconducts, which can end in quasi bans (cool downs longer than their life). … One can dream.
    • tzahola 9y ago
      I’m glad you didn’t downvote me! The faster we can get this thing going, the earlier we can get a tabula rasa ;) Until then, keep riding the tiger!
  • Pete_D 9y ago
    On the one hand, I'm afraid that what you describe will eventually become commonplace. On the other hand, I wonder why it didn't already happen during the Flash days.
• protoster 9y ago
  A beautiful little tech-utopia where standards were open and everyone cooperated for the collective good existed for a few glorious years. The geeks had their way for a few years, but the show's over. In my cynical belief there is nothing we can do practically to reverse the trends. Tragedy of the commons, greed, masses following the path of least resistance, etc. will assert themselves just like they do in all other spheres of human society.
• tlogan 9y ago
  This happens because people refuse to pay for anything on the web. And you get what you pay for. I guess I'm just stating the obvious. Now 100% sure how to fix this - but it hard problem.
• mobilemidget 9y ago
  "I quit Facebook seven months ago. Despite its undeniable value" Cant take this seriously right? You treasure the web, yet you are on facebook.
• deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
• wuliwong 9y ago
  I went to the "first web page" and saw this link to "etiquette". http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/Provider/Etiquette.html http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/Provider/Etiquette.html Good pointers for making websites. :)
• Auricoma 9y ago
  Stop complaining about free stuff.
• sanbor 9y ago
  One important factor of the success of Facebook/YouTube/etc. is that you have an admin every 10k people. Let's say instead of Facebook we have million of people hosting their websites. Then you'd need a lot more admins. A lot more of security issues. Facebook makes super easy for people to put content online and also interact between them. I wish setting up a server and securing a server to host your content would be as easy as creating a Facebook account.
• jumpkickhit 9y ago
  I've been active online since 1994. In my opinion, the start of the cellphone era (iPhone and up) was when the internet started it's way downhill. All sorts of people who weren't online suddenly were there, and businesses took a lot more interest in the lest tech savvy types who've started to populate the internet. At the same time, these same mobile users saw they could be anonymous and had no learned netiquette unlike so many others before them. So because of this new-user saturation, the internet became no longer niche and now mainstream, to the detriment of everyone else online. Yes yes, Eternal September and all that, but were they wrong about the similar assessment back then?
• ChuckMcM 9y ago
  I agree with the author, if people would pay for the information they got over the Web then the providers of that information would be open to not selling information about you to people who wished to exploit it. The challenge though is trust, and of course transparency. Even if PrivacyBook (the mythical anti-facebook product) had paying customers and no tracking, how could you really verify that they weren't selling your information? And of course nation states always have a large hammer when they can put you out of business if you don't hand over data that they deem important. In some ways DAO's are an interesting response to this, immune to pressure from nation states they may be able to provide a foundation for a distributed service that resists oversight. It might be a viable business plan if you could get more than the tin foil hat demographic to buy into it.
• leepowers 9y ago
  > the page is 3.1 MB in size, makes about 460 HTTP requests of which 430 are third-party requests (outside of its parent domain) and takes 20 seconds to fully load on a fast 3G connection That's a lot of ad-tracking and ad delivery code. More than that, it's also remarkable that so much of this code is essentially duplicated. It's all user tracking and ad delivery but with each separate company loading it's own "stack" to accomplish the same thing. It's part of a larger trend from content-centered and user-centered to advertising centered. The problem is not centralization per se but business built on advertising revenue. Facebook is an extreme example - the news feed algorithms are optimized for generating ad revenue and not necessarily favoring news reports that happen to be true.
• gingerb 9y ago
  I totally disagree. It is not the web or www that is hostile but many websites and services out there. I think no one will go back to the old web, although I agree it was an epic experience back then. For me it is totally logical that many people try to find a way to earn money on the internet, and in this economy there is in principle nothing wrong with that IMHO. No one forces you to use Facebook, Google or any of the great services available. But people seem to forget that in life almost everything comes with a price. For Facebook and Google you pay with your (more or less private) data. So? If you think it's not a fair deal, simply don't use it! But please don't blame the entire web for that. The web as it is now has soooo much more to offer than the old web that it is hard to even imagine! A few things I use that were impossible in the 90's, from the top of my head: listen music on youtube, learn and use any programming language for free, git, open source, read the latest news in online newspapers from remote countries, buy tickets online, airbnb, online banking, broadcast on twitter, social networks, slack, OS updates, World of Warcraft/games, crypto currencies, etc.. etc... I'm happy to pay with some of my privacy to any of the services above, it's up to me to decide whether the balance is OK.
  • moises_silva 9y ago
    THIS I'm tired of people equating the web with facebook.
  • boomlinde 9y ago
    Maybe some of these things didn't engage us as much, but it is dubious whether that's for better or for worse. For what it's worth: > listen music on youtube True by definition, but listening to and distributing music via computer networks has been going on since the 80s. > learn and use any programming language for free There were plenty of resources on that on the web in the 90s and on bulletin board systems in the 80s. > git A complete side note since it has nothing to do with the web. > open source Many significant open/free software projects started in the 90s. NetBSD/FreeBSD since 93. GNU has been around since 83. > read the latest news in online newspapers from remote countries News websites surprisingly existed in the 90s as well. It is speculative to say that their increasing plurality owes anything to the current centralization trend. > broadcast on twitter Broadcast on your own personal website. Broadcast in a newsgroup. Broadcast by email. Broadcast on IRC. > social networks Bulletin boards. Email. Newsgroups. > slack IRC > OS updates Like, say, Slackware in the mid 90s? > World of Warcraft/games On-line, networked games existed before the web and don't really need to rely on it. > crypto currencies Again, not really dependent on the web.
• halayli 9y ago
  > Cedexis: a CND/ad-delivery platform Cedexis is not an ad-delivery platform. It's a multi-cdn platform that allows you use multiple cdns under the hood and picks optimum cdn based on the user's location. OP loses credibility when making such false accusations just to make their point.
  • livatlantis 9y ago
    Fair point, that was an error on my part. I've corrected it with a note of the change right below it. Thanks for pointing it out!
• MikeGale 9y ago
  I share a lot of Parimal says in this piece. Well worth a read if, you too, are finding ways to escape from and minimise the impact of this web-dystopia. His suggestions are well worth a careful read. I suggest going further. Many of you are quite capable of making your own web based facilities, know people who you can collaborate with... In short you're in a position to actually make your own web environment. An environment that grows your own cognitive abilities, that enables you to learn well, that enables human growth instead of diminishing brain function. It's a good idea to take control. Shape your own web, don't let it shape you.
• tjpnz 9y ago
  I'm saddened by this because despite agreeing with the essay I know that I'm complicit in it by virtue of working in e-commerce (same could be said of most if not all commercial web ventures). While I like to believe the people I work with respect the privacy of our users I know that the online advertising industry as a whole doesn't - as touched on in the essay. How do others deal with this moral quandary?
• tau255 9y ago
  I browse mainly on mobile devices and forward link to interesting articles. Earlier I just bookmarked page after reading and it was fine, but now that linkrot made a mess of my bookmark list I tend to print to pdf. It is amazing how much thought is put into looks and design of web pages that just ends scrambling everything during printout or just prevents to obtain any meaningful result (ie. imgur) I look around and see options to share on tweeter, pinterest, tumblr, reddit, facebook. But no print button that would make it easy to archive. It is like articles are disposable and not thought to be of any reference in future (even highly technical ones).
• syphilis2 9y ago
  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.
• gojomo 9y ago
  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
• deftturtle 9y ago
  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.
  • 0x00000000 9y ago
    Twitter and reddit drive me up the fucking wall. Twitter removed most functionality if you aren't logged in and hits you with a popup about once every 0.1 seconds as you scroll but gives up when you close it about 6 times. The mobile reddit site is just straight broken. Images disappear if you click in the wrong place, video doesn't work, can't change search options, posts act like they fail resulting in duplicate comments. Yet they have the audacity to push their shitty app down your throat every other page which is just a webview of the mobile site with the same problems. These companies will do anything to inflate their user count and get more access to more data to sell. Instagram is particularly egregious about inflating user count. You can make an account without even verifying your email, but you can't log in again or even delete your account without linking a valid phone number. There is probably a 7 figure number of abandoned accounts like that.
    • freeflight 9y ago
      Add Pinterest to that list of super annoying services who won't let you even look at anything without signing up/linking up/whatever else they could extort from you before letting you look at a simple picture.
• d--b 9y ago
  Hopefully this kind of backlash makes more people disapprove of bad practices and look for crap-free websites. Hopefully the internet follows the organic food movement. Too many people tired of crap push for a change.
• hawski 9y ago
  I started research on making of an alternative search engine. It would not index sites serving ads and possibly e-commerce. I would like to also penalize JavaScript use at least as an option. At the beginning I would use Adblock rulesets like the Easy List - if there is a match I do not index the site. I named it Abracabra. I hope that this would remove most crap out there with some minor collateral damage. Also that the index would be small enough that a little fish like me could do it without massive cost or infrastructure. Regarding JavaScript use penalization I have in mind at least lower ranking. Probably for the first version not including them at all would be the simplest thing to do. Some later version could attempt to classify used JavaScript. I would like it to index information first and not care much about web apps. Sometimes within the information only site there could be a link to a webapp. I’m wondering if it would make sense to distribute whole index via torrent. Then search could be done locally. But for this too make sense it would have to be in an order of, at most, tens of gigabytes. The problem would be to make updates as small as possible and also to not use prohibitive amount of CPU time. I don't have any monetization in mind as you probably should have guessed at this point. Probably if it would be frugal enough it could run from my pocket and hopefully some donations. However I’m almost totally green in this area. I started a bit with learning how to index and search with SQLite's FTS5. I don't like dependencies too much and would like to keep the local version option available. So probably typical ElasticSearch and other Java apps are probably too heavy. You can safely ignore technical side of my comment if you know better. If someone is more capable to do this than me, please make it instead of me ;)
• magice 9y ago
  This is a thought provoking read. I, too, have been meditating over this matter a lot. Unfortunately, though, it seems to me that people generally adopt one of the 3 camps: * Don't care (that is, most users until their internet slows) * Business of humanity is business. Anyone disagrees with the previous sentence is socialist/communist/hippie/devil-spawn. * "GIVE ME LIBERTY OR GIVE ME DEATH." Ready to leave Google/Facebook/AWS at moment notice. I mean, it's important to know what bad large firms have brought forth with the internet. But it's equally important to acknowledge what they (and commerce in general) have enabled, as well as what advantages they possess to users in everyday life. To take a simple example: the article ends with a question: "Do we want the web to be open, accessible, empowering and collaborative? [...] Or do we want it to be just another means of endless consumption[...]?" Look, about 80% of the time, I do want mindless consumption. Maybe a stupid sitcom on one of the streaming service; maybe some cheesy pop over YouTube. I need that. And, you know what, the current arrangement is damned good at deliver that kind of consumption. Thus, condemning the status quo wholesale is either useless or extremely risky. Look, the status quo is status quo for a reason. How did Amazon get so big? Not because they send out goons to smash windows of local bookstores! They get big because they provide genuine value (large selection, stellar customer service, fast shipping, etc.). Google got so big because they are very very good with organization of information and extremely good with matching customers and advertisement. Apple got so big because they produce(d) beautiful products. Facebook got so big because they connect people together. Uber got so big because they make taxi-ing so convenient (and cheap). These businesses got there for good reasons. Except the case where you find way to provide the same (or at the minimum almost the same) value with free and open ecosystem, status quo remains. Sure, you can host your own fonts and pictures and videos, but then they will be served from your hosts. Have you invested billions of dollars in gateway to be near your customers? Have you invested many hundreds of engineering-years to test over as many browsers as you can find? And remember, you are probably a power user of the internet. How about everyone else? Does everyone need to learn how to administrate GNU/Linux to post views of the world? Without providing the same value, revolutions tend to fall short of their promises. Take American Revolution. They proclaimed "All Men are created equal," killed a bunch of people (many innocent), then proceeded to keep slavery anyway. And that's one of the most successful revolutions. French Revolution produced an emperor to replace a king. English Revolutionary failed. Paris Commune failed. Russian and Chinese Revolutions were followed by famines. And so on. Imagine the internet without Google, Facebook, and AWS. You know what will happen next? Somebody else will become Google, Facebook, and AWS. Look at China: sure, they are independent from Google and Facebook; and they have Baidu and Weibo. Google, Facebook, Amazon, AWS serve important needs. You can't not have someone like them. In other words: all of these protests are useless and/or harmful without careful consideration of the underlining economics and usage. And I am not sure if anyone has gotten around to figure out an economic model for free web yet.
• rackforms 9y ago
  Leading by example, the author's site makes no external connections of any sort.
• QuadrupleA 9y ago
  One factor that might be at play: the user base of the web has probably dumbed down considerably over time. In 1999 you had to have some technical chops to get your modem, PPP settings, ISP phone number etc. all sorted out, and know some arcane URLs to type into the browser to get started with (back when browsers didn't auto-complete the http:// http:// for you). So it probably attracted more intelligent people on average, with nerdy/intellectual interests. Better browsers, broadband, tech usability improvements, smartphones, easy-to-use websites like Facebook, etc. lowered the barrier considerably. So maybe a lot of this is the influx of "dumb" people who can't be bothered to learn HTML to put up a page, or understand the privacy implications of the 450 surreptitious HTTP requests streaming along as they read their news article. ("dumb" is a little facetious here - in other words just ordinary people not as tech savvy or focused on intellectual pursuits as the web's early adopters).
  • GuiA 9y ago
    Honestly attitude like yours are a big part of the issue. Developers love to treat non technical people as dumbasses to ignore at best, or make fun of/exploit at worst. Maybe try to put yourself in the shoes of someone who works 3 jobs as a single parent and uses their phone to look for new housing when they get evicted or sign up for online classes, instead of claiming broadly that “they can’t bother to learn HTML”. Not everyone is as privileged as the millions of teenagers who have hours and hours of free time every night and access to a computer+internet to learn how to code or the privacy implications of surreptitious HTTP requests. If developers had spent the past few decades thinking of how to make technologies understandable, open, democratic - instead of insulting 99% of the population like you just did - perhaps we wouldn’t be in this mess. I am speaking as a former dumbass privileged teenager/engineer who thought he was smarter than everyone else.
    • QuadrupleA 9y ago
      I meant it a little facetiously, and not as condescending to "ordinary people" as it maybe sounded. Like you said a lot of it is just a factor of free time, not having the free time to learn PPP settings and HTML and all that (as I did when I was a teenager). I'm not suggesting that everybody should learn HTML or else they're an idiot, far from it, if someone just wants to focus on writing for a blog, etc. then there absolutely should be tools to make that simple. One of the laments in the article is the way the web has changed from the early days of simple HTML webpages people put up themselves focused on astrophysics etc., and I think that does speak to a difference of interests and abilities in the web's community over time. And people do have differences in intelligence, as touchy and controversial a subject as it is. I say that not to make myself feel like some shining genius, I'm not, but commercial interests tend to exploit whatever they can exploit (unfortunately) and the shifting audience of the web likely made it easier to get away with a lot of this stuff.
• dpkonofa 9y ago
  It's weird to me that the author kinda meanders around a few key things without ever explicitly saying them and, in that regard, they kinda muddy the water around their point. 1) He blames the fall of the web on all the people (web designers, UX designers, developers, creative directors, social media managers, data scientists, product managers, start-up people, strategists) that works towards creating it but I think the problem is more the people that have changed the culture around the web, namely that it has to be monetized. The aforementioned "architects of the web" are just there to create content but they're not the ones that need to load it up with tracking codes, tag managers, and DRM. The people that monetized the web are the ones that broke it. 2) The culture of the internet is completely different now and I think it's because the barrier of entry for the internet is so low now. Consider that, up until a few years ago (5-10 maybe, or longer?), it took some amount of knowledge and/or skill to use the internet. Everyone couldn't just jump on the web. You had to know enough about how to use a computer to install the software, you had to be educated enough to connect the hardware and install drivers, and you had to know how to find information. Even more so, if you wanted to contribute to the web, you needed to know some kind of programming language and at least basic HTML, how to get those pages on to a server, and how to connect it all to a domain. It wasn't all just a Google search away from whatever word-vomit is advertised the most and pushed up to the front via SEO and Facebook/social media. Now, anyone can get on the internet. Almost every person on the planet has some access to the web and adding to the bucket of knowledge and data on the web is done via WYSIWYG editors and text comment boxes that require nothing more than the ability to use a keyboard. YouTube comments and Facebook comments are complete shit for the very reason that it doesn't take any amount of effort to post them. 3) Intellectual property on the internet is a mess and, as the article has pointed out, everything is starting to centralize instead of the decentralized web of the past. There is severe bit-rot that happens that didn't happen before simply due to the fact that a YouTube video can now be automatically taken down, without cause, over even the suspicion or false claim that it contains copyrighted content. The amount of content that has disappeared off the internet because of a DMCA takedown is heartbreaking, especially when you consider that a lot of other content embeds it or references it. The web's greatest feature, the hyperlink, is now its biggest downfall because corporations and greedy assholes can take down content just by accusing it of violating copyrights. They don't even have to own it to make a claim. In other words, the ability to rot that content is far easier and more automated than the ability to protect that content. Politicians the world over have done their part to sell us all out and reinforce this negative cycle instead of protecting the backbone of the internet. All in all, the internet used to be about sharing information. Now it's about cashing in on everything possible and, to the author's credit, he's at least identified that commoditization is a huge part of that problem. It's not the only problem, though. Tracking is a symptom, not the cause.
• macdiddy 9y ago
  When it comes to programming, video is a pretty difficult platform.
• iamleppert 9y ago
  Can we please, pretty please go back to using pages for the majority of web sites? There I said it. You have a web site, not a web app. At least most people do. Remember the days of semantic markup and the CSS Zen Garden? When you could actually read and understand a web page's source? Now we have these javascript behemoths that are as clumsy as they are stupid. I have a feeling we are in for a renaissance of simplicity, and its going to start with a page, and end with a page. Pages are scalable. Google has like 50 billion of them. Pages are nice. Now do me a favor and kill off react.js and every walled garden like Facebook. Can we please just fix them from the inside? If you're an engineer at Facebook, why don't you take it upon yourself to actually do something about this mess?
• rajam 9y ago
  This essay is very informative
• rkagerer 9y ago
  Maybe Web 3.0 can be a movement to reclaim what we've lost - honesty and transparency in the interaction between websites and users. Webbkoll ought to offer a badge the same way "Verified by Verisign" did when SSL was new.
• deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
• du_bing 9y ago
  I have the same observation and prepare to do something about it. I am in China, the Web is terrible, quite hostile to anyone reading them. If you have the same idea and really want to improve it, welcome to contact me.
• wruza 9y ago
  Tl;dr: places are lovely until you get millions of people, thousands of businesses and trillions of dollars in there. Typical ‘Back then xxx, we must yyy’ talk. No, you can’t, enjoy the freedom of average user to put his personal life on the internet, not think twice, create a market to exploit and exploiter to come. It is the essence of freedom on average, you wanted it for “everyone”.
• vuyani 9y ago
  Do you know, that you CANNOT use any of your google accounts if you turn your cookies off? that is just grossly invasive
• dxmalai 9y ago
  it was clear that the amount of content has gone down, the noise has gone up.
• k3a 9y ago
  We need to start making 'open web embeedded in this infrastructure'. I mean some open communities (outside facebook) and lists of websites containing useful and true information. Wikipedia helps a lot and I love this ycombinator news..
• reacweb 9y ago
  I love his punch line: "We're quietly replacing an open web that connects and empowers with one that restricts and commoditizes people. We need to stop it.". How can we stop it ?
• deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
• cyphunk 9y ago
  Stop referencing Cambridge Analytica. They grossly overstated their results with intent. Everyone seems to have taken the headlines produced from their first post-US-election presentation as truth, without even bothering to watch that presentation. Because when doing so even the most forgiving would get a sense of screaming suspicion. They brag about taking one Republican candidate (Ted Cruz) from the bottom of 20 candidates to... #3 in the Republican party primary. And then the logic of the headlines continue on to claim that this means with 300 likes they can predict you better than you mother. Candidate #3? I promise you there were as many data analytic companies as there were candidates but the difference is that only Cambridge Analytica came up with the clever marketing pitches to promote their strategy and only they had the guts to promote that strategy even though their pony lost the race. And it shouldn't surprise anyone because good marketing strategy, not good data, lead to such sensational headlines. Cambridge Analytica should be treated with the suspicion provided to all marketing firms, because it is clear when looking closely that this is what they are, and one with a rather shady history full of scams at that: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-03-23/trump-data-gurus-leave-long-trail-of-subterfuge-dubious-dealing https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-03-23/trump-dat... https://hn.algolia.com/?query=cambridge%20analytica&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?query=cambridge%20analytica&sort=byP... Stop referencing Cambridge Analytica. The headlines that their marketing produced just happen to fit so nicely in the techno-evil horror fluff stories we all as liberal leftists (myself included) so desperately want to eat. But find better references, please!
• JepZ 9y ago
  > [...], stop and think about the consequences of that shit. Anybody else read it that way? ;-)
• saladeen 9y ago
  Pushing of apps onto mobile users viewing sites inside browser has really gone evil. Reddit makes you click 'No, I don't want to install reddit app' or similar at least 3 times before letting you view the content. Unrelated to that, as a HAM I've long (since 2000 or so) been preaching that if you want to know how internet will be changed by commercial and government interest, look into early radio history - it has many parallels with development of internet: an open, free to publish network primarily ran by enthusiasts that got progressively locked down until you had to be a major player to publish content on it, turned into ad-driven economy etc.
• b0rsuk 9y ago
  I think many web apps are essentially closed source taken to the next level. Back when the war was Windows vs Linux, software could still be painstakingly reverse-engineered. This made making open source alternatives easier, as well as compatibility projects like Wine, Samba... With online services, there's no chance. They can even take copylefted software, modify it, use, and don't release. This is technically compliant with GPL2, but against its spirit. (A)GPL3 was made to combat this. I agree the license is complicated, verbose and very hard to enforce, but at least it's a try. I think the problem is two-fold: data and software. The article focuses on user data, but it's not hard to believe a culture of closed source breeds a closed approach to user data.
• b0rsuk 9y ago
  Videos (mostly video ads) are the pop-up windows of 2010's. It seems people have memorized that alert(); is bad without understanding what made it bad.
• djhworld 9y ago
  I really enjoyed reading this essay, I've had this uneasy feeling for a few years too. Most of my browsing habits these days centralise around HN and Reddit, with a sprinkling of RSS feeds via NewsBlur (although most RSS feeds are crap these days - truncated articles etc) At home I use Pi-Hole to block DNS requests to known nefarious actors, so adverts are generally not a problem. I can't help but feel that all these concerns are really not that much of an issue to the average user though. From a <insert corporation here> perspective, I'm wondering what their exposure rate is for their ads in terms of traffic - say if 10% of their users block ads - does the company even care that much?
• jd3 9y ago
  https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence https://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2015/07/stop_pushing_th.html https://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2015/07/stop_pushin... http://idlewords.com/talks/web_design_first_100_years.htm http://idlewords.com/talks/web_design_first_100_years.htm http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm http://david.woodhou.se/email.html http://david.woodhou.se/email.html
• dispo001 9y ago
  Oh an essay about videos, or wait....
• kburkhardt 9y ago
  What are some companies (and initiatives) that are actively working to protect privacy online?
• wiz21c 9y ago
  It's not because the invention of typesetting lead to massive publication of tabloids that one has to cry on the death of paper. You can watch elsewhere. You're not entitled to watch video or have access to informational and free websites. Many people here forget that all the things they got for free are often the result of hard work and lot a love from people who do it because they like it. So instead of complaining about the vicious tracking, just support those who build another web. And too bad if it's too expensive for your activists to make a better youtube.
• aabbcc1241 9y ago
  I agree the author's view but I have hard time convicting my friends or collaborator to use non-popular alternatives, especially those who are not technical
• unlmtd1 9y ago
  Matrix.org