3 ms·

I'm not buying it. Web development complexity grows but so does desktop software, kernel development, etc. You used to be able to have a small program written

by dkns 8y ago

I'm not buying it. Web development complexity grows but so does desktop software, kernel development, etc. You used to be able to have a small program written in BASIC or whatever that would give you a simple popup alert on desktop. Now you need to worry about backwards compatibility, different OSes, etc. But guess what? You can still write simple programs, without all the complex stuff, if you want to. The exact same thing applies for web. You can bundle megabytes of javascript, for some fancy stuff, or you can have simple static index.html with just text. "The web was never supposed to be a few walled gardens of concentrated content owned by Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and a few other major publishers. It was supposed to be a cacophony of different sites and voices." It still is. Facebook, YT and Twitter are simply more known than your local pet owners forum but that doesn't mean the pet owner forum doesn't exists. It's similar to supermarket chains and your local grocery store. Both still exist.

hvidgaard 8y ago
> the pet owner forum doesn't exists They are increasingly moving to FB Groups. It's a good tool for what it does.
nicbou 8y ago
It's still possible: http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ When I made All About Berlin, it was just HTML and CSS. Nothing complex there. I eventually added Disqus and Google Analytics, but it's still possible to build simple websites.
- 3pt14159 8y ago
  Fixing the internet is hard. There are so many things wrong with it. Take your website for example: 1. No encryption, meaning any intermediate router could have altered the contents or at the very least surveilled them. 2. Illegible line length without me boosting the font size or browser width. 3. No protection for the reader that this is actually motherfuckingwebsite.com and not some .com with a Cyrillic character instead. 4. No protection for the reader that what is on this site hasn't been fingerprinted somehow (zero-width characters, Cyrillic, etc). 5. Even if the site was encrypted the DNS lookup would have exposed that I was looking at it anyway. 6. It's on the root of the domain which has a number of headaches at scale and roots vs www in general complicate things like understanding certs, CORS, etc. I agree that we need something simpler and locked down and I've even thought through not just the web portion, but the underlying portion as well, but it requires a massive change to get something that is both secure / trustworthy, not prone to spam, useable by the non-technical, and resilient against well funded mal-actors like warring nation states. And none of the replacement makes the world better for most of the worlds well funded corporations. Silicon Valley and Hollywood would both take a real hit because their business models both rely on insecurity. Hollywood is reliant on surveillance to enforce copyright and SV is reliant on surveillance to supply targeted ads.
  - exolymph 8y ago
    doesn't address all of your points, but: https://bestmotherfucking.website/ https://bestmotherfucking.website/

by dkns 8y ago

hvidgaard 8y ago

> the pet owner forum doesn't exists They are increasingly moving to FB Groups. It's a good tool for what it does.

nicbou 8y ago

It's still possible: http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ When I made All About Berlin, it was just HTML and CSS. Nothing complex there. I eventually added Disqus and Google Analytics, but it's still possible to build simple websites.

3pt14159 8y ago
Fixing the internet is hard. There are so many things wrong with it. Take your website for example: 1. No encryption, meaning any intermediate router could have altered the contents or at the very least surveilled them. 2. Illegible line length without me boosting the font size or browser width. 3. No protection for the reader that this is actually motherfuckingwebsite.com and not some .com with a Cyrillic character instead. 4. No protection for the reader that what is on this site hasn't been fingerprinted somehow (zero-width characters, Cyrillic, etc). 5. Even if the site was encrypted the DNS lookup would have exposed that I was looking at it anyway. 6. It's on the root of the domain which has a number of headaches at scale and roots vs www in general complicate things like understanding certs, CORS, etc. I agree that we need something simpler and locked down and I've even thought through not just the web portion, but the underlying portion as well, but it requires a massive change to get something that is both secure / trustworthy, not prone to spam, useable by the non-technical, and resilient against well funded mal-actors like warring nation states. And none of the replacement makes the world better for most of the worlds well funded corporations. Silicon Valley and Hollywood would both take a real hit because their business models both rely on insecurity. Hollywood is reliant on surveillance to enforce copyright and SV is reliant on surveillance to supply targeted ads.
- exolymph 8y ago
  doesn't address all of your points, but: https://bestmotherfucking.website/ https://bestmotherfucking.website/