8 ms·

The Mutable Web

79 points by rauhl 7y ago

jamesjyu 7y ago
There's also an aesthetic homogeneity to the big social media sites that strikes me as bleak and depressing compared to the amateurish, handmade web pages of my childhood. Different pages on the same website — even different entries in the same journal — might look wildly different I touched on this in a recent post here: https://www.jamesyu.org/blog/my-journey-from-frame-maker-to-painter/ https://www.jamesyu.org/blog/my-journey-from-frame-maker-to-... I empathize with the author on this, but I also appreciate that platforms have designed their frames to prioritize content. This has resulted in an explosion of creativity within the frame that we wouldn't have otherwise seen, because the platforms have allowed more people than ever to express themselves, and not just the folks who know how to hand code pages. Homogeneity provided the consistency so that creators could focus within the frame.
- doctorpangloss 7y ago
  > designed their frames to prioritize content Not only is most content delivered snippets devoid of styling, the lowest common denominator Internet user is just (1) the only source of growth nowadays and (2) utterly conditioned to expect everything looks like a Google SERP, so (3) everything looks like a Google SERP.
- vishnuharidas 7y ago
  #offtopic - what CMS do you use in your blog?
  - jamesjyu 7y ago
    Jekyll static site with a custom template.
    - simulacrumparty 7y ago
      Well, not Jekyll, but similar. I built my own static site generator.
      - vishnuharidas 7y ago
        @jamesjyu @simulacrumparty I liked both! Simple and minimalistic. @simulacrumparty Is your staticgen opensource? Like to have a minimalistic one like that.
l00sed 7y ago
Great post! I completely sympathize with your nostalgia for a shared Web, but I doubt a great many people know how to edit the appearance of pages they visit. I like that you've included your own buttons for light/dark mode and serif/sans. I enjoy customizing my apps' appearances (and it seems like more and more are offering this feature); but I also think your blog looks exceptionally clean and organized. I don't completely hate Twitter's redesign-- it does include a night mode and different highlight colors. I feel like-- as a professional installation art designer, web designer, and an education in architecture-- I can spot the same obvious pitfalls of the re-design you call out: mainly, phat text and a bulky sidebar. However, it's clear you have a stronger-than-most design sense, and are sensitive to these issues. I wonder how the everyday user-- the consumer that uses (and does not make or own) a platform-- feels about these features? How about someone who isn't adept at web design? Who can't read small text or icons?
- klez 7y ago
  > I don't completely hate Twitter's redesign For me it's not the design, per se. It's that they changed a couple of things in the UX department that really rile me up. 1- The old design pulled for updates in the background, and the browser tab notified me that there were new tweets in my timeline (which is not a notification for every tweet, it's just letting me know there are new tweets). This doesn't work anymore. I have to open the tab and then it loads new tweets. 2- Every damn day, I have to reset the ordering of tweets to chronological. If I set an opiton I expect it to stay put.
- simulacrumparty 7y ago
  Thanks for the comments! I don't think the issue is ability so much as inclination. People see the web as something to consume rather than participate in so modifying a website doesn't cross their minds at all. I think with a little rebranding and some tweaking for non-devs devtools would be a fantastic way for anybody to start off slow, changing colors and so on, and gradually work their way up to more complicated CSS concepts, or even JS. I think if this functionality was right in front of people rather than being hidden deep in a menu behind the name Developer Tools, it's entirely possible people would take to it without much trouble.
md224 7y ago
I believe that the web could be so much more if competition between platforms was somehow decoupled from competition between UIs. It would be incredible if every social network had a marketplace of competing UIs, allowing for rapid front-end innovation. Of course, many services provide APIs, so in theory this decoupling is already possible, but the problem is that many platforms rely on advertising & promoted content for their revenue, so they need to maintain control over the front-end and therefore won't allow people to build alternative UIs. I don't know how to solve the revenue problem. I just wish we could find a way to have UI competition.
- asark 7y ago
  Before behemoths funded by free-but-spying software/services took over, protocols and standards were a thing and had some power, at least. They've (largely Google, but not just them) been slowly killing them. Can't risk making it easy for eyeballs to leave your platform (ugh) since that's what you're selling, and you can't just stick ads in (say) their RSS feed since that doesn't help you track what people click, let alone spy on them across other sites. Basically protocols are what you want, but they don't make it easy enough to be shitty, so they're dying until we outlaw (yes, with actual laws) being shitty. Which may never happen.
- echelon 7y ago
  I really want to try this. A new Reddit - but with the Wikipedia funding model - with Snapchat's ephemerality - an amazing API and all open source code - all submissions cc-by-sa licensed Since profit isn't a motive, it would encourage the proliferation of new frontends and clients. As well as really cool mashups (haven't heard that term in awhile - probably due to increasingly closed ecosystems.) Without having to save user generated content you can save tremendously on servers. You don't have to scale other than enough to handle the fire hose. Everything could reside in memory. Just Redis and Rust. The content gets scrubbed after a week. No sharded storage is necessary. But due to the license, others can persist content they like. There's next to zero value in looking up old posts. I don't know why this hasn't been done.
  - munmaek 7y ago
the_pwner224 7y ago
Interestingly the images on this site did not load until I disabled my adblocker... In the uBlock Origin settings the second tab ('Filter lists') contains a list of filter files, some of which are enabled by default and some of which aren't. I checked the boxes to enable some additional filter lists - everything in the 'Built-in' category except Experimental, and everything in the 'Annoyances' category. It's been a while since I enabled these so I don't remember what exactly all of them do, but I rarely see a cookie banner or a modal popup subscribe dialog, I think due to these extra filters. These extra filters also include social blocking ones, which delete like/share buttons such as those from Facebook and Twitter (these buttons are useless to me). I think one of the rules in these extra filter lists is matching on your images, which are on the path '/assets/images/tmw-twitter-xxx.png.' The uBO logger shows the rule being matched as '/images/twitter-' and that it is present in Fanboy's Annoyances and Social Blocking lists. Of course there's nothing wrong with the site, the images here are just a casualty of a blocking rule. But it was an interesting 'bug' to find.
kaycebasques 7y ago
Regarding overriding the styles of a site, this is another possibility: https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2018/01/devtools-without-devtools https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2018/01/devtools-w... Disclosure: Wrote that doc
TazeTSchnitzel 7y ago
If you are nostalgic for the aesthetics of the web of old: https://cameronsworld.net https://cameronsworld.net
- lanevorockz 7y ago
  On the age before SEO it was much easier to find what you wanted. That's the nostalgic feel that I miss. Type the title of a research paper and get the direct link to the pdf.
nihilismislove 7y ago
Heavy Stylus user here, this is how I actually read the OP's article (I didn't know what it was going to be about) - https://imgur.com/dWtQKLT https://imgur.com/dWtQKLT
- simulacrumparty 7y ago
  Hey, that's awesome. It was important to me to design my website to be amenable to user styling so I'm glad someone is taking advantage of it!

79 points by rauhl 7y ago

There's also an aesthetic homogeneity to the big social media sites that strikes me as bleak and depressing compared to the amateurish, handmade web pages of my childhood. Different pages on the same website — even different entries in the same journal — might look wildly different I touched on this in a recent post here: https://www.jamesyu.org/blog/my-journey-from-frame-maker-to-painter/ https://www.jamesyu.org/blog/my-journey-from-frame-maker-to-... I empathize with the author on this, but I also appreciate that platforms have designed their frames to prioritize content. This has resulted in an explosion of creativity within the frame that we wouldn't have otherwise seen, because the platforms have allowed more people than ever to express themselves, and not just the folks who know how to hand code pages. Homogeneity provided the consistency so that creators could focus within the frame.

doctorpangloss 7y ago
> designed their frames to prioritize content Not only is most content delivered snippets devoid of styling, the lowest common denominator Internet user is just (1) the only source of growth nowadays and (2) utterly conditioned to expect everything looks like a Google SERP, so (3) everything looks like a Google SERP.
vishnuharidas 7y ago
#offtopic - what CMS do you use in your blog?
- jamesjyu 7y ago
  Jekyll static site with a custom template.
  - simulacrumparty 7y ago
    Well, not Jekyll, but similar. I built my own static site generator.
    - vishnuharidas 7y ago
      @jamesjyu @simulacrumparty I liked both! Simple and minimalistic. @simulacrumparty Is your staticgen opensource? Like to have a minimalistic one like that.

l00sed 7y ago

Great post! I completely sympathize with your nostalgia for a shared Web, but I doubt a great many people know how to edit the appearance of pages they visit. I like that you've included your own buttons for light/dark mode and serif/sans. I enjoy customizing my apps' appearances (and it seems like more and more are offering this feature); but I also think your blog looks exceptionally clean and organized. I don't completely hate Twitter's redesign-- it does include a night mode and different highlight colors. I feel like-- as a professional installation art designer, web designer, and an education in architecture-- I can spot the same obvious pitfalls of the re-design you call out: mainly, phat text and a bulky sidebar. However, it's clear you have a stronger-than-most design sense, and are sensitive to these issues. I wonder how the everyday user-- the consumer that uses (and does not make or own) a platform-- feels about these features? How about someone who isn't adept at web design? Who can't read small text or icons?

klez 7y ago
> I don't completely hate Twitter's redesign For me it's not the design, per se. It's that they changed a couple of things in the UX department that really rile me up. 1- The old design pulled for updates in the background, and the browser tab notified me that there were new tweets in my timeline (which is not a notification for every tweet, it's just letting me know there are new tweets). This doesn't work anymore. I have to open the tab and then it loads new tweets. 2- Every damn day, I have to reset the ordering of tweets to chronological. If I set an opiton I expect it to stay put.
simulacrumparty 7y ago
Thanks for the comments! I don't think the issue is ability so much as inclination. People see the web as something to consume rather than participate in so modifying a website doesn't cross their minds at all. I think with a little rebranding and some tweaking for non-devs devtools would be a fantastic way for anybody to start off slow, changing colors and so on, and gradually work their way up to more complicated CSS concepts, or even JS. I think if this functionality was right in front of people rather than being hidden deep in a menu behind the name Developer Tools, it's entirely possible people would take to it without much trouble.

md224 7y ago

I believe that the web could be so much more if competition between platforms was somehow decoupled from competition between UIs. It would be incredible if every social network had a marketplace of competing UIs, allowing for rapid front-end innovation. Of course, many services provide APIs, so in theory this decoupling is already possible, but the problem is that many platforms rely on advertising & promoted content for their revenue, so they need to maintain control over the front-end and therefore won't allow people to build alternative UIs. I don't know how to solve the revenue problem. I just wish we could find a way to have UI competition.

asark 7y ago
Before behemoths funded by free-but-spying software/services took over, protocols and standards were a thing and had some power, at least. They've (largely Google, but not just them) been slowly killing them. Can't risk making it easy for eyeballs to leave your platform (ugh) since that's what you're selling, and you can't just stick ads in (say) their RSS feed since that doesn't help you track what people click, let alone spy on them across other sites. Basically protocols are what you want, but they don't make it easy enough to be shitty, so they're dying until we outlaw (yes, with actual laws) being shitty. Which may never happen.
echelon 7y ago
I really want to try this. A new Reddit - but with the Wikipedia funding model - with Snapchat's ephemerality - an amazing API and all open source code - all submissions cc-by-sa licensed Since profit isn't a motive, it would encourage the proliferation of new frontends and clients. As well as really cool mashups (haven't heard that term in awhile - probably due to increasingly closed ecosystems.) Without having to save user generated content you can save tremendously on servers. You don't have to scale other than enough to handle the fire hose. Everything could reside in memory. Just Redis and Rust. The content gets scrubbed after a week. No sharded storage is necessary. But due to the license, others can persist content they like. There's next to zero value in looking up old posts. I don't know why this hasn't been done.
- munmaek 7y ago

the_pwner224 7y ago

Interestingly the images on this site did not load until I disabled my adblocker... In the uBlock Origin settings the second tab ('Filter lists') contains a list of filter files, some of which are enabled by default and some of which aren't. I checked the boxes to enable some additional filter lists - everything in the 'Built-in' category except Experimental, and everything in the 'Annoyances' category. It's been a while since I enabled these so I don't remember what exactly all of them do, but I rarely see a cookie banner or a modal popup subscribe dialog, I think due to these extra filters. These extra filters also include social blocking ones, which delete like/share buttons such as those from Facebook and Twitter (these buttons are useless to me). I think one of the rules in these extra filter lists is matching on your images, which are on the path '/assets/images/tmw-twitter-xxx.png.' The uBO logger shows the rule being matched as '/images/twitter-' and that it is present in Fanboy's Annoyances and Social Blocking lists. Of course there's nothing wrong with the site, the images here are just a casualty of a blocking rule. But it was an interesting 'bug' to find.

kaycebasques 7y ago

Regarding overriding the styles of a site, this is another possibility: https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2018/01/devtools-without-devtools https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2018/01/devtools-w... Disclosure: Wrote that doc

TazeTSchnitzel 7y ago

If you are nostalgic for the aesthetics of the web of old: https://cameronsworld.net https://cameronsworld.net

lanevorockz 7y ago
On the age before SEO it was much easier to find what you wanted. That's the nostalgic feel that I miss. Type the title of a research paper and get the direct link to the pdf.

nihilismislove 7y ago

Heavy Stylus user here, this is how I actually read the OP's article (I didn't know what it was going to be about) - https://imgur.com/dWtQKLT https://imgur.com/dWtQKLT

simulacrumparty 7y ago
Hey, that's awesome. It was important to me to design my website to be amenable to user styling so I'm glad someone is taking advantage of it!