8 ms·

Yeah, so basically modals, banners, reminders to use the app etc. (vide https://www.webdesignerdepot.com/cdn-origin/uploads/2019/06/Medium-Mobile-Popup.png http

Yeah, so basically modals, banners, reminders to use the app etc. (vide https://www.webdesignerdepot.com/cdn-origin/uploads/2019/06/Medium-Mobile-Popup.png https://www.webdesignerdepot.com/cdn-origin/uploads/2019/06/...) are new toolbars of the late 2010s (http://i.imgur.com/X7ipc.png http://i.imgur.com/X7ipc.png). I don't like the direction where the Web is currently heading. Shutting down open APIs, forcing users to use the one and only official app (Facebook Messenger, Instagram, Reddit's starting to do so more and more), ubiquitous tracking, aggressive ad targeting and so on. How can we - users, programmers, hackers - fight this?

Santosh83 7y ago
By use a diverse set of browsers and minimally using apps, we can slow down the silo'ing of the Internet. If users don't blindly buy into every app out there, big corps will have little choice but to interoperate on the open web.
- sjamaan 7y ago
  Also by setting good examples and not using this shit ourselves, even if it's the expedient option.
- agluszak 7y ago
  But the big companies do everything that's possible to stop us from using browsers and plain, old websites. Users are not blind, but choosing not to conform to corps' will requires knowledge (why and how, because dark design patterns are called dark for a reason)
  - batat 7y ago
    I quit using Imgur because of agressive promotion of their app. Actually you can't even upload an image, neither view a full-size image on mobile version now.
Nextgrid 7y ago
As users, a step in the right direction would be to vote with your wallet, not use nasty services and prefer respectful services wherever possible. As engineers & designers, we need to stop being complicit and building this shit nor working for such awful companies. If the majority of engineers become ethical then companies like Facebook, Google, etc will have a hard time hiring people to do their dirty work.
- thelittleone 7y ago
  > As users, a step in the right direction would be to vote with your wallet, not use nasty services and prefer respectful services wherever possible. I'd love an app where I could define companies, people and perhaps countries I don't want to pay so that I'm notified when browsing to a site, or scanning a product to buy so that my time and money could be invested elsewhere.
  - pjc50 7y ago
    Adblocking is a good start. For physical products .. it's a lot harder. I don't want to go full "no ethical consumption under capitalisim", since that's useless, but basically everything that isn't specifically marketed as ethical probably is doing something wrong in the supply chain somewhere, and half of the "ethical" claims are dubious too.
    - thelittleone 7y ago
      > I don't want to go full "no ethical consumption under capitalism" True but one step at a time in the right direction is all it takes for change. Say if I got shafted by Expedia. I would like to add them to my "do not buy" list and have their other brands (e.g. orbitz, travelocity etc) added to the do not buy list. Could make it social so that if my sister got shafted by some company I could see that too and opt for an alternative. There are often stories about unethical companies (Monsanto for example which is now owned by Bayer). I'd like to avoid them, but the burden of doing so prevents it. Lower that burden, provide alternatives and maybe over time we'd see improved ethics and accountability.
ben_jones 7y ago
Disincentivize company founders from cashing out to the detriment of their users by moving the cradle of these technologies to a place where you can respectably buy a house and raise kids without millions of dollars. We did this to ourselves through decades of equating personal wealth to community and social value. Which is ironic given the economic purpose of hacker news.
SahAssar 7y ago
> How can we - users, programmers, hackers - fight this? By doing exactly what ElementaryOS did here: stop using these platforms. And if you have to use them (as a user), try to use them in the most open way possible: Never via a dedicated app, preferably via RSS or similar for the platforms where it is suitable and where it is supported (like youtube).
- chris_wot 7y ago
  This is correct. The readers should not be the ones paying for this, it should be the publishers who use the platform.
javajosh 7y ago
Well, the fundamental problem is that Capital comes in and builds a really great Thing, a Thing that may not have been built without Capital, but then Capital wants a Return, which causes the Thing to decay. The thing Hackers can do, as in the OPs article, is to salvage the good ideas that the initial efforts of Capital managed to prove, and leave out the rest. This won't work for individuals, in general, because writing good software is hard. Even if you rely heavily on 3rd party libraries like Jekyll, you still have to know how to pick those libraries, and how to use them, how to deploy them. Personally, I think it's cool that Capital is willing to get into the fray, even though it so often ends badly. Often it does contribute something, even if it dies. People get mad at Google for axing projects, like Reader, but why? Consider all the market validation they did, for you, for me, for free. Consider all the product design work they did, for all of us, for free. I don't even think it's bad that devs at Medium are, almost by definition, currently working on nothing but anti-features. It's just part of the Capital-driven software lifecycle, and they are feeding their families, and learning a lot. I can't even hate the managers who made unethical product decisions, because it was always going to be that way, and better to participate in the Capital driven software lifecycle and contribute something then to never have participated at all. There are amazing, sustainable, ethical, Capital-driven software ideas still waiting to be done, and that couldn't be done without Capital's involvement, but clearly that's not Medium and its ilk. But as Medium declines and eventually dies, remember that this is the fate that waits for every project, no matter how successful, and they leave behind valuable information for us.
- ohithereyou 7y ago
  >Consider all the market validation they did, for you, for me, for free. Consider all the product design work they did, for all of us, for free. I have a feeling that their intent wasn't to do it for free. What happened is that they couldn't gather enough information about their users to turn a profit. Yes, that's what capital does, but the end result was not free for any of its users - they gave up personal data to use it.
- 013a 7y ago
  I like to look at it this way: bad ideas, or bad executions of good ideas, or bad fits for VC, that somehow get funding and die before going public, or even better, get purchased by some bloated old company with too much money; the end result is a wealth transfer from the ultra-wealthy to the middle class. Paychecks get paid out. Stock options liquidate for something usually. Services get purchased to support the business even though they may not be worth supporting. Right now, the VCs behind Medium are doing the world an amazing service. They're going to see almost no return on investment, but why would any of us "normal people" care about that? Its their money they're wasting. They're paying employees, probably a great wage. Probably providing a ton of benefits to attract talent, including lots of options, great insurance, snacks in the office, unlimited PTO. They're producing a product that is actively teaching competitors like write.as and ghost what Not To Do. I'd bet even most of their employees hate the direction they're going, which means they're learning as well.
artsyca 7y ago
agluszak, I've been around modern technology since the very beginning, before the Apple ][ days when the web wasn't much more than a gleam in Tim Berners-Lee's eyes and 'Money for nothing' by Dire Straits was the cutting edge of computer graphics and MTV was the closest thing anyone had to streaming media I've witnessed the rise of the machines from a unique vantage point just across the y2k horizon which makes me uniquely qualified to describe the evolution of the so-called 'technology professional' born of the nexus of home-brew computing, video gaming, sci-fi and old corporatism -- the modern 'tech bro' if you will I tell you for sure it's the attitude of the casually invested subtly egotistical tech pro intermingling with the traditional corporate stereotype that has brought us here and the only way out is to bootstrap ourselves out of the shadows and take over the system from the inside out by becoming sentient adults rather than code weaving pithicathropus. Our black monolith moment is way overdue
- DaveWalk 7y ago
  Upvoted for being pithy and beautiful. Where's our manifesto? Can I suggest you write it?
giancarlostoro 7y ago
Improve existing platforms: Wordpress, Ghost, etc. There's none of that nonsense on those open source platforms. An aside: Tumblr isn't hostile like Medium is. At least not last I used it. I prefer seeing Tumblr to medium you can really just do any kind of blog you want whether it's a meme feed, or some serious blogging. Edit: Forgot to add, also Tumblr lets you optionally advertise to non-logged in users to join Tumblr, and it's not a modal, just a button on the top right hand corner where the "Follow" button shows up to logged in users, or you can hide it entirely.
- ymolodtsov 7y ago
  Haven’t you noticed a glaring difference between these platforms, namely the fact that Wordpress and Ghost have a completely different business model and basically no social layer to distribute the content? That’s why they don’t have such problems – but this is also they reason most people don’t care about them.
  - claudiulodro 7y ago
    WordPress powers 1/3 of all sites on the internet . . .
    - martin_a 7y ago
      And it's getting worse by setting the wrong priorities. OPs point stands though, as there is no platform like YouTube where you can easily discover similar content. wordpress.com is not really the place for that, either.
  - giancarlostoro 7y ago
    My point somewhat still stands though. You've got Tumblr which has a social layer through likes, reblogging, and even "Ask'ing" and messaging other users. Then you've got projects like Mastodon, and specs like ActivityStreams that have not been adopted by Ghost or WordPress yet, but there's no reason plugins can't be made, these would add a social element to these blogging platforms and turn them into federated blogging platforms. This is just a side thought, but it's not impossible for WordPress and Ghost to get there. WordPress is used more than most realize.
fredthomsen 7y ago
Well it is being fought on some level. More and more blogs have moved off of medium and hosting their own. I sense that rss is making a bit of a comeback as well
- agluszak 7y ago
  Yeah, but I meant the more general problem of "modalization" and monetization of the Web, biggest service providers like Facebook or Google shutting down their open APIs and pushing us not towards common, open web standards, but towards some sort of closed bubbles or silos. Rss may have its own niche, especially among the hacker community, but most non-tech people will rely on Facebook or Twitter for staying up to date with sites/topics/people they wish to follow. And both FB and Twitter are neither open nor free (as in freedom)
justaguyhere 7y ago
As users, I guess we can start with paying for good content, tools, apps etc. Most of us don't even pay for something as important as email, and then complain about Google's non existent support for GMail etc. The other thing we could do is intentionally support good, honest indie makers over mega corps (but there is no guarantee they won't sell to mega corps).
mikaelmello 7y ago
I guess you meant late 2000s? We are in the late 2010s right now!
- agluszak 7y ago
  Yes, and I meant 2010s, because that's when all these aggressive modals urging you to log in/subscribe/etc. started to appear. This may be a bias, but to me the Web used to be a much more peaceful place when a simple adblock sufficed to browse it without pain
hawski 7y ago
I think we should code around them, instead of writing comments on HN. Me included. I previously wanted to write an elaborate comment, but I should really focus more on productive endeavors.
- agluszak 7y ago
  To be honest, I find writing comments and discussing on this topic very important. Maybe on HN people are aware of such practices and know how to mitigate them, but the general public need to be educated, otherwise they will be completely helpless and at the mercy of corporations relentlessly trying to "monetize" them.
WBrad 7y ago
I believe the only way to combat this as users is to use agnostic tools. When a website, program or other service wants to force you to use a specific thing to access them just view in a web browser with ad/script blocking or choose to not view it at all if that isn't an option. As programmers we can refuse to implement such nagware. There's not much worker solidarity in our field so quitting is usually the only option if the company has made up their mind on the matter. Overall I don't believe it can be stopped at this point. This process is called privatizing the commons and it will continue to happen to every common good as long as capitalism is the system which we work under.
- klarstrup 7y ago
  Your point on worker solidarity got me thinking. In some countries(such as mine) we have decent unionization rates for IT workers, would it be a good idea to have such ethical issues encoded into the union lines?
  - WBrad 7y ago
    Absolutely. If you feel you are creating a product that has a negative impact on the people you are serving you should do something about it. Unions can greatly benefit society should they choose to.
    - agluszak 7y ago
      But it appears that the issue of ethics in IT is almost non-existent. From a perspective of a CS student - everyone around wants to work at Google/MS/FB because that's the bleeding edge of technology, but no one gives a shit about corporation business practices and their consequences on privacy and digital wellbeing of other people.
      - WBrad 7y ago
        Do you think we could do anything to change the industry for the better?
    - 7y ago
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
fnord123 7y ago
>How can we - users, programmers, hackers - fight this? Pardon the interruption -> close window.
tomcooks 7y ago
Avoid those sites, and when asked for feedback mention the problems (a great place for feedback is the customer serivce chat, followed with a FU, enter and a ctrl+w)
chasing 7y ago
> How can we - users, programmers, hackers - fight this? my_article.html Uploaded into a public directory on a web server.
drinchev 7y ago
There needs to be an app that has the ability to connect ( via oAuth, whatever ) with DigitalOcean / AWS and that can generate a static website out of a WordPress(-like) editor, keeping the state in the cloud - again DO or whatever in a managed database. The app should cost <20$ ( or be open sourced ) and it should have a huge eco-system of themes / plugins, including paid ones. Sadly this app will never have an IPO or growth rate worth investing, but it will fix the problem ( for a while ).

Santosh83 7y ago

By use a diverse set of browsers and minimally using apps, we can slow down the silo'ing of the Internet. If users don't blindly buy into every app out there, big corps will have little choice but to interoperate on the open web.

sjamaan 7y ago
Also by setting good examples and not using this shit ourselves, even if it's the expedient option.
agluszak 7y ago
But the big companies do everything that's possible to stop us from using browsers and plain, old websites. Users are not blind, but choosing not to conform to corps' will requires knowledge (why and how, because dark design patterns are called dark for a reason)
- batat 7y ago
  I quit using Imgur because of agressive promotion of their app. Actually you can't even upload an image, neither view a full-size image on mobile version now.

Nextgrid 7y ago

As users, a step in the right direction would be to vote with your wallet, not use nasty services and prefer respectful services wherever possible. As engineers & designers, we need to stop being complicit and building this shit nor working for such awful companies. If the majority of engineers become ethical then companies like Facebook, Google, etc will have a hard time hiring people to do their dirty work.

thelittleone 7y ago
> As users, a step in the right direction would be to vote with your wallet, not use nasty services and prefer respectful services wherever possible. I'd love an app where I could define companies, people and perhaps countries I don't want to pay so that I'm notified when browsing to a site, or scanning a product to buy so that my time and money could be invested elsewhere.
- pjc50 7y ago
  Adblocking is a good start. For physical products .. it's a lot harder. I don't want to go full "no ethical consumption under capitalisim", since that's useless, but basically everything that isn't specifically marketed as ethical probably is doing something wrong in the supply chain somewhere, and half of the "ethical" claims are dubious too.
  - thelittleone 7y ago
    > I don't want to go full "no ethical consumption under capitalism" True but one step at a time in the right direction is all it takes for change. Say if I got shafted by Expedia. I would like to add them to my "do not buy" list and have their other brands (e.g. orbitz, travelocity etc) added to the do not buy list. Could make it social so that if my sister got shafted by some company I could see that too and opt for an alternative. There are often stories about unethical companies (Monsanto for example which is now owned by Bayer). I'd like to avoid them, but the burden of doing so prevents it. Lower that burden, provide alternatives and maybe over time we'd see improved ethics and accountability.

ben_jones 7y ago

Disincentivize company founders from cashing out to the detriment of their users by moving the cradle of these technologies to a place where you can respectably buy a house and raise kids without millions of dollars. We did this to ourselves through decades of equating personal wealth to community and social value. Which is ironic given the economic purpose of hacker news.

SahAssar 7y ago

> How can we - users, programmers, hackers - fight this? By doing exactly what ElementaryOS did here: stop using these platforms. And if you have to use them (as a user), try to use them in the most open way possible: Never via a dedicated app, preferably via RSS or similar for the platforms where it is suitable and where it is supported (like youtube).

chris_wot 7y ago
This is correct. The readers should not be the ones paying for this, it should be the publishers who use the platform.

javajosh 7y ago

Well, the fundamental problem is that Capital comes in and builds a really great Thing, a Thing that may not have been built without Capital, but then Capital wants a Return, which causes the Thing to decay. The thing Hackers can do, as in the OPs article, is to salvage the good ideas that the initial efforts of Capital managed to prove, and leave out the rest. This won't work for individuals, in general, because writing good software is hard. Even if you rely heavily on 3rd party libraries like Jekyll, you still have to know how to pick those libraries, and how to use them, how to deploy them. Personally, I think it's cool that Capital is willing to get into the fray, even though it so often ends badly. Often it does contribute something, even if it dies. People get mad at Google for axing projects, like Reader, but why? Consider all the market validation they did, for you, for me, for free. Consider all the product design work they did, for all of us, for free. I don't even think it's bad that devs at Medium are, almost by definition, currently working on nothing but anti-features. It's just part of the Capital-driven software lifecycle, and they are feeding their families, and learning a lot. I can't even hate the managers who made unethical product decisions, because it was always going to be that way, and better to participate in the Capital driven software lifecycle and contribute something then to never have participated at all. There are amazing, sustainable, ethical, Capital-driven software ideas still waiting to be done, and that couldn't be done without Capital's involvement, but clearly that's not Medium and its ilk. But as Medium declines and eventually dies, remember that this is the fate that waits for every project, no matter how successful, and they leave behind valuable information for us.

ohithereyou 7y ago
>Consider all the market validation they did, for you, for me, for free. Consider all the product design work they did, for all of us, for free. I have a feeling that their intent wasn't to do it for free. What happened is that they couldn't gather enough information about their users to turn a profit. Yes, that's what capital does, but the end result was not free for any of its users - they gave up personal data to use it.
013a 7y ago
I like to look at it this way: bad ideas, or bad executions of good ideas, or bad fits for VC, that somehow get funding and die before going public, or even better, get purchased by some bloated old company with too much money; the end result is a wealth transfer from the ultra-wealthy to the middle class. Paychecks get paid out. Stock options liquidate for something usually. Services get purchased to support the business even though they may not be worth supporting. Right now, the VCs behind Medium are doing the world an amazing service. They're going to see almost no return on investment, but why would any of us "normal people" care about that? Its their money they're wasting. They're paying employees, probably a great wage. Probably providing a ton of benefits to attract talent, including lots of options, great insurance, snacks in the office, unlimited PTO. They're producing a product that is actively teaching competitors like write.as and ghost what Not To Do. I'd bet even most of their employees hate the direction they're going, which means they're learning as well.

artsyca 7y ago

agluszak, I've been around modern technology since the very beginning, before the Apple ][ days when the web wasn't much more than a gleam in Tim Berners-Lee's eyes and 'Money for nothing' by Dire Straits was the cutting edge of computer graphics and MTV was the closest thing anyone had to streaming media I've witnessed the rise of the machines from a unique vantage point just across the y2k horizon which makes me uniquely qualified to describe the evolution of the so-called 'technology professional' born of the nexus of home-brew computing, video gaming, sci-fi and old corporatism -- the modern 'tech bro' if you will I tell you for sure it's the attitude of the casually invested subtly egotistical tech pro intermingling with the traditional corporate stereotype that has brought us here and the only way out is to bootstrap ourselves out of the shadows and take over the system from the inside out by becoming sentient adults rather than code weaving pithicathropus. Our black monolith moment is way overdue

DaveWalk 7y ago
Upvoted for being pithy and beautiful. Where's our manifesto? Can I suggest you write it?

giancarlostoro 7y ago

Improve existing platforms: Wordpress, Ghost, etc. There's none of that nonsense on those open source platforms. An aside: Tumblr isn't hostile like Medium is. At least not last I used it. I prefer seeing Tumblr to medium you can really just do any kind of blog you want whether it's a meme feed, or some serious blogging. Edit: Forgot to add, also Tumblr lets you optionally advertise to non-logged in users to join Tumblr, and it's not a modal, just a button on the top right hand corner where the "Follow" button shows up to logged in users, or you can hide it entirely.

ymolodtsov 7y ago
Haven’t you noticed a glaring difference between these platforms, namely the fact that Wordpress and Ghost have a completely different business model and basically no social layer to distribute the content? That’s why they don’t have such problems – but this is also they reason most people don’t care about them.
- claudiulodro 7y ago
  WordPress powers 1/3 of all sites on the internet . . .
  - martin_a 7y ago
    And it's getting worse by setting the wrong priorities. OPs point stands though, as there is no platform like YouTube where you can easily discover similar content. wordpress.com is not really the place for that, either.
- giancarlostoro 7y ago
  My point somewhat still stands though. You've got Tumblr which has a social layer through likes, reblogging, and even "Ask'ing" and messaging other users. Then you've got projects like Mastodon, and specs like ActivityStreams that have not been adopted by Ghost or WordPress yet, but there's no reason plugins can't be made, these would add a social element to these blogging platforms and turn them into federated blogging platforms. This is just a side thought, but it's not impossible for WordPress and Ghost to get there. WordPress is used more than most realize.

fredthomsen 7y ago

Well it is being fought on some level. More and more blogs have moved off of medium and hosting their own. I sense that rss is making a bit of a comeback as well

agluszak 7y ago
Yeah, but I meant the more general problem of "modalization" and monetization of the Web, biggest service providers like Facebook or Google shutting down their open APIs and pushing us not towards common, open web standards, but towards some sort of closed bubbles or silos. Rss may have its own niche, especially among the hacker community, but most non-tech people will rely on Facebook or Twitter for staying up to date with sites/topics/people they wish to follow. And both FB and Twitter are neither open nor free (as in freedom)

justaguyhere 7y ago

As users, I guess we can start with paying for good content, tools, apps etc. Most of us don't even pay for something as important as email, and then complain about Google's non existent support for GMail etc. The other thing we could do is intentionally support good, honest indie makers over mega corps (but there is no guarantee they won't sell to mega corps).

mikaelmello 7y ago

I guess you meant late 2000s? We are in the late 2010s right now!

agluszak 7y ago
Yes, and I meant 2010s, because that's when all these aggressive modals urging you to log in/subscribe/etc. started to appear. This may be a bias, but to me the Web used to be a much more peaceful place when a simple adblock sufficed to browse it without pain

hawski 7y ago

I think we should code around them, instead of writing comments on HN. Me included. I previously wanted to write an elaborate comment, but I should really focus more on productive endeavors.

agluszak 7y ago
To be honest, I find writing comments and discussing on this topic very important. Maybe on HN people are aware of such practices and know how to mitigate them, but the general public need to be educated, otherwise they will be completely helpless and at the mercy of corporations relentlessly trying to "monetize" them.

WBrad 7y ago

I believe the only way to combat this as users is to use agnostic tools. When a website, program or other service wants to force you to use a specific thing to access them just view in a web browser with ad/script blocking or choose to not view it at all if that isn't an option. As programmers we can refuse to implement such nagware. There's not much worker solidarity in our field so quitting is usually the only option if the company has made up their mind on the matter. Overall I don't believe it can be stopped at this point. This process is called privatizing the commons and it will continue to happen to every common good as long as capitalism is the system which we work under.

klarstrup 7y ago
Your point on worker solidarity got me thinking. In some countries(such as mine) we have decent unionization rates for IT workers, would it be a good idea to have such ethical issues encoded into the union lines?
- WBrad 7y ago
  Absolutely. If you feel you are creating a product that has a negative impact on the people you are serving you should do something about it. Unions can greatly benefit society should they choose to.
  - agluszak 7y ago
    But it appears that the issue of ethics in IT is almost non-existent. From a perspective of a CS student - everyone around wants to work at Google/MS/FB because that's the bleeding edge of technology, but no one gives a shit about corporation business practices and their consequences on privacy and digital wellbeing of other people.
    - WBrad 7y ago
      Do you think we could do anything to change the industry for the better?
  - 7y ago

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

fnord123 7y ago

>How can we - users, programmers, hackers - fight this? Pardon the interruption -> close window.

tomcooks 7y ago

Avoid those sites, and when asked for feedback mention the problems (a great place for feedback is the customer serivce chat, followed with a FU, enter and a ctrl+w)

chasing 7y ago

> How can we - users, programmers, hackers - fight this? my_article.html Uploaded into a public directory on a web server.

drinchev 7y ago

There needs to be an app that has the ability to connect ( via oAuth, whatever ) with DigitalOcean / AWS and that can generate a static website out of a WordPress(-like) editor, keeping the state in the cloud - again DO or whatever in a managed database. The app should cost <20$ ( or be open sourced ) and it should have a huge eco-system of themes / plugins, including paid ones. Sadly this app will never have an IPO or growth rate worth investing, but it will fix the problem ( for a while ).