5 ms·

You know when the Web Dark Ages are? They're upon us right now. With Google, Fb extracting all value out of the extant web, github & co having "educated" develo

You know when the Web Dark Ages are? They're upon us right now. With Google, Fb extracting all value out of the extant web, github & co having "educated" developers what to expect from software download sites and depending on network effects, StackExchange and a couple other sites covering "How To" material (not meant as a SE critique) and ad prices going down, the only "rational" incentive for new content is to publish polarizing clickbait. In the 1990s and 2000s, all kinds of Wikis and collaboration sites emerged; in the early 2010s, the nascent mobile web prompted a vibrant web design community, but when was the last time you went to a new web site? The web was once meant as an easy way for self-publishing, bypassing middle-men. Turns out we've just exchanged one middleman with another. I'm especially pissed at the staged HTML5 campaign to yield power over web standards to Google. HTML5 chose a shield as a logo, but who's going to shield us from Google and WHATWG destroying the web?

GordonS 6y ago
Facebook is perhaps the most frightening for me, because for many people Facebook is the internet! Something I absolutely hate is when I want to learn more about a local business and search for them on Google, but all I find is a Facebook page with minimal info - what happened to websites?!
- artificial 6y ago
  Facebook is like AOL in the heyday: a curated contained world complete with IM. Chrome is effectively IE6 as Blink makes up a significant portion of the browser engines these days and many only test against it. Need some "Best viewed in Chrome!" gifs.
- irrational 6y ago
  I know. It would be okay if you could view Facebook pages without an account, but since I don’t have one, all of those pages (including many friends and family members) are entirely shut out for me.
- sdevonoes 6y ago
  Facebook is "free" (as in it does not cost money to open a profile and post info there). Websites are not, and even if they are, not all people know how to publish something to a website. I hate it too yeah, but for non-techie people Facebook is just plain simple.
- sp332 6y ago
  This effect is even stronger in certain countries where Facebook pays ISPs to zero-rate their pages, so many people only have access to Facebook because they can't afford to access the rest of the internet. If you think clickbait headlines are bad, imagine not having the ability to even click through to the article. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_Zero https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_Zero
- xtracto 6y ago
  > Facebook is perhaps the most frightening for me, because for many people Facebook is the internet! This reminded me the times of Mozilla Netscape, IE and Firefox. I remember having conversations in /. about how for "normal people" the big blue E icon is the Internet and that grandmas of the world cried that "the internet was gone" when that icon disappeard. Then it was Google, and now it is Facebook.
  - GordonS 6y ago
    At least then it was the means of accessing the web, rather than the web itself.
- jopsen 6y ago
  > what happened to websites?! Did you ever think that many businesses never had a website. Even fewer had one that was up-to-date and useful. What happened is that the masses found their way in to the web, and they did it the easiest way possible. There is still many independent businesses that have a small website. You haven't proven that the number of such independent business websites has declined. Most likely, the fraction of small businesses that has an online presence has increased. And this may have skewed the ratio of websites to Facebook pages. But in absolute numbers, I doubt there's fewer small independent websites today.
dgb23 6y ago
I'm not that big on Google criticism. I dislike targeted advertising, because I find it useless. I like context advertising much more: When I browse X then I find ads related to X sometimes useful. I use some of their products like gmail and drive sometimes. But for browsing and searching I use Firefox and DDG. But as a web-dev I dislike Apple/Safari. They have become MS/IE 2.0. My not so generous assumption is that they try to restrict the web to make their app platform more appealing. This issue is different from the things we criticize about Google. They neither restrict me as a user nor as a developer. I can avoid using their stuff and I can avoid aggressively targeted ads (in fact they have a psychologically negative impact on me). As for personal sites and blogs: I still very much read personal blogs. The quality (whatever that means, but you know...) of articles on those is generally much higher than on medium/dev.to or whatever platform. In fact there is so much good content on small/personal sites, that I don't have time to read it all.
- mistersquid 6y ago
  > But as a web-dev I dislike Apple/Safari. They have become MS/IE 2.0. This sentiment is inexact and incorrect. MS/IE was a problem once it achieved market dominance. Safari has never achieved such dominance. More accurate is a comparison using Netscape 1.x-4.x and MSIE =< 6. Allow me to explain. Prior to MSIE dominating with IE 6, MS was engaged in its campaign to "embrace, extend, and extinguish" Netscape. This is similar to where Google Chrome is now. Google Chrome rolls in not-yet-ratified web "standards" before anyone, including Safari, has a chance to respond. Thereby, Google Chrome increasingly establishes its dominance. Safari is in the position of Netscape, with a codebase that is increasingly perceived as inadequate when compared to Google Chrome. Of course, such a comparison can only go so far. My main point is that Safari is not flouting or disregarding established W3C/WHATWG web standards but, rather, being very careful about how it implements ratified standards, something that takes time. Google Chrome, on the other hand, bakes in anything and everything to secure its advantage in the browser market, just as MS did with IE when Netscape was still around. Once Netscape died, MSIE 6 was the problem.
  - dgb23 6y ago
    First of all thank you for relativising my one-sided comment. Let me clarify what I mean a bit. I agree with you on your arguments about Chrome. I don't support Chrome specific features. They even have broken things in the past. My perspective on this is that iOS locks out non-Safari browsers, so users are forced to use it and as a developer I'm forced to make workarounds for it. With IE11 I don't have this problem anymore. We're at a stage now where I can convince my clients of "This is a browser, which is losing official support soon. I can make this feature work/look better on IE11 if you really want, which costs me this much time". IE is being faded out just by the fact that more new stuff looks worse and works worse. With Safari this is not the case. There is no "Oh this website works better with Firefox, you should install it" which is likely the biggest factor for browser adoption and my gut feeling says that Apple knows and uses this. This particular statement seems questionable: > My main point is that Safari is not flouting or disregarding established W3C/WHATWG web standards but, rather, being very careful about how it implements those standards which takes time. In some cases their actions simply don't make sense, except if you look at it from a perspective of protecting their iOS App platform. For example breaking localStorage in the name of privacy (which is ridiculously paradox) and not supporting obvious, simple UX improvements like scroll-anchoring. Safari is in some cases stricter/more standards compliant than Firefox and especially Chrome. But in some cases like above the feature intersection of Firefox and Chrome is the one that makes the most sense for the web.
PJDK 6y ago
I assume you were being rhetorical - but it definitely still happens. Radiohead's website redesign being the last one I personally experienced earlier this year https://www.radiohead.com/library/#ir https://www.radiohead.com/library/#ir (mostly sharing because it's great).
AlexandrB 6y ago
To add, a lot of practices that were considered "spyware" or "malware" during the web dark ages have become normalized as growth-hacks or the cost of using free (as in beer) software.
drno123 6y ago
Add to that a wast amount of shitty articles written fore the sole purpose of SEO.
- xtracto 6y ago
  This for me is what has really decreased the quality of the Internet. Geocities was full of really good articles about things like electronics instructions manuals, DIYs and whatnot. Nowadays the Internet is full of spam disguised as content, but really not containing any content. The majority of the content you see on the web is actually written by marketing agencies, and even "white papers", "case studies" or other similar articles are nothing more than marketing material.
ngold 6y ago
Our privacy is their serfdom to profit off of.
rkagerer 6y ago
> They're upon us right now. That was my first thought too, when I read the headline.
annowiki 6y ago
This is so depressing to read. I'm a self-taught developer with no professional experience, but for over a year I learned everything I needed to know to build a massive web application to fulfill my own need: a collaborative annotation wiki. I poured my freaking heart into it and could never get a single user. I drew on Jimmy Wales' experiences founding Wikipedia for a lot of inspiration. But got nowhere near the traction he got. As in, I got zero users after nine months since launch. Now it's largely a portfolio piece as I try to search for a real job in tech, by leveraging the 14,000 lines of code in Python/Flask to prove that I know how to develop an app. ( https://anno.wiki https://anno.wiki is the url if you're curious). I can only hope that the real reasons I haven't gained traction are that (a) the interface just isn't welcoming enough (I tried too hard to do progressive enhancement with almost no experience in UX) and (b) simply not advertising. After a nine month break I'm getting ready to start re-developing a new front end in React to maybe make it more welcoming to non-techie lit nerds, and then maybe target advertise on Facebook, but I just don't know. My deepest fear is just that the web is not an interesting place anymore, and Wikipedia just wouldn't get a foothold now, and that's why I can't. I just don't know.
- whatshisface 6y ago
  Some comments on your wiki: 1. The contrast is way too low, I can barely read it. 2. The typesetting for Hamlet looks really nice. 3. Why would I want to use this?
  - annowiki 6y ago
    Thank you for looking at it! The basic idea was (is) to create a definitive resource for annotations on literature. Annotated information on any text is spread sloppily across different editions, from Oxford World Classics to Norton, and generally don't focus on the same issues. Much of it is commentary on textual issues, or only identify certain things. Entire passages will be detailed in one copy, but not in another. Basically I just feel like there should be a definitive resource for deep reading. An ever more detailed pool of analytical interpretation. It's a dream, I just don't know that others are as interested in it as me. There are certain resources, like Infinite Jest Page by Page[1] that were essentially a single book version of what I'm trying to accomplish and were super effective, but not very normalized or formalized. I really just hope to do something like that, on a larger scale, with more literature. My dream would be to also include copyright texts, viewable either through a token provided by a purchase of the text from the publisher, or by just searching for lines to see annotations. I really just want to create a super massive body of exhaustive and quasi-definitive annotations to all of the world's literature. And yeah, the color scheme is apparently not very popular. It's really just my own implementation of Ethan Schoonover's light version of solarized[0], which is supposed to be what it's like to read a book in the shade on a bright summer day. But however romantic that sounds, it's not very popular. [0]: https://ethanschoonover.com/solarized/ https://ethanschoonover.com/solarized/ [1]: https://infinitejest.wallacewiki.com/david-foster-wallace/index.php?title=Infinite_Jest_Page_by_Page https://infinitejest.wallacewiki.com/david-foster-wallace/in...

GordonS 6y ago

Facebook is perhaps the most frightening for me, because for many people Facebook is the internet! Something I absolutely hate is when I want to learn more about a local business and search for them on Google, but all I find is a Facebook page with minimal info - what happened to websites?!

artificial 6y ago
Facebook is like AOL in the heyday: a curated contained world complete with IM. Chrome is effectively IE6 as Blink makes up a significant portion of the browser engines these days and many only test against it. Need some "Best viewed in Chrome!" gifs.
irrational 6y ago
I know. It would be okay if you could view Facebook pages without an account, but since I don’t have one, all of those pages (including many friends and family members) are entirely shut out for me.
sdevonoes 6y ago
Facebook is "free" (as in it does not cost money to open a profile and post info there). Websites are not, and even if they are, not all people know how to publish something to a website. I hate it too yeah, but for non-techie people Facebook is just plain simple.
sp332 6y ago
This effect is even stronger in certain countries where Facebook pays ISPs to zero-rate their pages, so many people only have access to Facebook because they can't afford to access the rest of the internet. If you think clickbait headlines are bad, imagine not having the ability to even click through to the article. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_Zero https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_Zero
xtracto 6y ago
> Facebook is perhaps the most frightening for me, because for many people Facebook is the internet! This reminded me the times of Mozilla Netscape, IE and Firefox. I remember having conversations in /. about how for "normal people" the big blue E icon is the Internet and that grandmas of the world cried that "the internet was gone" when that icon disappeard. Then it was Google, and now it is Facebook.
- GordonS 6y ago
  At least then it was the means of accessing the web, rather than the web itself.
jopsen 6y ago
> what happened to websites?! Did you ever think that many businesses never had a website. Even fewer had one that was up-to-date and useful. What happened is that the masses found their way in to the web, and they did it the easiest way possible. There is still many independent businesses that have a small website. You haven't proven that the number of such independent business websites has declined. Most likely, the fraction of small businesses that has an online presence has increased. And this may have skewed the ratio of websites to Facebook pages. But in absolute numbers, I doubt there's fewer small independent websites today.

dgb23 6y ago

I'm not that big on Google criticism. I dislike targeted advertising, because I find it useless. I like context advertising much more: When I browse X then I find ads related to X sometimes useful. I use some of their products like gmail and drive sometimes. But for browsing and searching I use Firefox and DDG. But as a web-dev I dislike Apple/Safari. They have become MS/IE 2.0. My not so generous assumption is that they try to restrict the web to make their app platform more appealing. This issue is different from the things we criticize about Google. They neither restrict me as a user nor as a developer. I can avoid using their stuff and I can avoid aggressively targeted ads (in fact they have a psychologically negative impact on me). As for personal sites and blogs: I still very much read personal blogs. The quality (whatever that means, but you know...) of articles on those is generally much higher than on medium/dev.to or whatever platform. In fact there is so much good content on small/personal sites, that I don't have time to read it all.

mistersquid 6y ago
> But as a web-dev I dislike Apple/Safari. They have become MS/IE 2.0. This sentiment is inexact and incorrect. MS/IE was a problem once it achieved market dominance. Safari has never achieved such dominance. More accurate is a comparison using Netscape 1.x-4.x and MSIE =< 6. Allow me to explain. Prior to MSIE dominating with IE 6, MS was engaged in its campaign to "embrace, extend, and extinguish" Netscape. This is similar to where Google Chrome is now. Google Chrome rolls in not-yet-ratified web "standards" before anyone, including Safari, has a chance to respond. Thereby, Google Chrome increasingly establishes its dominance. Safari is in the position of Netscape, with a codebase that is increasingly perceived as inadequate when compared to Google Chrome. Of course, such a comparison can only go so far. My main point is that Safari is not flouting or disregarding established W3C/WHATWG web standards but, rather, being very careful about how it implements ratified standards, something that takes time. Google Chrome, on the other hand, bakes in anything and everything to secure its advantage in the browser market, just as MS did with IE when Netscape was still around. Once Netscape died, MSIE 6 was the problem.
- dgb23 6y ago
  First of all thank you for relativising my one-sided comment. Let me clarify what I mean a bit. I agree with you on your arguments about Chrome. I don't support Chrome specific features. They even have broken things in the past. My perspective on this is that iOS locks out non-Safari browsers, so users are forced to use it and as a developer I'm forced to make workarounds for it. With IE11 I don't have this problem anymore. We're at a stage now where I can convince my clients of "This is a browser, which is losing official support soon. I can make this feature work/look better on IE11 if you really want, which costs me this much time". IE is being faded out just by the fact that more new stuff looks worse and works worse. With Safari this is not the case. There is no "Oh this website works better with Firefox, you should install it" which is likely the biggest factor for browser adoption and my gut feeling says that Apple knows and uses this. This particular statement seems questionable: > My main point is that Safari is not flouting or disregarding established W3C/WHATWG web standards but, rather, being very careful about how it implements those standards which takes time. In some cases their actions simply don't make sense, except if you look at it from a perspective of protecting their iOS App platform. For example breaking localStorage in the name of privacy (which is ridiculously paradox) and not supporting obvious, simple UX improvements like scroll-anchoring. Safari is in some cases stricter/more standards compliant than Firefox and especially Chrome. But in some cases like above the feature intersection of Firefox and Chrome is the one that makes the most sense for the web.

PJDK 6y ago

I assume you were being rhetorical - but it definitely still happens. Radiohead's website redesign being the last one I personally experienced earlier this year https://www.radiohead.com/library/#ir https://www.radiohead.com/library/#ir (mostly sharing because it's great).

AlexandrB 6y ago

To add, a lot of practices that were considered "spyware" or "malware" during the web dark ages have become normalized as growth-hacks or the cost of using free (as in beer) software.

drno123 6y ago

Add to that a wast amount of shitty articles written fore the sole purpose of SEO.

xtracto 6y ago
This for me is what has really decreased the quality of the Internet. Geocities was full of really good articles about things like electronics instructions manuals, DIYs and whatnot. Nowadays the Internet is full of spam disguised as content, but really not containing any content. The majority of the content you see on the web is actually written by marketing agencies, and even "white papers", "case studies" or other similar articles are nothing more than marketing material.

ngold 6y ago

Our privacy is their serfdom to profit off of.

rkagerer 6y ago

> They're upon us right now. That was my first thought too, when I read the headline.

annowiki 6y ago

This is so depressing to read. I'm a self-taught developer with no professional experience, but for over a year I learned everything I needed to know to build a massive web application to fulfill my own need: a collaborative annotation wiki. I poured my freaking heart into it and could never get a single user. I drew on Jimmy Wales' experiences founding Wikipedia for a lot of inspiration. But got nowhere near the traction he got. As in, I got zero users after nine months since launch. Now it's largely a portfolio piece as I try to search for a real job in tech, by leveraging the 14,000 lines of code in Python/Flask to prove that I know how to develop an app. ( https://anno.wiki https://anno.wiki is the url if you're curious). I can only hope that the real reasons I haven't gained traction are that (a) the interface just isn't welcoming enough (I tried too hard to do progressive enhancement with almost no experience in UX) and (b) simply not advertising. After a nine month break I'm getting ready to start re-developing a new front end in React to maybe make it more welcoming to non-techie lit nerds, and then maybe target advertise on Facebook, but I just don't know. My deepest fear is just that the web is not an interesting place anymore, and Wikipedia just wouldn't get a foothold now, and that's why I can't. I just don't know.

whatshisface 6y ago
Some comments on your wiki: 1. The contrast is way too low, I can barely read it. 2. The typesetting for Hamlet looks really nice. 3. Why would I want to use this?
- annowiki 6y ago
  Thank you for looking at it! The basic idea was (is) to create a definitive resource for annotations on literature. Annotated information on any text is spread sloppily across different editions, from Oxford World Classics to Norton, and generally don't focus on the same issues. Much of it is commentary on textual issues, or only identify certain things. Entire passages will be detailed in one copy, but not in another. Basically I just feel like there should be a definitive resource for deep reading. An ever more detailed pool of analytical interpretation. It's a dream, I just don't know that others are as interested in it as me. There are certain resources, like Infinite Jest Page by Page[1] that were essentially a single book version of what I'm trying to accomplish and were super effective, but not very normalized or formalized. I really just hope to do something like that, on a larger scale, with more literature. My dream would be to also include copyright texts, viewable either through a token provided by a purchase of the text from the publisher, or by just searching for lines to see annotations. I really just want to create a super massive body of exhaustive and quasi-definitive annotations to all of the world's literature. And yeah, the color scheme is apparently not very popular. It's really just my own implementation of Ethan Schoonover's light version of solarized[0], which is supposed to be what it's like to read a book in the shade on a bright summer day. But however romantic that sounds, it's not very popular. [0]: https://ethanschoonover.com/solarized/ https://ethanschoonover.com/solarized/ [1]: https://infinitejest.wallacewiki.com/david-foster-wallace/index.php?title=Infinite_Jest_Page_by_Page https://infinitejest.wallacewiki.com/david-foster-wallace/in...