4 ms·

I think maybe your post is conflating "evil" and "user-hostile."

by fwip 5y ago

Karrot_Kream 5y ago
No and that's the point. Gemini is developer-centric and user-hostile. It isn't evil. These are distinct concepts. We can't use good and evil as a way to exonerate bad software.
- wahern 5y ago
  The original promise of the Internet and, especially, the WWW was to elide the distinction between publisher and consumer--i.e. developer and user. The incredible increase in the complexity of the modern internet has almost completely restored that fundamental distinction, if not made it deeper and wider, giving rise to publishers (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc) and other media companies (e.g. Google) with powers we haven't seen for over a century, if ever.
  - Jtsummers 5y ago
    > The original promise of the Internet and, especially, the WWW was to elide the distinction between publisher and consumer--i.e. developer and user. Where does this idea come from?
    - wahern 5y ago
      From the 1990s and, to a lesser degree, early 2000s internet culture--both the zeitgest and scholarship. I'd post links but ever since Google began heavily favoring publication date over keyword and semantic matching I've found it difficult and often impossible (not for lack of trying) to find the various websites, manifestos, blogs, and magazine articles that I read and re-read back then. One of my favorite manifestos was about the issue of [the non-existence of] spectrum scarcity, which also hashed out the threat posed by the reimposition of a strong publisher/consumer dichotomy. Alas, I haven't been able to find it again in the past several years. These days whenever I come across a good article (my metric is an article I return to at least once, either to re-read or cite) I archive the link. Google is now useless for finding anything but the most recent content, and headed in that same direction when it comes to finding substantive content. Another object lesson in the perils of centralization and technological reliance.
    - weikju 5y ago
      https://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/WorldWideWeb.html https://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/WorldWideWeb.html > The first web browser - or browser-editor rather > ... https://worldwideweb.cern.ch/worldwideweb/ https://worldwideweb.cern.ch/worldwideweb/ > Editing > To edit any document, whether it's one you created, or a page on the world wide web: > Click on the text you want edit. > Edit it.
  - Karrot_Kream 5y ago
    > The original promise of the Internet and, especially, the WWW was to elide the distinction between publisher and consumer--i.e. developer and user. I disagree. I do _not_ equate a "publisher" with a "developer". I'd much rather see a world where publishers are _not_ developers. It's not like all the books I read are written by developers.
    - wahern 5y ago
      A developer is analogous to publisher because of the deep publisher/consumer dichotomy. Complexity favors scale, scale requires capital; similarly, complexity favors specialized skills (e.g. developers), which require capital. Of course, publishers are not actually the same as developers. Few Facebook engineers consider themselves publishers. Heck, Facebook doesn't consider itself a publisher--in the contemporary context a publisher would be a media platform (or "technology" platform). But it's publishers who pay developers, and it's often developers who seek to find themselves in the role of publisher, building their walled gardens, through their startups. Similarly, both publisher and developer are active roles, whereas user and consumer are passive--they exist as largely distinct roles with one primarily existing to enrich the other in exchange for entertainment. The original promise was in many ways overly simplistic. For one thing, scientists (e.g. CERN scientists) were much better positioned to acquire and utilize certain technical skills as an ancillary part of their job. But the ultimate belief was that by eliding the distinction between publisher and consumer, the erstwhile consumers would be empowered and the erstwhile publishers disempowered. The concern was, as it remains today, about relative control over both the media and the message. It many important ways it's still relatively simple as an absolute matter to throw up a simple HTML site. But the opportunity costs are different, and so we self-sort ourselves into traditional roles. In that way the original promise was even more naive in believing that roles wouldn't bifurcate in a manner similar to how they historically had been. Also, suffice it to say that there are still huge markets where developers work building systems not directly related to publishing. But it's the publishers and their ecosystems that are driving most modern software systems, and they drive those systems in directions that are rarely well suited for the needs of everybody else. Rather, those systems are optimized for a network where media platforms push out highly sophisticated content and users are still largely passive consumers notwithstanding the interactive, social aspect.
- dredmorbius 5y ago
  Coming back after thinking over your comment and this thread for a while. The Web really just does not have a user-oriented document format presently. HTML5 via WATWG / Google / Facebook is advertiser friendly. The result is horrible both for anyone looking to independently implement a fully-compliant, capable Web browser AND any user actually accessing Today's-Web-As-Designed. Gemini addresses the dev-unfriendliness ... bu still tosses out far too much functionality IMO in the name of simplicity. The basic semantics of HTML5 are actually reasonably sound, but without some external enforcement over styles and complexity, it's simply going to be abused. Having used tablets and e-readers principally for the past six years or so, I much prefer the presentation of, yes, PDF (generally, it's still possible to stuff those up entirely) to virtually anything rendered in HTML by a browser. At a desktop system, console-mode simple markup remains reasonably readily consumed, and is quite useful for reference and incorporation into other works (writing / literature study). I'm not entirely sure where the answer lies, but I don't think Gemini is the promised land. Possibly a bondage-and-disciplin markup format, enforced by ... what exactly I don't know, though a defined set of document formats, and perhaps an independent search platform's ranking systems, might be one approach. (Yes, addressing the issues of copyright, compensation, and authors integrity might also help, though at this point, stripping the Web of all advertising seems a good start.)
  - Karrot_Kream 5y ago
    I largely agree with this. A constrained markup format I look to for inspiration is EPUB [1], which uses XHTML and a constrained directory layout, but recent versions have fallen in thrall of HTML5 and has the potential for its attendant complexity. I think a scoped version of EPUB has a lot of promise and is readily supported on many, many devices. Another format inspired similarly is the now-defunc WML [2], which uses an even more constrained XML document to describe layout specifically for constrained devices. Regardless, I largely feel that constrained markup formats are where the effort to make the web both user and developer friendly again should lie. There is also another defunct format, the AMB [3] which is a very different approach, but its goals and assumptions are a little too far out from the expectations of modern users IMO. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPUB https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPUB [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_Markup_Language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_Markup_Language [3]: http://amb.osdn.io/ http://amb.osdn.io/

I think maybe your post is conflating "evil" and "user-hostile."

by fwip 5y ago

I think maybe your post is conflating "evil" and "user-hostile."

No and that's the point. Gemini is developer-centric and user-hostile. It isn't evil. These are distinct concepts. We can't use good and evil as a way to exonerate bad software.

wahern 5y ago
The original promise of the Internet and, especially, the WWW was to elide the distinction between publisher and consumer--i.e. developer and user. The incredible increase in the complexity of the modern internet has almost completely restored that fundamental distinction, if not made it deeper and wider, giving rise to publishers (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc) and other media companies (e.g. Google) with powers we haven't seen for over a century, if ever.
- Jtsummers 5y ago
  > The original promise of the Internet and, especially, the WWW was to elide the distinction between publisher and consumer--i.e. developer and user. Where does this idea come from?
  - wahern 5y ago
    From the 1990s and, to a lesser degree, early 2000s internet culture--both the zeitgest and scholarship. I'd post links but ever since Google began heavily favoring publication date over keyword and semantic matching I've found it difficult and often impossible (not for lack of trying) to find the various websites, manifestos, blogs, and magazine articles that I read and re-read back then. One of my favorite manifestos was about the issue of [the non-existence of] spectrum scarcity, which also hashed out the threat posed by the reimposition of a strong publisher/consumer dichotomy. Alas, I haven't been able to find it again in the past several years. These days whenever I come across a good article (my metric is an article I return to at least once, either to re-read or cite) I archive the link. Google is now useless for finding anything but the most recent content, and headed in that same direction when it comes to finding substantive content. Another object lesson in the perils of centralization and technological reliance.
  - weikju 5y ago
    https://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/WorldWideWeb.html https://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/WorldWideWeb.html > The first web browser - or browser-editor rather > ... https://worldwideweb.cern.ch/worldwideweb/ https://worldwideweb.cern.ch/worldwideweb/ > Editing > To edit any document, whether it's one you created, or a page on the world wide web: > Click on the text you want edit. > Edit it.
- Karrot_Kream 5y ago
  > The original promise of the Internet and, especially, the WWW was to elide the distinction between publisher and consumer--i.e. developer and user. I disagree. I do _not_ equate a "publisher" with a "developer". I'd much rather see a world where publishers are _not_ developers. It's not like all the books I read are written by developers.
  - wahern 5y ago
    A developer is analogous to publisher because of the deep publisher/consumer dichotomy. Complexity favors scale, scale requires capital; similarly, complexity favors specialized skills (e.g. developers), which require capital. Of course, publishers are not actually the same as developers. Few Facebook engineers consider themselves publishers. Heck, Facebook doesn't consider itself a publisher--in the contemporary context a publisher would be a media platform (or "technology" platform). But it's publishers who pay developers, and it's often developers who seek to find themselves in the role of publisher, building their walled gardens, through their startups. Similarly, both publisher and developer are active roles, whereas user and consumer are passive--they exist as largely distinct roles with one primarily existing to enrich the other in exchange for entertainment. The original promise was in many ways overly simplistic. For one thing, scientists (e.g. CERN scientists) were much better positioned to acquire and utilize certain technical skills as an ancillary part of their job. But the ultimate belief was that by eliding the distinction between publisher and consumer, the erstwhile consumers would be empowered and the erstwhile publishers disempowered. The concern was, as it remains today, about relative control over both the media and the message. It many important ways it's still relatively simple as an absolute matter to throw up a simple HTML site. But the opportunity costs are different, and so we self-sort ourselves into traditional roles. In that way the original promise was even more naive in believing that roles wouldn't bifurcate in a manner similar to how they historically had been. Also, suffice it to say that there are still huge markets where developers work building systems not directly related to publishing. But it's the publishers and their ecosystems that are driving most modern software systems, and they drive those systems in directions that are rarely well suited for the needs of everybody else. Rather, those systems are optimized for a network where media platforms push out highly sophisticated content and users are still largely passive consumers notwithstanding the interactive, social aspect.
dredmorbius 5y ago
Coming back after thinking over your comment and this thread for a while. The Web really just does not have a user-oriented document format presently. HTML5 via WATWG / Google / Facebook is advertiser friendly. The result is horrible both for anyone looking to independently implement a fully-compliant, capable Web browser AND any user actually accessing Today's-Web-As-Designed. Gemini addresses the dev-unfriendliness ... bu still tosses out far too much functionality IMO in the name of simplicity. The basic semantics of HTML5 are actually reasonably sound, but without some external enforcement over styles and complexity, it's simply going to be abused. Having used tablets and e-readers principally for the past six years or so, I much prefer the presentation of, yes, PDF (generally, it's still possible to stuff those up entirely) to virtually anything rendered in HTML by a browser. At a desktop system, console-mode simple markup remains reasonably readily consumed, and is quite useful for reference and incorporation into other works (writing / literature study). I'm not entirely sure where the answer lies, but I don't think Gemini is the promised land. Possibly a bondage-and-disciplin markup format, enforced by ... what exactly I don't know, though a defined set of document formats, and perhaps an independent search platform's ranking systems, might be one approach. (Yes, addressing the issues of copyright, compensation, and authors integrity might also help, though at this point, stripping the Web of all advertising seems a good start.)
- Karrot_Kream 5y ago
  I largely agree with this. A constrained markup format I look to for inspiration is EPUB [1], which uses XHTML and a constrained directory layout, but recent versions have fallen in thrall of HTML5 and has the potential for its attendant complexity. I think a scoped version of EPUB has a lot of promise and is readily supported on many, many devices. Another format inspired similarly is the now-defunc WML [2], which uses an even more constrained XML document to describe layout specifically for constrained devices. Regardless, I largely feel that constrained markup formats are where the effort to make the web both user and developer friendly again should lie. There is also another defunct format, the AMB [3] which is a very different approach, but its goals and assumptions are a little too far out from the expectations of modern users IMO. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPUB https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPUB [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_Markup_Language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_Markup_Language [3]: http://amb.osdn.io/ http://amb.osdn.io/