8 ms·

Sure, the web used to be a fun place for tinkerers in the beginning. But the cat's out of the bag and we cannot put it back inside. Going luddite is never a go

Sure, the web used to be a fun place for tinkerers in the beginning. But the cat's out of the bag and we cannot put it back inside. Going luddite is never a good solution. We'll just have to accept the consequences of what all this new development has brought us and learn how to live with it, not suppress all recent development in the hopes of recreating an environment that only really worked for a small subsection of humanity. Personally, I'm hoping all this share-everything is just a trend, that will pass by itself. Future users will look back at it with a sense of wonder: did people really post pictures of their food online? "Yep, and then we had buttons to tell each other that we liked seeing it. It was a weird time. Some people still miss it and argue we should go back to Web 2.0."

shockeychap 5y ago
> Personally, I'm hoping all this share-everything is just a trend, that will pass by itself. Future users will look back at it with a sense of wonder: did people really post pictures of their food online? "Yep, and then we had buttons to tell each other that we liked seeing it. It was a weird time. Some people still miss it and argue we should go back to Web 3.0." This. 100%.
- jordz 5y ago
  Also agree. However, I do yearn to relive the days where one can load up a web page and start reading content, without being jarred by pop-ups and ads that inadvertently move the content post load (which of course happens 3 seconds later..).
  - todd3834 5y ago
    Ad blockers are so good that I nearly forgot about this experience.
  - marginalia_nu 5y ago
    I know a site, it's on mobile. You use it by entering a location in a search bar. You select the search bar, the keyboard takes a second to appear. You start typing, nothing happens because they've reimplemented the text box in javascript, and the script hasn't fully loaded yet. The script loads and the second half of the letters you typed appears in a letter by letter fashion. The page freezes and a suggestion box appears, every second or so the suggestions change to reflect the letters you typed earlier. You erase what you've typed. With every letter that changes, the page freezes a second as a new suggestion loads. When it freezes, it stops accepting letters, so there's a lot of erasing and re-typing. Alright, you're almost done typing... then the page freezes and the page turns grey, and a pop over loads. They want you to load fill out a satisfaction survey. You try to close it to continue, but the script handling the close button hasn't loaded yet so it doesn't work for a good 20 seconds. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a javascript stomping on a human face -- for ever.
    - iamevn 5y ago
      This accurately describes my experience using Google Search on Google Chrome on a Google Pixel 5 running the latest version of Google Android (for good measure, using Gboard). It baffles me that for a long time I couldn't even select text in the search bar without something going so wrong that my phone ground to a halt and had to soft reboot.
  - ryandrake 5y ago
    There was an article posted here [1] a few weeks ago called I Don’t Like Computers which had the same nostalgic vibe about computing in the past and I argue it boils down to loss of control. End users used to be in charge. We used to be in the driver’s seat. We used to tell computers what to do. Now, with pop-ups, ads, notifications, and so on, they tell us what we should be doing and we have to beg and work around them to do what we want. “Where do you want to go today?” is long dead. 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30851371 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30851371
Starlevel001 5y ago
> Going luddite is never a good solution. > Personally, I'm hoping all this share-everything is just a trend, that will pass by itself. Future users will look back at it with a sense of wonder: did people really post pictures of their food online? This seems like a very contradictory post.
- sleepymoose 5y ago
  I disagree. The first point is saying we shouldn't go backwards, which I agree with. The second is hoping for forward progress, the exact thing that he was arguing for with the first point.
  - c22 5y ago
    Being a luddite isn't about going backwards, it's about refusing to support technologies that work against your interests.
    - DrSiemer 5y ago
      Being a luddite is not about withholding support, it is about completely denying the existence of new technologies, or even actively trying to destroy them. A return to the state of web 1.0 would definitely be a major move backwards, similar to banning the use of cars to prevent traffic accidents from happening. Wouldn't it be better to just learn how to drive?
      - AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
        The Luddites were a group of people who destroyed machinery that threatened their livelihood. In modern parlance it typically just means someone who is opposed to the adoption of new technology. I think parent's definition is more accurate than yours in either case.
- Retric 5y ago
  Sharing a vastly smaller fraction of things is completely reasonable. Currently systems are optimized by social media companies to maximize engagement not utility. Unfortunately, the only way that’s likely to change is a new company or nonprofit that decides not to sell out to Facebook or Advertising.
hwers 5y ago
I've come to think of this as just a culture problem. We think of share-everything and recent social changes as innovation and "the future" but not everything that is modified at t+1 vs at time t is necessarily a pareto improvement. I've come to believe something similar to you, that we need to come to our senses (each individually) and converge to more reasonable social norms.
Brian_K_White 5y ago
"Going luddite is never a good solution." Change is merely change, neither good nor bad. Same for absense of change.
Existenceblinks 5y ago
> It was a weird time Torture time is so long. A generation loss is bearable. A couple generation loss seems like hell. I'm pessimistic that we are going to a worse era.
gjulianm 5y ago
> Personally, I'm hoping all this share-everything is just a trend, that will pass by itself. I think it definitely has passed, at least in my environment. I see less people sharing inane things, and most of the time it's done they use things like stories, which are temporary and with less feedback (no "like button" on Instagram stories, for example, only messages), and more organic (the same way some people talk about whatever they ate in person, they share it with their friends with these tools).
navjack27 5y ago
It's not even going Luddite. Look at the other pages linked in the web ring. There are some slick websites.
rootusrootus 5y ago
> Personally, I'm hoping all this share-everything is just a trend, that will pass by itself. Future users will look back at it with a sense of wonder: did people really post pictures of their food online? "Yep, and then we had buttons to tell each other that we liked seeing it. It was a weird time. Some people still miss it and argue we should go back to Web 2.0." I expect future generations may well say the same thing about memes. "People thought that was cool???"
- DrSiemer 5y ago
  Memes are a new type of language, a development supported by technology that is in some ways comparable to the rise of remixing music. I don't think they will be ridiculed to the same level as I hope our current social media behavior will be. They will more likely evolve to new levels, when the methods of remixing media expand and they become even easier to create.
photochemsyn 5y ago
It's not the users choosing to share something that's the problem, it's the corporations choosing to collect every bit of data on their users they can without the consent of the users. From the article: > "But it gets worse. These social media giants are collecting data about every single internet user at an alarming rate, housing it in enormous data storage facilities around the world. Once collected, this information is analyzed, compiled, and sold to any interested parties willing to pay for it. It’s not only your activities in a web browser that are gathered; many smart devices including televisions, smart phones, home automation equipment, and more will passively listen to casual conversation looking for key words and phrases. This data will be correlated with the online profile of the speaker with speech recognition and anything you talk about will be added to a database of your interests. Once complied, this data becomes impossible to track down and remove. A user’s personal data will never disappear from the internet. It will be continually be added to, recompiled, reanalyzed, and sold over and over in order to sell ads in the hope of selling a product. If you sign up for a free service on the web, then you are what is being sold."
- shadowgovt 5y ago
  Going Web 1.0 wouldn't stop that. The genie that came out of the bottle was the realization that such whole-data aggregation is possible. Take away JavaScript today, and it'd be replaced with the (slower, but still lucrative enough to justify it) process of paying site admins to share their access logs and user account data.
- mkl 5y ago
  > many smart devices including televisions, smart phones, home automation equipment, and more will passively listen to casual conversation looking for key words and phrases. That sounds like conspiracy theory nonsense. Is there any evidence for this beyond anecdotes that are probably Baader-Meinhof effects? If it was happening, hundreds of people would be working on those systems, and at least one of them would have talked.
  - candiddevmike 5y ago
    I don't think anyone will be able to find out easily since this communication is encrypted. Who knows what the random bursts of data from some IoT device are? I can guarantee someone built a way to enable telemetry and diagnostic data into these devices "to improve user experience". It wouldn't take much for another engineer/sociopathic PM to enable it across the board (telemetry is now opt out) or change the sampling frequency or storage location.
kkfx 5y ago
Well, just imaging a different society: you have broadband at home and that means you have a small homeserver at home, an IPv6 global for it, a domain name for you/you family/business with eventual subdomains. You took photos with connected device like you do today, but instead of sync them against your Google Drive/iCloud your phone sync them to your homeserver both via internet when you are on the go or at home in your LAN. Your friend have a phonebook like all modern smartphones have today but that's phonebook is a little bit more featuresful, from it looking for a contact you can initiate a voice{,+video} call IP2IP, you can write a mail but also see a classic blog page of the contact if he/she/it have one, this is just a local app that offer you correspondents "public namespaces" (Plan 9 style) mounted locally as you wish and cached locally as you wish. That's means that you photo gallery offer access to your contacts public photos and videos, just looking for them. You browser, a real browser, not a modern WebVM offer your contacts sites, cached as you wish in similar ways etc. That's means: more functionalities, no feature erased by some corporate decision, only the community decide, you contents on your iron, contents you like on your iron, so far faster usage, far better integration, far less reliance on any specific third party services. Not a single functionality less. It's not a dream, technically is perfectly doable, those systems actually are already designed decades ago, with the first P2P video-conference with screen sharing in 1968 (NLS mother of all the demos), with late '70s Xerox Star Office system etc it's not there just because few big & powerful have other plans for their own interests and most others do not know nor care.
enos_feedler 5y ago
We can't put it back inside, but we can create new silos within the web that are not built around Delaware c corps and instead built around communities with standards/culture so that we can choose the kind of places we want to be online. We need to move away from the "app" and platform metaphors and into something different that connects people together. I think Jack sort of wanted Twitter to be this but in realizing it wasn't possible to build this as a Delaware C corp itself, kicked off Bluesky.
nonrandomstring 5y ago
> Going luddite Please, I do wish you would think carefully before using what is really a pejorative and potentially quite insulting term in regard to modern tech critique. Some of the smartest people out there, who built the digital world you take for granted today, are having (belated) second thoughts about the social and geo-political impacts of these creations. Heartily I recommend Cory Doctorow's recent piece about this [1]. One could arguably turn it around and say that those "cargo-cultists" hell-bent on ploughing ahead regardless, without pause or reflection, are closer to the common misuse of the word "Luddite" - a kind of straw-chewing bumpkin who lives in fear of progress. No. Progress is the radical questioning of "progress" itself. > We'll just have to accept the consequences of what all this new > development has brought us and learn how to live with it No we won't. Be careful of this "genie and bottle" fallacy. It is absolutely the wrong attitude found at the intersection of unreasoned defeatism, resignation, learned helplessness, and abdication of civic engagement and responsibility. We are here, as hackers, to _shape_ the technology that runs our world, not to sit on the sidelines and amuse ourselves to death [2]. > recreating an environment that only really worked for a small subsection of humanity. There's a framing error in this reasoning. The technology of Web 1.0 did not exist in limited scope because it was only suitable for a small subsection of humanity. It was only being used by a small subsection because that was the developmental stage of the web. One could say (disingenuously) that at the time Web 1.0 was such a successful technology it was being used by 100 percent of web users! [1] https://onezero.medium.com/science-fiction-is-a-luddite-literature-56ed9cfc5470 https://onezero.medium.com/science-fiction-is-a-luddite-lite... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death
- Clubber 5y ago
  Just to add, Luddites weren't irrationally afraid of technology like is commonly believed. They destroyed machinery because they saw it being used to destroy artisanship and their livelihoods. Perhaps we'd be better off of there were more Luddites going from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 or offshoring jobs, or military AI. Just as an example, I own furniture my parents bought in the 1960s when they were first married. It's still solid. My family has furniture from the 1800s that still is solid. The furniture I buy today I have to replace every 5 years and is complete garbage. Maybe we should stop considering being a Luddite as a pejorative and perhaps concede they might have been right about some industries. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite
digitalsanctum 5y ago
> I'm hoping all this share-everything is just a trend, that will pass by itself. "Hope" is not a strategy
jjav 5y ago
> Going luddite is never a good solution. That's a terribly fatalistic position and also a misrepresentation. Rejecting the centralized ad-driven wall-garden spyware model isn't "luddite" in the offensive sense you're using it. It's a matter of noticing what's best for the user and consumer, not for the adware companies. The good thing is that it's still all there, just drowned out by the noise. I maintain my blog as always have, I maintain my hobby interest websites for others as a reference source (some of these going back to mid 90s, some I've just started recently). Search engines today make these harder to find because my sites don't bring the advertisers any benefit. I have no ads, no trackers, no "analytics" (aka trackers) or any such noise. Just content by regular people for regular people interested in various niche topics. But they still exist and people in those niche interest find their way to them. My suggestion to anyone is that if you're looking to become famous and gather millions of followers and all that, sure, use the mainstream platforms. But if you're just looking to share an interest, do it in a way that you control and keep the ad-spyware out: start a website, start a blog, start a mailing list. You won't scale to millions of users but that's a wonderful thing.
- moistly 5y ago
  > I have no ads, no trackers, no "analytics" (aka trackers) or any such noise. Just content by regular people for regular people interested in various niche topics. But they still exist and people in those niche interest find their way to them. We need a search engine/card catalog that makes it easier to find these real-person sites, that also checks on occasion that they are still not running analytics, ad-spyware, etc. I suppose an “Awesome” list could do the trick, even.
sneak 5y ago
> But the cat's out of the bag and we cannot put it back inside. I browse the web with javascript off for most sites, and my site works fine without javascript, renders text beautifully and readably. Millions read it without issue. Web 1.0 is still there and can still be used. I do. It's great.
1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago
"Sure, the web used to be a fun place for tinkerers. But the cat's out of the bag and we cannot put it back inside. "Going luddite is never a good solution." Making the web more fun for tinkerers is "going luddite"? I first used the web in 1993. I do not remember it being more "fun". Seems like there is far more "tinkering" going on today, namely by "web developers" who try to keep themselves entertained while pledging loyalty to surveillance and advertising. Reducing the amount of tinkering with respect to the "web development" would actually improve the web, at least for this user. Less "fixing" and "replacing" of things that work well enough.

shockeychap 5y ago

> Personally, I'm hoping all this share-everything is just a trend, that will pass by itself. Future users will look back at it with a sense of wonder: did people really post pictures of their food online? "Yep, and then we had buttons to tell each other that we liked seeing it. It was a weird time. Some people still miss it and argue we should go back to Web 3.0." This. 100%.

jordz 5y ago
Also agree. However, I do yearn to relive the days where one can load up a web page and start reading content, without being jarred by pop-ups and ads that inadvertently move the content post load (which of course happens 3 seconds later..).
- todd3834 5y ago
  Ad blockers are so good that I nearly forgot about this experience.
- marginalia_nu 5y ago
  I know a site, it's on mobile. You use it by entering a location in a search bar. You select the search bar, the keyboard takes a second to appear. You start typing, nothing happens because they've reimplemented the text box in javascript, and the script hasn't fully loaded yet. The script loads and the second half of the letters you typed appears in a letter by letter fashion. The page freezes and a suggestion box appears, every second or so the suggestions change to reflect the letters you typed earlier. You erase what you've typed. With every letter that changes, the page freezes a second as a new suggestion loads. When it freezes, it stops accepting letters, so there's a lot of erasing and re-typing. Alright, you're almost done typing... then the page freezes and the page turns grey, and a pop over loads. They want you to load fill out a satisfaction survey. You try to close it to continue, but the script handling the close button hasn't loaded yet so it doesn't work for a good 20 seconds. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a javascript stomping on a human face -- for ever.
  - iamevn 5y ago
    This accurately describes my experience using Google Search on Google Chrome on a Google Pixel 5 running the latest version of Google Android (for good measure, using Gboard). It baffles me that for a long time I couldn't even select text in the search bar without something going so wrong that my phone ground to a halt and had to soft reboot.
- ryandrake 5y ago
  There was an article posted here [1] a few weeks ago called I Don’t Like Computers which had the same nostalgic vibe about computing in the past and I argue it boils down to loss of control. End users used to be in charge. We used to be in the driver’s seat. We used to tell computers what to do. Now, with pop-ups, ads, notifications, and so on, they tell us what we should be doing and we have to beg and work around them to do what we want. “Where do you want to go today?” is long dead. 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30851371 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30851371

Starlevel001 5y ago

> Going luddite is never a good solution. > Personally, I'm hoping all this share-everything is just a trend, that will pass by itself. Future users will look back at it with a sense of wonder: did people really post pictures of their food online? This seems like a very contradictory post.

sleepymoose 5y ago
I disagree. The first point is saying we shouldn't go backwards, which I agree with. The second is hoping for forward progress, the exact thing that he was arguing for with the first point.
- c22 5y ago
  Being a luddite isn't about going backwards, it's about refusing to support technologies that work against your interests.
  - DrSiemer 5y ago
    Being a luddite is not about withholding support, it is about completely denying the existence of new technologies, or even actively trying to destroy them. A return to the state of web 1.0 would definitely be a major move backwards, similar to banning the use of cars to prevent traffic accidents from happening. Wouldn't it be better to just learn how to drive?
    - AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
      The Luddites were a group of people who destroyed machinery that threatened their livelihood. In modern parlance it typically just means someone who is opposed to the adoption of new technology. I think parent's definition is more accurate than yours in either case.
Retric 5y ago
Sharing a vastly smaller fraction of things is completely reasonable. Currently systems are optimized by social media companies to maximize engagement not utility. Unfortunately, the only way that’s likely to change is a new company or nonprofit that decides not to sell out to Facebook or Advertising.

hwers 5y ago

I've come to think of this as just a culture problem. We think of share-everything and recent social changes as innovation and "the future" but not everything that is modified at t+1 vs at time t is necessarily a pareto improvement. I've come to believe something similar to you, that we need to come to our senses (each individually) and converge to more reasonable social norms.

Brian_K_White 5y ago

"Going luddite is never a good solution." Change is merely change, neither good nor bad. Same for absense of change.

Existenceblinks 5y ago

> It was a weird time Torture time is so long. A generation loss is bearable. A couple generation loss seems like hell. I'm pessimistic that we are going to a worse era.

gjulianm 5y ago

> Personally, I'm hoping all this share-everything is just a trend, that will pass by itself. I think it definitely has passed, at least in my environment. I see less people sharing inane things, and most of the time it's done they use things like stories, which are temporary and with less feedback (no "like button" on Instagram stories, for example, only messages), and more organic (the same way some people talk about whatever they ate in person, they share it with their friends with these tools).

navjack27 5y ago

It's not even going Luddite. Look at the other pages linked in the web ring. There are some slick websites.

rootusrootus 5y ago

DrSiemer 5y ago
Memes are a new type of language, a development supported by technology that is in some ways comparable to the rise of remixing music. I don't think they will be ridiculed to the same level as I hope our current social media behavior will be. They will more likely evolve to new levels, when the methods of remixing media expand and they become even easier to create.

photochemsyn 5y ago

It's not the users choosing to share something that's the problem, it's the corporations choosing to collect every bit of data on their users they can without the consent of the users. From the article: > "But it gets worse. These social media giants are collecting data about every single internet user at an alarming rate, housing it in enormous data storage facilities around the world. Once collected, this information is analyzed, compiled, and sold to any interested parties willing to pay for it. It’s not only your activities in a web browser that are gathered; many smart devices including televisions, smart phones, home automation equipment, and more will passively listen to casual conversation looking for key words and phrases. This data will be correlated with the online profile of the speaker with speech recognition and anything you talk about will be added to a database of your interests. Once complied, this data becomes impossible to track down and remove. A user’s personal data will never disappear from the internet. It will be continually be added to, recompiled, reanalyzed, and sold over and over in order to sell ads in the hope of selling a product. If you sign up for a free service on the web, then you are what is being sold."

shadowgovt 5y ago
Going Web 1.0 wouldn't stop that. The genie that came out of the bottle was the realization that such whole-data aggregation is possible. Take away JavaScript today, and it'd be replaced with the (slower, but still lucrative enough to justify it) process of paying site admins to share their access logs and user account data.
mkl 5y ago
> many smart devices including televisions, smart phones, home automation equipment, and more will passively listen to casual conversation looking for key words and phrases. That sounds like conspiracy theory nonsense. Is there any evidence for this beyond anecdotes that are probably Baader-Meinhof effects? If it was happening, hundreds of people would be working on those systems, and at least one of them would have talked.
- candiddevmike 5y ago
  I don't think anyone will be able to find out easily since this communication is encrypted. Who knows what the random bursts of data from some IoT device are? I can guarantee someone built a way to enable telemetry and diagnostic data into these devices "to improve user experience". It wouldn't take much for another engineer/sociopathic PM to enable it across the board (telemetry is now opt out) or change the sampling frequency or storage location.

kkfx 5y ago

Well, just imaging a different society: you have broadband at home and that means you have a small homeserver at home, an IPv6 global for it, a domain name for you/you family/business with eventual subdomains. You took photos with connected device like you do today, but instead of sync them against your Google Drive/iCloud your phone sync them to your homeserver both via internet when you are on the go or at home in your LAN. Your friend have a phonebook like all modern smartphones have today but that's phonebook is a little bit more featuresful, from it looking for a contact you can initiate a voice{,+video} call IP2IP, you can write a mail but also see a classic blog page of the contact if he/she/it have one, this is just a local app that offer you correspondents "public namespaces" (Plan 9 style) mounted locally as you wish and cached locally as you wish. That's means that you photo gallery offer access to your contacts public photos and videos, just looking for them. You browser, a real browser, not a modern WebVM offer your contacts sites, cached as you wish in similar ways etc. That's means: more functionalities, no feature erased by some corporate decision, only the community decide, you contents on your iron, contents you like on your iron, so far faster usage, far better integration, far less reliance on any specific third party services. Not a single functionality less. It's not a dream, technically is perfectly doable, those systems actually are already designed decades ago, with the first P2P video-conference with screen sharing in 1968 (NLS mother of all the demos), with late '70s Xerox Star Office system etc it's not there just because few big & powerful have other plans for their own interests and most others do not know nor care.

enos_feedler 5y ago

We can't put it back inside, but we can create new silos within the web that are not built around Delaware c corps and instead built around communities with standards/culture so that we can choose the kind of places we want to be online. We need to move away from the "app" and platform metaphors and into something different that connects people together. I think Jack sort of wanted Twitter to be this but in realizing it wasn't possible to build this as a Delaware C corp itself, kicked off Bluesky.

nonrandomstring 5y ago

> Going luddite Please, I do wish you would think carefully before using what is really a pejorative and potentially quite insulting term in regard to modern tech critique. Some of the smartest people out there, who built the digital world you take for granted today, are having (belated) second thoughts about the social and geo-political impacts of these creations. Heartily I recommend Cory Doctorow's recent piece about this [1]. One could arguably turn it around and say that those "cargo-cultists" hell-bent on ploughing ahead regardless, without pause or reflection, are closer to the common misuse of the word "Luddite" - a kind of straw-chewing bumpkin who lives in fear of progress. No. Progress is the radical questioning of "progress" itself. > We'll just have to accept the consequences of what all this new > development has brought us and learn how to live with it No we won't. Be careful of this "genie and bottle" fallacy. It is absolutely the wrong attitude found at the intersection of unreasoned defeatism, resignation, learned helplessness, and abdication of civic engagement and responsibility. We are here, as hackers, to _shape_ the technology that runs our world, not to sit on the sidelines and amuse ourselves to death [2]. > recreating an environment that only really worked for a small subsection of humanity. There's a framing error in this reasoning. The technology of Web 1.0 did not exist in limited scope because it was only suitable for a small subsection of humanity. It was only being used by a small subsection because that was the developmental stage of the web. One could say (disingenuously) that at the time Web 1.0 was such a successful technology it was being used by 100 percent of web users! [1] https://onezero.medium.com/science-fiction-is-a-luddite-literature-56ed9cfc5470 https://onezero.medium.com/science-fiction-is-a-luddite-lite... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death

Clubber 5y ago
Just to add, Luddites weren't irrationally afraid of technology like is commonly believed. They destroyed machinery because they saw it being used to destroy artisanship and their livelihoods. Perhaps we'd be better off of there were more Luddites going from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 or offshoring jobs, or military AI. Just as an example, I own furniture my parents bought in the 1960s when they were first married. It's still solid. My family has furniture from the 1800s that still is solid. The furniture I buy today I have to replace every 5 years and is complete garbage. Maybe we should stop considering being a Luddite as a pejorative and perhaps concede they might have been right about some industries. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite

digitalsanctum 5y ago

> I'm hoping all this share-everything is just a trend, that will pass by itself. "Hope" is not a strategy

jjav 5y ago

> Going luddite is never a good solution. That's a terribly fatalistic position and also a misrepresentation. Rejecting the centralized ad-driven wall-garden spyware model isn't "luddite" in the offensive sense you're using it. It's a matter of noticing what's best for the user and consumer, not for the adware companies. The good thing is that it's still all there, just drowned out by the noise. I maintain my blog as always have, I maintain my hobby interest websites for others as a reference source (some of these going back to mid 90s, some I've just started recently). Search engines today make these harder to find because my sites don't bring the advertisers any benefit. I have no ads, no trackers, no "analytics" (aka trackers) or any such noise. Just content by regular people for regular people interested in various niche topics. But they still exist and people in those niche interest find their way to them. My suggestion to anyone is that if you're looking to become famous and gather millions of followers and all that, sure, use the mainstream platforms. But if you're just looking to share an interest, do it in a way that you control and keep the ad-spyware out: start a website, start a blog, start a mailing list. You won't scale to millions of users but that's a wonderful thing.

moistly 5y ago
> I have no ads, no trackers, no "analytics" (aka trackers) or any such noise. Just content by regular people for regular people interested in various niche topics. But they still exist and people in those niche interest find their way to them. We need a search engine/card catalog that makes it easier to find these real-person sites, that also checks on occasion that they are still not running analytics, ad-spyware, etc. I suppose an “Awesome” list could do the trick, even.

sneak 5y ago

> But the cat's out of the bag and we cannot put it back inside. I browse the web with javascript off for most sites, and my site works fine without javascript, renders text beautifully and readably. Millions read it without issue. Web 1.0 is still there and can still be used. I do. It's great.

1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago

"Sure, the web used to be a fun place for tinkerers. But the cat's out of the bag and we cannot put it back inside. "Going luddite is never a good solution." Making the web more fun for tinkerers is "going luddite"? I first used the web in 1993. I do not remember it being more "fun". Seems like there is far more "tinkering" going on today, namely by "web developers" who try to keep themselves entertained while pledging loyalty to surveillance and advertising. Reducing the amount of tinkering with respect to the "web development" would actually improve the web, at least for this user. Less "fixing" and "replacing" of things that work well enough.