5 ms·

> I wanted TikTok i'd use TikTok You want some experience, but then you describe how Youtube is forcing you to click through shorts and BS as that. I think p

> I wanted TikTok i'd use TikTok You want some experience, but then you describe how Youtube is forcing you to click through shorts and BS as that. I think power users should give up on direct interaction with internet. With youtube you can have a scripts that download videosm, and filter out shorts, ads and other garbage. With news you can just print everything on laser printer... Spotify should be exported as bunch of MP3 files... It is very easy to hire some English speaking assistant in India or Philippines, or have cron jobs that does tedious work for you. I think today, if you see ad on web, or you are directly exposed to some shifty behavior like Reddit does, it is major red flag for your lifestyle. Like when you live in an apartment without proper ventilation or with toxic fumes.

zuppy 3y ago
i (at least), as a power user, don't want to work for every small thing in my life. my free time gets spent on hobbies and friends, not on fixing the broken web. if i can use those tools with low friction, i will, if not, i will stop doing it entirely.
visarga 3y ago
> It is very easy to hire some English speaking assistant in India or Philippines, or have cron jobs that does tedious work for you. Mate, can I interest you in a bit of GPT? We got 3.5 and 4, good shit, you don't need to hire someone. The newsfeed is not a critical task, AI will suffice.
- tjoff 3y ago
  GPT isn't nearly powerful enough for that.
- cityhall 3y ago
  The solution to social media companies behaving badly once they have users locked in may not be to lock yourself into another unprofitable company's closed ecosystem that's temporarily free.
cshimmin 3y ago
Wow haven't seen a "peak hn" comment like this in the wild for quite a while :) Make a sure you write everything in brainfuck too! As for myself, I'll just stop using Reddit (largely have over the last year), and do something else with the free time.
- TeMPOraL 3y ago
  They have a point, though. In my honest opinion, more than 50% modern apps and services I've used - including e.g. Spotify, or pretty much every e-commerce site - have UI/UX strictly inferior to that of MS Access. Less functional, less ergonomic, less integrated, less useful. A lot of UI and design work that people think is creative, making a positive contribution, is actually spending millions of dollars on removing and reducing value delivered to the users relative to cheaper or near-free alternatives. Sometimes it's even funny. How many startups are explicitly or implicitly trying to be a replacement for some internal Excel spreadsheet? How many of them realize that their offering would work strictly better if it was distributed as an Excel spreadsheet or plugin instead of an SPA? But it's not about utility, it's about control. Driving users through funnels, putting them on flows that minimize actual creative or maintenance work for you, locking them in and bleeding dry with subscriptions.
  - ryandrake 3y ago
    I think web browsers need to get back to basics and do their original job as "The User's Agent" rather than what they are today: Instead of being a tool to fetch and display hyperlinked text, they've morphed into this API platform built for web companies to control down to the pixel what users see in their browser window. Today browsers barely give you a few blunt tools to control your own browsing experience: Javascript on/off, Styles on/off, and so on. I want a browser that 1. fetches YouTube's HTML, 2. understands it to be essentially a bunch of links to video URLs, and 3. present me a simple list of those video URLs that I can click to watch or download. I don't want my browser to act against me by being a platform where YouTube executes god-knows-what on my system to render everything the way YouTube wants and to show me things that YouTube wants and push content that YouTube wants to push. Put the user back in control. Same for Reddit. Browser should fetch Reddit's HTML, realize it's essentially a list of links, and simply display those links, ignoring all the other shit that comes down in the site's HTML, CSS, and JS. I realize that step #2 above is hard and probably magic at this point. But that's the direction I'd like to see browsers go. Stop adding even more APIs that companies can use to control my browser.
post-it 3y ago
Ok Stallman.
jjgreen 3y ago
Excellent, reminiscent of the search by postcard service offered by Google in the early days: https://www.labnol.org/internet/google-postcard-search/8085/ https://www.labnol.org/internet/google-postcard-search/8085/

zuppy 3y ago

i (at least), as a power user, don't want to work for every small thing in my life. my free time gets spent on hobbies and friends, not on fixing the broken web. if i can use those tools with low friction, i will, if not, i will stop doing it entirely.

visarga 3y ago

> It is very easy to hire some English speaking assistant in India or Philippines, or have cron jobs that does tedious work for you. Mate, can I interest you in a bit of GPT? We got 3.5 and 4, good shit, you don't need to hire someone. The newsfeed is not a critical task, AI will suffice.

tjoff 3y ago
GPT isn't nearly powerful enough for that.
cityhall 3y ago
The solution to social media companies behaving badly once they have users locked in may not be to lock yourself into another unprofitable company's closed ecosystem that's temporarily free.

cshimmin 3y ago

Wow haven't seen a "peak hn" comment like this in the wild for quite a while :) Make a sure you write everything in brainfuck too! As for myself, I'll just stop using Reddit (largely have over the last year), and do something else with the free time.

TeMPOraL 3y ago
They have a point, though. In my honest opinion, more than 50% modern apps and services I've used - including e.g. Spotify, or pretty much every e-commerce site - have UI/UX strictly inferior to that of MS Access. Less functional, less ergonomic, less integrated, less useful. A lot of UI and design work that people think is creative, making a positive contribution, is actually spending millions of dollars on removing and reducing value delivered to the users relative to cheaper or near-free alternatives. Sometimes it's even funny. How many startups are explicitly or implicitly trying to be a replacement for some internal Excel spreadsheet? How many of them realize that their offering would work strictly better if it was distributed as an Excel spreadsheet or plugin instead of an SPA? But it's not about utility, it's about control. Driving users through funnels, putting them on flows that minimize actual creative or maintenance work for you, locking them in and bleeding dry with subscriptions.
- ryandrake 3y ago
  I think web browsers need to get back to basics and do their original job as "The User's Agent" rather than what they are today: Instead of being a tool to fetch and display hyperlinked text, they've morphed into this API platform built for web companies to control down to the pixel what users see in their browser window. Today browsers barely give you a few blunt tools to control your own browsing experience: Javascript on/off, Styles on/off, and so on. I want a browser that 1. fetches YouTube's HTML, 2. understands it to be essentially a bunch of links to video URLs, and 3. present me a simple list of those video URLs that I can click to watch or download. I don't want my browser to act against me by being a platform where YouTube executes god-knows-what on my system to render everything the way YouTube wants and to show me things that YouTube wants and push content that YouTube wants to push. Put the user back in control. Same for Reddit. Browser should fetch Reddit's HTML, realize it's essentially a list of links, and simply display those links, ignoring all the other shit that comes down in the site's HTML, CSS, and JS. I realize that step #2 above is hard and probably magic at this point. But that's the direction I'd like to see browsers go. Stop adding even more APIs that companies can use to control my browser.

post-it 3y ago

Ok Stallman.

jjgreen 3y ago

Excellent, reminiscent of the search by postcard service offered by Google in the early days: https://www.labnol.org/internet/google-postcard-search/8085/ https://www.labnol.org/internet/google-postcard-search/8085/