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That's like saying you can do anything by writing a book that you can do with haiku. It's trivially true. But it misses the value of strongly imposed constrain

That's like saying you can do anything by writing a book that you can do with haiku. It's trivially true. But it misses the value of strongly imposed constraints. I know that goes against a prevailing (well USA) culture of "bigger and more is always better". Sometimes less is more. > It's fine to dislike how Google has ruined the web. That doesn't make the web itself bad or useless. It sort of does though. It's like saying; yeah it's bad that loads of drug dealers and thieves moved into the neighbourhood. but that doesn't make the neighbourhood itself bad. For practical purposes it totally does. It may not make the buildings and streets bad, as if a technology in isolation could be "bad", but it makes nobody want to go there.

giantrobot 2y ago
Your neighborhood analogy is nonsensical. You can't ignore drug dealers in a neighborhood. You can ignore Google. You can build a website and not give two shits about Google. There's zero requirement for a website to run ads, host trackers, or even use JavaScript. You can just type some HTML into a text editor and put it on a server. Websites are not physical neighborhoods. They're not affected by things in physical proximity. A visitor is not affected by anything in physical proximity. A website, like a gopher site only contains the content the owner put up. You can put up a bunch of plain text on a website to show how much of a hipster you are. No one is stopping you.
- nonrandomstring 2y ago
  > Your neighborhood analogy is nonsensical. I thought it was rather good. Oh well, life is nonsensical my giant robot friend, so let's enjoy it and not get upset about whose protocol is the best and baddest ;)
- smaudet 2y ago
  > Websites are not physical neighborhoods. True but incidental, possibly anathema, to the point... Which is that physical neighborhoods make up the user-base of the web, whether they be large server farms or small form-factor computing devices. And because those users live in real neighborhoods, connected by real wires (or radio waves connected to towers that are connected by wires), the following statement simply isn't true: > Your neighborhood analogy is nonsensical. You can't ignore drug dealers in a neighborhood. You can't ignore cyber-criminals or SEO farms that are trying to sell you stuff. There are real neighborhoods made by real people and real devices, just because you can't draw a nice circle around it on a single landmass on a map doesn't make them less real. > You can build a website and not give two shits about Google. You can, but you building a website is not you using a website. This is no different than glorifying Gopher - yes the protocol is there, but if no one is using it in the way you intend to use it then it hardly matters? I don't think gopher is necessarily the best protocol, but there is probably a real "neighborhood effect", at least for a while (until the metaphorical drug dealers move in again). Neither gopher nor http+www does much for solving that issue, though.

giantrobot 2y ago

Your neighborhood analogy is nonsensical. You can't ignore drug dealers in a neighborhood. You can ignore Google. You can build a website and not give two shits about Google. There's zero requirement for a website to run ads, host trackers, or even use JavaScript. You can just type some HTML into a text editor and put it on a server. Websites are not physical neighborhoods. They're not affected by things in physical proximity. A visitor is not affected by anything in physical proximity. A website, like a gopher site only contains the content the owner put up. You can put up a bunch of plain text on a website to show how much of a hipster you are. No one is stopping you.

nonrandomstring 2y ago
> Your neighborhood analogy is nonsensical. I thought it was rather good. Oh well, life is nonsensical my giant robot friend, so let's enjoy it and not get upset about whose protocol is the best and baddest ;)
smaudet 2y ago
> Websites are not physical neighborhoods. True but incidental, possibly anathema, to the point... Which is that physical neighborhoods make up the user-base of the web, whether they be large server farms or small form-factor computing devices. And because those users live in real neighborhoods, connected by real wires (or radio waves connected to towers that are connected by wires), the following statement simply isn't true: > Your neighborhood analogy is nonsensical. You can't ignore drug dealers in a neighborhood. You can't ignore cyber-criminals or SEO farms that are trying to sell you stuff. There are real neighborhoods made by real people and real devices, just because you can't draw a nice circle around it on a single landmass on a map doesn't make them less real. > You can build a website and not give two shits about Google. You can, but you building a website is not you using a website. This is no different than glorifying Gopher - yes the protocol is there, but if no one is using it in the way you intend to use it then it hardly matters? I don't think gopher is necessarily the best protocol, but there is probably a real "neighborhood effect", at least for a while (until the metaphorical drug dealers move in again). Neither gopher nor http+www does much for solving that issue, though.