5 ms·

The design work we see in the modern web is (IMHO) a result of making the web marketable and thus monetizable. You have a point that is would have remained an o

by bane 12y ago

The design work we see in the modern web is (IMHO) a result of making the web marketable and thus monetizable. You have a point that is would have remained an obscure geek meeting ground, but the reasons for the modern web aren't to make it easier to use, it's to make it not feel so much like reading. Logos and colors, design and layout are designed to make the web appealing and inviting to some group. Black text on white feels too much like a book and an amazingly large segment of society is put off from that. Yet his page is fast, responsive, standards compliant, easy to navigate, accessible (screen readers have no problems with it). I don't have to addblock it, turn on readability, or any other nonsense to focus on the content. We've succeeded in simply trying to reinvent what we already have.

blowski 12y ago
I agree with what you're saying, to a point. If it hadn't become monetisable, then services like Youtube and Netflix etc, would never have taken off. I wouldn't have been able to convince family to use email. I would still need to stand in a queue on my lunchbreak to transfer money from my savings account to my current account. Instead, the web evolved, some people took advantage of that for their own ends, and we've ended up with a system which is better for most people, though a long way from being perfect for each individual group.
eropple 12y ago
> The design work we see in the modern web is (IMHO) a result of making the web marketable and thus monetizable. What you call "marketable and thus monetizable", I (and I'm not a designer, though I do a little of my own print and web design) call "human-friendly." It's not that people don't want to read, it's that we have learned over the span of human history how to present information in a more accessible way, culminating for now--though surely not terminating--in high-signal, short forms: lectures, web content, stuff like that. I'm not saying that's an unequivocal good; as this post might show, I like to write, and I have more than occasionally been told that I like to "lecture" because I have and share thoughts that take more than a few sentences to get to their conclusion. But it's not purely for marketing, it's because this is how most people think. It's not a new thing, it's not Those Kids And Their Short Attention Spans, it's why a catchy slogan has always done better than a reasoned argument. You can speak to them in your language, and get mad that they Just Don't Understand, or you can speak to them in theirs. There's a reason the absolute best work on the NSA and spying was John Oliver asking Edward Snowden if the NSA can see pictures of his penis. That one interview did more than literally every electron perturbed by the EFF and other groups to get this into people's heads. That's more than marketing. That's human communication. And dismissing it is fashionable in nerdy circles and absolutely tragic at the same time. We need to get out of our own heads and understand other people, dammit. It's the only way we can really do good.
- hurin 12y ago
  > We need to get out of our own heads and understand other people, dammit. It's the only way we can really do good. What you call understanding people is what I call pandering to the least common-denominator. Most of those web-pages aren't better, they are objectively less informative, and harder to access useful information on - maybe the problem isn't that plain white on black isn't exciting enough but that people are so accustomed to being served low quality content packaged with frivolous design, explosions or 10 second sound-bites. Here is a good discussion of the topic at large: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death
  - eropple 12y ago
    I'm sure you do call it that. How many people listen to you when you do? A one-sentence summary has grabbed people better than pages and pages for as long as people have been people, and that's not going to change because you want it to.
    - hurin 12y ago
      Compare: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lincoln%E2%80%93Douglas_debates http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lincoln%E2%80%93Douglas_debates http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election_debates,_2012 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_elec... So - it as a matter of fact has changed and that you think that this is okay (as I'm sure many people do) is obviously telling of something. But hey, maybe you'd prefer the 2020 election-debate winner be decided by who can keep a reddit-pun thread going longer.
      - eropple 12y ago
        I would thank you, my supercilious friend, to not fucking put words in my mouth, okay? What I am asserting is that it has not, "as a matter of fact", changed. You can point at Presidential elections as oh, hurr, shallow, and I'll even agree with you. And then I will point at Obama's convention speech in '04 or even Bill Clinton's in '12 as modern examples of long-form rhetoric. Because that stuff happens today, too. And people watched, and listened, and talked about those, too (but they had the temerity to talk about it on Twitter, so I'm sure it didn't count). Lincoln-Douglas looms large in the retrospective eye because it was important (and was at the confluence of a number of factors, not the least of which that it was a geographically diverse set of venues but mass communication was still the newspaper and the telegraph). Perhaps it is worth reflecting that modern presidental elections may not be so important--I mean, the gap between a right-wing and a center-right party is, on balance, very small--and the level of discourse may reflect it. Consider also the consular elections of the Roman republic during times when very little of importance was happening. They're venal, they're often populist, they're regularly pandering and stupid. They look like--well--today's. Because nothing is as stupid as fights when there's nothing of meaning to gain. I mean, shit, dude. You know what came most of a century before the Lincoln-Douglas debates? A little speech by a dude in a church in Richmond. It's about fourteen paragraphs long. I've read it. But there's one sentence from it that you actually know: "give me liberty or give me death." Patrick Henry laid the groundwork for that sentence. It's a good speech, if you care about that sort of thing. But nobody was reading it then (it wasn't published for forty years, and nobody's actually sure how much of it is the original speech). That sentence is what caught, because it is distilled sentiment and meaning and requires no attention span at all. You are arguing against history as well as the tide, to heroify dead people and pretend they were other than how they were. I don't understand why.
ams6110 12y ago
We've made the consumer web look like TV and magazines. Not much more complicated than that. People find color, icons, animation, and video engaging. Sure we may be going overboard with some of the latest javascript effects. That's just Flash all over again. But there's a reason that the web no longer looks like academic journal articles. Those are boring.

by bane 12y ago

blowski 12y ago

I agree with what you're saying, to a point. If it hadn't become monetisable, then services like Youtube and Netflix etc, would never have taken off. I wouldn't have been able to convince family to use email. I would still need to stand in a queue on my lunchbreak to transfer money from my savings account to my current account. Instead, the web evolved, some people took advantage of that for their own ends, and we've ended up with a system which is better for most people, though a long way from being perfect for each individual group.

eropple 12y ago

> The design work we see in the modern web is (IMHO) a result of making the web marketable and thus monetizable. What you call "marketable and thus monetizable", I (and I'm not a designer, though I do a little of my own print and web design) call "human-friendly." It's not that people don't want to read, it's that we have learned over the span of human history how to present information in a more accessible way, culminating for now--though surely not terminating--in high-signal, short forms: lectures, web content, stuff like that. I'm not saying that's an unequivocal good; as this post might show, I like to write, and I have more than occasionally been told that I like to "lecture" because I have and share thoughts that take more than a few sentences to get to their conclusion. But it's not purely for marketing, it's because this is how most people think. It's not a new thing, it's not Those Kids And Their Short Attention Spans, it's why a catchy slogan has always done better than a reasoned argument. You can speak to them in your language, and get mad that they Just Don't Understand, or you can speak to them in theirs. There's a reason the absolute best work on the NSA and spying was John Oliver asking Edward Snowden if the NSA can see pictures of his penis. That one interview did more than literally every electron perturbed by the EFF and other groups to get this into people's heads. That's more than marketing. That's human communication. And dismissing it is fashionable in nerdy circles and absolutely tragic at the same time. We need to get out of our own heads and understand other people, dammit. It's the only way we can really do good.

hurin 12y ago
> We need to get out of our own heads and understand other people, dammit. It's the only way we can really do good. What you call understanding people is what I call pandering to the least common-denominator. Most of those web-pages aren't better, they are objectively less informative, and harder to access useful information on - maybe the problem isn't that plain white on black isn't exciting enough but that people are so accustomed to being served low quality content packaged with frivolous design, explosions or 10 second sound-bites. Here is a good discussion of the topic at large: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death
- eropple 12y ago
  I'm sure you do call it that. How many people listen to you when you do? A one-sentence summary has grabbed people better than pages and pages for as long as people have been people, and that's not going to change because you want it to.
  - hurin 12y ago
    Compare: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lincoln%E2%80%93Douglas_debates http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lincoln%E2%80%93Douglas_debates http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election_debates,_2012 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_elec... So - it as a matter of fact has changed and that you think that this is okay (as I'm sure many people do) is obviously telling of something. But hey, maybe you'd prefer the 2020 election-debate winner be decided by who can keep a reddit-pun thread going longer.
    - eropple 12y ago
      I would thank you, my supercilious friend, to not fucking put words in my mouth, okay? What I am asserting is that it has not, "as a matter of fact", changed. You can point at Presidential elections as oh, hurr, shallow, and I'll even agree with you. And then I will point at Obama's convention speech in '04 or even Bill Clinton's in '12 as modern examples of long-form rhetoric. Because that stuff happens today, too. And people watched, and listened, and talked about those, too (but they had the temerity to talk about it on Twitter, so I'm sure it didn't count). Lincoln-Douglas looms large in the retrospective eye because it was important (and was at the confluence of a number of factors, not the least of which that it was a geographically diverse set of venues but mass communication was still the newspaper and the telegraph). Perhaps it is worth reflecting that modern presidental elections may not be so important--I mean, the gap between a right-wing and a center-right party is, on balance, very small--and the level of discourse may reflect it. Consider also the consular elections of the Roman republic during times when very little of importance was happening. They're venal, they're often populist, they're regularly pandering and stupid. They look like--well--today's. Because nothing is as stupid as fights when there's nothing of meaning to gain. I mean, shit, dude. You know what came most of a century before the Lincoln-Douglas debates? A little speech by a dude in a church in Richmond. It's about fourteen paragraphs long. I've read it. But there's one sentence from it that you actually know: "give me liberty or give me death." Patrick Henry laid the groundwork for that sentence. It's a good speech, if you care about that sort of thing. But nobody was reading it then (it wasn't published for forty years, and nobody's actually sure how much of it is the original speech). That sentence is what caught, because it is distilled sentiment and meaning and requires no attention span at all. You are arguing against history as well as the tide, to heroify dead people and pretend they were other than how they were. I don't understand why.

ams6110 12y ago

We've made the consumer web look like TV and magazines. Not much more complicated than that. People find color, icons, animation, and video engaging. Sure we may be going overboard with some of the latest javascript effects. That's just Flash all over again. But there's a reason that the web no longer looks like academic journal articles. Those are boring.