
Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web (2017) - stargrave
https://neustadt.fr/essays/against-a-user-hostile-web/
======
headalgorithm
See previous discussion from 2017:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15611122](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15611122)

~~~
Pick-A-Hill2019
The contrast in comments between the 2017 version vs. this 2020 post is
fascinating so my thanks :) For what it's worth I strongly agreed with the
author at the time and feel doubly-so in 2020.

------
crazygringo
> _But most of the time we spend on the web today is no longer on the open
> Internet - it 's on private services like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn._

Ultimately there are three good reasons for this, which the author doesn't
address at all.

The first is spam and abuse. The problem with a purely "open web" is that
there's no solution to those, because of bad actors. The only solution we've
found so far are centralized organizations which can run sophisticated machine
learning and hire thousands of moderators.

The second is aggregation and discoverability. What good is it to publish if
nobody finds you? Matching what people want to read, with the content they'll
like (and not turning it into a firehose) is a really hard problem which,
again, open standards basically do nothing for.

And then of course the third is monetization. There's a lot of amazing content
on, e.g. YouTube, that wouldn't have been created if it weren't for
monetization, because it takes content creators time that they'd otherwise
have to spend at a job.

Now if we can create open standards that work as well as centralized solutions
for all three of these... then we're talking.

~~~
ordinaryradical
> The only solution we've found so far are centralized organizations which can
> run sophisticated machine learning and hire thousands of moderators.

I’m pretty sure HN, the site were literally posting on, does not have either
of these, or at least not at that scale and yet it’s miles better than
anything on fb or twitter so I’m not sure I buy this argument.

~~~
munificent
_> I’m pretty sure HN, the site were literally posting on, does not have
either of these,_

As far as I know, HN does have two full-time employees whose sole job is
moderation. I believe they also have some automated spam detection involved
too.

 _> yet it’s miles better than anything on fb or twitter so I’m not sure I buy
this argument. _

This can be explained almost entirely by the fact that bad actors go where the
greatest concentration of good actors is. Small communities are relatively
safe with little effort required on their part, because they simply aren't a
big enough target to be worth a bad actor's time.

For a long time, it was taken for granted that "Mac didn't have viruses". It
wasn't because Mac OS was somehow more virus-proof than Windows. It was simply
that Mac was like 2% of the marketshare and thus just not a worthwhile
platform for hackers to target.

~~~
saagarjha
> HN does have two full-time employees whose sole job is moderation.

I believe that number is currently one.

------
benjaminjosephw
The author talks about the web as "one of humanity's greatest inventions."
which is now in crisis:

> And now, we the architects of the modern web — web designers, UX designers,
> developers, creative directors, social media managers, data scientists,
> product managers, start-up people, strategists — are destroying it.

The interests of tech companies, investors and web professionals have not
always aligned with the best interests of end-users and so there has been a
gradual erosion of the freedoms embedded in the foundations of the web itself.

My favourite StarTrek moment is Captain Pike's statement "We are always in a
fight for the future". Given the current state of the web, this feels truer
than ever. Unlike the author, however, I don't think the answer is better web
pages. Any chance of us winning the fight for user freedoms must be bigger and
bolder than that.

There has been an entire generation of entrepreneurs and investors who have
thought and planned strategically how to shape the web to work in their best
interests. A meaningful counter has to be equally intentional and coordinated
to stand a chance at shaping the course technology takes. We are in a fight
for the future and we need to think bigger to stand a chance of winning that
fight.

~~~
throwaway_pdp09
Agreed, but what are you personally going to do, very specifically, to fight
back?

~~~
throwaway_pdp09
Replying to @all

What I was getting at was dead simpl,e: turn off JS and install a hostfile-
based blocklist, or other. It really was that simple. I also enable cookies
just for HN posting. Else no cookies of any kind ever accepted.

So are people doing that, because if you don't co-operate with their code,
tracking you gets vastly harder. You can take back control of you machine - if
you choose.

It's simple and you can do it now - if you choose.

@benjaminjosephw: can you give more detail? (glad you're not just all talk!)

@marcus_holmes, @zdkl, @saagarjha: you may need to get together with others to
unify the idea of doing your own web servers. A collective not a commercial
entity which you are trying to avoid being involved in. That gives you
together much more power.

I think that's what @MaxBarraclough is suggesting looking at . I will to.

@saagarjha: writing your own browser engine seems totally pointless - it's the
web at fault, not the browser that renders it. If you don't like bits of the
browser, remove the code. Don't understand what you're trying to do.

~~~
bloak
JavaScript by itself isn't evil. A static web site that uses JavaScript to let
the user do everything on the client provides more privacy than an old-school
web site with CGI scripts and forms.

I've been playing with this idea recently. If you want to provide access to a
database which is infrequently updated and no bigger than a few megabytes
(like the catalogue of a library with 30 000 books), then provide the database
with the web page and implement the search function in JavaScript. If you
avoid using a JavaScript "framework" then you may find that the web page
responds to your typing so instantaneously that you feel like you're back in
the 1980s using a Z80-based machine. (You remember those Z80-based word
processors that could keep up with a competent typist?)

~~~
boomlinde
_> A static web site that uses JavaScript to let the user do everything on the
client provides more privacy than an old-school web site with CGI scripts and
forms._

Of course, on the majority of websites I am not doing any interactions where
that would be necessary to me in the first place, and on the majority of
websites where JavaScript is used, it's used with little mind towards privacy.

That it isn't inherently evil is a pretty toothless argument that
fundamentally doesn't address the proposed solution you're responding to. The
fact that the web is a cesspool of scripts ranging from completely useless to
directly user-hostile isn't nullified by use cases that are so rare that you
from the top of your head can apparently only hypothesize about them.

~~~
bloak
Perhaps you're right. Perhaps we need to replace JavaScript with something
that can be more easily constrained.

There seems to be something wrong with a world in which it is in some ways
easier/safer to run an untrusted binary, by putting it in a container, than an
untrusted web page. You can of course put the browser in a container, but it's
crazy that we have to resort to that.

Thanks to Spectre and Meltdown, if you want to be really safe when running
untrusted code, you need separate hardware.

------
gexla
Did the web sort of start out a super walled garden for millions of people?

My embarrassing story was starting out with an AOL disk in the mail. I thought
the "web" was great fun and apparently I wasn't alone. Often I couldn't even
log in because the web was all busy signals. It was the AOL fail wail.

In those early explorations, I found a button with the label "www." I didn't
know what it was, but I did know that it sucked! I don't think I bothered with
the www again until after I moved away from AOL.

All the things we complain about on the web today should have its place. We
just don't need to go there. It's not actually that hard to avoid tracking,
etc. The majority of HN could probably work out some sort of Stallman type of
setup over a weekend or two.

If we can't avoid, then maybe we could create "personas" instead. Like in an
MMORPG, create an avatar. Maybe we can create noise machines to throw people
off. Do the opposite of the Brave browser. Run bots and clicking operations in
the background (IMO clicking ads served to me with no intent to buy is only
bad when I intend to profit or help someone I know to profit from it. If I
have a process to do things randomly to obscure my tracks, then I'm fine?)

I think if we're really going to make a dent, we need to work to create an
ecosystem elsewhere. Look at the dark web for example. It's crap, but you can
buy drugs there! Open source developers maybe need to jump on the tooling.
Writers need to add the content. Then of course we'll just start the cycle
over again. But maybe distributed next time.

~~~
reaperducer
_Did the web sort of start out a super walled garden for millions of people?_

If you define "web" as web sites on the internet, then no. But if you define
"web" as people communicating en masse via computer, then yes.

I remember when even something as basic as e-mail would only work within a
single e-mail service. Eventually gateways were built between networks, but
not every network connected to every other network, so in order to send an
e-mail message from User A to User B, you'd have to send it through Gateway X,
Gateway Y, and Gateway Z.

For content, we were all in the walled gardens of CompuServe, The Source, The
WELL, HAL-PC, and dozens other commercial services, plus tens of thousands of
private mini-gardens in the form of BBSes.

------
x32n23nr
If you want a better web, we need to figure out two things, none of which
appear in the author's article:

1\. How to pay for stuff in the web in the same way you can pay with cash in
the real world.

2\. How to regulate the new-age, digital-good, information-aggregation
monopolies. I suspect this will have to be done by either a state-forced, or a
highly-useful interoperability protocol for building new tech.

~~~
Frost1x
>1\. How to pay for stuff in the web in the same way you can pay with cash in
the real world.

This one is a bit easier. Prepaid credit cards are frequently accepted online
and can be purchased with cash. The fees are a bit high as is but there's no
reason merchants can't create more of these and likely even lower the prices.

Alternatively your CC provider could potentially act as a privacy guard by
providing randomized rotating onetime transaction numbers as well, I know some
pay services like Samsung pay do this to some degree already by creating
virtual cards that require a third party to authenticate without giving your
actual account, though I believe those virtual cards remain fairly static.
With more potential entropy (large GUID), it seems reasonable you could rotate
those on the fly.

~~~
kiddlethorp
My wife's (Indonesian) bank only allows online payments using a randomly
generated CC number. It seems pretty obvious, and I'm a little surprised it's
not supported by my western country banks. (It's true, I don't know how many
of these virtual card numbers exist. It may be that there aren't enough.)

------
f055
The author highlights tracking, profiling & targeting. Just yesterday, I Asked
HN but none responded: can't we just flood the trackers with random data
instead of fight so hard to block them?
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23324946](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23324946)

~~~
benjaminjosephw
Like a chrome extension that sends trackers lots of randomized user actions
and garbled data instead of just blocking them? We'd make the data unreliable
and render it useless! What an incredibly sly counter-attack.

I think it could take a fair amount of work to be effective (i.e. reverse
engineering APIs, formatting payloads, etc) but I'm sure a community of
engineers would support those efforts if it were in wide enough use. The
problem here is that those engineers may be deterred by the possibility of
getting sucked into legal battles. Maybe if it were backed by an organization
that could allay that fear like the EFF, Mozilla or the FSF then I could see
this actually having a shot of being genuinely effective.

~~~
severine
Are you aware of [https://adnauseam.io/](https://adnauseam.io/) ?

~~~
f055
Ah thank you! I knew I remembered there was something along these lines
already but couldn’t find it.

------
onebot
This really hits home for me. Somehow the centralized web became better, maybe
its a user experience thing. One can't help but wonder if these are solvable
in a decentralized or even federated approach?

~~~
decasteve
> Somehow the centralized web became better...

That "somehow" was billions of dollars for development, acquisitions, and
marketing. Sites loved to market themselves as ad-free havens that are making
the world a better place. Everyone bought it. Once they achieve platform
dominance, the ads come in, slowly at first, and then ratcheted up over the
next decade until we have what we have now.

The federated approach is great in my opinion. It's where I hang my hat. Not
everyone finds a home on a federated site but there are vibrant communities.

The problem I have is when governments and community organizations start to
use walled gardens exclusively. Having to submit to a site's ToS just to get
official government communications, releases, streamed video, and take part in
discussions around it, is a threat to democracy.

------
thePunisher
I've been thinking about writing a new webbrowser with very limited
functionality which could be used on secure networks, such as Tor. It would
only support a limited subset of HTTP and HTML / CSS and HTML Video. No
Javascript / frames or anything else that could impart the safety.

I've been meaning to pitch it to the Tor Project, but haven't gotten around to
it yet.

~~~
1bc29b36f623ba8
That sounds like Dillo using a TOR proxy. It's quite usable, but it's limited
CSS-capabilities break more sites than the missing JS support does.

~~~
augustk
I love Dillo and its philosophy. It's snappy like few other (currently
maintained) GUI applications. I wish there was an e-mail client with the same
goals.

~~~
boomlinde
_> I wish there was an e-mail client with the same goals._

I recommend giving Sylpheed a try.

~~~
augustk
Thanks for the tip. It seems to have improved since I last tried it.

------
fossuser
I really liked this article (I found it after reading his newer one that was
posted earlier today).

It’s also interesting that he links to a Cambridge Analytica talk to make his
point in 2017 (before the scandal broke).

It’s even more accurate three years later.

------
mr_custard
"Consider minimalist browsers like Min ..."

Oh! Exciting!

I dutifully went to check out the Min browser web page. "Oh shit, it's another
Electron app". Noped it out of there.

~~~
cosmojg
Moving to Min from Chrome is certainly moving in the right direction, though.
After all, Electron is just a stripped-down version of Chromium, and thus
quite a bit more minimal by default.

~~~
mr_custard
Electron contains the Chromium browser code, yes. But you still have to render
to that browser.

Electron also contains a back-end Node.js process and a bunch of related JS
APIs for building and hosting these apps.

Anyway, I accept your point that I'd be replacing a browser with... well a
browser and some other stuff.

The problem though is the proliferation of Electron apps everywhere...
suddenly your OS is full of these things and you don't get the memory
management benefits of running just one Chrome or Chromium. Each app having
its own copy of Chromium and Node.js merrily consuming CPU and RAM like
they're the only ones doing it.

Signal, GitHub, Slack, VS Code, Skype, Notion, Tusk, WhatsApp etc. It's a
cancer, I tell ya!

Ughh. And We're not even talking about the security issues here.

Sigh. I'm going out now, to buy more RAM.

------
michaelyoshika
It's just consequence of some niche thing becoming popular.

There is no way to fix it other than inventing a new niche thing.

------
jonnypotty
Anything sufficiently successful will always be consumed by the powerful and
will ultimately become their tool

~~~
munificent
The yin and yang of human society is:

1\. Those with power will use their power to gain more, causing power to
concentrate into fewer and fewer people over time.

2\. The more concentrated the power is, the more greatly the powerful are
outnumbered and the more people there are with aligned interests who want to
take away or limit their power.

The Industrial Revolution created a ton of power and led to massive power
imbalances due to #1. At his peak John D. Rockefeller was worth almost 2% of
the entire US economy.

Eventually that led to anti-trust cases driven by a democratic government, the
labor movement, and other causes. World War II, especially in the US, was a
big shake-up that reset many power dynamics. But, since then, #1 has been
doing the incremental growth it always done.

My hunch is that we're starting to approach an "organized information"
movement like we had an "organized labor" movement after the Industrial
Revolution. The elites in power will fight it tooth and nail. But they will
lose, because they are outnumbered.

~~~
jonnypotty
People generally revolt when they're hungry, not depressed.

~~~
antepodius
We haven't had the latter without the former very often in world history. I'd
say this is still pretty novel ground.

------
slx26
I really like it when people try to give practical advice after describing
problems. Agree with most of what's written in the post. But I'd like to
discuss one part of it:

> [...] the major websites of today's web are not built for the visitor, but
> as means of using her.

To me, here lies a key point that both the writer and many commenters here in
HN seemed to miss in 2017. What's written here is just a _consequence_ , and
the post goes on to develop it through all its length... but why did the
dynamics change in that way? What's the underlying reason for the shift?

Some comments here in HN mentioned it: internet becoming a marketplace. With
both its good and bad side-effects. It's an extremely complex issue, but money
does completely shape dynamics of current society, and therefore internet too,
and it leaves us _without spaces that aren 't conditioned by it_. At small
scale it doesn't seem a big problem, or we rationalize it because everyone
needs money to survive... But it really shapes the world, and we can't simply
ignore the ugly sides of it and pretend we can solve it without ever involving
the discussion about money and the dynamics it generates.

The "magic" the post talks about only needs three ingredients: human
curiosity, time (to develop that curiosity), and spaces (to host those humans
and their time). Human curiosity and creativity will always exist as long as
we don't go extinct. About time... well, we can satisfy our basic needs more
efficiently than ever... and yet, ironically, we are using the newly freed
time to create "more competitive" products that focus on enslaving the
potential of our fellow human beings through infinite-scroll addiction, fear
of missing out, instant gratification, attention grabbing and other kinds of
biases and "bugs" in the human system. And finally spaces. Well, nothing left.
If the only accessible spaces require money or work-to-generate-money, you
close the circle and can't scape the landscape and conditioning I was
describing. Even if there are some spaces left, they tend to fell into
oblivion against the competition. Too hard to escape, too easy to rationalize.

And honestly, I don't think there's any game-changer discussion about morality
standards here. Morals must play a very important part in getting us to start
a change (and by us I mean the kind of people that's most directly involved in
tech, like this HN crowd), but as long as we don't try to really disrupt at
least some of the dynamics generated by money-profit-survival-motivations, I'm
somewhat skeptical we will be able to move the needle, because efforts will be
eaten by the competition even if we never wanted to play under those rules.
Let's hope I'm mistaken and it's easier to solve.

~~~
kubanczyk
That's well put. I'd challenge the assumption that money _completely_ shapes
the internet. After all, Wikipedia did happen relatively recently, and I
presume it's what you mean by "necessary space". Having that example in mind,
what do you feel is the next step (in ethical norms?...) that would lead to
something even more gratuitous?

I'm non-native and I searched for a while for a better word than "gratuitous"
here. The vocabulary looks a bit narrow. I mean for example "non-profit",
firstly, contains a negation and, secondly, implies that profit can only be
measured financially. "Free" on the other hand is too broad, too imprecise.

~~~
slx26
Yes, "completely" was not the appropriate word. I meant it as "it has an
enormous weight", rather than "it completely defines (as the one and only
factor)". I don't really speak english either.

About more gratuitous, it's tricky, and the problem is not that Wikipedia
isn't free enough, but that it's kind of an exception. There are quite a few
ways in which "free spaces" can compete/coexist with "commercial spaces". The
first group of options involves the commercial spaces not eating the whole
landscape and getting all the attention (drowning out the rest). In theory
this can happen when: there's no viable lucrative strategy for the space (not
the case here), the commercial explotation of the space incurs in obvious
ethical concerns which can't be covered up (some might think this is the case
right now, but for the general public it is not, or companies can keep the
perception muddy enough, or the trade-offs are considered acceptable _in
practice_ even if the issue is acknowledged [this could be discussed much more
in depth]), the commercial spaces degrade enough for free spaces to catch up
and get enough attention (but this is likely to be only temporary), the kind
of value that commercial spaces can provide is different from the value that
free spaces can provide (I'm tempted to believe that this can only happen when
the commercial space is not profitable [so, back to the first case], but maybe
there are some forms of social organization / solidarity that can only happen
in free spaces?), there's regulation specifically protecting free spaces (not
sure how this would go or if they wouldn't become counter-productive
artificial walls), or they provide the same~ value but the free version has
less ethical concerns (some open software can go here, but in most cases where
open source succeeds, it's because it's good enough... but free, in which case
it simply becomes more accessible [in a capitalist world, this is
subsidization. we are actually doing good on the software side, but then
there's also hardware and maintenance, and... well, that's for the next
point]).

Most of these are already happening. Right now it's not enough, but hey, maybe
the current recipe is good and we just need to keep cooking... I'm not
completely skeptical, but I'm also interested on others options, like reducing
our dependence / weakening commercial spaces, talking about that publicly.
There's a balance. The more critical money is to our survival, the less we
care about the ethics of what we do. And in general too: everyone yells when
they get stomped, but when it comes to our own jobs we are much more willing
to rationalize stomping on others. And maybe society has a very perverse idea
of what "value" and "job" mean and we need to get more to the root of the
issue.

Let's get people to have a clearer idea of what contributing positively to the
world means, and have them focus first on what they are creating or offering
to others. Most of us already agree~ with that, but there seems to be too much
noise and too many options, and we can't organize effectively. Maybe trying to
find "the" organization or "the" consensus is impractical. Maybe we have to
find more "exceptions" like Wikipedia. I'm personally favoring projects that I
can start with little money, trying to free as much time as possible to be
able to work on them, and try to make things that can work starting from my
town, that can get people involved beyond the online world, and that can
expand with clearly different premises from commercial projects. And keep
scaling. If we can create enough exceptions like Wikipedia on different
fronts, taking advantage of the inertia of good ideas, and getting people
involved in new free spaces instead of discussing "how could they ever come to
life", that might be a good way to start moving in a different direction.

------
stakkur
Some days, I miss telnet-ing into BBSes.

------
peter_d_sherman
I (as an armchair philosopher, and not a very good one at that), argue that
the problem is not the web, nor technology, but Complexity Vs. Convenience.

In order to create the modern world, in order to create its conveniences,
systems, sometimes very complex systems, must be implemented underneath, as
infrastructure, to support all of that convenience.

Sometimes they are "systems of systems", that is, infrastructures heaped on
top of other infrastructures, etc.

They provide conveniences; that's true, but they conversely create a series of
corner-cases, a series of circumstances where the complexity creates
additional problems, where the complexity serves to be the problem.

Consider a future sci-fi scenario of robot war...

What happened? What went wrong? Here's what went wrong:

Robots were created to serve humanity, but over many centuries, many
generations, the knowledge of how they were created (and what it took to
control them) was lost, as mankind became lazier and lazier, and deferred all
work to the robots.

The complexity of the robots (and their AI) increased, whereas the knowledge
humanity possessed about them decreased.

At a certain time, at a certain critical juncture, because of the increasing
knowledge asymmetry, creator (humanity) and creation switched roles, and now
the creation caused great problems for the creator, who had basically lost the
knowledge, ("lost the manual for" <g>), how to control the creation.

We see this pattern repeat in a variety of formats, in a variety of historic
and present-day contexts; it includes (but is not limited to!): Technology,
Religion, Law, Governments, Social Systems, etc.

Basically, all of those things were created to serve man, to serve mankind...

And (depending upon where you are in history, or what your knowledge (or lack
of knowledge) of them is, in the present day), some of them either will, or at
least have the apparency of, the loss of control by their creator -- mankind.

Frankenstein, by Mary Shelly, is an allegory of this theme, that is, of a
creator that creates something for beneficial purposes, only that with enough
time (and/or loss of knowledge), the creation turns on the creator...

Understood properly, here's the reason why all societies eventually fail, and
why far in mankind's past, there may have been a high-tecnology society
(Atlantis?) which was destroyed, because with all of the solutions it brought,
it also brought additional problems, such that those could not be controlled,
and eventually it was destroyed, or was the cause of its own destruction...

The Greek myth of Sisyphus -- is also an allegory for this phenomena... If the
stone which he has to roll up a hill (only to watch it roll back down again!
"There goes the neighborhood!" <g>) represents society, then he is fated to
roll it up the hill to its pinacle -- only to watch it roll back down again...
over and over and over, for eternity...

So, Complexity Vs. Convenience. With every new convenience, you require more
complexity, and you generate a new set of problems...

~~~
livatlantis
Brilliant. Love it. Of course we see this everything, in automation in
aviation for example, or in cars, or even reliance on urban solutions like
food delivery and such.

In each of these cases, things become more convenient/less complex, but a new
set of problems crop up.

Thank you for your armchain philosophising.

~~~
peter_d_sherman
Thank you for your kind comments! <g>

------
lanevorockz
Seems interesting how he predicted how social media would turn users into
commodities.

~~~
mpswardle
i think that happened way before when this article was published in 2017.

------
buzzkillington
That's a very fall of man rhetoric.

All electronic networks, from the original arpanet to tor, have suffered from
the same problem: someone needs to pay for them yet each individual
transaction is too small to matter.

Surveillance capitalism is the one model that scaled better than 'let the army
and universities pay for it' and it's the one we're stuck with until Xanadu
becomes something more than vaporware.

~~~
salawat
Uh... How you figure? Only the infrastructure needs to be paid for. The
"switching fabric" if you will. And of course the power you use to run the
computer.

It costs nothing else to put a packet out there on the Net sans doing so
through a draconian metered connection, and surveillance capitalism had
nothing to do with that. In fact, if anything, the fact the Net was free did
more to boost surveillance capitalism than anything else.

If companies actually had to pay to collect, hold, operate on, and be privy to
information about people; In Short, if there were acknowledged data privacy
rights in play with regard to people's meta-information, and it was not just
handed to corporations as a blank check money making asset, surveillance
capitalism couldn't have gotten off the ground.

------
jefreybulla
In case people are interested: I created a list of alternatives to Google and
Facebook services.

[https://jefreybulla.github.io/beprivate/](https://jefreybulla.github.io/beprivate/)

------
isolli
In the time since the article was published (2017), the GDPR has come into
effect. I wonder how it affected third-party traffic, if at all. Especially
for European websites such as lemonde.fr (used as an example by the author).

~~~
nicbou
In my experience, not at all. They replaced silent tracking with obnoxiously
loud tracking. Extracting consent became a new art form.

