
Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web - livatlantis
https://www.neustadt.fr/essays/against-a-user-hostile-web/
======
blunte
This is a good an informative essay.

However, there's another element of "user-hostile" that I didn't see addressed
(maybe I missed it in my haste?) -- that is the websites trying to control
exactly how the content is consumed by the user.

It seems increasingly that web content is being delivered in video form. That
itself is hostile to some people. Some of us want the freedom to read (or scan
quickly). But many of the providers of "content" know they have little to
provide, so they drag it out in video form, saving the actual information for
the last 10% of the video (if ever!) This I find incredibly hostile, and it
makes me eventually abandon that source as a matter of principle. Then there
are javascript-jacked sites, sites that are unbearably slow and clunky because
of a mix of javascript/ads. I won't mention any specific sites, but I stopped
reading one similar to Mired.com long ago for that reason.

This problem isn't just limited to the web though. If you're unfortunate
enough to see modern television (or movies, for that matter), it's clear that
the amount of content has gone down, the noise has gone up, and the efforts to
lock the audience in have increased.

There are some people who advocate avoiding all news and media. I think it's a
bit extreme, but it may be more beneficial than harmful.

~~~
DeusExMachina
If video content would be so "hostile", it would have failed on its own
already. People would flock to other places where they can read instead.

I don't buy this idea where everything is always imposed on us by evil
corporations.

More and more websites using video to me seems more like a proof that people
prefer videos over written content. That's why videos usually autoplay, also
on YouTube and Facebook: if a person starts watching and listening, it's much
more likely that they will stay instead of closing the page.

We have taught things to each other by talking for as long as hundreds of
thousands of years, probably more. By contrast, reading has been common among
a large percentage of the population only for a couple of centuries.

We evolved using verbal communication, not written one. Written form has, of
course, its advantages, but it does not mean that it's the preferred medium
for most people.

Videos and audio are also easier to watch/listen to while you are doing
something else like cooking, gardening or commuting. There are a ton of
contexts where you cant read, but you can at least listen.

That's why even books are converted into audio formats nowadays.

The fact that a small crowd on HN prefers reading is not the proof that video
is "user-hostile". HN is rarely the reflection of the general public.

Although I keep reading a lot of online content or books, lately I have
consumed a lot more valuable information in a podcast/video lecture format
than in a written one.

~~~
pera
I do agree that not everything is imposed by evil corps, but hostile products
don't necessarily fail by their own: cigarettes and junk foods are just one
example of this.

In general I'm not against video content in a web page, as it actually can be
a good source of raw data that we can use to understand something in great
details, but I would argue that in many cases video is objectively inferior to
text: texts are much easier to parse (both for computers and humans) and also
some irrelevant information included in the audiovisual format can reduce the
entropy of a content (e.g. how a reporter looks like physically).

~~~
DeusExMachina
Cigarettes and junk food are not hostile in this context. We are talking about
things that people don’t like but are forced to get anyway.

Cigarettes and junk food are definitely unhealthy, but people love them. So
much that it’s hard to take them away from them.

~~~
smhost
That's a very bizarre definition of love. Few people are happy about their
addiction to an unhealthy habit. Don't you think it's disingenuous to talk
about user preference without talking about reward hacking? I think the
internet is actually worse in this respect because much of it is
systematically designed to induce addiction with no upper limit.

Your evolutionary arguments are also pretty bizarre and reductionist. Maybe we
did evolve using verbal communication, but we didn't evolve to be
schizophrenic voyeuristic mutes without face-to-face nonverbal feedback.

~~~
sillysaurus3
Can we stop framing arguments as "bizarre"? It's unduly personal.

I don't think their arguments are bizarre, and it's better to meet them head-
on than to insinuate they're weird.

------
pmoriarty
_" For many of us in the early 2000s, the web was magical. You connected a
phone line to your computer, let it make a funny noise and suddenly you had
access to a seemingly-unending repository of thoughts and ideas from people
around the world._

 _" It might not seem like much now, but what that noise represented was the
stuff of science fiction at the time: near-instantaneous communication at a
planetary scale. It was a big deal."_

I kind of yearn for the pre-web days... when the primary means of
communication was mailing lists and newsgroups, without any commercial
interest.

The creation of the web was when it all started to go wrong. Corporations
started to flock to it like flies and tried their best to turn it in to an ad-
laden, spyware-laden, dumbed-down, one-way broadcasting medium not too far
from television.

~~~
amorphid
I never got into the pre-web stuff, so I don't know exactly what the
differences are. Don't those things still exist? Isn't the comment section of
this HN post a form of async, text-only communication?

~~~
pmoriarty
It's still centralized, and owned and run by a commercial entity that uses it
to further their own interests, with a record of its users' interests and
opinions.

The capabilities and features of web forums are also really dumbed-down and
limited compared to what you could get with the mail clients and news clients
of even 20 or 30 years ago.

~~~
DerfNet
Could you expand on that second line a bit? I'm curious what features we're
currently missing out on compared to decades past.

~~~
pmoriarty
From a recent thread on _" Why kernel development still uses email"_: [1]

 _" This is one of the things that web-based forums have yet to get right.
Email (and NNTP news) clients from 20 or 30 years ago are far superior in this
respect, because they can intelligently deal with threading and folding. These
features alone makes large conversations much easier to deal with than on web-
forums.

To add to that, email (and NNTP news) clients even from 20 or 30 years ago
have other powerful features that web forums have yet to catch up on:

\- kill files[2] (which you can use to filter out unwanted articles/mails
based on content or metadata such as subject, user, etc)

\- scoring

\- user-configurable anti-spam filtering or other "intelligent" filtering
(such as bayesian filtering not just for spam/ham, but for
interesting/unintersting content)

\- tagging not just on a site-wide level but at the client level so each user
can tag messages/articles the way they make sense to them

\- other advanced filtering and scripting based on any of the above

Web-based forums are just incredibly primitive compared to this many-decade-
old technology."_

[1] -
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15373179](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15373179)

[2] -
[https://wikivisually.com/wiki/Kill_file](https://wikivisually.com/wiki/Kill_file)

~~~
ptero
I cannot agree more. When one is used to thread and folding for email or
usenet, the user experience of web mail/forum seems woefully inadequate.

When I first saw that gmail starts a new thread when you change a subject I
did not believe it at first; I thought I have made a mistake in replying.
Text-based clients of old (tin, pine, etc.) still outperform current
monstrosities by a wide margin.

~~~
krapp
That's not an inherent limitation of the web or web forums, though - I've seen
those features implemented in a lot of them.

And of course, there's nothing stopping anyone from building a web forum and
offering an endpoint for third party clients, they just _don 't,_ mostly
because web forums themselves have more or less been superseded by Facebook,
Twitter and Youtube, and no one seems to care about them anymore.

The only pre-web feature that web forums can't really implement is
decentralization.

------
jccalhoun
I use ublock origin and privacy badger not because I am worried about privacy
but because the internet is basically unusable without it.

Because of this, I don't see many ads. But I have been an amazon customer
since 1999 (according to what they say on their website when I'm logged in.)
Looking at what they recommend for me, this personalization stuff is crap.

In music, Amazon recommends bands I never listen to like Montrose, Metallica,
and the Doors (and to be fair, some people I've never heard of so I guess it
is possible that I would be interested in them. Greta Van Fleet? William
Patrick Corgan?)

In books, I do like scifi but they recommend a bunch of books with spaceships
shooting each other on the cover - not what I have ever been interested in.

In the "humor and entertainment" section of books they do list some books that
I would be interested in but, strangely, none of them are "humor" but are all
academic books about videogames (which I am interested in). Even here the
recommendation engine is very unsophisticated because in between academic
books on videogames there are books on the art of Zelda and other coffee table
books that I am not interested in.

And the first book in their recommended children's book section is 1984. (and
I don't have any kids any way).

If this is the best they can do with 18 years of tracking my purchases then I
am not worried.

~~~
komali2
To be fair, you sound like one of the harder people to track accurately.

However, I as well have been "disappointed" by the ability of websites to
judge my interests. After reading about cases such as Target, who have
"spooky" ability to gauge interest, I was expecting better.

So I searched for a _very_ specific motorcycle jacket with _very_ specific
features and now my page is inundated with every clothing item that has the
tag "motorcycle_jacket?" That's.... it? The same result I'd get for hitting
google with "site:amazon.com 'motorcycle jacket'" ?

~~~
Chaebixi
The impression that I got was that Target thing wasn't some spooky self-
learning AI product recommender, but rather they had the data to write some
special-purpose analytics to detect a specific but common purchasing pattern.
Your motorcycle jacket example isn't the kind of thing that would get that
kind of special attention.

~~~
komali2
Really? Because I would expect Amazon to be like "oh fuck, this dude bought a
motorcycle! Inundaaaaate!" and start seeing a bunch of ads for Senas, helmets,
gloves, etc.

~~~
bluGill
Unless you buy your motorcycle from amazon as well they don't know to send you
that.

Target was able to get the spooky results because there is in fact a real
correlation: girls who switch from scented products (soaps) to unscented are
very likely to buy a maternity clothing in a couple months, and a few months
latter baby products. Note that this all starts because then girl was buying
scented products at target to begin with, and so the change in habit was the
important part.

------
titzer
FTA:

"...we have faster connections, better browser standards, tighter security and
new media formats. But it is also different in the values it espouses. Today,
we are so far from that initial vision of linking documents to share knowledge
that it's hard to simply browse the web for information without constantly
being asked to buy something, like something, follow someone, share the page
on Facebook or sign up to some newsletter. All the while being tracked and
profiled."

The author is absolutely right that the _values_ of the web have changed. IMO
this is due to the much more vast penetration of the web and the bubbles which
have been birthed as a result of attracting very aggressive profit-driven
actors. Rebasing the web's economic model on advertising has fundamentally
changed the conception of users, and the expectation of enormous profits has
steamrolled the egalitarian principles of early web citizens.

I kind of hope that the web will reboot itself in dark corners, away from the
mega actors, away from the tracking and surveillance, and the torrent of the
current web can keep on going for the masses.

~~~
greenscale
I think you're right, but one issue is keeping the problems of the "web of the
masses" from spreading to our secluded dark corners once they pick up
traction.

------
gruez
>If you use Chrome as your main browser, consider switching to Chromium, the
open-source version of the browser. Consider minimalist browsers like Min (and
choose to block all ads, trackers and scripts) to browser news websites.

no love for firefox? or for that matter, any non webkit browsers?

>HERE WeGo for maps (free)

i'm not sure that's any better in terms of privacy

~~~
annabellish
It always astonishes me how many people who are ostensibly against the webkit
derivative hegemony won't even consider recommending Firefox. It's certainly a
competitive browser, and personally my favourite, and Mozilla does
fantastically important work balancing out an otherwise entirely corporate,
ulterior-motive laden browser market.

~~~
throwaway2016a
My experience has been that Firefox was unusably slow on OS X and Linux for a
long time and they lost a lot of users because of it. Now it is faster but it
is difficult to woo people back.

And even if it is faster, there track record shows that they found doing a
release that slows down a large portion of users was acceptable. Granted I
doubt they still have that attitude, and i think they are more performance
based now, but a lot of us left for Chrome and never looked back.

~~~
wtetzner
> and i think they are more performance based now, but a lot of us left for
> Chrome and never looked back.

And you don't have the same problem with Chrome? I've found Chrome to be a
terrible resource hog lately, and sometimes I have to kill it to get my
computer back to a usable state. And of course, I have to dig through all of
the Chrome process and try to figure out which is the one that will take down
the rest of them.

~~~
throwaway2016a
> And you don't have the same problem with Chrome? I've found Chrome to be a
> terrible resource hog lately

I'm OS X and I've had some CPU issues lately if I have a lot of tabs open but
overall not nearly as many issues as when I finally decided to give up
Firefox.

I actually downloaded Firefox lately and it seems pretty nice. If Chrome gets
works I may consider it.

~~~
leggomylibro
I usually have a few hundred tabs open in Firefox without issue; it seems to
do a good job of putting unused/old tabs to 'sleep' until you come back to
them.

------
kbuchanan
> Today, we are so far from that initial vision of linking documents to share
> knowledge that it's hard to simply browse the web for information without
> constantly being asked to buy something, like something, follow someone,
> share the page on Facebook or sign up to some newsletter.

I'm a non-user of all things social media. My Twitter account is purely
nominal (for pinging company support), and I don't have a Facebook account. As
a business owner, my peers think it's bizarre that I don't have a LinkedIn
account. The problems this author talks about are _chains of our own making_.
Yes, corporations exploit us, but they exploit human frailties. This problem
will not go away, and more "open tech" will not solve it.

~~~
alexandercrohde
It's not unsolvable though. HN is an example of a technology that shapes the
rules of the forum in such a way that a top spot cannot be purchased.

Forum design is the new frontier.

~~~
gruez
>that a top spot cannot be purchased.

you can buy hn upvotes, which is the same as buying a top spot.

------
jumpkickhit
I've been active online since 1994. In my opinion, the start of the cellphone
era (iPhone and up) was when the internet started it's way downhill.

All sorts of people who weren't online suddenly were there, and businesses
took a lot more interest in the lest tech savvy types who've started to
populate the internet.

At the same time, these same mobile users saw they could be anonymous and had
no learned netiquette unlike so many others before them.

So because of this new-user saturation, the internet became no longer niche
and now mainstream, to the detriment of everyone else online.

Yes yes, Eternal September and all that, but were they wrong about the similar
assessment back then?

------
leephillips
I agree with this author and implemented all his suggestions years ago, both
as a consumer and creator of web sites. But sewers like Facebook and ad
networks are low-hanging fruit. Search for something on the once-indispensible
Google, and, after five or six ads, you will likely see a Wikipedia link. On
the fifth page of results will be the professor's .edu page that the Wikipedia
article plagiarizes from.

Google succeeded because their pagerank algorithm discovered useful sites. But
now those same algorithms promote popular (or Google-profitable) sites at the
expense of higher-quality sites (that often carry no advertising). W3schools,
anybody? It was probably a natural evolution: the algorithm ate itself, and
results that might actually be useful are buried under sites that are popular.
I think sites like Wikipedia and Google feeding off each other is a more
insidious problem - one with no quick technological solution, like installing
an ad blocker.

------
alexandercrohde
This is good, but simplistic.

Firstly the downfall in the geocities-web came in many phases:

1\. Spam Email Phase

2\. Phishing / Nigerian phase

3\. Popup phase

4\. Autoplaying Flash/ActiveX phase

5\. Pagerank phase (forums being ruined until rel=nofollow)

Now google, previously the main gateway to discovery, is pretty much useless
for discovering new non-commercial content.

The way this could go away is only from a market shift; deleting your facebook
won't bring back geocities. The fact is, if I had a geocities page it'd be
undiscoverable due to pagerank, so I have no incentive to publish unless I
have another avenue of attention (resume, Hn profile).

Can a non-commercial search engine ever exist? I suppose reddit/HN voting is
one semi-successful method of content ranking...

~~~
ravenstine
A decentralized p2p search engine exists, though really nobody uses it.

[https://yacy.net/en/index.html](https://yacy.net/en/index.html)

Perhaps a bare bones donation-supported search engine could exist if it
implemented the same protocol using WebRTC and served a single JavaScript-
powered webpage from S3.

------
gingerb
I totally disagree. It is not the web or www that is hostile but many websites
and services out there.

I think no one will go back to the old web, although I agree it was an epic
experience back then. For me it is totally logical that many people try to
find a way to earn money on the internet, and in this economy there is in
principle nothing wrong with that IMHO.

No one forces you to use Facebook, Google or any of the great services
available. But people seem to forget that in life almost everything comes with
a price. For Facebook and Google you pay with your (more or less private)
data. So? If you think it's not a fair deal, simply don't use it! But please
don't blame the entire web for that.

The web as it is now has soooo much more to offer than the old web that it is
hard to even imagine! A few things I use that were impossible in the 90's,
from the top of my head:

    
    
      listen music on youtube, learn and use any programming language for free, git, open source, read the latest news in online 
      newspapers from remote countries, buy tickets online, airbnb, online banking, broadcast on twitter, social networks, slack, 
      OS updates, World of Warcraft/games, crypto currencies, etc.. etc...
    

I'm happy to pay with some of my privacy to any of the services above, it's up
to me to decide whether the balance is OK.

~~~
boomlinde
Maybe some of these things didn't engage us as much, but it is dubious whether
that's for better or for worse. For what it's worth:

> listen music on youtube

True by definition, but listening to and distributing music via computer
networks has been going on since the 80s.

> learn and use any programming language for free

There were plenty of resources on that on the web in the 90s and on bulletin
board systems in the 80s.

> git

A complete side note since it has nothing to do with the web.

> open source

Many significant open/free software projects started in the 90s.
NetBSD/FreeBSD since 93. GNU has been around since 83.

> read the latest news in online newspapers from remote countries

News websites surprisingly existed in the 90s as well. It is speculative to
say that their increasing plurality owes anything to the current
centralization trend.

> broadcast on twitter

Broadcast on your own personal website. Broadcast in a newsgroup. Broadcast by
email. Broadcast on IRC.

> social networks

Bulletin boards. Email. Newsgroups.

> slack

IRC

> OS updates

Like, say, Slackware in the mid 90s?

> World of Warcraft/games

On-line, networked games existed before the web and don't really need to rely
on it.

> crypto currencies

Again, not really dependent on the web.

------
QuadrupleA
One factor that might be at play: the user base of the web has probably dumbed
down considerably over time. In 1999 you had to have some technical chops to
get your modem, PPP settings, ISP phone number etc. all sorted out, and know
some arcane URLs to type into the browser to get started with (back when
browsers didn't auto-complete the [http://](http://) for you). So it probably
attracted more intelligent people on average, with nerdy/intellectual
interests.

Better browsers, broadband, tech usability improvements, smartphones, easy-to-
use websites like Facebook, etc. lowered the barrier considerably. So maybe a
lot of this is the influx of "dumb" people who can't be bothered to learn HTML
to put up a page, or understand the privacy implications of the 450
surreptitious HTTP requests streaming along as they read their news article.
("dumb" is a little facetious here - in other words just ordinary people not
as tech savvy or focused on intellectual pursuits as the web's early
adopters).

~~~
GuiA
Honestly attitude like yours are a big part of the issue. Developers love to
treat non technical people as dumbasses to ignore at best, or make fun
of/exploit at worst.

Maybe try to put yourself in the shoes of someone who works 3 jobs as a single
parent and uses their phone to look for new housing when they get evicted or
sign up for online classes, instead of claiming broadly that “they can’t
bother to learn HTML”. Not everyone is as privileged as the millions of
teenagers who have hours and hours of free time every night and access to a
computer+internet to learn how to code or the privacy implications of
surreptitious HTTP requests.

If developers had spent the past few decades thinking of how to make
technologies understandable, open, democratic - instead of insulting 99% of
the population like you just did - perhaps we wouldn’t be in this mess.

I am speaking as a former dumbass privileged teenager/engineer who thought he
was smarter than everyone else.

~~~
QuadrupleA
I meant it a little facetiously, and not as condescending to "ordinary people"
as it maybe sounded. Like you said a lot of it is just a factor of free time,
not having the free time to learn PPP settings and HTML and all that (as I did
when I was a teenager). I'm not suggesting that everybody should learn HTML or
else they're an idiot, far from it, if someone just wants to focus on writing
for a blog, etc. then there absolutely should be tools to make that simple.

One of the laments in the article is the way the web has changed from the
early days of simple HTML webpages people put up themselves focused on
astrophysics etc., and I think that does speak to a difference of interests
and abilities in the web's community over time.

And people do have differences in intelligence, as touchy and controversial a
subject as it is. I say that not to make myself feel like some shining genius,
I'm not, but commercial interests tend to exploit whatever they can exploit
(unfortunately) and the shifting audience of the web likely made it easier to
get away with a lot of this stuff.

~~~
GuiA
Yes. The web didn’t get “dumbed down”; it got more diverse. This is a very
good thing.

The issue is that technologists insist on making a clear distinction between
the “user” and the “developer”. If you hide the number of web requests away in
an obscure, borderline illegible, “developer tools” pane, is it a surprise
that the average user has no idea about what is going on in their browser? No
one is interested about building a browser, or even an operating system for
that matter, that focuses on making things understandable, learnable. That is
part of the reason why we end up in situations like the ones described in the
article.

Regarding differences in intelligence, that is not a particularly relevant
point here. People have differences (plural) in intelligences (plural). Even
one person has diffferences in intelligences throughout their life at many
different scales - I was much better at physics back in college than I am now
because I practiced it more, and yet I wouldn’t say I was more intelligent 10
years ago than I am now even though I could solve physics problems faster.
There are even pretty big fluctuations in my intelligence in a single day
based on how tired/frustrated I am, if I have concerns at the back of my mind,
etc. All of these statements aren’t really relevant here, because we have
systems that deliberately obfuscate how they work, which is a much bigger
problem.

~~~
QuadrupleA
So more "users" should be developers? And some idealized Chrome dev tools
should be shown to everybody by default? That's the kind of techy, unix-y shit
that turned off average people from the early web in the first place. Turning
that stuff off and hiding it is what made things like the iPhone so popular.

Most people aren't interested in learning about HTTP, security certificates,
javascript AJAX requests etc., no matter how "learnable" the browsers could
make them. It's just irrelevant to chatting with your kids or reading about
what happened in the Dodgers game. Geeky tech people will seek that stuff out,
average people won't.

------
throwaway2016a
As a technical person I agree with a lot of this article. We were moving
towards a data centric web for a while but now we're moving towards one where
form is more important than function.

But with that said, I would have liked to have seen an article about
accessibility have more talk about how the web is not only less accessible now
for regular users but also even less accessible than it was before for people
with disabilities such as blindness, color blindness, and even hearing loss.

------
duxup
I remember when even some corporate web sites often had a misc site somewhere
with something about who built the site, even a picture of the server, a
cat.... it was personal. It was very human.

------
iamleppert
Can we please, pretty please go back to using pages for the majority of web
sites? There I said it. You have a web site, not a web app. At least most
people do.

Remember the days of semantic markup and the CSS Zen Garden? When you could
actually read and understand a web page's source? Now we have these javascript
behemoths that are as clumsy as they are stupid.

I have a feeling we are in for a renaissance of simplicity, and its going to
start with a page, and end with a page. Pages are scalable. Google has like 50
billion of them. Pages are nice. Now do me a favor and kill off react.js and
every walled garden like Facebook.

Can we please just fix them from the inside? If you're an engineer at
Facebook, why don't you take it upon yourself to actually do something about
this mess?

------
hawski
I started research on making of an alternative search engine. It would not
index sites serving ads and possibly e-commerce. I would like to also penalize
JavaScript use at least as an option. At the beginning I would use Adblock
rulesets like the Easy List - if there is a match I do not index the site. I
named it Abracabra.

I hope that this would remove most crap out there with some minor collateral
damage. Also that the index would be small enough that a little fish like me
could do it without massive cost or infrastructure.

Regarding JavaScript use penalization I have in mind at least lower ranking.
Probably for the first version not including them at all would be the simplest
thing to do. Some later version could attempt to classify used JavaScript.

I would like it to index information first and not care much about web apps.
Sometimes within the information only site there could be a link to a webapp.
I’m wondering if it would make sense to distribute whole index via torrent.
Then search could be done locally. But for this too make sense it would have
to be in an order of, at most, tens of gigabytes. The problem would be to make
updates as small as possible and also to not use prohibitive amount of CPU
time.

I don't have any monetization in mind as you probably should have guessed at
this point. Probably if it would be frugal enough it could run from my pocket
and hopefully some donations.

However I’m almost totally green in this area. I started a bit with learning
how to index and search with SQLite's FTS5. I don't like dependencies too much
and would like to keep the local version option available. So probably typical
ElasticSearch and other Java apps are probably too heavy. You can safely
ignore technical side of my comment if you know better. If someone is more
capable to do this than me, please make it instead of me ;)

------
ducttape12
I've actually become a bit put off on a lot of "modern" technologies lately.
Every website tries to keep you on as long as possible with click bait, every
advertiser tries to track your habits, video games just try to upsell you to
the season pass, and every webapp is just an upsell to the paid pro version.
Heck, even our operating systems are nothing more than data collection points.

In many ways, I feel like technology doesn't work for us anymore, we work to
serve technology.

~~~
DerfNet
That's without even mentioning the "internet of things" phenomenon, standalone
voice assistants, and so on. The advertisers aren't happy just collecting web
usage data anymore and now they want into our actual homes.

~~~
ZenoArrow
I honestly don't get it. Some tech-savvy people I know are hyped up about
Alexa and technologies like it, speaking to them about it it's like we live in
a world where the Snowden leaks never happened. Either that or the interest
from exploring new technology is hiding the downsides.

------
deftturtle
Yelp is extremely hostile to web users on mobile and shoves their app at you,
actively blocking mobile functionality. You have to spoof user agent or
request desktop site to use their service. So after realizing how hostile they
are, I stopped using their service. Wasn't aware of their shady business
practices in the past, and I think they've improved somewhat? My main issue
with them today is their subverting of mobile web usage.

Similarly, Square Cash hides their login page on the mobile cash.me site. You
have to request the desktop site and actually go to cash.me/login to have any
chance of using their mobile site. It's fucking crazy.

~~~
0x00000000
Twitter and reddit drive me up the fucking wall. Twitter removed most
functionality if you aren't logged in and hits you with a popup about once
every 0.1 seconds as you scroll but gives up when you close it about 6 times.
The mobile reddit site is just straight broken. Images disappear if you click
in the wrong place, video doesn't work, can't change search options, posts act
like they fail resulting in duplicate comments. Yet they have the audacity to
push their shitty app down your throat every other page which is just a
webview of the mobile site with the same problems.

These companies will do anything to inflate their user count and get more
access to more data to sell. Instagram is particularly egregious about
inflating user count. You can make an account without even verifying your
email, but you can't log in again or even delete your account without linking
a valid phone number. There is probably a 7 figure number of abandoned
accounts like that.

~~~
freeflight
Add Pinterest to that list of super annoying services who won't let you even
look at anything without signing up/linking up/whatever else they could extort
from you before letting you look at a simple picture.

------
platz
Consumer's can't solve this from the ground up. What's needed is to prevent
certain kinds of key acquisitions. The law around acquisitions is too
permissive in an age of network effects; acquisition laws were fine pre-
internet but don't solve their intended purpose anymore. Normally, the market
corrects against the biggest players because the biggest players are slow to
change culture and their business. But, acquisitions are the mechanism by
which the big players are preventing themselves from being disrupted by
smaller, more nimble players. If the big players can simply buy up any new
comers (who will want a deserved pay-out for their efforts) on the scene, they
maintain complete control regardless of what consumers want. Otherwise, any
"alternative practices" you try to foster will simply be crushed, if they ever
become a large enough threat.

Facebook acquiring Instagram is a perfect example.

------
cyphunk
Stop referencing Cambridge Analytica. They grossly overstated their results
with intent. Everyone seems to have taken the headlines produced from their
first post-US-election presentation as truth, without even bothering to watch
that presentation. Because when doing so even the most forgiving would get a
sense of screaming suspicion. They brag about taking one Republican candidate
(Ted Cruz) from the bottom of 20 candidates to... #3 in the Republican party
primary. And then the logic of the headlines continue on to claim that this
means with 300 likes they can predict you better than you mother. Candidate
#3? I promise you there were as many data analytic companies as there were
candidates but the difference is that only Cambridge Analytica came up with
the clever marketing pitches to promote their strategy and only they had the
guts to promote that strategy even though their pony lost the race. And it
shouldn't surprise anyone because good marketing strategy, not good data, lead
to such sensational headlines. Cambridge Analytica should be treated with the
suspicion provided to all marketing firms, because it is clear when looking
closely that this is what they are, and one with a rather shady history full
of scams at that:

[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-03-23/trump-
dat...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-03-23/trump-data-gurus-
leave-long-trail-of-subterfuge-dubious-dealing)

[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=cambridge%20analytica&sort=byP...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=cambridge%20analytica&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story)

Stop referencing Cambridge Analytica. The headlines that their marketing
produced just happen to fit so nicely in the techno-evil horror fluff stories
we all as liberal leftists (myself included) so desperately want to eat. But
find better references, please!

------
j_s
Meet HN user megous, his fellow closed-source re-inventing co-conspirators
(click a 'comments' link on the search results, then 'parent'), and potential
open-source future fans:

λmegous(2016Dec):
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13226170](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13226170)

 _For each use case that is not a free browsing I create an electron app, that
never executes any code from the web or uses any external style. It only uses
XHR to fetch html pages /json data/other static stuff and then transforms that
data and uses it in the custom UI designed for the use case._

[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=13226170&type=comment](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=13226170&type=comment)

Any references to similar projects (whether closed, commercial, or open-
source) would be appreciated.

------
ashark
The Web was doomed the moment we let Javascript initiate connections and (less
significantly) modify form content.

~~~
Santosh83
Not really. It was doomed the moment it stopped being a place for _mere_
exchange of information and messages and turned into a marketplace. It is the
profit motive that has given rise, directly or indirectly, to every good and
bad thing about the modern web. Unfortunately profit motive is completely
amoral. And it isn't going away. So what we need are more restrictions and
regulations. And a paradigm shift back to doing more things more enjoyably in
meat-space.

~~~
jjawssd
> So what we need are more restrictions and regulations.

Fully disagree. You cannot legislate this problem away.

~~~
YouAreGreat
Advertising tax, privacy law, monopoly breakups.

------
protoster
A beautiful little tech-utopia where standards were open and everyone
cooperated for the collective good existed for a few glorious years. The geeks
had their way for a few years, but the show's over. In my cynical belief there
is nothing we can do practically to reverse the trends. Tragedy of the
commons, greed, masses following the path of least resistance, etc. will
assert themselves just like they do in all other spheres of human society.

------
tbirrell
I agree with much of this article, but at this point I'm dangerously close to
falling into the camp of, "is it even worth it?" I have been using google
accounts for almost 10 years, I'm very much locked into that ecosystem. Even
if there was a privacy issue, I wonder if it is worth the monumental hassle to
leave and spin up my own versions of everything I use.

Thanks to equifax, all my most important information is probably already out
in the wild, and thanks to the US government (and how they deal with replacing
identifying information) I'm likely screwed for the rest of my life. In the
face of that, the harm that google or facebook (which I'll admit to using less
and less of) can do to me seems trivial.

Yeah, as a user, I'm a commodity online. But I'll be damned if I'm not
enjoying the bread and circuses they use to keep me there. There is little to
nothing I can do to prevent anyone from doing anything with my information, so
I might as well take advantage of what I've already "paid" for.

~~~
robin_reala
You don’t have to do everything in one go; you can migrate out a service at a
time and see how it works for you.

------
yosito
> You become a manipulable data point at the mercy of big corporations who
> sell their ability to manipulate you based on the data you volunteer.

This might be the best summary of "why the world is fucked" that I've seen.

------
b0rsuk
I think many web apps are essentially closed source taken to the next level.
Back when the war was Windows vs Linux, software could still be painstakingly
reverse-engineered. This made making open source alternatives easier, as well
as compatibility projects like Wine, Samba...

With online services, there's no chance. They can even take copylefted
software, modify it, use, and don't release. This is technically compliant
with GPL2, but against its spirit. (A)GPL3 was made to combat this. I agree
the license is complicated, verbose and very hard to enforce, but at least
it's a try.

I think the problem is two-fold: data and software. The article focuses on
user data, but it's not hard to believe a culture of closed source breeds a
closed approach to user data.

------
partycoder
I am ashamed of my generation.

We took a decentralized web full of potential, and we are leaving a wasteland
of corporate garbage to our kids. If you used the web in the 90s you know what
I am talking about.

------
reaperducer
Irony: The web page that rails about the web being user hostile is coded so
that Safari's user-friendly reader mode is disabled.

~~~
livatlantis
Author here. Is it? It works on my end. Could you tell me which OS/Safari
version you're using? Thanks.

~~~
caryhartline
Even on the latest Safari it doesn't work: 10.13.1 (17B48) with macOS: 10.13.1
(17B48)

Nothing about that page seems like it would stop Reader so I filed a Radar
about it.

~~~
dictum
Reader readies Radar regarding Reader regression.

(Please don't continue this. I just had to get it out of my system.)

------
macawfish
We need web browsers with good local & p2p indexing/search/bookmarking
features.

Before I ever touch google, I want my search/address bar to look thoroughly
through well organized, locally bookmarked content indexes.

The next stop before Google is indexes I've subscribed to. My friends, family,
organizations, libraries, businesses, campaigns, wikipedia, etc.

After that, duckduckgo. If I haven't found it by then, google.

This kind of browser feature could make DAT/ipfs hypertext much more useful.

~~~
QasimK
I’ve found Chrome/Chromium to be absolutely terrible at searching local
history and bookmarks. It often fails to find even the simplest of pages which
I know I’ve been to recently, while Firefox is capable of digging out pages
that are barely in my memory.

It’s one of the things that keep me on Firefox - it’s simply more usable!

(Personally, I’m convinced Google does it deliberately to gain more user
attention time on their search service.)

The idea of having subscribed indexes is interesting! I often just want to
search Wikipedia. The idea of indexes from friends or family sounds more like
“trusted sources”, or the web of trust, or even GPG key verification. You’re
saying I trust these sources more because I trust these people more.

I think doing this slightly in the background automatically (vs actively
asking your friend for recommendations, or looking at a bloggers recommended
materials page) could make the internet safer. It risks creating “bubbles”,
but these should be a lot less significant than your own personal (Google)
search bubble.

~~~
macawfish
Yes, indeed, there is a strong risk for bubbles. In order to deter bubbles,
there must still be a healthy social fabric and network applications that
promote and incentivize cross-cultural interaction and knowledge sharing.
That's a social, political, design & technical challenge.

Also...

I'm imagining the possibility "encrypted queries" between trusted parties. You
could allow people to send you a search query that is encrypted in some way
such that you couldn't read it, but you could still run it on your local index
and send them back a result. Storing not only your own well-structured index
but numerous other parties indices as well could be way too expensive.
Instead, it makes sense only to maintain a relatively small local index for
when you're truly offline. But to allow others to search your index
anonymously, perhaps in exchange for the ability to search theirs anonymously.
You could let trusted parties search your content without actually revealing
their search terms, which may contain sensitive terms, like "cancer" or
"schizophrenia symptoms". Maybe this could be done in a way that also obscures
who actually ran the query. This sounds like a challenge for zero-knowledge
proofs and some kind of anonymous traffic routing system.

In practice, it'd be like a hybrid of anonymous distributed routing and
anonymous distributed search.

------
cjhanks
This strikes me as rant saying; "For years I loved eating spam. 7 months ago I
stopped eating spam. Now I think spam is evil. You should stop eating spam."

The decentralized internet of anonymous chat servers, mail servers, and
communication channels aren't dead. Most people simply do not like them.

~~~
jonahx
This is the "it is this way; therefore people must want it this way" argument.
It ignores the power of money to manipulate through advertising (or, in the
general case, of power to coerce).

To take the specific example of FB, most people don't want to be tracked and
advertised to, they just want an easy social space to interact with their
friends and family. Sure, they'd probably prefer an ad-free, non-tracking
version of FB, but not if it costs them much effort. So, FB's growth hacking,
advertising, and critical mass have pushed millions of people into something
they themselves would consider sub-optimal (assuming it was explained to them,
ofc -- many are plain unaware).

On top of that, the average user simply does not have the knowledge to make an
informed decision. Not about what's technically happening, and certainly not
about what the long term consequences will be, although arguably no one knows
about that.

~~~
cjhanks
I use the "mom and dad test". My parents are completely non-tech savvy... by
no means luddites... but they know very little of the details.

They seem fairly aware that Facebook and Google probably knows more about them
than the NSA. And they don't care - because they can easily snap chat their
kids or post pictures to their friends on pinterest. What's more, they
sometimes even find the sales ads _helpful_.

Average users, in my opinion, are reasonably smart.

~~~
jonahx
1\. Your parents are outliers, ime

2\. That wasn't my point. The question isn't: "Will they put up with
sacrificing their privacy in exchange for the value they get?" We know the
answer is "yes" to that. The question is: "Would they prefer to get the same
service for the same amount of effort and _not_ give up their privacy?" And I
believe the answer to that is also "yes." And there is really no reason why
that couldn't be the case. FB is not solving a technical problem that only
they can solve.

------
jd3
[https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence](https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-
independence)

[https://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2015/07/stop_pushin...](https://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2015/07/stop_pushing_th.html)

[http://idlewords.com/talks/web_design_first_100_years.htm](http://idlewords.com/talks/web_design_first_100_years.htm)

[http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm](http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm)

[http://david.woodhou.se/email.html](http://david.woodhou.se/email.html)

------
syphilis2
I would love to use a search engine that allowed filtering results by
categories such as: personal, unincorporated, forum, news, contains ads, page
size, blog, video, slideshow, contains javascript. Search is so cluttered,
it's difficult to find small pages with excellent content.

I mention this because it's what obstructs my access to the Web I enjoyed so
much before. I don't like reading news from whatever bloated sites news.google
links me to, I don't like being redirected 3 times just to read a recipe, or
getting movie recommendations in aggregate rather than from a single reviewer
that I trust. But search engines lead users to these undesired things, and
companies compete to get top search results, and the best way I find good
websites is ironically offline.

------
mortenjorck
Exploring the early WWW of 20 years ago, I recall a cautionary sentiment to
the effect of "This is all free today, but eventually, they'll charge for
everything." It's funny how that came true in a way we never predicted:
Everything is still "free," and yet everything is also monetized. Rather than
a paywall in front of every website, a hidden "spywall" extracts payment in
other forms.

They ended up charging for everything after all, only through an indirect and
vastly more complex, opaque, and far-reaching system.

------
saladeen
Pushing of apps onto mobile users viewing sites inside browser has really gone
evil. Reddit makes you click 'No, I don't want to install reddit app' or
similar at least 3 times before letting you view the content.

Unrelated to that, as a HAM I've long (since 2000 or so) been preaching that
if you want to know how internet will be changed by commercial and government
interest, look into early radio history - it has many parallels with
development of internet: an open, free to publish network primarily ran by
enthusiasts that got progressively locked down until you had to be a major
player to publish content on it, turned into ad-driven economy etc.

------
dmitriid
This article nicely complements anither one: [https://staltz.com/the-web-
began-dying-in-2014-heres-how.htm...](https://staltz.com/the-web-began-dying-
in-2014-heres-how.html)

------
gojomo
Two missing recommendations:

* for those concerned with abusive ads/trackers, try Brave web browser, the browser most committed to privacy

* for those concerned about central chokepoints, start experimenting with 'decentralized web' technologies - the 'Beaker Browser'/DAT ecosystem is doing lots of interesting things; the blockchain-anchored namespaces, storage, or services promoted by Blockstack, Filecoin/Protocol-Labs, etc may soon offer compelling alternatives

------
ChuckMcM
I agree with the author, if people would pay for the information they got over
the Web then the providers of that information would be open to not selling
information about you to people who wished to exploit it.

The challenge though is trust, and of course transparency. Even if PrivacyBook
(the mythical anti-facebook product) had paying customers and no tracking, how
could you really _verify_ that they weren't selling your information? And of
course nation states always have a large hammer when they can put you out of
business if you don't hand over data that they deem important.

In some ways DAO's are an interesting response to this, immune to pressure
from nation states they may be able to provide a foundation for a distributed
service that resists oversight. It might be a viable business plan if you
could get more than the tin foil hat demographic to buy into it.

------
leepowers
> the page is 3.1 MB in size, makes about 460 HTTP requests of which 430 are
> third-party requests (outside of its parent domain) and takes 20 seconds to
> fully load on a fast 3G connection

That's a lot of ad-tracking and ad delivery code. More than that, it's also
remarkable that so much of this code is essentially duplicated. It's all user
tracking and ad delivery but with each separate company loading it's own
"stack" to accomplish the same thing.

It's part of a larger trend from content-centered and user-centered to
_advertising centered_. The problem is not centralization per se but business
built on advertising revenue. Facebook is an extreme example - the news feed
algorithms are optimized for generating ad revenue and not necessarily
favoring news reports that happen to be true.

------
wuliwong
I went to the "first web page" and saw this link to "etiquette".

[http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/Provider/Etiquette.html](http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/Provider/Etiquette.html)

Good pointers for making websites. :)

------
djhworld
I really enjoyed reading this essay, I've had this uneasy feeling for a few
years too.

Most of my browsing habits these days centralise around HN and Reddit, with a
sprinkling of RSS feeds via NewsBlur (although most RSS feeds are crap these
days - truncated articles etc)

At home I use Pi-Hole to block DNS requests to known nefarious actors, so
adverts are generally not a problem.

I can't help but feel that all these concerns are really not that much of an
issue to the average user though. From a <insert corporation here>
perspective, I'm wondering what their exposure rate is for their ads in terms
of traffic - say if 10% of their users block ads - does the company even care
that much?

------
tau255
I browse mainly on mobile devices and forward link to interesting articles.
Earlier I just bookmarked page after reading and it was fine, but now that
linkrot made a mess of my bookmark list I tend to print to pdf.

It is amazing how much thought is put into looks and design of web pages that
just ends scrambling everything during printout or just prevents to obtain any
meaningful result (ie. imgur)

I look around and see options to share on tweeter, pinterest, tumblr, reddit,
facebook. But no print button that would make it easy to archive. It is like
articles are disposable and not thought to be of any reference in future (even
highly technical ones).

------
MikeGale
I share a lot of Parimal says in this piece.

Well worth a read if, you too, are finding ways to escape from and minimise
the impact of this web-dystopia.

His suggestions are well worth a careful read. I suggest going further. Many
of you are quite capable of making your own web based facilities, know people
who you can collaborate with... In short you're in a position to actually make
your own web environment. An environment that grows your own cognitive
abilities, that enables you to learn well, that enables human growth instead
of diminishing brain function.

It's a good idea to take control. Shape your own web, don't let it shape you.

------
du_bing
I have the same observation and prepare to do something about it. I am in
China, the Web is terrible, quite hostile to anyone reading them. If you have
the same idea and really want to improve it, welcome to contact me.

------
wiz21c
It's not because the invention of typesetting lead to massive publication of
tabloids that one has to cry on the death of paper. You can watch elsewhere.
You're not entitled to watch video or have access to informational and free
websites.

Many people here forget that all the things they got for free are often the
result of hard work and lot a love from people who do it because they like it.
So instead of complaining about the vicious tracking, just support those who
build another web.

And too bad if it's too expensive for your activists to make a better youtube.

------
sanbor
One important factor of the success of Facebook/YouTube/etc. is that you have
an admin every 10k people. Let's say instead of Facebook we have million of
people hosting their websites. Then you'd need a lot more admins. A lot more
of security issues. Facebook makes super easy for people to put content online
and also interact between them. I wish setting up a server and securing a
server to host your content would be as easy as creating a Facebook account.

------
Animats
It's all about me, Me, ME!

The entire first screen is some guy blithering about himself. Cory Doctorow
says all this, better.

Diaspora would be a good idea if it had any traction. Until then, we're stuck
with Facebook.

Google, not so much. Most of Google's services have quite good alternatives. I
don't use any service that requires a Google account. With Google reading and
censoring what you put in Google Docs, that's probably a bad idea anyway.

------
b0rsuk
Videos (mostly video ads) are the pop-up windows of 2010's. It seems people
have memorized that alert(); is bad without _understanding_ what made it bad.

------
tjpnz
I'm saddened by this because despite agreeing with the essay I know that I'm
complicit in it by virtue of working in e-commerce (same could be said of most
if not all commercial web ventures). While I like to believe the people I work
with respect the privacy of our users I know that the online advertising
industry as a whole doesn't - as touched on in the essay. How do others deal
with this moral quandary?

------
tlogan
This happens because people refuse to pay for anything on the web. And you get
what you pay for.

I guess I'm just stating the obvious.

Now 100% sure how to fix this - but it hard problem.

------
starshadowx2
"A website on Doom level design on Geocities from 1999, accessed October 31,
20017 via Archive.org"

Glad to know Archive.org will still be around in 20017.

~~~
jstewartmobile
Brewster Kahle is my hero!

------
wruza
Tl;dr: places are lovely until you get millions of people, thousands of
businesses and trillions of dollars in there.

Typical ‘Back then xxx, we must yyy’ talk. No, you can’t, enjoy the freedom of
average user to put his personal life on the internet, not think twice, create
a market to exploit and exploiter to come. It is the essence of freedom on
average, _you_ wanted it for “everyone”.

------
halayli
> Cedexis: a CND/ad-delivery platform

Cedexis is not an ad-delivery platform. It's a multi-cdn platform that allows
you use multiple cdns under the hood and picks optimum cdn based on the user's
location.

OP loses credibility when making such false accusations just to make their
point.

~~~
livatlantis
Fair point, that was an error on my part. I've corrected it with a note of the
change right below it. Thanks for pointing it out!

------
profalseidol
In an increasingly capitalist world.

------
k3a
We need to start making 'open web embeedded in this infrastructure'. I mean
some open communities (outside facebook) and lists of websites containing
useful and true information. Wikipedia helps a lot and I love this ycombinator
news..

------
rkagerer
Maybe Web 3.0 can be a movement to reclaim what we've lost - honesty and
transparency in the interaction between websites and users.

Webbkoll ought to offer a badge the same way "Verified by Verisign" did when
SSL was new.

------
d--b
Hopefully this kind of backlash makes more people disapprove of bad practices
and look for crap-free websites.

Hopefully the internet follows the organic food movement. Too many people
tired of crap push for a change.

------
reacweb
I love his punch line: "We're quietly replacing an open web that connects and
empowers with one that restricts and commoditizes people. We need to stop
it.". How can we stop it ?

------
aabbcc1241
I agree the author's view but I have hard time convicting my friends or
collaborator to use non-popular alternatives, especially those who are not
technical

------
vuyani
Do you know, that you CANNOT use any of your google accounts if you turn your
cookies off? that is just grossly invasive

------
kburkhardt
What are some companies (and initiatives) that are actively working to protect
privacy online?

------
JepZ
> [...], stop and think about the consequences of that _shit_.

Anybody else read it that way? ;-)

------
rackforms
Leading by example, the author's site makes no external connections of any
sort.

------
macdiddy
When it comes to programming, video is a pretty difficult platform.

------
dispo001
Oh an essay about videos, or wait....

------
dpkonofa
It's weird to me that the author kinda meanders around a few key things
without ever explicitly saying them and, in that regard, they kinda muddy the
water around their point.

1) He blames the fall of the web on all the people (web designers, UX
designers, developers, creative directors, social media managers, data
scientists, product managers, start-up people, strategists) that works towards
creating it but I think the problem is more the people that have changed the
culture around the web, namely that it _has_ to be monetized. The
aforementioned "architects of the web" are just there to create content but
they're not the ones that need to load it up with tracking codes, tag
managers, and DRM. The people that monetized the web are the ones that broke
it.

2) The culture of the internet is completely different now and I think it's
because the barrier of entry for the internet is so low now. Consider that, up
until a few years ago (5-10 maybe, or longer?), it took some amount of
knowledge and/or skill to use the internet. Everyone couldn't just jump on the
web. You had to know enough about how to use a computer to install the
software, you had to be educated enough to connect the hardware and install
drivers, and you had to know how to find information. Even more so, if you
wanted to _contribute_ to the web, you needed to know some kind of programming
language and at least basic HTML, how to get those pages on to a server, and
how to connect it all to a domain. It wasn't all just a Google search away
from whatever word-vomit is advertised the most and pushed up to the front via
SEO and Facebook/social media. Now, anyone can get on the internet. Almost
every person on the planet has some access to the web and adding to the bucket
of knowledge and data on the web is done via WYSIWYG editors and text comment
boxes that require nothing more than the ability to use a keyboard. YouTube
comments and Facebook comments are complete shit for the very reason that it
doesn't take any amount of effort to post them.

3) Intellectual property on the internet is a mess and, as the article has
pointed out, everything is starting to centralize instead of the decentralized
web of the past. There is _severe_ bit-rot that happens that didn't happen
before simply due to the fact that a YouTube video can now be automatically
taken down, without cause, over even the suspicion or false claim that it
contains copyrighted content. The amount of content that has disappeared off
the internet because of a DMCA takedown is heartbreaking, especially when you
consider that a lot of other content embeds it or references it. The web's
greatest feature, the hyperlink, is now its biggest downfall because
corporations and greedy assholes can take down content just by accusing it of
violating copyrights. They don't even have to own it to make a claim. In other
words, the ability to rot that content is far easier and more automated than
the ability to protect that content. Politicians the world over have done
their part to sell us all out and reinforce this negative cycle instead of
protecting the backbone of the internet.

All in all, the internet used to be about sharing information. Now it's about
cashing in on everything possible and, to the author's credit, he's at least
identified that commoditization is a huge part of that problem. It's not the
only problem, though. Tracking is a symptom, not the cause.

------
magice
This is a thought provoking read. I, too, have been meditating over this
matter a lot.

Unfortunately, though, it seems to me that people generally adopt one of the 3
camps: * Don't care (that is, most users until their internet slows) *
Business of humanity is business. Anyone disagrees with the previous sentence
is socialist/communist/hippie/devil-spawn. * "GIVE ME LIBERTY OR GIVE ME
DEATH." Ready to leave Google/Facebook/AWS at moment notice.

I mean, it's important to know what bad large firms have brought forth with
the internet. But it's equally important to acknowledge what they (and
commerce in general) have enabled, as well as what advantages they possess to
users in everyday life.

To take a simple example: the article ends with a question: "Do we want the
web to be open, accessible, empowering and collaborative? [...] Or do we want
it to be just another means of endless consumption[...]?" Look, about 80% of
the time, I do want mindless consumption. Maybe a stupid sitcom on one of the
streaming service; maybe some cheesy pop over YouTube. I need that. And, you
know what, the current arrangement is damned good at deliver that kind of
consumption.

Thus, condemning the status quo wholesale is either useless or extremely
risky. Look, the status quo is status quo for a reason. How did Amazon get so
big? Not because they send out goons to smash windows of local bookstores!
They get big because they provide genuine value (large selection, stellar
customer service, fast shipping, etc.). Google got so big because they are
very _very_ good with organization of information and extremely good with
matching customers and advertisement. Apple got so big because they produce(d)
beautiful products. Facebook got so big because they connect people together.
Uber got so big because they make taxi-ing so convenient (and cheap). These
businesses got there for good reasons.

Except the case where you find way to provide the same (or at the minimum
almost the same) value with free and open ecosystem, status quo remains. Sure,
you can host your own fonts and pictures and videos, but then they will be
served from _your_ hosts. Have you invested billions of dollars in gateway to
be near your customers? Have you invested many hundreds of engineering-years
to test over as many browsers as you can find? And remember, you are probably
a power user of the internet. How about everyone else? Does everyone need to
learn how to administrate GNU/Linux to post views of the world?

Without providing the same value, revolutions tend to fall short of their
promises. Take American Revolution. They proclaimed "All Men are created
equal," killed a bunch of people (many innocent), then proceeded to keep
slavery anyway. And that's one of the most successful revolutions. French
Revolution produced an emperor to replace a king. English Revolutionary
failed. Paris Commune failed. Russian and Chinese Revolutions were followed by
famines. And so on.

Imagine the internet without Google, Facebook, and AWS. You know what will
happen next? Somebody else will become Google, Facebook, and AWS. Look at
China: sure, they are independent from Google and Facebook; and they have
Baidu and Weibo. Google, Facebook, Amazon, AWS serve important needs. You
can't not have someone like them.

In other words: all of these protests are useless and/or harmful without
careful consideration of the underlining economics and usage. And I am not
sure if anyone has gotten around to figure out an economic model for free web
yet.

------
ataturk
The part where the author tries to tie Brexit and the election of Donald Trump
to the user-hostile web is bonkers.

People, you have to understand this: There exists a large number of others out
there who desperately want government reformed, want more localized control
over their lives, and who voted accordingly. It wasn't some trick pulled on
them by corporations or Russians manipulating social media. I realize that may
be hard to understand, but it is the truth!

The rest of the article was well-intentioned, but somehow just a bit off. We
can't go back to 1999 or 1993, but we can limit the walled gardens and
censorship if we want to. But this is important: It's not the freedom-minded
people who want to shut down free speech or filter and censor, it is the dyed-
in-the-wool Marxist hardliners and the corporatists.

~~~
iamcasen
"died-in-the-wool Marxist hardliners and corporatists"

You really trying to equate Marxists and corporatists??? Dude...

~~~
guelo
Especially when what they really voted for was cutting the corporatists' taxes
and regulations. It is one of the greatest tricks of modern propaganda that
the super-pro-corporate parties have turned around the hate of corporations
onto the, umm, less-pro-corporate party.

~~~
vim_wannabe
One party for the corporations, the other for multi-nationals.

------
hasenj
I think the problem is one of economics.

The SV culture made it valuable for startups to amass a large amount of users.

Where as before this bubble started, it was more profitable for development
shops to build (and sell) software that anyone can use to host their own
site/forum/whatever.

This might not be the entire solution, but I think it would be a step in the
right direction:

We need more products that are developed for people to deploy on their own
private servers. They have to have some very compelling points that I think
are still lacking in many existing solution:

\- They have to be really really fast. Nothing in "python" or "nodejs" or
whatever.

\- They have to be really really easy to deploy. No requiring a separate
database server such as mysql. Just use SQLite. Also, no copying over of tons
of files. Just a single executable. All other data should live in the database
(sqlite file). Maybe have two database files: one for user generated content,
and one for bundling application resources (images, etc). I'm not exactly sure
what's the best setup, but something along those lines.

\- They have to be profitable for people who develop them.

This is more of a cultural issue.

I love open source, but requiring all software to be "free" means that it's
much more profitable to create a product for yourself only and try to lure as
many users as possible, just like facebook.

To this end, I think something like the physical source initiative makes a lot
of sense: if you buy the software, you have the right to make changes to it.
But you don't have the right to also copy it and distribute it.

~~~
wickawic
sidebar: lots of easy to enjoy things are implemented in 'slow' interpreted
languages. This site, for one.

~~~
hasenj
Which I think is a big mistake, because even if it ends up being used in a low
traffic site, it ends up complicating the installation process. Where as a
compiled language not only would run fast but also have a very simple setup:
just copy over the exe and run it. Nothing to configure. No dependencies to
install.

~~~
noobiemcfoob
Many applications I've used that come as an exe are hardly that easy to
install and configure. Inevitably, something breaks because of my machine's
particular configuration. On the development side, building to that magical
executable is an even bigger nightmare.

Most packages in python or nodejs? Install and run through package managers
just fine.

~~~
hasenj
The more you depend on things to be right in the target environment, the more
chances you have of breaking things.

Having a statically linked binary will not always magically solve this, but
it's a great step in that direction.

The other step is not relying on any external servers or services, e.g.
postgresql, redis, etc.

The rest just boils down to programmer discipline. Never introduce something
that can potentially cause a headache to the end user.

If you're building on an interpreted language, you can't really do that. You
will always at least require the user to have a specific version of
python/node/whatever.

This can get complicated if the user has a different version, so now you have
to introduce a virtualization layer that can manage several different versions
of the environment. These tools are always annoying to use.

Not to mention that some packages could have native dependencies (e.g. a
python library having a dependency on a c library) and this is almost always a
source of headaches.

~~~
sillysaurus3
I mean, have you tried running arc? You can fire up arc 3.1 via racket and it
runs fine.

~~~
hasenj
I remember playing with it many years ago when I was still naive and at the
time had bought into PG's promotion of lisp.

------
tzahola
I’m more and more convinced of the profitability of this idea I have come up
with recently: WebAssembly pages which render their contents via WebGL.
Adblocking would become impossible; content providers could disable text
copy/paste too!

Brave new world, huh?

~~~
tqkxzugoaupvwqr
I felt a strong urge to downvote you to not give this idea any spotlight. (I
didn’t though.)

If this ever happens I will disable WebGL, and if this won’t be possible
anymore (corporate interests…), I will invent a web competitor where
participants are legally bound to my terms. Terms that will forbid ads, spying
and spamming. Misbehaving users will experience increasingly long cool downs
for misconducts, which can end in quasi bans (cool downs longer than their
life). … One can dream.

~~~
tzahola
I’m glad you didn’t downvote me! The faster we can get this thing going, the
earlier we can get a tabula rasa ;)

Until then, keep riding the tiger!

------
draw_down
I used to have a boss who lived his whole life in Russia, and then moved here
after his nominal retirement. He used to say this to me, often:

"That's capitalism, baby."

~~~
jwilk
Here?

------
rajam
This essay is very informative

------
RightMillennial
-

~~~
benbenolson
I'm going to assume that this is a joke.

------
jstewartmobile
Talk about silver linings! Trump's victory certainly made the
facebook/twitter/instagram liberals see what an obscenity this has all become.

Of course if the dems make a comeback in the midterms, watch them all go into
full-blown social-media relapse.

~~~
sctb
Please don't post this kind of partisan flamebait on Hacker News. We're here
to try for better.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

~~~
jstewartmobile
my bad

------
mobilemidget
"I quit Facebook seven months ago. Despite its undeniable value"

Cant take this seriously right? You treasure the web, yet you are on facebook.

