[HN Gopher] Woob: Web Outside of Browsers
___________________________________________________________________
Woob: Web Outside of Browsers
Author : pcr910303
Score : 216 points
Date : 2022-01-14 15:36 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (woob.tech)
(TXT) w3m dump (woob.tech)
| thih9 wrote:
| I've been playing with it, but I keep running into errors. E.g.:
|
| in woob-weather, with weather.com backend, I've been getting
| "Error(weather): 401 Client Error: Unauthorized";
|
| in woob-gallery, with imgur backend, when I attempt to download
| an image the module crashes with "FileNotFoundError: [Errno 2] No
| such file or directory: ''"
|
| I like the idea though and I'll keep trying further.
|
| ---
|
| Update: I resolved the image-gallery problem by specifying the
| foldername (so: using "download ID 1 foldername" instead of
| "download ID"). BUT: it looks like I'm unable to download text
| descriptions that sometimes accompany the images.
| vmception wrote:
| Reading the linked site and some of the discussion, I highly
| recommend finding your nearest Chinese friend or person and
| getting authorized on Wechat. Its a whole parallel other
| internet! Kinda similar to how a private set of Facebook pages
| are otherwise inaccessible with an account, except in a parellel
| reality where people use them for all business and have no other
| internet presence.
|
| Yes, as a user another government gets to read your posts, but I
| mean yet another.
|
| To get on, I literally just knocked on a few doors in San
| Francisco and got authorized, so many people here can too. You
| could probably do it at a park.
|
| Note: Hong Kong citizens cannot do it for US citizens even I was
| trying. Has to be a mainland Chinese person.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| Weibo is a heavily censored and manipulated platform. The CCP
| uses it to track dissidents abroad.
|
| Do not install or operate on any trusted device. Do not connect
| to your home network. Do not store personal details on your
| weibo device. Do not ever send sensitive information or talk to
| real contacts on Weibo.
| vmception wrote:
| As you know, it is not possible to separate corporate China
| from government China due to the structure of that system so
| no analogy exactly works, but our day to day experience is
| exceedingly similar as we rely on heavily censored and
| manipulated private platforms. Although we retain options to
| express ideas, there is not enough saturation of other people
| to view those ideas except to participate on heavily censored
| platforms and risk complete deplatforming. Its an almost
| daily topic here, for example.
|
| So the user experience on a Chinese service is simply not
| different _enough_ for me to treat it differently.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| I'm someone who is heavily critical of Facebook and
| Twitter.
|
| However there is a world of difference between sloppily
| shutting down vaccine or election misinformation, and
| actively censoring a Tennis star reporting a sexual assault
| by a politiburo member.
|
| There is a world of difference between taking down shit
| talking politicians twitter profiles, and actively
| censoring the genocide of an ethnic minority.
|
| Ads that slurp up personal data are bad. Threatening
| political dissidents abroad directly is incomparable.
|
| To say "well they are all the same bad" is to be willfully
| blind to the basic facts.
|
| [1] - https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/0
| 3/what-...
|
| [2] - https://www.thecut.com/2021/12/the-disappearance-of-
| peng-shu...
| vmception wrote:
| > To say "well they are all the same bad" is to be
| willfully blind to the basic facts.
|
| Haha I'm not saying that, I'm saying it has nothing to do
| with my participation in those platforms because I know
| what to expect and my lack of participation changes
| nothing.
|
| My words are the user experience is not different enough.
|
| For everyone else, check out that great robust example of
| a web outside of browsers.
| nope96 wrote:
| Wouldn't a person need to understand Chinese? or is wechat
| English?
| vmception wrote:
| The settings will be in English and there are pages and chat
| rooms you can find. It is mostly Mandarin though. If you are
| in any particular niche you might be able to follow since the
| memes and reactions are familiar. You can also chat with
| other people in English if they know it, some of your friends
| probably already uploaded your contact info there so when you
| make an account you'll be connected with them even if you
| dont share access to your contacts - just like how Facebook
| and most other social apps work.
| brutal_chaos_ wrote:
| This is clever and fantastic. I have been pondering a similar
| concept recently and I think I would like to contribute. I'm
| curious as to why LGPL-3 was chosen as the license, though, not
| that the license is a show stopper.
| Zababa wrote:
| One explanation might be that the project is mostly French, and
| the GPL/LGPL seems more popular in France than in the USA.
| Ajedi32 wrote:
| Wow! I actually love the idea of being able to interact with
| websites via a standard API rather being forced to use web-based
| UI they provide. It opens up a whole lot of possibles for things
| like alternate clients, standard UIs for interacting across
| multiple sites, etc. Also eliminates the possibility of sites
| engaging in annoying or abusive behavior by putting users in full
| control of the client rather than the site operator. Obviously it
| can't work for _every_ site, but it 's quite the interesting
| concept.
| rpastuszak wrote:
| In a way you're describing how browsers should work.
|
| > Also eliminates the possibility of sites engaging in annoying
| or abusive behavior by putting users in full control of the
| client rather than the site operator. Obviously it can't work
| for every site, but it's quite the interesting concept.
|
| That's the job of the User Agent after all, acting on behalf of
| the user.
| sys_64738 wrote:
| Isn't this just what Electron provides?
| clone1018 wrote:
| I've had two ideas related to this in the past that I've always
| wanted to prototype:
|
| - A social media website without a frontend. We just provide a
| fully exposed API and Oauth, and devs can create their own
| client to interact with the social network. This would give
| devs the freedom to create their own experiences without
| locking users into one specific way of using the social
| network.
|
| - "Cloud" content hosting as a service. You'd be able to build
| your own frontend for interacting with a website / blog, and
| then include our JS code and your site's content will
| automatically be populated in. This would keep the frontend
| clean, simple, and cheap, while offloading posts, comments, and
| other advanced functionality to the service.
|
| Of course both are purely experimental ideas, with no potential
| real world meaning :D
| andrewfromx wrote:
| this sounds perfect for https://www.deso.org/ social network
| code
| rglullis wrote:
| > A social media website without a frontend. We just provide
| a fully exposed API and Oauth,
|
| Take CouchDB and store all activities as ActivityStreams
| documents.
|
| > "Cloud" content hosting as a service.
|
| "Headless CMS" is the term you are looking for, and it is
| already a big industry https://jamstack.org/headless-cms/
| mxuribe wrote:
| For your first idea around social media, while not 100%
| exactly what you cited, the fediverse sort of already
| provides for that...Well, specifically the ActivityPub
| protocol (and couple of other protocols) enable such
| functionality...and frankly there are numerous (yes, not just
| 1 or 2, but numerous) server implementation which further
| enable numerous desktop and mobile clients to interact with
| content...all federated/sort of decentralized. If you've
| heard of mastodon, then they tend to capture most of the
| mindshare, but there are many other servers and clients...and
| there are reportedly millions of people on the fediverse
| around the world...so we're sort of already where you would
| like to be. ;-)
|
| I'm sure there are many sites which help provide better
| context for the fediverse, but here, check this one out:
| https://fediverse.party/en/fediverse
|
| Cheers!
| thecakefive wrote:
| For the social media part that existed; see
| https://socialize.dmonn.ch/
|
| It has fallen out of fashion tho.
| smt88 wrote:
| > _I actually love the idea of being able to interact with
| websites via a standard API rather being forced to use web-
| based UI they provide._
|
| For a while, people were pitching this as Web 2.0. It's also
| what RSS and podcasts still are.
|
| Unfortunately, most of the websites we visit are revenue-
| generating and want to control their presentation.
| vannevar wrote:
| Right. There are all kinds of great services that could be
| built on top of other peoples' web sites, but most sites want
| to own the relationship with their customer directly. And
| most of the great ideas for mashup services are predicated on
| the idea that the mashup will get most of the revenue, which
| is not going to fly with the underlying value providers. In
| an ad-supported web world, those who own the eyeballs call
| the shots.
| anderspitman wrote:
| It's a tricky problem. I just have to believe there's a way
| we can make the world work without ads at all. They're just
| gross. But I have no idea how that could happen.
| Ajedi32 wrote:
| > most of the websites we visit are revenue-generating and
| want to control their presentation
|
| This project seems designed to work even _without_ the
| cooperation of the sites you 're interacting with; all the
| site-specific modules are maintained by the community.
| Adversarial interoperability at its finest.
|
| In extreme cases, one could imagine a module running a full
| headless browser on the back-end, pretending to be a user
| scrolling around and clicking stuff, while presenting the
| actual user with a clean front-end.
| onion2k wrote:
| _I actually love the idea of being able to interact with
| websites via a standard API rather being forced to use web-
| based UI they provide._
|
| That's what HTTP is. You're free to write a client that isn't a
| browser that sends and receives the same API messages as any
| HTTP client app does. Most people use browsers, but there's
| also things like iOS and Android apps that consume the same
| APIs as browsers, or Postman that directly communicates with
| the APIs, etc.
|
| The APIs that sit in top of HTTP are even sort of standardized
| in the sense that HTTP verbs mean the same everywhere (in
| theory, but some devs get it wrong.)
|
| Thr only hard bit that no one has really solved in a nice way
| is how you discover the APIs in the first place. There's things
| like WSDL but it's horrible.
| 0x445442 wrote:
| Believe it or not, around the turn of the century there were many
| thick client apps. But back then it was a challenge to ship and
| update these applications. This pain, along with the continued
| rollout of broadband led many to advocate for creating
| applications that would run in a web browser while being
| controlled on centralized servers. In practice, turning the
| platform that was designed to render markup text into an
| application host. This would allow applications to be shipped and
| updated with little interaction from the user.
|
| However, right about the same time web apps were taking over the
| world there were thick client apps that were solving the problems
| of installation and and updates. Two of the prominent thick
| client applications doing this were iTunes and the browsers
| themselves.
|
| Now fast forward a decade to the early teens and the ubiquitous
| use of smart phones. What is the single largest determining
| factor of platform success? Is it the ability for web apps to
| render on your platform's web browser or is it the breadth and
| depth of your platform's app store?
|
| My rant is over, I wish web apps would die. I've wished that for
| most of the 21st century.
| mahastore wrote:
| Good example of another solution without a problem.
| mkdirp wrote:
| Really? You ever tried automating your own data from e.g. your
| bank? Cos I have, and it's a lot more annoying that it should
| be.
|
| Woob does a lot more than just banks. It allows you to get any
| of your data. Adding additional providers is piss easy too.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| This is so cool. A custom client for websites. Essentially a web
| scraper with a GUI on top. You can define your own user
| experience instead of accepting what they designed for you.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| This is.... bizarre. And I like it?
|
| At first I thought this was like an API to integrate web content
| into your own apps. But now it looks more like Groupware, in the
| sense that Woob is actually your user interface and there are
| just modules to consume content from random websites.
|
| It goes back to the old idea where you would have one dedicated
| desktop application for each thing you wanted to do on the
| internet, like read news, send mail, listen to music, view a
| calendar... turning your computer into a utilitarian appliance.
| Rather than a portal for businesses to spend a lot of time and
| money building their own dedicated user interfaces to lock you
| in. The latter has made life more difficult, where we have to
| constantly learn every business's new interface, there's always
| competition between missing features, and the dedicated UI (or
| platform) becomes a way for the business to squeeze more out of
| the user.
|
| And there are no ads. I just realized there's an entire
| generation who have never seen technology without advertisements.
| I wonder what they'd make of this.
| NavinF wrote:
| Re: that last part. We're probably thinking of different
| generations, but I agree. Demographics from a random unreliable
| source: Age vs ad blocker usage (female, male)
| 16-24 43.2%, 49.2% 25-34 43.0%, 47.6% 35-44
| 38.4%, 44.8% 45-54 33.5%, 39.1% 55-65 32.1%,
| 37.3%
|
| Those poor boomers. They grew up watching ads on every cable
| television channel and now they watch ads on every YouTube
| video.
| jessaustin wrote:
| Let's not waste sympathy on the boomers...
| CodeGlitch wrote:
| Ageism at it's finest.
| kodablah wrote:
| I think a version of this is what the internet needs but using
| headless browsers from the client and with a somewhat-centrally
| curated set of scraper "recipes" if you will. Basically a
| community curated/updated set of scraper logic per site (yes some
| trust is required) that essentially provides JSON data and/or
| APIs based on the site. Even just a neutered HTML equivalent of
| sites (e.g. amp w/out the Google and ads stuff) would be good.
|
| Since it is all client side, it can be dubbed a "browser" not a
| "scraper" and one might hope popularity is high enough that
| active blocking of it is blatantly user hostile. Granted one
| hopes that, like EasyList and uBO and others have shown, the
| community can outpace site owners. Not appearing headless
| (tunneling captchas, literal mousemove events in pseudo-random
| human-like ways, etc) should be doable.
|
| It's something I have thought about and once dubbed "recapitate"
| (https://github.com/cretz/software-ideas/issues/82) and plan to
| revisit. I have seen many versions of this attempted. We need to
| encourage shared data extraction tools.
| pjerem wrote:
| Interesting to see Woob here. Most of the modules are for french
| environment (banks, dating websites, job boards ...). I always
| liked the irreverence of the module's names and logos (which are
| authentic MS Paint piece of work).
| reaperducer wrote:
| Unless my brain isn't parsing it right, that dating icon is
| both funny and NSFW.
| soheil wrote:
| aum or happn?
| zeeZ wrote:
| My first guess was this had something to do with legal
| nonsense, and I guess I was right:
|
| > If provided, icons are preferred to be parodic or humorous in
| nature for legal reasons, however there are no restrictions on
| the quality or style of humor.
|
| https://gitlab.com/woob/woob/-/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md
| pjerem wrote:
| Yes, but I think they are, also, just for making fun of some
| brands.
|
| Because, also a fun fact : this project changed its name
| recently, it was called Weboob before: https://weboob.org
| userbinator wrote:
| I remember weboob, and all the amusing names of the various
| pieces. Unfortunate that the (French) humour was killed by
| political correctness.
| awrmc wrote:
| Are you suggesting "political correctness" is the only
| reason someone might be discouraged from installing a
| program named after toilet humor and juvenile references
| to specific parts of the anatomy? I've let my kids watch
| plenty of children's movies with fart jokes in them, but
| I still don't want to hear more of that when I'm trying
| to use a tool to access a banking service. It seems
| there's even still a banking module with a crude poop
| icon: https://woob.tech/applications/bank.html
|
| Doesn't really inspire confidence in their
| professionalism or trustworthiness with handling
| financial transactions, if you ask me.
| Vosporos wrote:
| Je suis francaise et cet humour etait vraiment merdique
| littlestymaar wrote:
| It's not "political correctness" which killed the humor,
| in fact the humor was there by accident and at the
| beginning the creator of the project found that funny, so
| it stuck for a while
|
| > When weboob was started in 2010, 11 years ago, the name
| was chosen, without a hidden agenda, since as a French
| speaker, "boob" wasn't part of my vocabulary.
|
| > Following its release and the ensuing reactions, during
| its first years, the project was complemented with
| various provocative elements (icons, application names,
| English slurs in the code). This was done with the sole
| motive that at that time, it was seen as "fun".
|
| But when the project gained traction he realized that the
| name was probably not appropriate for people building
| business apps with it, which he wanted to support.
|
| > But in practice, it's been years the project isn't
| following this approach anymore, it's used as an
| essential building block of professional companies, the
| provocative elements are progressively removed, and the
| professionnalisation[sic] question is being raised.
|
| Source: Weboob will become woob - https://lists.symlink.m
| e/pipermail/weboob/2021-February/0016...
| throwaway744678 wrote:
| The 6th contributor's (nick)name, can be translated to
| something like "Fuckthewhores", with a play on words with
| Belzebuth
| Hackbraten wrote:
| Good on them. I really disliked the old name.
| smm11 wrote:
| France just can't shake the Minitel, that's for sure.
| beders wrote:
| was thinking the same thing ;)
| res0nat0r wrote:
| Also: woob - 1994 is one of the best ambient albums ever made.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0S3owK3pN64
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| This is great. In my ideal world all the web should be like this.
| togaen wrote:
| but... why
| btrettel wrote:
| A while back I heard about Z39.50 [0], a protocol that libraries
| use for their catalogs. In the 90s it seems there were native
| clients for the protocol so that one could interact with the
| library catalog without using a web interface. A lot of the
| current web interfaces are terribly slow JS monstrosities now so
| I'd like to try something faster.
|
| I never did figure out if any of the GUI clients [1] are still
| actively developed and I'd appreciate if anyone who knows about
| this could point me towards a good client.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z39.50
|
| [1] Some software listed here:
| http://www.loc.gov/z3950/agency/resources/software.html
| librarianscott wrote:
| The most well-known Z39.50 using software that still works is a
| paid citation manager called EndNote (the desktop client not
| the web client). You can ingest PDFs with that software too. I
| don't think the open-source Zotero has added that feature yet.
| Z39.50 is clunky, and our old LMS (library management software,
| used behind the scenes) can pull in MARC records for our staff
| when we order books, but I don't even want to think about the
| security.
| kadomony wrote:
| Woobs out
| anderspitman wrote:
| Something I've been thinking about lately is how browsers have
| essentially become a dependency for any sort of auth on the
| internet. Pretty much everything uses OAuth2, which requires you
| to be able to render HTML and CSS, and in many implementations
| JavaScript.
|
| That's ~20M (Firefox) to ~30M (Chromium) lines of code as a
| dependency for your application, just for auth. This applies even
| if you have a slick CLI app like rclone. If you want to connect
| it to Google drive you still need a browser to do the OAuth2
| flow. All of this just so we have a safe, known location to stash
| auth cookies.
|
| It would be sweet if there was a lightweight protocol where you
| could lay out a basic consent UI (maybe with a simple JSON
| format) that can be rendered outside the browser. Then you need a
| way to connect to a central trusted cookie store. You could still
| redirect to a separate app, but it wouldn't need to be nearly as
| complicated as a browser.
| notorandit wrote:
| I do exactly the other way around on my smartphone: if there is a
| web app i won't install the app.
| pavlov wrote:
| It's like a peek at an alternative Internet where Gopher won
| instead of WWW.
| mxuribe wrote:
| There has been a desire to go back to older days where text was
| more prevalent, and so Gemini has begin and is gaining
| popularity - though I'm sure very slowly. See:
| https://gemini.circumlunar.space/
|
| Also, separately (though i wouild not be surprised if
| frequented by same/similar folks who have interets in Gemini),
| there is also the tildeverse...again, more text-heavy
| environments. See: https://tildeverse.org/
|
| And, as i have stated in another comment there is the fediverse
| (e.g. Mastodon, pleroma, etc.), so the ability to leverage APIs
| to interact with other folks and their content without
| explicitly needing a typical web browser exists, and
| flourishes.
|
| I'll end by stating that there are a few exciting things - like
| the above items i mention as well as this neat Woob platform -
| which to me seem very fun, a little new, and yet at the same
| time in some ways nostalgic...maybe they won't make the morning
| news, and likely only attract geeks, but it is all still
| exciting - at least for me!
| Qub3d wrote:
| The tildeverse looks pretty cool, but why does it redirect me
| to a Rick Roll on Firefox?
|
| I can see the normal site just fine on Lynx browser (maybe
| that's the point?)
|
| Edit: ah, I see, they're doing a JWZ and redirecting based on
| referral, but going a step further and setting a cookie.
| Cute, but also terribly immature.
| mxuribe wrote:
| Oops, sorry about that. I never had an issue before...but
| funny after visiting HN, see exactly what you mean.
| (Clearing the cookies avoids the classic rick roll video).
| Anyway, yeah i guess the tilde folks are "characters". But,
| separate of that, the community i've interacted with is
| quite fun, respectful, and good-natured. I also failed to
| mention a sort of equivalent to HN, which i frequent (with
| similar topics to HN but often nicer crowd):
| https://tildes.net/
|
| ...Tilde.net used to be only open to invite not open to
| anyone creating an account...so if interested - and still
| not open to the public - i can trigger to send you an
| invite.
| louissan wrote:
| woob woob woob! Battletech pulse lasers anyone?
| diogenesjunior wrote:
| Small discussion earlier:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29935634
| zepto wrote:
| Smaller as in essentially zero, and with a link back to this
| one.
|
| An amusing detour.
| dylan-m wrote:
| I like the idea of this. There's so much _information_ on the
| web, but we still need a way to bring that information to other
| applications, without being tied to a particular source. That was
| really the dream of the semantic web, after all.
|
| This kind of idea would be really nicely paired with good
| Microformats[1] support, which continues to be a very good idea.
| That way we can find, say, a recipe or an address on a web page
| in a reusable way and without needing magical heuristics.
|
| (Of course, "reusable" in theory, with the caveat that everybody
| forgot about microformats around when Google decided they could
| machine learn their way out of everything).
|
| [1] http://microformats.org
| MaxBarraclough wrote:
| > I like the idea of this. There's so much information on the
| web, but we still need a way to bring that information to other
| applications, without being tied to a particular source.
|
| I'm not sure I'm interpreting you correctly here, but I think
| I'm on the other side of this. The problem is that many modern
| websites are godawful. I think the story pretty much ends
| there. If websites were not awful, we wouldn't find ourselves
| appalled by the idea of just embedding a browser.
|
| Modern web browsers feature a 'reader mode' as a countermeasure
| to that much modern web design is significantly worse than
| having no web design at all.
|
| If you're serious about a 'lightweight' alternative to the
| lumbering horror-show of the modern web, the way forward is
| either Gemini [0], or a formalised simple subset of HTML. [1]
|
| > That way we can find, say, a recipe or an address on a web
| page in a reusable way and without needing magical heuristics.
|
| I think the _find_ and _reusable_ aspects here are really two
| very different problems.
|
| The _reusable_ part is easy. HTML is already reusable. A
| standardised simple subset would be even more so. [1]
|
| The _find_ part is trickier. Discovering decent content is
| harder, as there 's an arms race of ad-funded spammers trying
| to out-compete legitimate recipe sites in search-engine
| rankings. (There's also the possibility of search engines not
| being motivated to work on delivering good search results. [2])
|
| The idea of having a choice between native GUI applications and
| web apps, has been with us for some time. Email is probably the
| best example, we've long had the choice between webmail and
| native email clients. Beyond webmail, these days even Microsoft
| Word has a web-based version. There are of course both
| advantages and disadvantages to web-based applications.
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23730408
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29291392
|
| [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29772136
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| How do you know someone uses Gemini? They'll tell you the
| moment they can! Like the vegans of the web...
| jka wrote:
| Also entirely possible that I'm misunderstanding both of you,
| but I think what the parent comment was imagining was
| something like common schemas (like schema.org[1]?) for
| content that is currently around the web and encased in the
| challenging web design you mention.
|
| With common (and evolving) formats -- and incentives for
| publishers to provide their information within those formats
| -- we could then have much simpler, more streamlined tools to
| use and remix that data in application-specific ways.
|
| [1] - https://schema.org/docs/full.html
| anderspitman wrote:
| > Discovering decent content is harder, as there's an arms
| race of ad-funded spammers trying to out-compete legitimate
| recipe sites in search-engine rankings
|
| I wonder if we even need the search engines? I think a lot of
| the things we've come to rely on them for could easily be
| handled in other ways. Recipes for example. You don't really
| want the best recipe _page_ for a given dish. You want a good
| quality recipe _site_ that has a recipe for that dish.
| Quality of recipe sites ebb and flow as they sell out and
| incentives change, but generally you would probably only need
| to be aware of the top 2-3 sites. This is exactly the type of
| information that is easily stored as "tribal knowledge" on a
| subreddit, forum sticky, community wiki, or even blasting out
| to your Facebook friends "hey what's everyone's favorite
| recipe site?"
| dillondoyle wrote:
| Funnily, Google has pushed websites to add more structured data
| into their html for crawling..
|
| Seems it's used for SEO hackinge. For instance on recipes why
| wouldn't a site give their recipe a super high rating. Those
| sites are awful SEO spam adservers basically.
|
| But business info that can be used to map seems pretty valuable
| to google.
|
| https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/structure...
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| One problem is that it takes a lot of work and effort to build
| any of the valuable hubs where people post information.
|
| Ever try to start a forum? It's a monumental task with no
| guarantee of success. You may even need to employ people to
| grow and maintain one.
|
| And once you've finally grown one of these hubs that
| accumulates recipes, lyrics, real estate listings, classifieds,
| etc. (whatever you had in mind) there's no incentive to make it
| as easy as possible to share it with the world. Once you get
| over "ugh, everyone just wants to make a buck", there's the
| fact that it wasn't free to build and maintain the platform to
| begin with. And perhaps the only incentive to build the
| platform was the idea that people would pay for the value.
|
| Or, who is supposed to do the work of curating and organizing
| all of this information and then producing an API so that
| others can build on it, and why haven't they started? There are
| probably some inconvenient truths in the answer beyond
| cynicism.
| anderspitman wrote:
| Ha, I'm trying to start a data ownership forum now. My
| approach has been to have it be a central place for support
| for all my open source projects. We'll see how that works
| out.
| matthewaveryusa wrote:
| This has Bloomberg terminal / minitel vibes. I think there's
| definitely a space for an alternative browser that can render
| guis with visually consistent widgets.
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