[HN Gopher] An argument for a return to Web 1.0
___________________________________________________________________
An argument for a return to Web 1.0
Author : pmlnr
Score : 183 points
Date : 2022-04-14 11:58 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (vhsoverdrive.neocities.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (vhsoverdrive.neocities.org)
| flyingfences wrote:
| I agree with the overall sentiment, but it seems a little ironic
| that this author is pining for a return to the simple old days of
| hand-written HTML but has written a site that doesn't even show
| links to its own pages with JS disabled.
| pgcj_poster wrote:
| The options available to the author are:
|
| 1. Manually add a link to every page on the site each time a
| new one is added.
|
| 2. Give up on hand-writing HTML and use a server-side
| templating system
|
| 3. Give up on having navigation on each page
|
| 4. Load the navigation through JavaScript
|
| Given that they want to hand-write HTML, and they (presumably)
| want it to be easy enough for everyone to do, the JS options
| seems like a reasonable choice.
| flyingfences wrote:
| 3 seems like the sane option to me... That's what I remember
| most sites doing back in the day if they weren't going for 2.
| Have a top-level "directory" page with individual pages
| linking back up to it and to the homepage, rather than having
| pages that link to literally nothing at all.
| pgcj_poster wrote:
| That's my preference as well, but I can understand how
| someone might want a more complex design while still using
| hand-written HTML.
|
| Perhaps a good compromise would be to put a link to a
| navigation page in the sidebar, but when available, use
| JavaScript to replace the link with the navigation page
| content.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Static site generators exist to solve this problem. No need
| for server-side rendering at all.
| usrbinbash wrote:
| "learning to hand code HTML" doesn't exclude using Javascript
| or CSS, or anything else for that matter.
| Mezzie wrote:
| I wrote a ton of CSS and early JS in Windows Notepad. Or ON
| PAPER if the computer(s) I had access to were in use.
| flyingfences wrote:
| No, it doesn't, but the general idea is that scripts are
| supposed to supplement the base page, not needlessly replace
| effectively static pieces of it.
| justaman wrote:
| I just want a web where everyone has their own space. Not renting
| a space from Facebook, Google, or XYZ. A space that can be ad
| free. One where people can choose what data is released and how;
| where deny all is default for any information gathering.
|
| If we want to socialize with someone, couldn't we just go to that
| person instead of a social media broker?
|
| The tech of web 1.0 is limiting and less approachable for the
| average person. There is no reason to throw the baby out with the
| bath water.
|
| We went down the rabbit hole of web 2.0 and it doesn't look like
| we will come back out. Web 3.0 feels dystopian.
| jaltekruse wrote:
| Social media has it's drawbacks, but large hosted services
| exist for good reasons and have spawned entire new industries.
| An independent artist couldn't host a server to share their
| work (especially if they want to share content like video
| widely), or run a store capable of handling a spike of traffic
| if they became popular. Also the network effects of the
| platforms give huge benefits allowing at least a portion of
| promising diamonds in the rough to be found and shared (even if
| they are mixed in with a bunch of dumb clickbait and cheap
| knockoffs of products as discussed in the recent Etsy boycott
| thread).
|
| It's definitely not all roses, but I don't really see a clear
| path out of this. Because for whatever feelings people have
| about big tech, YouTube, Facebook, Etsy, Instagram have all
| driven billions in business for non-tech companies. And they've
| done it by creating experiences that are engaging to end
| consumers. Sure we might see traffic exchange hands among the
| big players, and there will be other successful new networks
| like we have seen with TikTok. But I think people don't want to
| self host for good reasons.
| Animats wrote:
| Web 1.0 is now called Markdown.
| thomassmith65 wrote:
| I love this essay, but this claim is false: On
| most large sites this can be mitigated by blocking of toxic users
|
| Given the design of the internet, it _cannot_. Large sites have
| the ability to block usernames, IPs, etc... not actual users.
|
| I realize this is hardly earth-shattering news to the HN
| audience, but it's meaningful.
| eljimmy wrote:
| The golden age of the Internet was also distinctly different
| because I'd wager that the majority of people online back in
| those days had some technical know-how. You knew you were
| interacting with people who could operate a computer well enough
| to dial-up to an ISP so generally they were fairly intelligent.
|
| As nostalgic as it is, I think if you were to really strive for
| that type of world again you need to move forward with building a
| new network - something that requires some measure of
| intelligence in order to gain access to it. Of course, what's
| then stopping someone from automating that and repeating the
| cycle all over again?
|
| Better off just carving out your little piece in this new massive
| online world and building a community - or - just join one that
| already exists. There's millions of forums and "hand-made"
| websites out there, you just need to dig a little deeper these
| days.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| The core argument is the same as a recent post here [1] about
| using older computers - that it reduces distractions and that
| older technology was better in its simplicity. Today's we are
| teetering on the brink of complexity breakdown.
|
| These are good arguments that stand alone.
|
| The counter-arguments are always the same "Hey, that's a problem
| with people - just exercise willpower and don't get distracted".
| Or "Hey, modern electronics and software is more 'efficient',
| just throw more cycles at it (silicon and cognitive) and get with
| the programme" But these only serve to minimise and deny real
| sentiments that smart software developers would pay close
| attention to.
|
| There's lot's of sentiment out there that is being mistaken for
| 'nostalgia', which is genuine dissatisfaction with modern tools.
| That's why projects like suckless.org [2] seem more relevant
| every day.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31001296
|
| [2] https://suckless.org/
| allo37 wrote:
| I think there's another point to consider with older
| technology: It was hard to use! The technical know-how required
| to get a site online in the 90's, early 2000's was a big filter
| for the quality of its content.
| krapp wrote:
| >The technical know-how required to get a site online in the
| 90's, early 2000's was a big filter for the quality of its
| content.
|
| It really wasn't. I don't know why people here believe that
| being able to set up a web server and write HTML has any
| relationship to the quality of the content being marked up
| and served. They're completely different things.
|
| And by then Geocities, etc. were a thing and it didn't
| exactly take an engineering degree to use those.
| allo37 wrote:
| Did it take an engineering degree? Of course not. But
| knowing how to write HTML and get it on the internet was
| harder than, say, sending a tweet is today. I might also
| just not be remembering all the crappy Geocities sites with
| perfect clarity :)
| dolni wrote:
| When I was ten years old (late 90s) I was able to publish
| a site using a WYSIWYG host of the time (Homestead).
|
| It was crappy, of course, but it was something. And it
| was easy.
| sanderjd wrote:
| I am sympathetic to the argument here, but I think this
| misrepresents the counterargument. I think the argument against
| this is simply that it's not what people actually want, it's
| what people like us want them to want.
|
| It sort of reminds me of that series where an architect makes
| fun of mcmansion monstrosities. The architect is right - those
| mcmansions suck - and we're right - simplicity in computing is
| better - but I think people want the mcmansions and I think
| people want the flashier more interactive software.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| Edit: Sorry Sandersd, I did not carefefully read what you
| said "it's what people like us want them to want." - which is
| even more interesting!
|
| I would go one stage more "meta" and say; No. Actually one of
| the deep, deep problems in computer science and digital
| technology is the very idea that "we know what people want".
| Or that they know themselves. There is so much said in this
| forum and other software communities about "what people
| really want". Outside of quite narrow UX psychology - which
| deals mainly with how people prefer to complete tasks within
| _paradigms that have already been selected for them_ - I know
| of little or no evidence based research on the lifestyle and
| societal choices around technology. That is why I frequently
| use the phrase *foisted upon " in Digital Vegan [1][2], to
| indicate the extraordinary errors of sentiment attribution
| that occur around tech.
|
| [1] https://digitalvegan.net
|
| [2] 'Foisted' is not the same as 'forced', but nontheless
| there is a 'great lie' that we tell ourselves about how
| markets of demand and supply work in realtion to technology.
| sanderjd wrote:
| I agree with this somewhat. But I also think in the face of
| unknowable true desires, that the preferences revealed by
| what does and doesn't get used by more people should be
| taken seriously and at face value.
|
| I saw "web 1.0" versions in the early to mid 2000s of
| pretty much every product that became big in the late 2000s
| and 2010s. People made their choice.
| krapp wrote:
| >but I think people want the mcmansions and I think people
| want the flashier more interactive software
|
| I think that's a bit too condescending. People don't want
| mcmansions and flash, they want to publish to the internet
| quickly and efficiently. The web is a tool for them, a means
| to an end.
|
| The HN set might prefer to live in a world where computers
| only shipped with Emacs and the web was just a raw JSON API
| and you had to write your own software for everything from
| scratch, but no one else does. And that's perfectly
| legitimate. Why should someone making music, or art, or who
| wants to set up a business or network with people have to
| hand-code their own HTML or write their own backend just
| because some self-appointed gatekeepers decided that using a
| service ruins the artisinal quirkiness of the web? That's
| like saying authors should have to hand-write their
| manuscripts or set their own type. The web is a tool that's
| supposed to serve everyone.
| sanderjd wrote:
| > _People don 't want mcmansions and flash, they want to
| publish to the internet quickly and efficiently. The web is
| a tool for them, a means to an end._
|
| I think for many and probably most people, the web is an
| entertainment much more so than a tool.
|
| What I said is only condescending if you add a judgment to
| it, rather than it just being an observation. I think I did
| that when I said that the architects are "right" about
| mcmansions and that we're "right" about simplicity. But
| those are just my own preferences and I really don't
| begrudge people for having different ones. I think it is
| more condescending (or perhaps patronizing is a better
| word) to claim that we know what's better for people, that
| they'd see that they really prefer simple brutalist
| software design if only that's what we would give them.
|
| I've just been around long enough to see this evolution
| from web applications that were very barebones to the
| current state, and my interpretation of what has happened
| during this period of time is that we've been following the
| preferences of most people who use software, as we should.
| rollcat wrote:
| > There's lot's of sentiment out there that is being mistaken
| for 'nostalgia', which is genuine dissatisfaction with modern
| tools. That's why projects like suckless.org [2] seem more
| relevant every day.
|
| Suckless (the org) is too elitist to produce software usable by
| non-power users, which is a shame, because these folks are for
| the most part excellent at balancing perfectionism and
| minimalism with pragmatism; they could go a very long way to
| help "fix" rampant complexity, but their complete disinterest
| in accommodating people who can't program in C will keep their
| projects irrelevant on the grand scale of things.
| ozim wrote:
| * _Hidden behind a veil of anonymity, users are emboldened to
| spew all manner of truly vile comments without fear of
| consequence.*_
|
| Author would be surprised if he would see what stuff people can
| post under their real legal names.
|
| I assume author is not on FB/TT and is not following shitstorms
| there.
|
| We are way past veil of anonymity.
|
| For the rest I like quite from Stanislaw Lem: * _Until I starded
| using interned, I was not aware there are so many idiots in the
| world.*_
| louissan wrote:
| Back to tables and shim.gif and Mosaic? No thanks. :-)
|
| However I think the "how it was / how it is /where to now?"
| postulate is right. Especially the "immediate dopamine injection
| via Tweet" versus "build on your own independent site". It could
| actually make for far less concentrated content and so data and
| so power (in a way).
|
| Twitter: "give hime a fish a eat". Independent Web: "Give him a
| fishing pole so he can learn how to catch them himself".
| unnouinceput wrote:
| What's wrong with tables? They draw faster than a crapload of
| chained DIV's just to show you a shitty "Press here to allow
| all cookies" info.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| CSS grid has finally made it unnecessary to abuse tables for
| layout.
| IYasha wrote:
| Call me when something "finally makes it unnecessary" to
| update browser or throw away perfectly usable devices.
| Tables work with IE6 and NetFront, so they rule. :P
| Bancakes wrote:
| Not just HTML. If we want a static web, we could write the whole
| thing out in stack automata like PostScript. Very simple.
| ryanbrunner wrote:
| The big thing HTML brought over literal static documents is
| easy and pervasive hyperlinking. Without that, I'm not even
| sure if you can call whatever's left "the web".
| cletus wrote:
| Many years ago I had a job to add some features to an existing
| PHP site. The code base was a mess. I think there were 7 copies
| of the code in production that were copied and modified slightly
| to some specific purpose. It was like 300,000 lines of code
| (IIRC, it's been awhile).
|
| This forced me to do what I always try and avoid doing (because
| no one will thank you for it) and that is to clean it up. Some of
| it was necessary (eg it was open to SQL injection). In doing so I
| reduced it down to <20,000 including the new features required.
|
| This was a fairly stock standard database driven website but in
| just doing things the right way the page load times got to under
| 50ms (from 500-1000ms). This wasn't an SPA (of course) but I
| remember thinking how refreshing it was. You could link to any
| page. Those links loaded superfast (this is the bane of SPAs when
| they support deep-linking at all) and ran on everything just
| fine.
|
| This is actually one of the best featurs about PHP too: a static
| functional core so there's basically no bootstrapping. This means
| you can tear down all the resources of rendering a page.
| Performance becomes way more predictable and you're way less
| prone to resource leaks.
|
| There is magic in fast loading pages and I miss that about good
| Web 1.0 sites.
|
| This is actually the biggest problem with all the ad and tracking
| JS packages: the load times go to shit. This becomes a
| justification for SPAs
|
| As for Web 3.0... ugh. Why? Just... why? I guess that's a whole
| separate topic.
| ryanbrunner wrote:
| This is still 100% possible, and many frameworks support it.
| SPAs are not the only way to build things, and frankly aren't
| even the most popular way to build things outside of tech
| startups.
| rambambram wrote:
| What you describe matches exactly my view on webdevelopment.
| Every click is a new request (with some exceptions, which prove
| the rule). Instead of jumping from document to document by
| clicking a link, it becomes one big flow with fast page loads.
| If you have fast page loads (easily done with PHP), it feels
| and behaves like any other application.
| Vox_Leone wrote:
| Re the OP
|
| Absolutely magisterial! I feel represented in each and every word
| of yours. I [hardcore anti-algorithm, anti-collection, anti-
| surveillance activist] would not say it better myself.
|
| Consider opening the licence for this post apropriately so the
| word can be translated and spread.
|
| Thank you.
| duxup wrote:
| Web applications are awesome. I don't have to buy hundred dollar
| licenses / pirate left and right to try and use things.
|
| So much more information, media, entertainment is now available.
|
| I have a lot of nostalgia about the past, but I'm not interested
| in going back.
| xyzzyz wrote:
| Instead of hundred dollar licenses, you have to pay hundred
| dollar subscription fees. I don't see it as improvement.
| duxup wrote:
| I don't find that to be the case.
| shrimp_emoji wrote:
| You also have less control over the application. It can spy on
| you and change out from under you.
|
| Information, media, and entertainment were always available,
| but in a form where you actually own it, not pay for N
| subscription services before their license runs out.
|
| That said: best of both worlds imo is fat client, traditional
| applications that run in a web runtime (e.g., Electron) since
| you can run 'em on any OS. ;p
| navjack27 wrote:
| You mean like photopia and office live or docs or whatever?
|
| I still pirate tons of other stuff to use and try and
| eventually buy. I can't buy Photoshop so that is a perma steal
| until they go back to $800 boxes of software.
|
| Media is available but just this year I bought three CDs and
| one cassette tape.
|
| I love moving backwards
| olah_1 wrote:
| So everyone makes custom websites, but 90% of them are hosted on
| the same service because nobody likes managing a VPS.
|
| This isn't any better than current social media imo.
| ozim wrote:
| It is better in a way that only people who can write HTML by
| hand are supposed to publish on the internet.
|
| While it is questionable if they are any better than general
| population, they probably have the same traits and common way
| of thinking. So they would like the same people to be on the
| internet.
|
| Web 2.0 allows anyone to post anything so eternal September is
| here alive and we are living it. But closing possibility to
| post stuff on the internet is not the way to go.
| olah_1 wrote:
| Non-techy "annoying" people can and have learned to code
| HTML.
|
| It just takes proper motivation. When the only game in town
| was Myspace, many people learned just so they could have an
| awesome page. Knowing HTML / CSS gave you more street cred,
| so to speak.
|
| Now that incentive doesn't exist. But the same people that
| would have learned are still posting online.
|
| Being open to the general public isn't a problem to me
| because sub-cultures naturally spring up. Hacker News is like
| a safe space for people that would have made these manual
| websites 15 years ago lol.
| ComradePhil wrote:
| It's a bit annoying that this kind of idiocy is upvoted to the
| front page very often.
|
| The web is the way it is becuase the forces which are seeking
| profit and power get their way in any new system that emerges.
|
| There is a new system which is truly designed from the ground up
| to serve the masses and is immune to the tactics used to control
| Web 2.0. The decentralized web is the internet run for the people
| by the people... and even if you rely on service providers to
| host your data or do your computation, they can't see what you
| want them to see or take your content down. It is called Web 3.0
| (there are two Web 3.0s, unfortunately... one is the Google's
| version where web is organized auch that you don't have to leave
| Google to browse it... think amp but for everything else... and
| then there is the blockchain version, which is what I am
| referring to).
|
| Here's Gavin Wood's TED talk on the topic:
| https://youtu.be/UIBR99gOLOQ
| cies wrote:
| I found the dark web full of web1.0 vibes. no-JS. sometimes no-
| cookies. pretty oldskool.
| randcraw wrote:
| I like the idea of establishing a persistent presence on the net
| that you manage yourself, where you plant your flag with a hand-
| built simple static web page, add a few essays, reading lists,
| pointers to other cool sites, etc, then invite others with like
| interests to link up. Connecting multiple 'flag' sites like these
| was one of my favorite ways to discover worthwhile creative
| content in the early days (as opposed to Web 2.0's automated
| firehose of spam).
|
| That model of web presence also does a nice job of excluding the
| www's multitude of trash that's otherwise inescapable these days.
| Playing once more in sandboxes where assholes are not invited
| _does_ have a certain appeal.
| mynameishere wrote:
| Everyone should wear masks because science is settled therefore
| we should go back to 1995 technologies. Something like that.
| Great argument.
| Deukhoofd wrote:
| The argument basically boils down to "everything used to be
| better, and the general populace shouldn't be able to use the
| internet". While I have good nostalgic feelings about the way the
| internet used to be, this misses a lot of things the modern
| internet offers our society, and only focuses on the negatives.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Couldn't there, technically speaking, be a technology that
| offered the things the Internet used to offer, in parallel with
| the technology that offers the things the modern offers our
| society?
| ryanbrunner wrote:
| Yes, but that seems like something new we want to strive for.
| Going back to Web 1.0 is basically saying that 90% of people
| shouldn't really be able to interact with the internet in a
| meaningful way beyond consumption. It's not all that
| different than the argument that things were better when
| newspapers were the only ones participating in the news.
|
| The original promise of the Internet was heavily tied to
| democratization of publishing media. In many ways, the
| internet of today is far closer to that goal than the
| internet of the late 90s, just with a lot of backsteps and
| additional problems created along the way. We ought to solve
| those problems, but just resetting the clock back 20 years
| isn't a step forward.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| If the technological "improvements" over the last 20 years
| have largely had negative effects, wouldn't it at be
| possible that going forward toward something new will have
| even more destructive effects?
| notriddle wrote:
| If.
|
| Where would you even _start_ to determine if that was
| true or not?
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Well the point is you we can't. It's every bit as
| baseless to assume continuing on this path will have
| beneficial effects as it is to assume they will have
| negative effects.
|
| Change may be discovering a hundred dollars in the pocket
| of your old jacket, or it may be discovering an ominous
| lump on your neck. You really don't know what it brings.
| Deukhoofd wrote:
| There could be, and there are, but the article focuses a lot
| on the negative effects the modern web (and especially social
| media) had on society. These effects would not change with
| parallel systems.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Perhaps it sounds cynical, but can't we just let things
| burn instead of spending all this time and energy
| attempting to put out the eternal dumpster fire that is the
| 2020s web-scape? Perhaps it isn't possible.
|
| Instead, maybe we build the replacements that we want,
| invite those who want a piece, sure, even put up a few
| signs pointing the way; but for the rest, you really can't
| save those who aren't looking for salvation, so let them
| have their technological dystopia if they can't see it for
| what it is.
| Deukhoofd wrote:
| Sure, there's systems for that, such as Gemini. If you
| don't want to use the modern web alongside the rest of
| society, it's fairly easy to just... not.
|
| https://gemini.circumlunar.space/
| CaptArmchair wrote:
| Eternal September is a thing. Over the past 15 years, billions of
| people became online. I use that number casual, but it's nothing
| short of a shift on par with the impact Gutenberg had with his
| printing press. Humanity's barely out of the gates in terms of
| assessing how this will play out in the long term.
|
| The bar to publishing your thoughts, having an online
| presence,... is stupidly low. That's what big platforms and
| centralization have achieved. The vast majority of people who
| make a living online don't care about the details. They simply
| want to express a thought, share what they see, etc. And the
| proverbial smartphone and Instagram account are all you need to
| do exactly that.
|
| Wishing to go back to Web 1.0 is a non sequitur because it would
| mean raising that same bar again. It would also run counter to
| the billion dollar cottage industries that have sprung up in the
| wake of the emergence of these platforms.
|
| That doesn't mean using the core technologies that make up the
| Web and leveraging platforms are mutually exclusive. They aren't.
| Nothing stops you from breaking away with like minded people and
| building your own community. The openness and standardization of
| the specifications that define the technology allow you to do
| exactly that.
| pmlnr wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IKEA_effect sometimes things that
| need some effort end up with more value in the eyes of their
| makers. That higher barrier might not be that bad, because I
| firmly believe one of the reasons what got us to the modern web
| is people not valuing what they had put into it.
| shuntress wrote:
| Low barrier-to-entry to share inane thoughts is not the
| problem.
|
| The problem is centralized systems attempting to maximize
| acquisition of attention by baiting for that attention with
| outrage and controversy.
| jdrc wrote:
| This is going to happen , and it will be driven by the
| availability of high-speed home connections. More and more users
| will start self-hosting things they outsource not simply becuase
| they have control, but it's also better.
| falcolas wrote:
| I love the simple and honest idealism that drives this message. I
| think it's completely unrealistic, and goes against human nature,
| but I still appreciate the vision.
| MarcoZavala wrote:
| Trouble_007 wrote:
| https://vhsoverdrive.neocities.org/essays/oldweb.html
|
| stated; _> The web was established with the best of intentions.
|
| The basic idea was that if everyone could share their thoughts
| and ideas with the world, the best ones would be vetted and float
| to the top.
|
| The bad ones would be ignored and pushed to the bottom.
|
| But human nature has a tendency to corrupt the best of
| intentions.<_
|
| -
|
| https://www.cbsnews.com/news/microsoft-shuts-down-ai-chatbot...
|
| stated; _> Microsoft shuts down AI chatbot after it turned into a
| Nazi - By Amy Kraft Updated on: March 25, 2016 <_
| DrSiemer wrote:
| Sure, the web used to be a fun place for tinkerers in the
| beginning. But the cat's out of the bag and we cannot put it back
| inside.
|
| Going luddite is never a good solution. We'll just have to accept
| the consequences of what all this new development has brought us
| and learn how to live with it, not suppress all recent
| development in the hopes of recreating an environment that only
| really worked for a small subsection of humanity.
|
| Personally, I'm hoping all this share-everything is just a trend,
| that will pass by itself. Future users will look back at it with
| a sense of wonder: did people really post pictures of their food
| online? "Yep, and then we had buttons to tell each other that we
| liked seeing it. It was a weird time. Some people still miss it
| and argue we should go back to Web 2.0."
| Brian_K_White wrote:
| "Going luddite is never a good solution."
|
| Change is merely change, neither good nor bad. Same for absense
| of change.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| It's not the users choosing to share something that's the
| problem, it's the corporations choosing to collect every bit of
| data on their users they can without the consent of the users.
| From the article:
|
| > "But it gets worse. These social media giants are collecting
| data about every single internet user at an alarming rate,
| housing it in enormous data storage facilities around the
| world. Once collected, this information is analyzed, compiled,
| and sold to any interested parties willing to pay for it. It's
| not only your activities in a web browser that are gathered;
| many smart devices including televisions, smart phones, home
| automation equipment, and more will passively listen to casual
| conversation looking for key words and phrases. This data will
| be correlated with the online profile of the speaker with
| speech recognition and anything you talk about will be added to
| a database of your interests. Once complied, this data becomes
| impossible to track down and remove. A user's personal data
| will never disappear from the internet. It will be continually
| be added to, recompiled, reanalyzed, and sold over and over in
| order to sell ads in the hope of selling a product. If you sign
| up for a free service on the web, then you are what is being
| sold."
| mkl wrote:
| > many smart devices including televisions, smart phones,
| home automation equipment, and more will passively listen to
| casual conversation looking for key words and phrases.
|
| That sounds like conspiracy theory nonsense. Is there any
| evidence for this beyond anecdotes that are probably Baader-
| Meinhof effects?
|
| If it was happening, hundreds of people would be working on
| those systems, and at least one of them would have talked.
| spicybright wrote:
| I was about to agree but GP is actually not far off.
|
| Smart TVs have been caught listening to people before. Cell
| phones absolutely do. Home automation is generally voice
| controlled, etc.
|
| I feel bad for individuals with paranoid schizophrenia.
| Give it another 10 years and there really will be invisible
| cameras and microphones everywhere recording you!
| dadver wrote:
| Schizophrenic here with a long time interest in computer
| security. I've had many discussions with my (previous)
| psychiatrist about exactly this, often arguing that it's
| not that far fetched that there are a swarm of entities
| (not just three-letter-agencies) that are interested in
| surveilling you. Add to that that your paranoia might be
| more or less well-founded, say that you're doing various
| criminal activities, the bounderies between justifiable
| paranoia and illness can become _very_ hard to make out.
|
| I remember especially us discussing three-letter-
| agencies' mass-surveillance and I brought up NSA's
| ECHELON and other things that have been semi-
| known/-public for decades. About two years later the
| Snowden leaks came about and my psychiatrist started
| telling me about different cases he had had where people
| were misdiagnosed with schizophrenia and there later
| turned out to be real world explanations and not
| hallucinations and/or delusions.
|
| I just wanted to share this anecdote. It's a shitty
| disease and you're absolutely on point about how it
| already is and will become even more so in the near
| future.
| candiddevmike wrote:
| I don't think anyone will be able to find out easily since
| this communication is encrypted. Who knows what the random
| bursts of data from some IoT device are?
|
| I can guarantee someone built a way to enable telemetry and
| diagnostic data into these devices "to improve user
| experience". It wouldn't take much for another
| engineer/sociopathic PM to enable it across the board
| (telemetry is now opt out) or change the sampling frequency
| or storage location.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Going Web 1.0 wouldn't stop that. The genie that came out of
| the bottle was the realization that such whole-data
| aggregation is _possible._
|
| Take away JavaScript today, and it'd be replaced with the
| (slower, but still lucrative enough to justify it) process of
| paying site admins to share their access logs and user
| account data.
| gjulianm wrote:
| > Personally, I'm hoping all this share-everything is just a
| trend, that will pass by itself.
|
| I think it definitely has passed, at least in my environment. I
| see less people sharing inane things, and most of the time it's
| done they use things like stories, which are temporary and with
| less feedback (no "like button" on Instagram stories, for
| example, only messages), and more organic (the same way some
| people talk about whatever they ate in person, they share it
| with their friends with these tools).
| navjack27 wrote:
| It's not even going Luddite. Look at the other pages linked in
| the web ring. There are some slick websites.
| jjav wrote:
| > Going luddite is never a good solution.
|
| That's a terribly fatalistic position and also a
| misrepresentation.
|
| Rejecting the centralized ad-driven wall-garden spyware model
| isn't "luddite" in the offensive sense you're using it. It's a
| matter of noticing what's best for the user and consumer, not
| for the adware companies.
|
| The good thing is that it's still all there, just drowned out
| by the noise.
|
| I maintain my blog as always have, I maintain my hobby interest
| websites for others as a reference source (some of these going
| back to mid 90s, some I've just started recently).
|
| Search engines today make these harder to find because my sites
| don't bring the advertisers any benefit. I have no ads, no
| trackers, no "analytics" (aka trackers) or any such noise. Just
| content by regular people for regular people interested in
| various niche topics. But they still exist and people in those
| niche interest find their way to them.
|
| My suggestion to anyone is that if you're looking to become
| famous and gather millions of followers and all that, sure, use
| the mainstream platforms.
|
| But if you're just looking to share an interest, do it in a way
| that you control and keep the ad-spyware out: start a website,
| start a blog, start a mailing list. You won't scale to millions
| of users but that's a wonderful thing.
| Starlevel001 wrote:
| > Going luddite is never a good solution.
|
| > Personally, I'm hoping all this share-everything is just a
| trend, that will pass by itself. Future users will look back at
| it with a sense of wonder: did people really post pictures of
| their food online?
|
| This seems like a very contradictory post.
| Retric wrote:
| Sharing a vastly smaller fraction of things is completely
| reasonable. Currently systems are optimized by social media
| companies to maximize engagement not utility.
|
| Unfortunately, the only way that's likely to change is a new
| company or nonprofit that decides not to sell out to Facebook
| or Advertising.
| sleepymoose wrote:
| I disagree. The first point is saying we shouldn't go
| backwards, which I agree with. The second is hoping for
| forward progress, the exact thing that he was arguing for
| with the first point.
| c22 wrote:
| Being a luddite isn't about going backwards, it's about
| refusing to support technologies that work against your
| interests.
| DrSiemer wrote:
| Being a luddite is not about withholding support, it is
| about completely denying the existence of new
| technologies, or even actively trying to destroy them.
|
| A return to the state of web 1.0 would definitely be a
| major move backwards, similar to banning the use of cars
| to prevent traffic accidents from happening. Wouldn't it
| be better to just learn how to drive?
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| The Luddites were a group of people who destroyed
| machinery that threatened their livelihood. In modern
| parlance it typically just means someone who is opposed
| to the adoption of new technology. I think parent's
| definition is more accurate than yours in either case.
| kkfx wrote:
| Well, just imaging a different society: you have broadband at
| home and that means you have a small homeserver at home, an
| IPv6 global for it, a domain name for you/you family/business
| with eventual subdomains.
|
| You took photos with connected device like you do today, but
| instead of sync them against your Google Drive/iCloud your
| phone sync them to your homeserver both via internet when you
| are on the go or at home in your LAN. Your friend have a
| phonebook like all modern smartphones have today but that's
| phonebook is a little bit more featuresful, from it looking for
| a contact you can initiate a voice{,+video} call IP2IP, you can
| write a mail but also see a classic blog page of the contact if
| he/she/it have one, this is just a local app that offer you
| correspondents "public namespaces" (Plan 9 style) mounted
| locally as you wish and cached locally as you wish. That's
| means that you photo gallery offer access to your contacts
| public photos and videos, just looking for them. You browser, a
| real browser, not a modern WebVM offer your contacts sites,
| cached as you wish in similar ways etc.
|
| That's means: _more functionalities_ , no feature erased by
| some corporate decision, only the community decide, you
| contents on your iron, contents you like on your iron, so far
| faster usage, far better integration, far less reliance on any
| specific third party services. Not a single functionality less.
|
| It's not a dream, technically is perfectly doable, those
| systems actually are already designed decades ago, with the
| first P2P video-conference with screen sharing in 1968 (NLS
| mother of all the demos), with late '70s Xerox Star Office
| system etc it's not there just because few big & powerful have
| other plans for their own interests and most others do not know
| nor care.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| > Personally, I'm hoping all this share-everything is just a
| trend, that will pass by itself. Future users will look back at
| it with a sense of wonder: did people really post pictures of
| their food online? "Yep, and then we had buttons to tell each
| other that we liked seeing it. It was a weird time. Some people
| still miss it and argue we should go back to Web 2.0."
|
| I expect future generations may well say the same thing about
| memes. "People thought that was _cool_??? "
| DrSiemer wrote:
| Memes are a new type of language, a development supported by
| technology that is in some ways comparable to the rise of
| remixing music.
|
| I don't think they will be ridiculed to the same level as I
| hope our current social media behavior will be. They will
| more likely evolve to new levels, when the methods of
| remixing media expand and they become even easier to create.
| shockeychap wrote:
| > Personally, I'm hoping all this share-everything is just a
| trend, that will pass by itself. Future users will look back at
| it with a sense of wonder: did people really post pictures of
| their food online? "Yep, and then we had buttons to tell each
| other that we liked seeing it. It was a weird time. Some people
| still miss it and argue we should go back to Web 3.0."
|
| This. 100%.
| jordz wrote:
| Also agree. However, I do yearn to relive the days where one
| can load up a web page and start reading content, without
| being jarred by pop-ups and ads that inadvertently move the
| content post load (which of course happens 3 seconds
| later..).
| ryandrake wrote:
| There was an article posted here [1] a few weeks ago called
| _I Don't Like Computers_ which had the same nostalgic vibe
| about computing in the past and I argue it boils down to
| loss of control. End users used to be in charge. We used to
| be in the driver's seat. We used to tell computers what to
| do. Now, with pop-ups, ads, notifications, and so on, they
| tell us what we should be doing and we have to beg and work
| around them to do what we want. "Where do you want to go
| today?" is long dead.
|
| 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30851371
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| I know a site, it's on mobile. You use it by entering a
| location in a search bar.
|
| You select the search bar, the keyboard takes a second to
| appear. You start typing, nothing happens because they've
| reimplemented the text box in javascript, and the script
| hasn't fully loaded yet. The script loads and the second
| half of the letters you typed appears in a letter by letter
| fashion. The page freezes and a suggestion box appears,
| every second or so the suggestions change to reflect the
| letters you typed earlier. You erase what you've typed.
| With every letter that changes, the page freezes a second
| as a new suggestion loads. When it freezes, it stops
| accepting letters, so there's a lot of erasing and re-
| typing. Alright, you're almost done typing... then the page
| freezes and the page turns grey, and a pop over loads. They
| want you to load fill out a satisfaction survey. You try to
| close it to continue, but the script handling the close
| button hasn't loaded yet so it doesn't work for a good 20
| seconds.
|
| If you want a picture of the future, imagine a javascript
| stomping on a human face -- for ever.
| iamevn wrote:
| This accurately describes my experience using Google
| Search on Google Chrome on a Google Pixel 5 running the
| latest version of Google Android (for good measure, using
| Gboard). It baffles me that for a long time I couldn't
| even select text in the search bar without something
| going so wrong that my phone ground to a halt and had to
| soft reboot.
| todd3834 wrote:
| Ad blockers are so good that I nearly forgot about this
| experience.
| digitalsanctum wrote:
| > I'm hoping all this share-everything is just a trend, that
| will pass by itself.
|
| "Hope" is not a strategy
| sneak wrote:
| > _But the cat 's out of the bag and we cannot put it back
| inside._
|
| I browse the web with javascript off for most sites, and my
| site works fine without javascript, renders text beautifully
| and readably. Millions read it without issue.
|
| Web 1.0 is still there and can still be used. I do. It's great.
| hwers wrote:
| I've come to think of this as just a culture problem. We think
| of share-everything and recent social changes as innovation and
| "the future" but not everything that is modified at t+1 vs at
| time t is necessarily a pareto improvement. I've come to
| believe something similar to you, that we need to come to our
| senses (each individually) and converge to more reasonable
| social norms.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| > Going luddite
|
| Please, I do wish you would think carefully before using what
| is really a pejorative and potentially quite insulting term in
| regard to modern tech critique. Some of the smartest people out
| there, who built the digital world you take for granted today,
| are having (belated) second thoughts about the social and geo-
| political impacts of these creations. Heartily I recommend Cory
| Doctorow's recent piece about this [1].
|
| One could arguably turn it around and say that those "cargo-
| cultists" hell-bent on ploughing ahead regardless, without
| pause or reflection, are closer to the common misuse of the
| word "Luddite" - a kind of straw-chewing bumpkin who lives in
| fear of progress. No. Progress is the radical questioning of
| "progress" itself.
|
| > We'll just have to accept the consequences of what all this
| new > development has brought us and learn how to live with it
|
| No we won't. Be careful of this "genie and bottle" fallacy. It
| is absolutely the wrong attitude found at the intersection of
| unreasoned defeatism, resignation, learned helplessness, and
| abdication of civic engagement and responsibility. We are here,
| as hackers, to _shape_ the technology that runs our world, not
| to sit on the sidelines and _amuse ourselves to death_ [2].
|
| > recreating an environment that only really worked for a small
| subsection of humanity.
|
| There's a framing error in this reasoning. The technology of
| Web 1.0 did not exist in limited scope because it was only
| suitable for a small subsection of humanity. It was only being
| _used_ by a small subsection because that was the developmental
| stage of the web. One could say (disingenuously) that at the
| time Web 1.0 was such a successful technology it was being used
| by 100 percent of web users!
|
| [1] https://onezero.medium.com/science-fiction-is-a-luddite-
| lite...
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death
| Clubber wrote:
| Just to add, Luddites weren't irrationally afraid of
| technology like is commonly believed. They destroyed
| machinery because they saw it being used to destroy
| artisanship and their livelihoods. Perhaps we'd be better off
| of there were more Luddites going from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 or
| offshoring jobs, or military AI. Just as an example, I own
| furniture my parents bought in the 1960s when they were first
| married. It's still solid. My family has furniture from the
| 1800s that still is solid. The furniture I buy today I have
| to replace every 5 years and is complete garbage. Maybe we
| should stop considering being a Luddite as a pejorative and
| perhaps concede they might have been right about some
| industries.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| > My family has furniture from the 1800s that still is
| solid. The furniture I buy today I have to replace every 5
| years and is complete garbage.
|
| This is the perfect example of where this ideology fails.
| You can _still_ find furniture like those bought in the
| 1800s that stand the test of time. Cabinetmakers exist and
| would be happy to build nice furniture that will outlive
| both the cabinetmaker and yourself. In the age of the Web
| many of them advertise their services online.
|
| The reason most people don't buy furniture from a
| cabinetmaker is because their furniture is _expensive_.
| Make no mistake, furniture in the past was quite expensive
| as well. Families would save up to buy furniture and
| preserve it at all cost because of how expensive it was to
| get nice furniture. Wealthy families would have nice
| furniture passed down for generations while poorer families
| made do with their seconds and thirds. Moreover
| cabinetmakers in the past often relied on cheap stocks of
| solid wood. In the present, wood has become more scarce due
| to overforesting and environmental concerns. When you buy
| furniture made from MDF it uses an order of magnitude less
| wood than a solid piece of Oak or Poplar made in the 1800s
| or even plywood from the 1960s. This comes at the cost of
| worse load-bearing capabilities and brittle joints.
|
| The difference is that consumers now have the option for
| cheap, environmentally friendly furniture. If a consumer
| wants long lasting furniture, they could do what most
| cultures did in the past; save up for furniture over years
| and commission a cabinetmaker for their services. If you
| want furniture that lasts made of mostly solid wood and/or
| plywood, cabinetmakers would be overjoyed to work with you.
| Most consumers don't care enough about furniture to inflate
| the cost 10x for long lasting furniture. That's their
| choice as consumers.
| jjav wrote:
| > You can _still_ find furniture like those bought in the
| 1800s that stand the test of time.
|
| You mostly can't. I always wanted quality wood furniture
| and once I had enough income I went shopping. Nothing. It
| can't be bought anywhere that I can find. Eventually gave
| up and bought the nicest office furniture I could find
| but it is still a very nice veneer over junk plywood. And
| even that was many thousands of dollars because it is a
| nice veneer instead of a cheap junk veneer.
|
| > Make no mistake, furniture in the past was quite
| expensive as well.
|
| Not really. Both my grandparent families were dirt poor
| small farmers and the furniture they had was orders of
| magnitude better quality than anything I can find or buy
| on a 2020s silicon valley tech salary.
| rnd0 wrote:
| >Both my grandparent families were dirt poor small
| farmers and the furniture they had
|
| I believe you, which makes me curious when they would
| have gotten it, and from where. 1940's? 1970's?
|
| EDIT: I was poor in the 70's and the best you were likely
| to come across (as a poor person) was fingerhut crap so
| I'm guessing it was earlier than that.
| jjav wrote:
| > >Both my grandparent families were dirt poor small
| farmers and the furniture they had
|
| > I believe you, which makes me curious when they would
| have gotten it, and from where. 1940's? 1970's?
|
| That would've been early 1900s, pre-WW1.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| I'll be honest I have no idea where you're looking. If
| you're looking at retail furniture stores in the US, then
| no you're not going to find it, unless you go far
| upmarket. But hop onto any woodworking forum/subreddit
| (well not r/woodworking as that's mostly beginners) and
| you'll find cabinetmakers willing to work with you for
| pieces. Few retail furniture outlets have a customer base
| willing to pay the prices needed for cabinetry, though I
| presume on a Silicon Valley tech salary you should be
| fine. Alternatively, reach out to an interior designer in
| your area who probably has contacts with many small
| cabinetry shops in the area. I'd link a few cabinetmakers
| I know of but I'd rather not call them out in a public
| forum. Patreon is going to have some also. Reddit's
| r/finishing has some experienced cabinetmakers. Another
| strategy is to go to a used furniture store, pick up an
| old piece made of solid wood/plywood, and ask a
| cabinetmaker to restore it, the same as furniture used to
| be passed down. If you're in the Bay Area I'll recommend
| Urban Ore as a good, cheap place to find used furniture.
| There are antique stores galore which restore old
| furniture and sell them for large amounts of money.
|
| In the past, the capability to build cheap furniture just
| wasn't there so everything you bought was made from solid
| wood and was hand-joined which is why your grandparents'
| family's furniture seems so much stronger. The market
| also had a floor on how cheap it could get before
| mechanization and the invention of composite materials so
| it was "easy" to find expensive furniture and "hard" to
| find cheap furniture. FYI plywood can make furniture that
| outlasts individuals and has been in use in furniture
| since the early 1900s. When you're thinking of crappy
| veneered engineered wood, you're probably thinking of MDF
| and OSB furniture. Most furniture at retail furniture
| stores are majority MDF and OSB because of cost and
| largely weight as both plywood and solid wood tend to be
| very heavy for their load bearing capabilities.
| jjav wrote:
| > I'll be honest I have no idea where you're looking.
|
| Silicon Valley area.
|
| At the very top of the market, yes, one can get fully
| custom furnitue to any spec you like, for a very high
| price. I know a few people who have done remodels with
| such custom furniture and the cost has been over 100K on
| the low end to closer to a million on the high end. Even
| with a senior silicon valley salary, that's as good as
| impossible.
|
| That's why I mention that in my grandparents generation,
| even low-income families could afford solid quality
| furniture. Today it is a privilege limited to those who
| hit major IPOs.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| > That's why I mention that in my grandparents
| generation, even low-income families could afford solid
| quality furniture. Today it is a privilege limited to
| those who hit major IPOs.
|
| Then go to an antique store. They restore old, expensive
| pieces, the same way people in the past would pass down
| heirloom furniture and the same way most poorer folks
| would buy their furniture. You're just not going to be
| able to get new, solid wooden furniture as cheap as you
| did even 80 years ago and this has nothing to do with the
| "good old days before progress for the sake of progress".
| There's exponentially more people in the world now,
| correspondingly less wood, and greater awareness about
| how to sustainably forest. Modern cabinetry is done with
| PPE to keep the woodworker safe and shops are ventilated
| and vacuumed to keep the area clean.
|
| None of this has to do with the "good old days before
| progress for the sake of progress". The ideology itself
| is tautological; instead of exploring what the problem
| is, it purports itself to be the solution to all
| problems. Good cabinetry is still available in the market
| at expensive prices but there are reasons why solid
| wooden furniture has become more expensive. These reasons
| are immaterial in the face of "good old days before
| progress for the sake of progress", even though PPE and
| occupational safety has been some of the gains made
| through this "progress for the sake of progress."
| Clubber wrote:
| >None of this has to do with the "good old days before
| progress for the sake of progress".
|
| It wasn't for the sake of progress, it was for the sake
| of profits. Making something almost as good that costs
| half the price is what the US has been doing for the last
| 30 years. After 30 years of "almost as good," turned in
| to absolute shit when compared to the older stuff.
|
| Technology of course isn't bad for the sake of being bad.
| Electric tools is what allowed the old furniture to be so
| good at a reasonable price. Wood glue and sawdust being
| pressed into something that looks like wood but falls
| apart fairly easily, is an example of when technology
| makes things much worse and is used strictly for
| maximizing profit at the expense of quality. There's a
| lot of that today.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| > Wood glue and sawdust being pressed into something that
| looks like wood but falls apart fairly easily, is an
| example of when technology makes things much worse and is
| used strictly for maximizing profit at the expense of
| quality. There's a lot of that today.
|
| Right so let's dive into that a bit. Why is this
| maximizing profit? Because solid wood is expensive. Why
| is solid wood expensive? Because it's a limited resource.
| I can guarantee you that if governments took away
| forestry restrictions that solid wood furniture would
| start to be built in a matter of months as new wood mills
| setup churning through previously restricted lands, at
| least until the Earth is deforested and climate change
| wreaks even greater havoc than it is already. Then once
| the forests are gone, the wood industry will collapse and
| wooden furniture would end until some brave government
| musters the will to repopulate a few forests.
|
| Profit isn't the scary boogieman that this ideology likes
| to make it out to be. Profit is the difference between
| revenue and expense. Reducing expenses is a way to use
| resources more efficiently. In this case, we stave off
| deforestation by pressing low-quality wood scraps and
| sawdust into OSB and MDF boards. Would you rather we
| deforest the Earth instead? Remember that working with
| OSB and MDF is tricky because of how brittle they are as
| materials. It is much easier _and cheaper_ to design
| processes around solid wood or plywood if possible.
| Fundamentally wood is a limited resource. Learning how to
| use wood more efficiently is what allows more humans to
| have a quality of life where they can afford furniture at
| all while keeping the Earth forested.
|
| In general though, applying the critique that chasing
| profits has impacted furniture quality is shortsighted.
| Margins on furniture are tiny. Consumers only have so
| much money they are willing to spend on furniture and
| cabinetmakers and industrialized furniture companies
| respond in kind. The critique would be more cogent _if_
| furniture profit margins were higher but they really
| aren't. Unfortunately, wood really is just that
| expensive. Don't believe me just ask some woodworkers. Or
| go to the lumberyard and just try to do some rough
| calculation on how much it would take to build a piece
| out of solid wood.
|
| This all comes back to my main point. The ideology that
| progress/profits/conspiracy is what's making things worse
| and the past was a better status quo is tautological;
| there's no proof or even research necessary to make the
| statement, only the invocation of conspiracy (c.f.
| profits.) Markets are complicated because reality is
| complicated. Some markets are indeed full of morally
| bankrupt boards charging huge margins on cheap goods. But
| reality has a surprising amount of detail and using some
| tautological ideology to advocate for technological
| regression is short-sighted.
|
| Go talk to a few cabinetmakers and ask them about their
| feelings (or complaints lol) on Ikea furniture. I can
| guarantee you that will give you better insight into the
| world of furniture and wood than making a tautological
| anti-capitalist statement would with ideological
| eschatological fervor.
| Clubber wrote:
| >I can guarantee you that if governments took away
| forestry restrictions that solid wood furniture would
| start to be built in a matter of months as new wood mills
| setup churning through previously restricted lands, at
| least until the Earth is deforested and climate change
| wreaks even greater havoc than it is already.
|
| >Why is solid wood expensive? Because it's a limited
| resource.
|
| Wood is a renewable resource, it gets cut and replanted
| all_the_time. Pine is a 30 year cycle and our country is
| full of it. Can you tell me what restrictions you think
| are in place preventing tree farmers from growing and
| selling trees?
|
| > ideology
|
| You keep saying ideology. What ideology are you talking
| about specifically?
|
| >we stave off deforestation by pressing low-quality wood
| scraps and sawdust into OSB and MDF boards
|
| Trees are a crop just like any crop, they just have a
| much longer grow cycle.
|
| >In general though, applying the critique that chasing
| profits has impacted furniture quality is shortsighted.
|
| It's really not. There is a market for higher end
| furniture made at an industrial scale, but it's just not
| being met. Chasing profits at the cost of quality is
| obvious everywhere you look, if you think it's not been
| happening I don't know what to tell you.
|
| >The ideology that progress/profits/conspiracy is what's
| making things worse and the past was a better status quo
| is tautological; there's no proof or even research
| necessary to make the statement, only the invocation of
| conspiracy
|
| You contradict yourself. You said if you want quality
| wood furniture, buy antique.
|
| >Then go to an antique store. They restore old, expensive
| pieces, the same way people in the past would pass down
| heirloom furniture and the same way most poorer folks
| would buy their furniture.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| > Moreover cabinetmakers in the past often relied on
| cheap stocks of solid wood.
|
| A luthier I met in Berlin had a large stock of wood in
| their workshop. I asked him what it was for, and he said
| "oh, that's my supply for the next 10 years, I add to it
| every year to keep it about the same size".
|
| Granted, luthiers use less wood than a cabinet maker.
| phs318u wrote:
| Replacing furniture every 5 years is decidedly less
| environmentally friendly than replacing it every 100
| years, irrespective of price difference.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| > There's a framing error in this reasoning. The technology
| of Web 1.0 did not exist in limited scope because it was only
| suitable for a small subsection of humanity. It was only
| being used by a small subsection because that was the
| developmental stage of the web. One could say
| (disingenuously) that at the time Web 1.0 was such a
| successful technology it was being used by 100 percent of web
| users!
|
| Do you have any proof of those assertions? You're strident in
| defending your ideology but this claim seems fantastically
| unsubstantiated. I remember trying to help parents and non
| technical friends use Web 1.0. they'd get URLs wrong, forget
| which TLDs a site hung off, clicked on phishing emails, and
| deal with hundreds of pop-up ads. Web 2.0, as much as this
| wasn't a buzzword, was a strict increase in usability for
| every non-technical person I know.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| > and deal with hundreds of pop-up ads. Web 2.0 was a
| strict increase in usability for every non-technical person
| I know.
|
| I have no idea precisely what you are calling "Web 2.0"
| because in my mind, the technology elements of Web 2.0
| outlined on the wikipedia page definitely have absolutely
| nothing to do with "getting URLs wrong", "forgetting TLDs".
| Changes from the same time period (around 1999) that were
| not typically considered to be part of "Web 2.0" were also
| responsible for a dramatic increase in the prevalence of
| popup ads. I think you're talking about something entirely
| different.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| It's tricky because I don't know what Web 1.0, 2.0, 3.0
| etc even mean since they're poorly defined. Generally I
| see the anti-Web2.0 digital vegan perspectives to be
| about opposing Javascript. I maintain that the Web after
| widespread Javascript was strictly more usable for non-
| technical people. I disagree that the pre-JS web was
| somehow incomplete or in a developer preview.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Javascript is fine for web-based interactivity. What
| people object to is using JS to publish simple documents,
| that's what HTML and CSS is for.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| I see you are a stalwart defender of JavaScript :)
|
| > Web after widespread JavaScript was strictly more
| usable for non-technical people.
|
| I suppose that's true. The "web" now has more reach, and
| generally user interfaces have improved, and JavaScript
| has had many positive effects on that improvement. But
| none of these things are necessarily causative, and may
| be more or less coincidences along the timeline.
|
| JavaScript solves some issues to do with presentation,
| and allowing web browsers to compute things instead of
| needing a server to. It also allows dangerous security
| holes, browser malware, spying on the user and a host of
| "bad things". So whether the overall experience is an
| "improvement" cannot be easily argued.
|
| There are some "Web Applications" like browser based
| videoconferencing that would be impossible without
| JavaScript. Whether these belong "in the browser" is
| debatable. However the misuse of JavaScript to lazily
| construct or decorate web content is a growing problem
| that is denounced by all sorts of people, including web
| developers and ordinary users who find their pages take
| ages to load, or function sporadically, or leak
| information.
|
| Have you used Gemini? Give it a try. Many non-technical
| people find it very "usable" and it is a technology on-
| par with Web 1.0 in many ways.
|
| > Generally I see the anti-Web2.0 digital vegan
| perspectives to be about opposing JavaScript.
|
| :) The DV arguments are much bigger and broader than
| JavaScript. But to put it in that context for you; most
| people like myself argue that JavaScript and other "web
| technologies" have transformed it into something that
| _isn 't the web any longer_. It doesn't function as an
| information publishing and distribution system. It's
| still called "The Web" by dint of evolutionary lineage,
| but in reality has transformed into something
| unrecognisable (a surveillance engine and content
| _pushing_ system). The simple, safe and widely understood
| function (that some here are calling Web 1.0) is now
| forced to live alongside something else with no clear
| boundaries or distinctions between them, and no sense of
| what parts of that technology are operating when you
| visit a site. This is very bad for everyone regardless of
| the usability gains obtained. I hope that makes sense.
| DrSiemer wrote:
| Of course we should not be complacent about it. We can try to
| come up with creative solutions, that limit the more negative
| side effects of this thing we have unleashed. But the one
| thing we cannot do is take it back. The general public needs
| their nuggets of endorfine.
|
| There is a lot of rosy retrospection when it comes to the old
| web, but really, most blogs were a pretty lonely place back
| then. It is hard to deny how modern solutions allow even
| someone with the most limited technical skillset to establish
| a meaningful online presence. Web 1.0 simply did not provide
| the same level of accessibility.
| enos_feedler wrote:
| We can't put it back inside, but we can create new silos within
| the web that are not built around Delaware c corps and instead
| built around communities with standards/culture so that we can
| choose the kind of places we want to be online. We need to move
| away from the "app" and platform metaphors and into something
| different that connects people together. I think Jack sort of
| wanted Twitter to be this but in realizing it wasn't possible
| to build this as a Delaware C corp itself, kicked off Bluesky.
| Existenceblinks wrote:
| > It was a weird time
|
| Torture time is so long. A generation loss is bearable. A
| couple generation loss seems like hell. I'm pessimistic that we
| are going to a worse era.
| IYasha wrote:
| Web 1.5 is fine too :) I can live with some minor XHTML and few
| optional lines of JS.
| joaomeloplus wrote:
| I am in the web since 1999. I loved it then and also love it now.
|
| It has popularized access do knowledge, opened a channel to all
| forms of expression for millions around the world and continously
| lower the barrier to more innovation.
|
| Friction is present in all social activities: politics, families,
| friendships. This kind of tought seems to me more as failure to
| cope with human nature than rational legitime analisys.
| shuntress wrote:
| The thing is though, I _want_ what Facebook, Twitter, and Tiktok
| have.
|
| I want to see what my friends, family, and acquaintances are
| doing and how their lives are going. To know what is "trending"
| and be able to look at the same thing everyone else is looking
| at. The crowd-sourced news and immediate updates from people who
| are on the ground where things are happening.
|
| This article spends a lot of words on "us vs them" and pining for
| the "good old days" without seeming to consider what the faster-
| more-intense version of "geocities neighborhoods" would be like.
| kkfx wrote:
| Can you try do detail what exactly you want about modern web?
| I'm asking because to many have forgotten, teaches included,
| that the web and internet are two distinct things or to be more
| precise one is the platform that run _also_ the other, but not
| _only_ the other.
|
| Long story short: if you want VoIP that's not necessarily a web
| thing, it's an internet thing. Public users DB again that's can
| be a web thing, in the sense a site a person, but can also be a
| Wikidata-like services without any web frontend, something that
| just offer an open API and anyone who want implement a local
| client for it, with relevant download/sync of information,
| caching etc. Internet banking? The same: a simple local desktop
| application that talk on an open protocols to your banks/peers,
| store copy of any transaction digitally signed by both parts
| AND by a State-run official public service as a guarantee for
| both etc all those things are not necessarily web and actually
| can be far superior in a classic networked desktop version.
|
| About crowdsourced news and aggregators: did you try to
| consider a classic personal one? I mean RSS feeds of a set of
| sites you like to follow with local scoring and peer
| recommendation service built-in? It can be far powerful than
| Google News or FB user homepage. It does not exists simply
| because no one actually have written it since most of the
| development is pushed toward web for economical reasons, but
| not because the web is better. It does not exists because most
| people fails to imaging a different world in terms of different
| tools and lifestyles so fails to see the enormous advantages
| for us users of that classic model witch actually was and still
| is the base of the entire IT and still the most advanced tech
| we have...
|
| Did you remember Popcorn Time? Well who impede to build a
| FacebookTime for instance over ZeroNet? Why do most people not
| ask nor look for a homeserver and ISPs that offer static IPv6
| global addresses to run their own personal infra so for
| instance just sharing photos does not means passing through
| Google Drive or iCloud? Why we do not push classic distributed
| iNUM/VoIP so we can make call with a very big number of
| participants and not much bandwidth issues? Those are not
| technical stuff but just human habits. We all se the modern web
| and most of us fail to imaging a different world.
| luckystarr wrote:
| Sticking to their own principles I see. It's even written in
| HTML4.01.
| layer8 wrote:
| I'm all for Web 1.0, but please use proportional fonts (even Web
| 1.0 did).
| wink wrote:
| Site uses CSS for columns and not tables. No dogfooding. /s
| snshn wrote:
| Most people like being ruled. That's why it's one person
| performing and thousands sitting and watching, not the other way
| around. Once early adopters are gone from something, it's usually
| all spectators what's left, and that's when things turn for the
| worse. The only thing that can bring back web 1.0 is good
| dictatorship of sorts, where one person with strong beliefs and
| good moral character takes control over something big. E.g.
| somebody wealthy purchasing large social media platform. But we
| can only hope for that to happen, it's very unlikely there's a
| person crazy enough to do such a thing today.
| kornhole wrote:
| I do remind myself that most people are followers. The leaders
| among us need to help lead others. I would like people to stop
| berating 'Social Media' because that is a general category and
| instead berate the specific corporate, AI, state affiliated
| social media platforms where the problems lie. Free social
| media such as those in the fediverse do not have the same
| problems and don't deserve to be lumped in with them. They have
| their own problems but much fewer.
| jameshart wrote:
| "And so the problem remained, and lots of the people were mean,
| and most of them were miserable, even the ones with digital
| watches.
|
| Many were increasingly of the opinion that they'd all made a big
| mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And
| some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no
| one should ever have left the oceans."
|
| Douglas Adams
| Trouble_007 wrote:
| Quote: _"The best laid Plans of Mice and Men often go Awry." --
| Robert Burns_
| sriku wrote:
| I hope in vain for a return to pre-web 1.0 -- when we were able
| to read without being watched. Many a revolution probably
| happened due to that "feature" of paper books ... which we lost
| when we went online with words.
| timcavel wrote:
| lobsang wrote:
| Not quite web 1.0 but I do wonder if there's a market for
| services that are closer to early web 2.0 products.
|
| For example something closer to Facebook circa 2006. No infinite
| scroll, a simple timeline, basic media sharing.
|
| Would it be possible to make a reasonable profit by offering
| simpler versions of existing services just without the engagement
| dark-patterns we currently have. And if so, could you create
| enough disruption to move the needle back slightly?
| cxr wrote:
| > Not quite web 1.0 but I do wonder if there's a market for
| services that are closer to early web 2.0 products.
|
| It has for a long time been my position that technical people
| who are aspiring entrepreneurs (esp. those itching to practice
| building something) should just clone an existing product and
| wait for the original to change or shut down. Whenever I say
| "clone", I really do mean that, and not "our own take on
| solving the same problem". Gmail's interface changes for the
| worse, or Vine gets bought and shut down? Boom, there you are
| on day 1 of the backlash, ready to capture anyone looking to
| (or forced to) jump ship.
|
| This worked so well by accident with Reddit being able to
| acquire the exodus of the Digg userbase that I don't understand
| why people don't try to do it deliberately. And in cases like
| Vine, due to the nature of abandoned trademarks, you could
| (eventually) even legally "relaunch" it under the the same
| brand. This is something that pizza shops do all the time, but
| it doesn't really happen in SV.
| ravenstine wrote:
| There's nothing holding people back from returning to Web 1.0.
|
| HTTP 1.1 is still a thing. Static webpages are still a thing. IRC
| is still a thing.
|
| Even better, host it on a P2P network like I2P where those on the
| network have to get over the hurdle of knowing about it in the
| first place and being able to set it up, just as early web users
| had to know how to plug in a modem, install a browser, and use
| those "URL" things.
|
| If your pages provide value, people will still find them in any
| case.
|
| Oh... but you wanted Web 1.0 content with Web 3.0 levels of
| _traffic_.
|
| Well, you're not gonna get that. Pick your poison.
| Zeff84 wrote:
| I feel like the biggest issue with Web 2.0 is the economic model.
| Most people probably still don't understand the amount of data
| collected and sold that funds a lot of social media. I often
| wonder what the internet would be like if data collection and
| advertising were gone and people had to pay for services they
| used.
| the_gipsy wrote:
| My argument: just let the fucking back-button work
| shadowgovt wrote:
| "CONFIRM FORM RESUBMISSION? The page that you're looking for
| used information that you entered. Returning to that page might
| cause any action you took to be repeated. Do you want to
| continue?"
| aslilac wrote:
| Haven't actual read it yet, but I was writing something last
| night about how I miss the early days of Web 2.0, which I refer
| to as "the teenage web"
| raspyberr wrote:
| I have yet to read the full article but the first thing I noticed
| was that the plaintext links in the navigation pane and the small
| picture links in the links pane didn't appear until I turned
| Javascript on. I found this amusing. No comments on the article
| yet though.
| skadamat wrote:
| Bring back Doug Engelbart's web vision!
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos
| dharma1 wrote:
| I also hand-coded my GeoCities site in 1995 and have good
| memories of those nostalgic times - but that's what it is -
| nostalgia.
|
| People still have the choice and freedom to build websites that
| that way - just like you might still want to record to multitrack
| tape instead of a DAW or shoot film instead of digital.
|
| In terms of data collection and privacy - I think these things
| are important and we are thankfully nearly there in tech maturity
| for local-first encrypted p2p apps becoming feasible.
|
| These technologies will enable rich collaborative user
| experiences without giving away your data unless you want to.
| [deleted]
| onion2k wrote:
| I don't understand the rational behind throwing away one of the
| most useful, most brilliant, and most valuable resource humans
| have created just because it has a few major problems. There's a
| strong argument in favor of fixing the problems, sure, but the
| world without the modern web would be significantly worse, not
| least because 90% of HN users wouldn't have jobs.
| jonassalen wrote:
| What resource are you talking about? Social media, or the
| internet?
|
| Because the author clearly states that corporate social media
| are the problem, which I - and a lot of psychologists and
| sociologists - agree with.
| onion2k wrote:
| _What resource are you talking about?_
|
| The modern web (eg Web 2.0) is an open software distribution
| platform that forms the basis of hundreds of thousands of
| company's products. Social media is a part of that, and it
| needs fixing, but a return to Web 1.0 is not the solution.
| darepublic wrote:
| I would rather try to create more compelling web apps that do
| respect privacy, and try to popularize those, then convince
| everyone to disable JavaScript for all their web browsing
| ok_coo wrote:
| Yes, but also, we used to have to develop around IE6.
| StackOverflow wasn't a thing. I recall debugging IE6 display
| issues for days as a junior. It was horrible.
|
| That's not to say the web doesn't currently have issues, it does.
| I just think it's healthy to be careful of embracing the past too
| hard.
| intrasight wrote:
| > Now the web has become a cesspool of toxic content.
|
| I strongly disagree. The web not only achieve but greatly
| exceeded it's potential. But the web has transitioned from being
| a destination to being a tool. Like all tools, it can be misused.
| gz5 wrote:
| Many of us share this nostalgia for the early-day, long-tail
| pioneer phase.
|
| I feel business model innovation is the key to moving the
| pendulum back towards that landscape - that the ad model will
| also result in centralization in which we are the product?
| bearjaws wrote:
| HN every week: Old thing good, new thing bad.
|
| Do you believe we should also go back to not having search
| engines? BBS as primary information sharing? Email & IRC as
| pretty much the only way to communicate?
|
| Web 1.0 was riddled with scalability problems, you are free to
| take what you consider the best parts of it and simplify your Web
| 2.0 site.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Web 1.0 had search engines, message boards and instant
| messaging. Most of what you are describing is things that
| dominated before the web.
| bearjaws wrote:
| No disagreement on having message boards and instant
| messaging or search engines, I am saying that they are an
| actual step backwards when it comes to making lay people
| productive when using the web.
|
| Not everyone is a HN alum ready to write a boolean query to
| find the most relevant post on a forum.
| HidyBush wrote:
| If a "return to web 1.0" means going back to baroque and quirky
| websites on which I have to constantly fight to find information
| and not carve my eyes out out of digust then no, thanks. The Web
| was meant as a means to publish hyperlinked text documents,
| nothing more, nothing less.
|
| I don't want to read an entire book on a web page, just let me
| download an .epub file. I don't want to read your poorly
| formatted artsy manifesto in my browser, just let me download a
| PDF. I don't want to read your blogpost which is just a
| presentation in disguise filled with inline images, just let me
| download a powerpoint file.
|
| I'm glad that if I want to search for some information Wikipedia
| presents me a consistent interface and gives me a brief overview
| of a subject and presents me with further hyperlinked content
| both pointing to IRL and web-hosted documents. Wikipedia to me
| perfectly represents the spirit of true Web 1.0 even if the
| content is Web 2.0 in nature.
| navjack27 wrote:
| It seems like you are conflating simple websites with the
| aesthetic of websites of web 1.0. these things are mutually
| exclusive and going back to web 1.0 will allow you to just
| download an epub of a very very simple text heavy website.
| HidyBush wrote:
| It's a matter of principles. If you give people javascript
| and css they will use it, full stop. The reason why the web
| has evolved this way is because the people back then were
| responsible for it. You have to cut the hydra's head and
| simply remove everything that is graphic and only keep basic
| text formatting.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Web 1.0 didn't tend to use: width: 600px
|
| to artificially constrain content to a tiny horizontal sliver.
| Some sites did it with tables, but most didn't bother to try to
| dictate so much style. Part of the wonderfulness of web 1.0 was
| taking advantage of browser defaults: Background colors, default
| text fonts, and not doing so much specifying exact style.
|
| The site is pleasantly readable and "responsive" to different
| browser sizes when you turn Style Sheets off!
| ryanbrunner wrote:
| 1.0 is a bit of an arbitrary distinction (especially since it's
| a term only applied in retrospect, no one called anything "Web
| 1.0" at the time). But there's definitely two distinct periods
| - one of which is what you're describing where styling was
| pretty minimal and many sites looked more or less like the
| browser defaults, but also a distinct period prior to "Web 2.0"
| where styling was overused even compared to today, and stuff
| like flash, image maps, frames, etc were fairly common.
| calvinmorrison wrote:
| yep, nobody is bringing up marquees, horrible gradient
| background, unreadable bright blue text on yellow
| backgrounds, flashing GIFs and all the other atrocities. Plus
| the endless "coming soon" and "under construction" pages
| BeefWellington wrote:
| I mean, those distractions haven't really gone away,
| they've just been replaced with advertising.
| navjack27 wrote:
| That's aesthetic and not defined rules
| btrettel wrote:
| I recall reading a similar HN comment before:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19414771
|
| I browse the internet full screen, which often makes text
| blocks far too wide. It's hard to read long lines. Yes, in
| principle, I could resize the window for every website, but in
| practice that would be annoying to do.
|
| Given current browser capabilities, on my own websites it would
| probably be best to set a maximum text width rather than a
| fixed text width. That way I can still adjust the window size
| to be smaller if I want to.
|
| In the future, it would be nice for a user to set their own
| desired text width (similar to setting the serif or sans-serif
| font) which could hypothetically be available to websites in
| CSS like this: max-width: preferred-width;
| WorldMaker wrote:
| I still wish multi-column CSS got more love. (It exists but
| it has seen more regressions in browser support than fixes
| for its papercuts.) Newspapers figured out centuries ago that
| good multi-column layouts are great for reading and it's kind
| of sad that web-browsers still aren't great at "newspaper"
| layouts. We could much better take advantage of our wide (and
| ultra-wide) screens with nice multi-column layouts than
| anything we could get away with just max-width alone.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Yes! These things should all be user-controllable
| preferences, NOT overridable by web site designers. Browsers
| have ceded _way too much_ control over look and feel to web
| designers! Ideally, a site like HN would just serve
| structured text content, and I would get to decide font
| typeface, text size, margins, color scheme, background image,
| and so on, from my configured preferences. This should be the
| browser's built-in default: I should not have to turn on
| extensions and plugins just to wrest control back from
| website designers. At most, website designers should be able
| to offer a default style for the case where the user did not
| set preferences, but the user's preference should always
| override!
| mr_mitm wrote:
| Wasn't the idea that the user could supply their own CSS? I
| vaguely remember old browsers offering an option for that.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| In UIKit under iOS/iPadOS, there's a concept known as
| "readable width" which is dynamic and changes depending on
| the width of the device's screen, and apps can take advantage
| of it to make blocks of text flow in a readable and pleasant
| way regardless of device form factor and orientation.
|
| I think this concept would be immensely useful in the
| browser. The closest one can get to that currently is to use
| media queries for a variety of screen widths with hand-tuned
| content widths, which is laborious and doesn't leave room for
| user customization.
| bpicolo wrote:
| To be fair monitors were only about that size in total at the
| time
| sanderjd wrote:
| If only the browser defaults had been better, this would have
| worked better.
| dpweb wrote:
| There needs to always be a place for anonymity, but I'd argue not
| in all forums.
|
| Words have impact. I'd love to see some foundation or something
| to work on the problem of toxicity/hate. Develop technologies to
| allow sites to better police against it, detect bots trying to
| incite, etc..
|
| Of course, you have to draw a line between free speech and hate
| speech but we already do that.
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