[HN Gopher] Splitting the Web
___________________________________________________________________
Splitting the Web
Author : bertman
Score : 156 points
Date : 2023-08-01 12:31 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (ploum.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (ploum.net)
| GMoromisato wrote:
| It's not symmetric, however. Those of us on the "full web" are
| still able to access everything. Which is why I don't feel
| compelled to "pick a side".
|
| Still, I do feel the enshittification that they're talking about.
| I hate that Google is less reliable and that (e.g.,) reading a
| recipe online requires shoveling away a mountain of spam. I think
| this is just the natural consequence of funding the web through
| ad clicks.
|
| Shameless plug: I'm working on something called GridWhale, which
| I hope eventually turns into a modern, global BBS. We'll be able
| to afford to publish the info you want without ads because we're
| getting revenue elsewhere. But since the revenue will come from
| customers, our incentives will be aligned, and we won't need to
| sacrifice privacy or use dark patterns.
|
| OK, I realize I'm not adding much to this discussion, but I was
| just waiting for the compiler. Sorry.
| johnnyworker wrote:
| How about a web ring? A manifesto? A good name for it, or
| several? By that I mean things to make this distributed
| discontent more discoverable, and more importantly, all those
| neat little tools and protocols that achieve great things with a
| fraction of the resources while keeping the autonomy of the user
| intact.
|
| We also need (more, discoverable) beginner level material that
| explains the beauty and potential of the web and many of its good
| parts (there are so many!). People who are as excited about the
| web and DIY as the Veritasium guy is about physics and math, and
| as talented at showing it. I certainly would tune in, and spread
| the word.
|
| Wouldn't it be great if we could leave something to future
| generations, like people left us diaries and books? If we just
| keep shoving our "content" and personal musings into those silos,
| chances are very good they will get basically nothing. A big fat
| hole, compared to what could be have if we actually cared about
| our files and bytes, and got the average person to care about
| theirs too. I consider that literacy in the digital age. You
| don't stop at 20% literacy, that would be appalling.
|
| And I posit it's not actually _hard_ to become an adult, it 's
| way harder not to. As long as you don't exercise autonomy it
| seems more and more daunting and hard, if you do, it becomes
| easier. I think the same applies here. There's just all these
| swarms of middlemen telling people it's all impossibly hard and
| dangerous (while they shovel on layers of complexity to make it
| so). They say don't bother walking, walking is hard, and offer to
| carry you. That goes well for a while, until you depend on them,
| until the idea of walking positively scares you. Then they start
| carrying you where it serves _them_.
| potta_coffee wrote:
| Discoverability for the kind of content I want to see is
| completely broken. I can barely find anything on the web
| anymore. Google gives me Reddit, Facebook and a million crappy
| review sites.
| gumby wrote:
| Key insight:
|
| > It's a bit like all those layers of JavaScript and flashy css
| have been used against usability, against them. Against us
| reboot81 wrote:
| I reject the ad injected sites, most gets handled with Pihole. To
| much ads? [?] + w. FB? I open the app once every 3 weeks, cant
| stand the ads. As the OP wrote: I have enough to read anyway.
| bruce511 wrote:
| I get where the author is coming from, but I feel like his
| conclusion is reductionist.
|
| Yes, on the one extreme you have Facebook, and the other extreme
| is say Mastodon, but there's also a huge middle way which is well
| populated.
|
| This week I've browsed hacker news, Wikipedia, done some research
| for an upcoming trip, kept up with OpenSSL and Jquery (yeah,
| that's still around, and still useful.)
|
| I bought some waterproofing (direct from the manufacturer),
| looked up nearby steel manufacturers, and looked up the phone
| number of my electrician (on his site).
|
| In cases where I feel I might be tracked, I just open an
| incognito browser [1]. Mostly though (apart from news) I don't
| really find myself on sites driven by advertising.
|
| If you spend your day on social media, news sites, or buying
| everything online, then sure, I get it, you're gonna get tracked.
| But that's really (for me) a tiny part of my browser history.
| Everyone is different I guess.
|
| [1] yeah I know, tracking is more than cookies, but I see so few
| ads anyway I haven't even bothered to load an ad-blocker. Then
| again, I'm not on social media...
| hightrix wrote:
| Replied to wrong comment
| palata wrote:
| > Everyone is different I guess.
|
| If you are not on any social media and not logged into google,
| then you are really in a very small minority.
| simonbarker87 wrote:
| I find it sad that people always want to go to extremes. It
| doesn't need to be the "handcrafted HTML" vs "bloated JS" sides
| the author describes.
|
| For example, I dislike scroll jacking in most cases, however some
| level of scroll based animation or interactivity can be nice and
| make things feel a bit more interesting.
|
| Humans are wired to notice and react to movement, a slightly
| animated button to go alongside a click is satisfying due to
| this.
|
| The author rails agains the world of corporate internet only
| after clicks and impressions. They have done the same, except
| with writing pitting one side against the other ignoring that the
| choice isn't binary, it is, like all things in life, a spectrum.
|
| But that doesn't sell as well so, good vs bad it is.
| bayindirh wrote:
| I'm one of the people who's leaning towards the small web, yet
| I don't go to these extremes.
|
| I use no adblockers, yet I use services that are part of the
| small web. I host my own webpage. However, if I need to use
| some part of the "common" web, I use that part. It just doesn't
| get used anymore.
|
| Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, many news sites are distant places.
| I have nothing to block them, but my lifestyle pushed them out
| of my life. I'll continue scaling down until I hit that optimal
| point, but I won't go to extremes just for reaching that limit.
|
| Also, seeing the bad practices and anti-patterns help me to
| keep my knowledge about these things up to date. This way, I
| can recognize the patterns and I don't re-implement them get
| blindsided.
| palata wrote:
| Hmm from your description, you sound very close to the author
| of that article. What makes you think they are extreme and
| you are not? Genuinely interested.
| cutler wrote:
| AI is a much more divisive factor than Javascript. AI polarises
| the end user and the massive corporate cloud entities with the
| technological capital to compute what an individual cannot. The
| corporate cloud is the real evil which has taken away the agency
| of individaul developers.
| shaunxcode wrote:
| Apparently I joined this movement decades ago on accident? I
| lurked Reddit on occasion but even that is dead to me now.
| Mastodon is awesome. It does need door game support though.
| beeburrt wrote:
| Door game?
| pschuegr wrote:
| I assume this means something to do with onboarding
| npongratz wrote:
| Not GP, but probably referring to door games similar to those
| found on BBSes:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBS_door#Door_games
| jakelazaroff wrote:
| _> It feels like everyone is now choosing its side. You can't
| stay in the middle anymore. You are either dedicating all your
| CPU cycles to run JavaScript tracking you or walking away from
| the big monopolies. You are either being paid to build huge
| advertising billboards on top of yet another framework or you are
| handcrafting HTML._
|
| Is that happening? I feel like there's a _ton_ of middle ground,
| and it 's only ever expanding. My personal website isn't a huge
| JavaScript app tracking my visitors, but I wouldn't really call
| it handcrafted HTML. I'm involved with a bunch of communities
| that aren't overly corporatized but don't take a big principled
| stand against it either.
|
| I prefer Maggie Appleton's diagram of the web [1]. The click-
| obsessed corporations are what she calls the "dark forest of the
| clear web". But below that there are email newsletters and RSS
| feeds, there are personal blogs and digital gardens, there are
| communities run on Discord and Slack.
|
| [1] https://maggieappleton.com/ai-dark-forest
| chomp wrote:
| Well, her analogy is more for protected areas where you can
| hide from lifeless, aggresively public areas and where you can
| consume (presumably) more authentic content. It doesn't work
| well in this case for e.g. "cozy web" because places like
| Snapchat are definitely harvesting your interactions. Whatsapp
| is literally Facebook. The author of this article is more
| ranting about the "commercial web" in this case. They don't
| seem to have the same level of appreciation for some of the
| corporations that Maggie does.
| jakelazaroff wrote:
| That's why I feel like the author is trying to force a square
| peg into a round hole. WhatsApp is literally Facebook, but
| all my messages are end-to-end encrypted; I don't feel like
| they're tracking me the same way I do on Instagram.
| Meanwhile, plenty of people's blogs have all sorts of nasty
| tracking shit. People love trying to fit things into
| dichotomies, but reality is always a lot messier.
| palata wrote:
| > I don't feel like they're tracking me the same way I do
| on Instagram.
|
| They care mostly about the metadata, not so much about the
| content of your messages.
|
| They know who you write to, when you write to them, when
| you check the app (which for many people basically means
| when they wake up and when they go to bed), they have your
| whole list of contacts.
|
| They are really tracking you.
| gochi wrote:
| None of that is metadata. It is just the data.
| palata wrote:
| When we talk about "metadata", in the context of a
| messenger like Whatsapp, it refers to the data (metadata
| _is_ data) around the actual "payload" (which is the
| e2ee message).
|
| Yes, all of that is metadata.
| Kovah wrote:
| I thought that there must be a middle ground after reading that
| part, too. But we, the people who know, run and support that
| cozy web, are actually a minority compared to the mass of
| internet users. It's not a good comparison, but my family and
| friends know absolutely nothing about all the things that make
| up the cozy web. Dozens of people and literally nobody knows
| what RSS, Mastodon or blogs are. When asked about privacy,
| nobody cares. Nobody except my brother uses ad blockers. Just a
| few examples.
|
| From my experience and what I know about web users in general,
| this seem to scale to the whole internet. Like 90% of the
| people know nothing about "our cozy web" and don't care about
| anything else than the commercial web.
| gochi wrote:
| I have a lot of thoughts about this, most glaringly because
| we tend to use our perspective of social media to paint our
| idea of others, when in reality social media in general still
| only captivates around 55% of the general population. It's
| important to keep this scale in mind, to prevent us from
| giving up hope and claiming nobody cares.
|
| We often keep the cozy web secretive due to eternal september
| and also underfunded. You can see how these loop into each
| other very easily. Can't fund a better solution when we keep
| trying to keep it a secret.
|
| We're also very bad at framing things. So often I'll observe
| what should have been a slam dunk: convey why privacy matters
| and easy alternatives they can use/ways to keep themselves
| safer, yet they wind up just convincing the person why they
| should stick within the misleading warm glow of the
| commercial web trap. Happens so often! A complete lack of
| empathy, just scoffing and dismissal.
|
| I say all of this to say, we can do better. We have ample
| opportunity, we need to stop squandering it and indirectly
| killing the cozy web along with it.
| jakelazaroff wrote:
| I don't think I understand what you're getting at. Like,
| yeah, the "cozy web" is fairly marginal, but the "tech-savvy"
| web the article discusses is even more so.
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| "It gathers as much information as it could about us and spams
| every second of our life with ads, beep, notifications,
| vibrations, blinking LEDs, background music and fluorescent
| titles."
|
| Plaintext SNI or TLS other than v1.3 is one way of gathering
| information, namely, a list of every domain the computer
| accesses.
|
| TLS1.3 without SNI:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20230801115645if_/https://ploum....
| throwing_away wrote:
| > When browsing on the "normal web", it is increasingly required
| to disable at least part of your antifeatures-blockers to access
| content.
|
| Author lost me here.
|
| I use Firefox and Kiwi browser with uBlock Origin with all the
| annoyance lists enabled, bypass-paywalls-clean, unpaywall,
| sponsorblock, alternate player for twitch, violentmonkey and a
| few scripts. I also have yt-dlp, streamlink, and mpv.
|
| I regularly read HN, Slashdot, and TechMeme, and it's extremely
| rare to get a link that I can't access.
|
| Oftentimes I can access content without a browser, thanks to
| mpv's excellent web support.
|
| I get that it's annoying, but it's really not that hard to solve
| it once and rarely think about it again. This has been my setup
| for at least 3 years now.
|
| Occasionally something will annoy me and get through my filters,
| and I have to spend a few minutes fixing it.
|
| The only thing I'm walled off from right now that's slightly
| annoying is browsing specific accounts in "X" with tweets ordered
| by timeline and viewing tweet replies. This is really low value
| so I haven't bothered looking for a solution, but if anyone knows
| one, feel free to link it here.
| teekert wrote:
| I do see it quite often. Also when signing up for things often
| I need to disable ublock or move to Edge entirely.
| throwing_away wrote:
| I've never run into that. I wonder what services? Maybe stuff
| I would get some other way.
| teekert wrote:
| It's mostly stuff like the local sushi shop like [0], works
| poorly, renders the "pay" button outside the screen on
| FireFox. Office 365 tools, sometime just kill FireFox
| performance, or there is no audio, while everything looks
| ok. Lots of issues trying to sign into this learning
| platform as well [1]. Can't think of more, but as said it
| happens surprisingly often.
|
| Edit: Also, on icloud in the browser I consistently need to
| click explicitly where I want to type (in notes) or my text
| won't register.
|
| It's the same type of sites that happily take my 32 random
| char password then I later find it was truncated to 12
| chars or so. Just amateur stuff.
|
| [0] https://www.sushimochi.nl/
|
| [1] https://www.develop-yourself.com/
| Kiro wrote:
| Reverting back to phone calls and visiting physical stores again?
| This person is living my nightmare.
| at-fates-hands wrote:
| My kids are teenagers who have stopped texting almost
| altogether. They do more facetime and other video conferencing.
| When I need to get a hold of either, I actually call. Texting
| stopped working years ago as a means to get a hold of them.
|
| Both are going to be seniors and have told me all their friends
| have all but abandoned texting and besides facetiming, they
| spend a LOT of time on conference calling when they're mobile
| gaming.
|
| It would appear communications continue to evolve over time
| from generation to generation. I thought once texting took
| hold, phone calls would become obsolete. I guess not. There's a
| lot more interesting things they do with tech these days, but I
| was fascinated with how their communication habits have changes
| so rapidly even in their own short lifetime.
| JohnFen wrote:
| I've largely been doing this (and more) for a few years now.
| It's seriously improved my quality of life.
| skybrian wrote:
| Sometimes people complain about life sucking in very general
| terms. Other times they criticize specific things, one at a time.
|
| This post seems like a generic, zoomed-out sort of complaint, and
| that doesn't appeal to me, because I'm not sure I learned about
| anything specific. I guess it's about how it's possible to stop
| using some business's websites and interact with them in other
| ways? But which businesses?
|
| "Splitting the web" implies a big claim that other people do the
| same, but how many? I guess we don't know since they aren't
| tracked?
|
| Yes, there are patterns, but each website is different. Maybe
| websites should be judged for themselves? I don't think it's a
| good idea to stop using a website I like due to generic concerns
| like this.
| palata wrote:
| Well the article describes a feeling which is shared by many
| (me included). It is interesting (again, at least for me) to
| see that others feel the same way.
|
| > I don't think it's a good idea to stop using a website I like
| due to generic concerns like this.
|
| I think that the idea is not to philosophically decide to stop
| using some websites. It is rather that some of those websites
| have become unbearable, and the author says that they won't
| make an effort anymore.
|
| I tend to do the same, and I guess many people do that too: if
| I start loading a website and it takes forever, or it lags, or
| it seems like a big spam, I don't spend 10 minutes checking if
| my feeling is right or not: I just close the tab.
| spansoa wrote:
| > The link I clicked doesn't open or is wrangled? Yep, I'm
| probably blocking some important third-party JavaScript. No, I
| don't care. I've too much to read on a day anyway. More time for
| something else.
|
| Only on a rare occasion does surfing with no JS actually hamper
| my surfing. If a site needs JS, I make a rare exception and
| whitelist it temporarily with uBlock Origin. I have a dedicated
| browser profile for sites which require JS and I need to be
| logged in, like Amazon, Gmail, Reddit, etc
| 8chanAnon wrote:
| From the article: But, increasingly, I feel less and less like an
| outsider. It's not me. It's people living for and by advertising
| who are the outsiders. They are the one destroying everything
| they touch, including the planet. They are the sick psychos and I
| don't want them in my life anymore.
|
| My thoughts exactly. Like the author, I don't have patience for
| glossy websites anymore. If a site needs third-party JS to be
| usable then I'm gone. I won't put up with 15mb downloads just to
| read some content (Twitter included). The web is not so much
| splitting in two. We are simply saying "no more" to the
| exploiters and grifters. Eventually, they will have to learn to
| eat with the commoners or eat by themselves.
| [deleted]
| skydhash wrote:
| I'm moving to Firefox as my main browser, and the amount of
| sites that break because of me blocking JavaScript (with
| ublock) is staggering. I can understand SPA being JS only, but
| simple blogs and other content sites, no.
| sodapopcan wrote:
| Using NoScript has been pretty eye-opening. I've come to
| learn that most of the time I'm happy unblock the primary
| domain. If the site doesn't work I'll look for a clearly-
| named CDN. If I can't identify one or, worse-yet, there is
| some kind of cdn.some-domain.com and unblocking that _still_
| doesn 't make the site work, then I'm out.
| 8chanAnon wrote:
| I've stopped using NoScript because it was breaking my own
| apps. It was fine until Mozilla changed something in
| Firefox. The problem is that NoScript inserts a lot of JS
| into the web page and some of that JS gets broken by some
| sort security lockout. It may be a bug in Firefox and maybe
| it's been fixed but I wasn't satisfied with NoScript
| anyway. I'm now using uMatrix. It doesn't insert JS on
| every active element (just at the top) so it avoids buggy
| behaviour. The main thing I like about it is that it only
| blocks cross-origin scripts (NoScript blocks everything by
| default, including same-site).
| anthk wrote:
| Get Lagrange in PC/Android, head to gemini://gemi.dev, go to
| The News Waffle and paste the whole URL (whole, as with
| https://www...) there in the URL input form.
|
| It works for sites and for news home pages. It detects RSS
| feeds, too, putting that option in the first place when you get
| the rendered page. It can cut down most pages down to 5% and
| less.
| teekert wrote:
| I feel this too. Moreover, I often want to signup fro something,
| like a webshop. Often it simply does not work and I choose to
| order without an account, sometimes it works then. Sometimes I
| need to disable ublock, sometimes I need to use Edge (on Linux).
| Often I'm already dropping out, using a different shop
| altogether.
|
| I guess we are a group to small to care about though.
| NovaDudely wrote:
| I will give various sites a little wiggle room via NoScript but
| by the 3rd failure due to an excess of 3rd party requirements I
| just move on to somewhere else.
| wilsonnb3 wrote:
| > It feels like everyone is now choosing its side. You can't stay
| in the middle anymore. You are either dedicating all your CPU
| cycles to run JavaScript tracking you or walking away from the
| big monopolies. You are either being paid to build huge
| advertising billboards on top of yet another framework or you are
| handcrafting HTML.
|
| This is only true because the UX of mastodon, Gemini, GrapheneOS,
| and other darlings of the non-commercial web crowd are so bad
| that the only reason to use them over commercial alternatives is
| ideological.
|
| Which, for Gemini at least, is intentional.
|
| So I guess I agree that the web is fracturing but the post makes
| it sound like some kind of battle between the commercial side and
| the 'tech savvy's side, as the post refers to it, when really it
| is just a minority of tech ideologues rejecting commercial tech,
| a tale at least as old as Stallman and not particularly
| interesting.
|
| Like the famous scene from Mad Men:
|
| Tech Savvy Web: "I feel bad for you, commercial web"
|
| Commercial Web: "I don't think about you at all"
| anthk wrote:
| UX of Gemini bad? I've seen browsers with far more complex
| settings in average.
| palata wrote:
| > This is only true because the UX of mastodon, Gemini,
| GrapheneOS, and other darlings of the non-commercial web crowd
| are so bad
|
| I don't know... many "commercial websites" are really, really
| slow. Slack, for one, regularly takes seconds to show me a few
| text messages. A big bloated website I absolutely hate is
| HelloFresh: I see how they may think it looks good, but loading
| it feels like I'm compiling a kernel or something. Facebook has
| an infinite wall, and regularly when I scroll it just makes me
| jump somewhere else (and therefore I lose this one post that
| was looking interesting in the middle of those ads).
|
| On the other hand, SourceHut may look "old", but it is so
| snappy, it's refreshing. And I find the UX really good. It just
| removes the glossy, useless UI stuff.
| bad_alloc wrote:
| This post expresses something I have been feeling fro a while. We
| need some catchy names for these parts of the web. I'd propose
| "Corponet" for the big sites (borrowed from Cyberpunk). How to
| call the other side though? "Fediverse" is its own thing, is
| there any other term that encompasses the fediverse, random
| personal sites and so on?
| treyd wrote:
| The term "small web" refers specifically to the old style of
| small handcrafted websites. But that would exclude Mastodon
| which is actually fairly heavy to run if you don't use a
| dedicated client and use the main browser app. I've heard the
| term "indie web" to roughly include both of these.
| tolciho wrote:
| smolnet is one such term.
| superkuh wrote:
| >People who try alternative networks such as Mastodon or, God
| forbid, Gemini. People who poke fun at the modern web by building
| true HTML and JavaScript-less pages.
|
| Mastodon is actually part of the "HTTP as a secure application
| delivery protocol" and is no longer part of the "HTTP as website
| document delivery" team.
|
| To me that seems the biggest split: self contained application
| versus hyperlinked documents.
| masfuerte wrote:
| It's such a shame. I stopped reading twitter links when they
| went js only. Mastodon is actually worse because there's no way
| I'm enabling js from some random domain I've never heard of
| before. It would take literally a couple of hours to add an
| unstyled html feed but, apart from me, who wants that?
| seabass-labrax wrote:
| Mastodon is fully usable without any JavaScript at all; there
| are a number of 'client' applications that you can install
| entirely locally[1].
|
| If you're using the 'normal' Web interface to Mastodon,
| you'll only ever need to run JavaScript from the server you
| registered for, even if you read posts from other servers.
|
| [1]: https://joinmastodon.org/apps
| the_gipsy wrote:
| I am ignorant of the underlying mastodon protocol, but couldn't
| there be a (mostly) HTML-only frontend for mastodon, or
| something like that?
|
| I really hated that about twitter too, that for reading a
| goddamn SMS-lenghty tiny text it couldn't just have been
| "prerendered" on the server, no, you have to fetch a million
| things and watch different spinners before you get at it.
| anthk wrote:
| There is:
|
| https://brutaldon.org
| doublepg23 wrote:
| GoToSocial exposes an API for basic frontends pretty much.
| https://github.com/superseriousbusiness/gotosocial
| steinuil wrote:
| Sure, you can write or run your own fediverse server that
| renders HTML-only page, and every time you see a Mastodon
| link you paste it in your server's lookup form and browse it
| from there. Honk (https://humungus.tedunangst.com/r/honk) is
| HTML only and very minimalistic. I'm sure there's frontends
| or clients for Mastodon that use less HTML as well, so you
| can also swap out Mastodon's default frontend for a less
| heavy one.
| aendruk wrote:
| The awful thing about Mastodon is it used to serve inert HTML
| but this behavior was removed.
|
| https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/19953
| Chiba-City wrote:
| [dead]
| tonyfader wrote:
| another virtue signaler using false equivalence to avoid personal
| discomfort.
|
| his "solutions" do nothing to address the power of these monopoly
| platforms.
| carlossouza wrote:
| Do you guys think the non-commercial web will ever achieve
| critical mass to tilt the scale in its favor and spark a chain
| reaction to drive flocks of people out of the commercial web?
|
| A refreshing thing about the non-commercial web is the fact that
| it is not trying to monopolize my attention and not trying to
| hard-sell me anything.
|
| More and more, I see people complaining about the big tech
| services... but that's a qualitative perception, certainly
| biased... I wonder if that's really happening.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > Do you guys think the non-commercial web will ever achieve
| critical mass
|
| I don't know. I rather doubt it. Personally, I've given up on
| that as a goal -- the masses can do what they like. My goal is
| more about self-preservation: finding those spaces that are
| beneficial to me.
|
| What I think is actually happening is that the web is
| balkanizing, as people who feel as I do build spaces that serve
| their needs.
| hanniabu wrote:
| That's what the web3 movement is about but everyone is too
| caught up in bias based on false narratives
| palata wrote:
| That's what the web3 people try to make you believe
| TheIronMark wrote:
| I get it, but man that's some hyperbole in there. I like
| Mastodon, but since there's still good stuff on other sites, I
| will read those, too. If the author thinks he's outsmarted
| analytics and tracking, they should check with their ISP. Or VPN
| provider.
| rodolphoarruda wrote:
| I like the text, but the author seems to indicate there is a fork
| in the road ahead. Take left to the open web (HTML, lessJS,
| etc.); take right to the commercial web (Fb, GA4, JS, Ads etc). I
| think we can easily have both options at the same time.
|
| If in the past we used to discuss our "work life" in opposition
| to our "personal life", I think we are at the point now of
| discussing our "small-tech text based web presence" vs. a "big-
| tech click based web presence" as described. Not a big deal, I
| think.
| EGreg wrote:
| _As I'm blocking completely google analytics, every Facebook
| domain and any analytics I can, I'm also disappearing for them. I
| don't see them and they don't see me!_
|
| Aww how cute. No, they can still track what you do. Remember
| Facebook Beacon and the outcry? It is now a reality. Facebook (oh
| excuse me, Meta) doesn't back down after people vehemently react
| to Newsfeed, Beacon, Metaverse etc. Mark used to respond "Calm
| down. Breathe. We hear you." before justifying what he did. That
| was when he was wet behind the ears -- he doesn't bother to do
| that anymore.
|
| Facebook changed our world, our ideas of the word Friend, of the
| word Like, etc. Whether you want to or not, these platforms
| controlled by a few people will reshape society unless we build
| open source alternatives.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_Beacon
|
| https://www.computerworld.com/article/2533161/facebook-s-bea...
|
| https://techcrunch.com/2008/09/18/is-beacon-back/
| masfuerte wrote:
| Beacon was client side. If you block access to facebook domains
| then they receive nothing.
| EGreg wrote:
| If a company has your first name, last name or other
| information, they can send it to Facebook
|
| Large corporations are buying this data, and even governments
|
| https://www.fastcompany.com/90310803/here-are-the-data-
| broke...
|
| https://www.propublica.org/article/everything-we-know-
| about-...
|
| https://www.dli.tech.cornell.edu/post/facebook-and-google-
| ar...
| butz wrote:
| Biggest issue will be to keep government and public services on
| the non-corporate web, as they probably jump ship for "security"
| reasons.
| deepsun wrote:
| > I've never received so many emails commenting my blog posts.
|
| I've always wondered if there's is an easy way to have a pre-
| moderated, owner-sorted list of comments section.
|
| Emails are private, but sometimes users can say something
| interesting for others to see. And I don't mind if website owner
| deletes/edits/down-sorts my comments -- it's their web property.
|
| PS: If only that page had a Like button... :)
| revskill wrote:
| My blog has no JS, but my customers dashboard is full of JS, a
| SPA. I'm on both side where it matters.
| klabb3 wrote:
| It's the monopolistic companies aka mega corps that really
| restrict individuals and stifle innovation.
|
| In the small-mid sized space, there are shitty actors but they're
| easier to avoid, and don't require resorting to living in a cave.
| They are competing with each other in the traditional sense of
| the word. They're not on a mission to extinguish.
|
| This is not unique to tech, it's everywhere. Private actors that
| become the size of countries switch to playing zero-sum games, by
| acquiring and consolidating. It's always bad for the consumer.
| jfengel wrote:
| In what way do they stifle people? I had the impression that
| for the most part they just ignored small fry. If you want to
| boot up a server and point a DNS address at it, knock yourself
| out.
|
| You can't "innovate" on Facebook's site, but why would you want
| to? People go there to do Facebook things. Your own web site is
| limited primarily by your imagination. (And occasionally the
| law, but that requires some pretty extreme stuff.)
| klabb3 wrote:
| > You can't "innovate" on Facebook's site, but why would you
| want to? People go there to do Facebook things.
|
| Parents use Facebook to schedule activities for kids.
| Governments and companies use Twitter to announce things to
| citizens and customers. So they are, as they claim, in a
| sense a digital townhall. But with arbitrary restrictions on
| access, both in terms of opinions and expressions and in
| terms of clients they don't want you to use, or APIs they
| don't want you to call.
|
| > for the most part they just ignored small fry
|
| Very small, yes. But as soon as you're bigger, they're gonna
| want to eliminate you, peacefully of course. Acquisitions are
| probably the first tool, then it's get uglier if that doesn't
| work out.
|
| Anyway, details in all its glory, but the trend as you grow
| larger is to play dominance games, which is another term for
| zero-sum. That's not the only thing they do of course, but
| the trend is overwhelming.
| wewxjfq wrote:
| It's sad, really. The information people want to get out of the
| web hasn't changed - an article is still a headline with a few
| paragraphs, a product is still a name, a description and a price,
| ... it's all so dead simple, yet the websites became unusable.
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