The modern web is becoming unusable

by csomar • 7 years ago

512 198 7 years ago

thesquib• 7 years ago

I dislike the popups asking if I want notifications, I never allow them. Stop that now please!

I don't know what browser you use, but I'm not familiar with any that both allow notification requests and don't allow you to turn them off somewhere in settings.

Cenk• 7 years ago

I’ve noticed sites putting up a fake notification modal first, and then triggering the real browser pop up only if you click yes. I believe this is so they can ask you again on your next visit if you say no, which you can’t do if you deny the browser pop up.

jacobsenscott• 7 years ago

When your only metric for success is growth, you have no choice.

mjevans• 7 years ago

Long term success is achieved by not behaving as a parasite.

draw_down• 7 years ago

I wish I was as sure about that as you appear to be.

ajna91• 7 years ago

Why was draw_down's comment killed? A quick glance at his profile indicates he is a 4 year old account with more than a 1500 karma, yet every recent comment by him is flagged/killed [1]. Yes, some of them appear trollish, but not all of them.

Does someone here have a grudge against him?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=draw_down

smt88• 7 years ago

I wish this were true, but unfortunately cheaters win and growth (of money, power, or both) trumps all other motivations for some people.

Competing is hard. Why compete when you can buy elected officials and change laws in your favor?

The sad truth is that lots of value-destroying and/or cheating companies succeed for decades.

Examples:

- every management consultancy - IBM - record labels + RIAA - Outbrain and all the other "related links" companies - many pharma examples, like the Sackler family - all of the heavily subsidized US industries like corn and oil - Nestle, Coca-Cola, and other companies monopolizing and selling public water - many grad school programs - Mercola - countless Chinese knockoff brands on Amazon - the House of Saud - Susan G. Komen Foundation - Intuit/TurboTax - Amway - almost all fund managers - HerbaLife - Donald Trump - most ISPs, cable companies, and mobile carriers - many (if not all) major defense contractors

jacob019• 7 years ago

All life has had to prove it's fitness, including parasites.

nirui2• 7 years ago

I doubt it.

While you guys thinking Facebook, Twitter, Medium is bad enough, we in China is on another level.

Most top websites in China will "ask" (If pop a download window counts) user to download their apps if the user is on a phone, some websites are intentionally left dysfunctional to force user to use their app. And guess what's the first thing those apps ask you to do? "Please login(, and... maybe send ALL your information to us plus a secretly taken screenshot of your portrait)".

Since almost all of them are doing this, I assume it is a crucial strategy for them to keep their user active. Facebook Twitter etc maybe up to the same thing just not bold enough.

jjgreen• 7 years ago

That's a great analogy, but I'm not sure of the conclusion. Being a parasite on man is not good evolutionary move, since we'll pick the little bastards off. But attach to something stupid, that's a better prospect.

So I guess it depends on how bright the host is, and that's questionable.

lota-putty• 7 years ago

I hope you mean `financial net-profit` by growth.

buboard4• 7 years ago

I think growth is accurate, because growth leads to dominance, and then you re invincible, profit is secured

hootbootscoot• 7 years ago

amen

momentoftop• 7 years ago

I don't have a Twitter account, so I browse it by going to mobile.twitter.com, which allows me to view tweets and replies. I assume this is an oversight by Twitter, and it will be locked down at some time, but it serves me for now.

Similarly, I only ever browse reddit by going to old.reddit.com. I don't expect that to be supported for much longer either.

saagarjha5• 7 years ago

The normal Twitter website works too.

arebop• 7 years ago

When I try to read comments on normal Twitter, it prompts me to login.

rapnie• 7 years ago

I just discovered Nitter as pointed out by danShumway in this thread. Thanks, Dan!

https://github.com/zedeus/nitter

makecheck• 7 years ago

I can understand sites not wanting to give things away forever. I cannot understand what is served by interrupting new visitors almost immediately, before they can practically do anything with your site. All that does is remind me how little I really “need” your services.

bjornjaja2• 7 years ago

Yeah those foresee pop ups can go suck it. I mean what are people thinking? It’s stupid really. But then again, that’s what people do: in the pursuit for money they shit chemicals in rivers and don’t clean up their garbage. Or they toss garbage in the recycling bin.

sturgill3• 7 years ago

I’m not sure exit intent pop ups are the same as polluting finite natural resources, and the more I learn about the recycling industry the more I believe that everything is just trash any way (reduce and reuse are the only viable paths).

Also, as a quant marketer I can tell you: exit intent works. Most traffic bounces and never returns. Being able to capture email and nurture leads is a profitable way of maximizing the return of your traffic.

There’s a reason why every furniture store is going out of business and has someone twirling signs: we are evolved to pick out movement and change. An exit intent that inverts the color scheme is obnoxious but only because you have to see it.

The interesting question (for me) is how obnoxious do you go before you start to hurt returns.

This comment is (oddly) unlikely to be popular on HN (odd because of HN’s heritage as an offshoot of YC), but exit intent works. It’s one of the first things I put in place at any new company.

mobjack• 7 years ago

The problem is that pop ups work and companies have A/B tests to prove it.

It is surprising how freely the average user gives up their email address.

The sad truth is that these practices work so websites will continue doing them.

anigbrowl3• 7 years ago

So true. Or my current pet hate, noticing that I'm using the mouse to close the tab and throwing up a begging popup - a great way to convert me from feeling a site was useful and interesting to finding it annoying and toxic.

byuu• 7 years ago

They do that because they know human nature (well, post-popup windows from the '90s) is to move your mouse down to close the popup and then close the tab, as if it makes any difference. That buys them another 2-4 seconds of time-spent-on-page analytics metrics. It took me a bit to untrain myself from that behavior. I'd quite like a browser extension that stops reporting when my mouse moves out of the tab.

mirimir2• 7 years ago

The Firefox add-on "DOM Delete" often works wonders.

andai2• 7 years ago

I recently had to go into the web-inspector and un-blur a website (I think Quora?)

ObsoleteNerd• 7 years ago

I just add them all to my adblocker list. Right click, block element.

LeftHandPath• 7 years ago

I usually just press F12 and delete it with the DOM tree inspector.

Is "DOM Delete" automated?

mongol• 7 years ago

I think, because if you give a little bit away, you need cookies to keep track of when / how much, and then the private browsing trick becomes an easy way to keep getting more.

z3t42• 7 years ago

Web users are so used to signing up to stuff that they will do it almost automatically.

conductr• 7 years ago

Is that true? Maybe I’m an outlier but I just bounce.

itqwertz• 7 years ago

The majority of content on Medium is low-quality, varying from personal blog post opinions stated as fact to yet another career-boosting tutorial on beginner React fundamentals. I advise most people to keep the content for their own blogs and let that site fall under the weight of hosting their crap content.

Twitter and Facebook are known cesspools that suck away your time and add very little value. I don’t know anyone same that uses Twitter regularly. Facebook seems to be used most by those who understand their business model least.

Guard your time and be careful with what you feed your time.

BTW this also applies to modern journalism sites like the New York Times and the Washington Post. Use archive.is and let them rot from years of neglectful journalism.

andrewnc• 7 years ago

I have found Twitter to be very valuable to follow machine learning researchers and find out about up and coming research.

unforeseen9991• 7 years ago

I've also found Twitter to be very valuable in my own profession.

I've found it to be a toxic hellhole of shit for everything else.

dorkwood• 7 years ago

I use Twitter to follow developers and artists who post interesting work. It's the best resource I've found for surfacing that sort of niche content (if anyone knows a better one, please let me know).

behnamoh• 7 years ago

It's weird that a previous thread on this didn't get to the front page:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21816674

I would put Medium, Pinterest, Wired, WSJ, Quora, etc. in the same basket of websites that hinder the free flow of information regardless of how useful their content is.

qu4ku• 7 years ago

I'll never understand what people mean when they say twitter is horrible — 'following people on twitter is a bit like building your own city'

danShumway2• 7 years ago

Somewhat related series of PSAs:

Nitter is an Open Source alternative front end for Twitter that requires zero Javascript to run, and it's really good, and is way nicer than Twitter's own UI, and yall should use it. I see Twitter threads hosted on HN all the time, and I kind of wish more of the posters would link to Nitter's public-facing instance instead of Twitter. I think its interface is just objectively better than Twitter's for browsing.

Invidious is an Open Source alternative to Youtube that is also really good and requires zero Javascript, but unfortunately it suffers from a lot of performance problems and videos will occasionally refuse to load -- Youtube is I think more hostile about throttling/blocking that kind of stuff, and proxying videos is probably harder than proxying tweets. You can donate to Invidious though, which might help them afford more powerful hardware.

In regards to Medium -- if you disable Javascript those popups will all vanish, and for the most part all you'll be missing out on is comments and occasionally a lazy-loaded image. It's amazing how much of the web (particularly news) works fine without Javascript, and getting rid of it gets rid of a lot of these annoying popups and requests. Use uMatrix, it makes it really easy to turn Javascript off by default and whitelist as necessary. And every person who disables Javascript is one more tiny audience metric to make it ever-so-slightly harder for news sites to ignore progressive enhancement.

dotancohen• 7 years ago

  > It's amazing how much of the web (particularly news) works
  > fine without Javascript,

It's amazing that any content would require Javascript. Web applications I understand, but content (particularly news) should have no need for scripting.

jm4• 7 years ago

They use it to auto play all their shitty videos. That auto play nonsense is ruining so many things for me. I don’t want any movement or sound on a page that I’m trying to read. It’s insane that content producers think it’s a good idea.

mehrdadn• 7 years ago

Infinite scrolling needs Javascript, and it's pretty useful for some sites that have feeds.

rubyfan• 7 years ago

A long time ago we used to cache static content and then use ajax to bring in anything dynamic like user preferences, comments, etc.

Those were mostly superfluous adds to experience on top of the content. It’s been a while but I’d like to believe if you didn’t have JS our content still functioned.

Now with things like Vue and React I see simple web pages with a loader in between what should be static content. Seems crazy to me.

3xblah• 7 years ago

An objective person reading this comment, who otherwise knows nothing about this subject, might ask "If the so much of the web works without Javascript, then why is Javascript enabled by default."

Google just made changes that require users to enable Javascript in order to log on, e.g., to check their email via the web. The rationale for compelling users to make themselves easier for Google to track can be exaplained away as a "security measure".

Google also recently made changes to Chrome that make it impossible to globally disable Javascript for all websites in Guest mode.

deith• 7 years ago

Nitter might not require Javascript to run, but it's everything but fast.

Every page that's not cached takes several seconds to generate. It's not much better to show a white page for seconds than it is to show a skeleton page and then load the data using javascript.

Also they have taken the decision to proxify all images/avatars through their own servers. Why? And if you do that, at least set appropriate cache headers! Every time I visit a page inside Nitter every single image loads again even if I've seen it already.

jonfw• 7 years ago

at least set appropriate cache headers!

This seems like some pretty good actionable advice. It might be a good idea to make this an issue on their github page.

https://github.com/zedeus/nitter

danShumway2• 7 years ago

Also they have taken the decision to proxify all images/avatars through their own servers. Why?

Privacy. I trust the devs of the Nitter instance I use more than I trust Twitter, and I like that Twitter has (at least somewhat) more difficulty knowing what IP is requesting what.

Better caching would be nice, but in general, I've found Nitter's speed to be fine. It's not amazingly snappy, and because it's proxying from Twitter it's probably never going to be faster than Twitter. But I've never been tempted to load Twitter to get around speed issues. Invidious on the other hand...

My guess is speed might also be affected by your region? I would be very surprised if Nitter's instance is trying to set up global CDNs or anything. It's probably just a couple Linode servers somewhere.

im3w1l• 7 years ago

Invidious isn't proxying the video, just embedding it. If you block third party requests from invidio.us to googlevideo.com, you wont see any clips.

iteratorloopmap• 7 years ago

I'd like to add that we can use ublock origin as well with JS-Off-By-Default.

jacquesm4• 7 years ago

The big divide is between apps and pages. Pages are just documents and should not contain any code. Apps are fine to contain code. The problem is that we now have pages that believe they are code and apps that have to be styled using the mechanisms for pages. This duality is here to stay for at least a while to come, and maybe for a long time.

But it would have been good security wise and privacy wise if this divide were made more explicit.

krapp4• 7 years ago

Pages are just documents and should not contain any code. Apps are fine to contain code. The problem is that we now have pages that believe they are code and apps that have to be styled using the mechanisms for pages.

Javascript was intended to script HTML pages long before the concept of a "web app" was a thing. A divide between static documents and "apps" never even existed in theory, and with very few bleeding-edge exceptions, apps are also documents.

jacquesm4• 7 years ago

Javascript was made to 'fix' faults in html forms processing such as input validation, and to allow underwater resource loading.

lmm2• 7 years ago

The reason the distinction isn't present in the web standards is that the web never intended for apps to be in scope at all. Being able to make something like Google Maps available on the web is pretty much a hack.

saagarjha5• 7 years ago

Some documents are meaningfully improved with code: data visualizations when done well, particularly.

jacquesm4• 7 years ago

That's true, there are places where code improves the page. But these are the exceptions that confirm the rule, your average news site, blog, scientific paper typically is improved without JS, not diminished.

zmix3• 7 years ago

Yes, true. It is important to understand, that computers brought us further than paper. We now can have "Interactive Documents". And we should respect that, understanding, that this often dissolves the border between document and application. I see no problem with that. In the end, it all comes out to: sometimes you need program logic (Javascript) in the document. If this is the case, then just use it. The problem, as so often, starts with business and marketing. For them it's neither a document nor an application, it is "presence". And this is how it tends to get nasty...

zokier• 7 years ago

What I have been wishing for a while is having well-defined purely document-oriented subset of HTML5 standardized. In practice it probably would mean different levels or profiles defined. It could help with many usecases beyond just web, email coming to mind as an example

eitland• 7 years ago

This might be a brilliant idea, on par with asm.js.

Mozilla can implement it like they they did with asm.js, after all it is a subset, not a superset.

It will then work in all browsers but (I guess) can be made to work much faster if the browser knows it can ignore the piles of old hacks that full html has to consider.

Edit: and like asm.js it might lead to something even better going forward.

jeddy3• 7 years ago

Brilliant. How can me make this happen?

atq2119• 7 years ago

The real challenge here is that document and application tend to get mixed up on the web.

Looking at even a good old-fashioned blog, there are really three nested things on your screen: the blog post document, the blog post-viewing application, and the browser.

Why a blog post-viewing application? In theory you could skip it and just have a plain reader view, but in practice you do want to have navigation and comments, and that's what the application part is for.

Many modern systems surface that split in the form of an API: the API is what gives you access to the underlying document.

The challenge would be making that solid accessible to the user. For example, could a browser natively have two address bars? One for the document, and one for the application that is used to access the document?

goodusername• 7 years ago

I have had thoughts around that same idea as well. Could be a start to just define a subset of existing good semantic HTML elements to use for a blog, a news site etc. My dream is to be able to browse a subset of the web, that only uses this kind of document format. Something like docuweb.example.com or whatever :)

AnIdiotOnTheNet• 7 years ago

The divide was pretty explicit once, but people hated Java and Flash Applets so this is the "improvement" we get. I hope you're all happy.

mattrp• 7 years ago

This article is a great headline that doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface of what’s wrong. I’d say the internet has become an Amazon-style marketplace of fake do-do. Anything you search for results in nothing but endless fake domains with fake reviews designed to pitch you more ads and track you even more. Finding an actual original legitimate source of anything is essentially impossible at this point.

randomsearch2• 7 years ago

This is massively hyperbolic. The internet is full of great resources from authoritative sources.

whiddershins• 7 years ago

I do find it incredibly hard to find anything resembling a trustworthy source of info on a bunch of topics.

Travel? Full of nonsense Diet? Don’t even try Exercise? Maybe Health/Medical? No Anything I might purchase? Depending on the category, everything is an advert by someone who has barely done anything with the product.

LoSboccacc• 7 years ago

every month a new site that lift content off stack overflow and somehow manages to top it in Google results is born, and that's an extremely niche audience with laser focused searches. I can't fathom what the web looks like to the untechnicals that don't know how to filter by domain or add keywords to remove the most egregious spam

sure the good stuff is out there of you know how to find it, but the discovery is getting worse by the years

lmm2• 7 years ago

How do you find an authoritative source on the web, if you're not one of the older generation who figured them out earlier?

Google directs you to a handful of big-name sites and a large pile on the spectrum between blogs and content farms. Facebook will only give you other Facebook pages. When I tried to track my passport application last year, my government passport agency was only available via Twitter.

Good luck getting to an actual authoritative organisation that runs their own website, or a college professor who actually has specialist knowledge about the subject.

oneepic• 7 years ago

What world is the author living in? Probably just the world of a web developer. Most people use the modern web all the time, it sucks, but sucks != unusable. Very clickbait headline.

thrower123• 7 years ago

You have to have the perspective of knowing what it can be like.

If you've never run an adblocker, you don't know that it can be so much better.

Conversely, if you always run an adblocker, you're insulated from the magnitude of the suck.

bloaf2• 7 years ago

I realized, while making a Christmas list this year that I don't know how to shop for things on the internet anymore. I am not a web developer, but I have grown up as the internet did and I've seen more of it than most people.

Amazon: Its tolerable if you know exactly what reputable-brand item you want, but if you don't you immediately find yourself in an unusable cesspool. Fake reviews. Chinese knockoffs. Low quality promoted items. I searched for "clamps" in the "tools and home improvement" category and there in my Amazon search results were trashy supermarket novels.

Amazon alternatives (e.g. Jet?): The selection is so poor that they are not usable for general shopping unless you are willing to settle for whatever one item is available.

Google/Bing/etc: Haha no. Sure you can find 1 bazillion retailers for any item you can think of, but they feel solidly sorted by "amount of money they pay google." Google shopping is more-or-less useless, and regular google search results don't allow you to compare products. Also, since it is not hard to find decent web developers, it is next-to-impossible to judge the reputation/quality of the bazillion retailers by their website polish.

Ebay/craigslist: Oh god no. Paypal hates me for some reason (it never accepts my perfectly ordinary credit cards) so payment can be literally unusable. All these sites feel like you're just selecting from a long list of scams. The amount of BS you have to manually filter out is completely ridiculous, and you are clearly competing with people who scrape these sites for items to flip for a profit.

Facebook: Unusable by anyone who actually cares about their privacy.

Chinese importers (ali/dx): shipping times of multiple weeks is unusable for many things. At least you know that you will be getting cheap Chinese products, so you can plan accordingly.

lazyjones3• 7 years ago

I have a similar impression of the current Amazon experience, but what works for me is shopping at small-ish stores using Amazon Pay. Hassle-free, no registration needed and I get proper service if required.

zzo38computer3• 7 years ago

Yes, it is true. The modern web really is becoming an unusable, user-hostile wasteland, and also is very slow, very complicated, very messy, etc. The web developer tools help a bit, at least, but not quite. But better configuration for web browser should also be better. (Of course, there are also some good web pages too, but they are making a lot of bad ones too.)

But (as another comment says) documents should not be apps; they are should be separate. (Although there is the case where sometimes you want to embed apps in documents, such as to make an interactive demonstration of some algorithm, or to include inline currency conversion, to validate or autocalculate a form, or whatever. But the document needs to be readable even if the code doesn't run, and the code probably shouldn't run by default. Also, I think such embedded apps should perhaps be separate frames even if enabled, and do not need to do as much stuff as is now exposed to JavaScript interfaces.)

The modern web is also overused. Often, there are better file formats (e.g. plain text), protocols (e.g. IRC, NNTP, Gopher), etc, that can do as well, or better. Or even existing features of HTML and so on, which you can use but they use worse ones instead.

joe_the_user• 7 years ago

I can at least understand Facebook (that I'm on), the NYTimes (that I'm not on), or the twenty other big sites being paywalls, even if I hate it.

But random newspaper from random little place telling to subscribe to their meager content after three articles? What do they really think? I mean, even if I subscribed to my own local news paper in my own little burge, am I really going to be going to the trouble of logging on and so-forth?

All the paywalls seem more like excuses publisher make for their failings than anything they could reasonably expect to make money from. It's a lot like scholarly sites charging $25/article. My guess 0% percent of visitor pay this. It's not a price people, it's a price to justify other bullshit.

sailfast• 7 years ago

The funny thing is that the local burgh paper needs that subscription or it will not be there in a couple of years. They need it a lot more than NYtimes, perhaps who has a bigger global base.

My answer to this is yes, absolutely, I will log in and pay for good local news coverage, and I do every day.

If you don’t live there but the story explodes for some reason, why not try to get some new subscribers? Asking for money is not a big deal in my opinion. Asking for it by compromising your UX or user privacy, however (“only paid subscribers can view in incognito”) is terrible.

buboard4• 7 years ago

What do they really think

Small publishers don't really have the resources to think much about their monetization. Sad that there are not more companies working on monetization really, i was hoping browsers like firefox would step in to help.

danaris• 7 years ago

For better or worse, NNTP and Gopher are effectively dead in the mainstream—and probably outside of extremely narrow niches. Wanting people to use them more is going to be an exercise in frustration.

IRC, of course, will never die.

B1FF_PSUVM• 7 years ago

The modern web really is becoming an unusable, user-hostile wasteland, and also is very slow, very complicated, very messy, etc.

Well, that's success at emulating print, no?

But at lower cost and vastly improved tracking. No more "don't know which 50% of ad-spend I'm wasting".

Flawless victory.

pasttense01• 7 years ago

We are on a site which is not. And there are lots of other sites which are not. And Ublock Origin makes much of the rest of the web quite usuable.

buboard4• 7 years ago

Thats not a sustainable model though

outime• 7 years ago

One particular annoyance (present in this post) is the FB pages.

Many business only have online presence in FB and nowadays I think you can’t even check reviews or e.g. the lunch menu (perhaps depends on the A/B test part you fall in).

I left FB many years ago and no way I’m creating a dummy account for the same reason shown in the post (requires a phone).

So I just give up and can’t blame the business owner since the person probably went for the straight forward free choice and didn’t have to learn anything new but FB, I truly hate it nowadays.

csydas• 7 years ago

Is this really still true? I have not been in the US for a few years, but at least in many of the European and Asian countries I've been in, this just is not a thing. I have noticed that in places like Korea and Japan, local aggregator sites are still popular/crawled by Google as the results for search/maps, but even my colleagues, Tokyo natives, use the same aggregator sites when I'm visiting and we're looking for a place to eat.

Facebook feels pervasive, sure, but from my POV it's still contained to North America, and the influence elsewhere is waning.

tyzerdak2• 7 years ago

I think he mean that for small business facebook is stadart nowadays.

A lot of small shop owners in east europe have only facebook page with location and hours and some updates.

And I can't blame them but there's fact that every platform becomes shit after gaining popularity or goes down if not. And people without technical skills are feeding facebook with this situation.

Would be nice for domain sellers to give free single page generator with basic info and free hosting for this html page attached to domain.

amelius• 7 years ago

One particular annoyance (present in this post) is the FB pages.

Or how about Pinterest?

I've tried to make Google keep Pinterest pages out of my search results, but somehow Google does not want to improve my "search experience" even though they explicitly say they do.

jturpin• 7 years ago

It's gotten to the point where when I read an article, I will move my mouse around to try and trigger the "Subscribe to our Newsletter" popup, so I can close it instead of accidentally triggering it as I read the article.

tmm84• 7 years ago

This behavior drives me nuts. I'll be like 3 minutes into reading and, bam, a modal popup blocks out what I was reading and I have to click it away. The ones that really make me angry are when I move towards the back button and show a popup (nope, I'm not gonna spend another millisecond here after that).

Or even worse, the ads that come in from the top and push everything down the page then leave a minute later.

Animats• 7 years ago

This used to be called Pulling a Myspace. Usage down? Add more ads. Repeat. Eventually, all ads and tiny usage.

colinsul• 7 years ago

I liked this NYT series for a perspective on this:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/11/14/magazine/inte...

zmix3• 7 years ago

And this is why we need Javascript in certain webpages! :-) Great!

anoncake• 7 years ago

For a "log in to continue reading" popup? No thanks.

wnevets• 7 years ago

the modern web reminds me of the days leading up to the .com bubble burst. Adverts being crammed every where, spying on users and other user hostile tactics to an attempt to make a dollar.

buboard4• 7 years ago

Talk about inequality. Faang absorb the bulk of online profits, leaving most websites destitute

lazyjones3• 7 years ago

It’s the browser vendors’ fault - they not only failed to provide us with options for disabling/circumventing this abuse, they are complicit with the ad industry and actively support their interests rather than their users’. They’ve also made browsers so complex that it’s impossible for small developers to provide a more useful alternative. This is where I am hoping we will reach the breaking point soon, so we can replace the whole mess with something simple and user-friendly.

zmix3• 7 years ago

It's just going to repeat history, then.

While I agree, that we need a Community's browser (one, that fully supports XML, ideally bringing back the original Seamonkey/Firefox way to do things), rather than a Corporation's browser, I doubt it could be made more simple. Today's technologies are here for a reason. It's always what you use your kitchen knife for. Change will not happen. But what we can do, is to keep "our" web alive and active, and communicate and socialise outside of the big corps wet dreams.

Just create your part of the web the way you want it to be, and as long as we keep up, we will not vanish. We need to understand, that we must support non-profits, like Archive.org, with our money, though.

thosakwe• 7 years ago

On the surface I agree with this, but you don't necessarily need to make a new browser to provide an alternative. Writing a browser is a fool's errand, but there are like a bajillion Chromium forks all focused on "privacy"and whatnot that block things by default.

smkellat• 7 years ago

I maintain a separate website for my sole proprietorship that is fairly tiny made with MkDocs. I have a blog running on ikiwiki. The sole proprietorship’s Facebook page mostly points you back to one of those two sites. There is a tiny amount of JavaScript on the MkDocs site but it is manageable.

Living in rural Ohio with flaky cable broadband means uBlock stays almost permanently on. I’m sure high engagement ads are nice things. Waiting a couple minutes for them to load makes for a poor user experience out here on the fringe of the qualitative digital divide.

userbinator3• 7 years ago

I mean it’s only $2/month. Less than what you’d pay for a cup of coffee. Or $340/year; here hoping you are very bad at math.

I suspect the 340 is deliberately designed to combine with the psychology of "bulk prices are always lower"; when shopping, I've seen plenty of examples where the larger quantity and more expensive item is shown boldly as "on sale" with a prominent reduction from a "non-sale price" when its per-unit price is still higher than the smaller quantity one.

Havoc• 7 years ago

They like doing this sort of psychology 101 stuff. Eg their digital plus paper is cheaper than just digital

cameronh90• 7 years ago

Could also be a business account thing. Lots of companies make you manually file an expenses claim for each payment, so if you're not paying anyway why not pick the easier option?

saagarjha5• 7 years ago

I'd guess the "$2/month" price has a catch.

lazyjones3• 7 years ago

Yes, it's $34.99 after 3 months. Currently, they've changed the introductory offer to $9.99/month (instead of 2).

Sambdala• 7 years ago

No, $2/month is the introductory rate for 3 months, then it goes back up to $34 or $39 a month, so if you're subscribing long-term, it still makes sense to go for the yearly package after your introductory price.

CuriousReader13• 7 years ago

Here is how I deal with the problem:

1. Customize a decent browser eg Firefox to my own safety standard (disable cookies, Autoplay, etc.)

2. Treat every website like an application. If a site is usable under my settings, fine.

3. If a site needs an additional capability, e.g a login credential or cookies, only provide them for that site if it’s compelling enough, otherwise blame the site and move on.

After customizing for a few dozens of sites, and not being able to use countless others, the modern web becomes a lot more manageable for me.

tempodox• 7 years ago

I do similar things and it kinda works for people like us. But, firstly, what about the rest of the world that's less knowledgable or technically inclined; and secondly, the fact that we (figuratively) have to put on armor and carry an arsenal of weapons before we can think of using the web still leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

egfx• 7 years ago

How come no mention of Pinterest in the mess hall? Talk about a website whose experience took this turn.

pzmarzly• 7 years ago

There is a solution: To buy a disposable phone number and use it to complete the verification. But this was the breaking point. At this point, I no longer bother.

This may not be enough. A case in point: two months ago my grandma decided to make herself a Facebook account to chat with her IRL friends. She had one made in 2014, but she only logged in to it few times. It was made using a fresh email, and never breached. So she logged in to that account on her phone, using the newest Facebook app on a brand new phone, provided real name, birth date and photo, and linked a real phone number, never used before. She got permanently banned within a week, by just chatting on Messenger and sending friend requests on Facebook. I suspect some of her IRL friends reported the friend request they received. Or maybe some AI decided she types too fast for an elderly woman, or uses too few emoji. We will never know.

The ban appeal form requires you to send photos of government-issued ID, and she decided it's not worth the risk.

ubercow13• 7 years ago

It’s especially bad because you can use Facebook to log in to countless other sites, which you will also lose access to. I even had to upload my photograph to Facebook once to ‘verify’ myself, and my photo was rejected with no reason given.

mtm7• 7 years ago

I know the “safe” decision in a boardroom is to suggest whatever makes the numbers go up, but this post is right. People push it too far and damage their products in the process.

Examples: I no longer click on Quora in search results. I’ve stopped using Reddit on mobile. I used to love Imgur, but now I hesitate because they force you to run 1MB+ of React and download 553 resources for a subpar experience of viewing a single image [0].

I understand that these are businesses and the lights must be kept on, but certainly there are better ways to do this. Maybe a more humane strategy wouldn’t be as profitable in the short term, but it would certainly be better for building a sustainable business that actually lasts.

[0] https://twitter.com/csswizardry/status/1185604806901207045

Nition• 7 years ago

For Reddit on mobile: https://i.reddit.com

boring_twenties6• 7 years ago

I’ve stopped using Reddit on mobile.

"Slide" is a free (as in freedom) reddit client for Android. Needless to say it's much better than either the mobile website or official app.

jakeogh• 7 years ago

When the general web user finally revolts against sites handing them arb programs to execute, the people that rely on them running their code ahum googfb caugh will have a "next gen" HTML that just happens to also be turing complete.

The only solution is to refuse to execute their code, and in the cases where we actually want to, grind the GET response through a halting engine a-la BPF.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20806638

otabdeveloper2• 7 years ago

becoming

tyzerdak2• 7 years ago

It's true. So why you use some third party for your blog?

Imo nowadays every platform goes to shit so static site generator is a must for every blog owner that it technical guy.

nottorp2• 7 years ago

The author is probably in the US, if you're in the EU you get a bonus:

The cookie popups that cover half or all the page, are usually dark patterned so it's very easy to opt in but hard to impossible to opt out and worse, come back every few days if you didn't opt in.

I simply can't follow some of the stuff that gets posted on HN because I'm not about to spend a day going through, for example, Yahoo->Oath->Verizon's popup about agreeing to tracking...

pricci• 7 years ago

The cookie popups [...] come back every few days if you didn't opt in.

Isn't that the expected behaviour?

nottorp2• 7 years ago

Why would it be, I've already opted out once.

I bet if i opted in the popups would never come back :)

frenchman99• 7 years ago

This website doesn't work properly without Javascript enabled. Talk about modern web being a pain.

Cougher• 7 years ago

A couple of other mentions:

Looking for restaurants as I'm traveling is a difficult process. I used to land on Yelp and its imitators, thinking that I was getting a solid list of what was available, only to find that there is so much more that isn't listed. And the reviewers are generally awful.

People search sites. Years ago, I was able to track down quite a few people from my long-distant past for free. Then those sites were bought by companies like Intellius, which is about as helpful as classmates.com.

nieve• 7 years ago

Early on Classmates.com had as pretty much their sole value proposition that they'd actually input insane numbers of class rosters and set up pages for the schools as gathering points. The social network side of things was actually more successful than I would have thought for a long time, but Facebook has pretty much eaten their lunch on that side so they're back to needing to be a good contact method. They're not.

Worse, they're getting creepier. They'd already collapsed into a nearly pure scam by 2010 or so, but apparently they're doing some very creepy stuff with their data sources now. I had to work with them trying to connect another site (ick) and never had an account that had both have my real name and high school (in fact my school was only in test data), but at some point in the last few years they connected the two and are trying to convince me that people are looking for me under a name they'd never know. I guess the inevitable devolution of something selling getting back in contact is selling the idea of contact without the reality.

tjpnz2• 7 years ago

Even simple stuff like the back button is now hopelessly broken on a lot of the news sites I frequent. The correct behaviour is to bring me back to where ever on the page I had scrolled to but that's no longer possible if you need to click a link to view the whole article. Even without that dark pattern it can still take 10+ seconds with all of the JS bloatware infesting the "modern" web.

oneeyedpigeon2• 7 years ago

I've started noticing in-page search breaking more and more, for the same kind of reason. Sometimes you'll see more search results reported than are visible and/or can be navigated to.

tjpnz2• 7 years ago

It certainly feels as though the core idea of sites having pages is dying or dead.

jasonvorhe• 7 years ago

Engagement-focussed platforms and publications are of course trying to sign up as many people as possible using dark patterns and other annoyances to make people subscribe to their services to be spared from all the bullshit. I'm not surprised: They actually provide useful services for free and the bigger the audience the higher their revenue from advertising. Over the next few years content on the Internet will go the same route as music and video: It's free if you endure the ads and there's one subscription for a majority of the publications with each getting their share.

However, what the author describes isn't "the web". The web is about 2 billion web pages with just a couple of percent of them being actively maintained. I'd be willing to get that just a tiny minority of these pages are actually serving the annoyances this post highlights.

We've seen the abuse of new technologies come and go, people just don't think about what they're building, they simply use what's available: Blinking text, text with drop shadows, Comic Sans, pages full of GIFs, pages built with tables, iframes, pop-ups, link-hijacking ads, Flash-ads, embedded Java code - the web was never the clean and organized place make it out to be. Never. It's a romanticised notion that just doesn't die. It's the same rethoric as when people claim that life was easier at some point in the past.

It's all about finding common ground on what's necessary and what isn't and it usually starts with a couple of independent publishers trying out something new and the big players following their lead. HTML5 video killed Flash and Silverlight with WebGL/Javascript & modern CSS features being the last nails in their coffins.

The web isn't just a couple of hundred big players and we will probably survive annoying push notification requests, overly complex Javascript and EU-mandated cookie opt-in hints.

We will have to live with me stuff being abused for a while until browser vendors device that it's gotten annoying enough to do something about it.

I wouldn't be too surprised if we find that all browser vendors decide that they'll disable cookie support in their browsers with a clear prompt to allow 1st party cookies globally only to then do some local machine learning magic to click all custom cookie acceptance dialogues without user interaction or something similar. Of course we'll then have to endure our browsers asking for permission to access Bluetooth devices in our vicinity or to run advertisements disguised as tiny WebAssembly programs. But even that will sort itself out as some point.

The web has always been user hostile and that won't change. The level of hostility however, will.

oxymoran• 7 years ago

”LinkedIn that keeps sending dozens of emails despite unsubscribing multiple times; and somehow evades the Spam filter“

MLB is also guilty of this. Tantamount to cyber stalking

defnotashton2• 7 years ago

Its pretty concerning that lines between desktop and web are blurring and the oses are platforming. Some additional things I feel are pretty hostile.

* Paypal - defaulting fee based payment options rather than "free ones" or allowing user to set a default.

* Google maps - Searching for "jiffy lube" will show you the business entry and its reviews. If you search for "oil change" it will show you a jiffy lube "ad" that looks the same as the entry but if the reviews are bad they are hidden. In this particular case the location had several thousand bad reviews.

* Google maps - restaurants "menu" button takes me to a page of a bunch of customer uploaded images.

* Amazon app - why isn't "returns" a main menu item for amazon mobile app.

* Uber eats/grub hub/favor - app carts hide fee increases to account for minimum spends meaning you are loosing out on another item for the same amount, and make it harder than it should be to remove items from cart.

* Nordevpn desktop app - hides the logout button in right click -> preferences.

* Apple/Google stores - make it difficult to view recurring subscriptions, and to request a refund.

* Chrome - over the last year I've had to go into settings and tell chrome to not allow sites to offer me notifications so many times. I don't understand why I have to keep resetting it with sync and similar.

* google images - pretty worthless thanks to pintrest, and that I cant download images cause bs corp ip laws.

* Image sharing - still getting more difficult in 2019.

* App notifications - more and more apps push unimportant notifications or spam for engagement while lacking granular controls. I find myself disabling more and more notifications outright only to miss a notification that I actually care about.

Remember that we are techies, "hyper" aware of these decisions and their implications. What about nana? We are loosing digital agency.

fulldecent2• 7 years ago

What we have today is: email addresses are valuable and people give them out.

The problem is that Gmail has failed to introduce one-time-use or per-recipient email addresses. That would immediately solve the problem of coerced email collection.

boring_twenties6• 7 years ago

I use a subdomain for this. *@subdomain is forwarded to me. Anytime I need to give anyone an email address, it's a unique one (usually their name or a derivation thereof). Anytime I tire of email from a given source, I configure my postfix to reject the message with something like "550 Go fuck yourselves."

It's the little things in life.

tripzilch• 7 years ago

Facebook and Twitter aren't "The web", though.

oneeyedpigeon2• 7 years ago

I know it's unoriginal to attack the 'hypocrisy' of such an article, but I found it frustrating that the page includes a 'kudos' control which a) could just be a click but, for some reason, is a 'hover for a very short number of seconds' action which cannot subsequently be undone b) works with the mouse only.

nanoscopic• 7 years ago

ITA: OMG! I'm required at many huge sites to register for the site to view content! Some of them aren't even free, I have to pay!

If you don't like those sites, don't use them. Sites as described do not constitute the "entire web". There are plenty of great still free still usable websites. There is an entire internet of them.

Believing that the whole web is just the monopolistic giants is the problem here.

The modern web is becoming unusable

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