However, there's another element of "user-hostile" that I didn't see addressed (maybe I missed it in my haste?) -- that is the websites trying to control exactly how the content is consumed by the user.
It seems increasingly that web content is being delivered in video form. That itself is hostile to some people. Some of us want the freedom to read (or scan quickly). But many of the providers of "content" know they have little to provide, so they drag it out in video form, saving the actual information for the last 10% of the video (if ever!) This I find incredibly hostile, and it makes me eventually abandon that source as a matter of principle. Then there are javascript-jacked sites, sites that are unbearably slow and clunky because of a mix of javascript/ads. I won't mention any specific sites, but I stopped reading one similar to Mired.com long ago for that reason.
This problem isn't just limited to the web though. If you're unfortunate enough to see modern television (or movies, for that matter), it's clear that the amount of content has gone down, the noise has gone up, and the efforts to lock the audience in have increased.
There are some people who advocate avoiding all news and media. I think it's a bit extreme, but it may be more beneficial than harmful.
I'm with you on this. Honestly at this point, if the information is only contained within a video, I skip it and move on[1]. (I usually leave video in the browser crippled, only turning it on when I actually want to watch something.)
[1] The trend of support docs for enterprise software going video is horrible, stupid, and a negative mark when I'm evaluating products. If someone has to spend hours of eyebleed rewinding some bullshit video over and over while writing actually usable documentation for incident response, of course that cost is part of the cost of the product in question.
My office provides a license for Pluralsight. I have found some courses with high quality content and interesting information, and it's really useful to have it all in one place. BUT, especially with programming, I find video to be a really challenging medium. It's so much more useful to scan for things you don't know or context of examples and spend some time digesting, or just playing around with sample code. Not everyone can learn at the same rate and text is great for allowing people to learn at their own pace. I really wish they provided a full text log of video caption instead of requiring the content to be consumed solely in video. Udemy suffers from this as well. I might as well look up the info on youtube.
Same here. I simply hate sites with videos and no related text content/summary. I’ve noticed that especially news sites are increasingly employing this “feature”. I assume the main reason for this is that can force you to watch the 20-30s video ad. There is no way of avoiding it other than opening a new tab and doing something else for 30s... what a waste of life time
Yeah personally I learn much faster and better by reading than via most videos. You can't keyword search a video, with text documentation I can keyword search within the page to find out exactly what I'm looking for.
I'm with you on this. Honestly at this point, if the information is only contained within a video, I skip it and move on
Same, and I've noticed this trend for quite a while now. Text can always be trivially copied, even by a granny, and inserted into an email or forum. A video? You can have a DRM arms race with video.
Videos also prevent skimming, and demand consumption of all content.
> But many of the providers of "content" know they have little to provide, so they drag it out in video form, saving the actual information for the last 10% of the video (if ever!)
0:00 - 00:10 Useless video animation
00:10-2:00 "Hey guys welcome to my channel. Make sure to like and subscribe and let me know how I'm doing in the comments. Also make sure to check out [sponsor] and use coupon code [code] for 10% off"
2:00-5:00 Useless personal story about why creator is making the video
There was always a lot of high quality content on the web, created and shared not with the intent of making money. This still exists but is crowded out by people incentivized to make content to monetize it ie the old publishing model.
This now makes up the bulk of 'content' and is heavily monetized and driven by monetization where the 'content creators' have a more intimate relationship with advertisers and platforms to essentially sell out their audience ie back to the old media model of 'influencers'.
The content is also derivative and repetitive but easier to access and consume. Thanks to the monetization the presentation and production values are higher. There is definitely some decent content produced by this model but it becomes harder and harder to find.
There is a certain desperation to capitalism that infects everything. Sell, sell, sell, make money, forget everything else unless it affects your ability to make money, and it becomes the primary driver.
I often feel this way about podcasts. Many great podcasts have a 0:30 intro, 1:30 of ads then 08:00 of random babble before getting into 5:00 of the meat of the podcast. The most recent one I can think of is 99% Invisible, though they're not even close to the only ones that do it.
You also forgot the slow unboxing if it's a product review. I mean I guess some people like that, but for me, it's just another point in favor of text.
I read some sports related sites. Many have auto play video that seems to pop up just a bit after you've already started reading.
The video almost always is unrelated (different team, different story) to what I'm already well into reading. This is annoying 100% of the time. It's never useful to me.
Even worse. Some stories will be just a few words and a video. So I go to a site, read, play video.... and that same site's autoplay video will pop up and play ON TOP OF THEIR OWN CONTENT. I don't even know what to think about that, what could they possibly feel they're accomplishing?
Do they visit their own site? Do they feel like shotgunning content at me and having me fight to close different windows is a good thing?
In Firefox, in `about:config` you can set `media.autoplay.enabled` to false to permanently disable auto-play video everywhere. I love it. Now videos only play when I press play. A slight annoyance when watching netflix/etc, but well worth the price everywhere else. If I could whitelist a set of domains to allow autoplay it would be perfect.
I'm convinced nobody at ESPN has tried to use their website in a long time. I remember it not being a dumpster fire of UX once, but that was like 10 years ago.
If video content would be so "hostile", it would have failed on its own already. People would flock to other places where they can read instead.
I don't buy this idea where everything is always imposed on us by evil corporations.
More and more websites using video to me seems more like a proof that people prefer videos over written content. That's why videos usually autoplay, also on YouTube and Facebook: if a person starts watching and listening, it's much more likely that they will stay instead of closing the page.
We have taught things to each other by talking for as long as hundreds of thousands of years, probably more. By contrast, reading has been common among a large percentage of the population only for a couple of centuries.
We evolved using verbal communication, not written one. Written form has, of course, its advantages, but it does not mean that it's the preferred medium for most people.
Videos and audio are also easier to watch/listen to while you are doing something else like cooking, gardening or commuting. There are a ton of contexts where you cant read, but you can at least listen.
That's why even books are converted into audio formats nowadays.
The fact that a small crowd on HN prefers reading is not the proof that video is "user-hostile". HN is rarely the reflection of the general public.
Although I keep reading a lot of online content or books, lately I have consumed a lot more valuable information in a podcast/video lecture format than in a written one.
I do agree that not everything is imposed by evil corps, but hostile products don't necessarily fail by their own: cigarettes and junk foods are just one example of this.
In general I'm not against video content in a web page, as it actually can be a good source of raw data that we can use to understand something in great details, but I would argue that in many cases video is objectively inferior to text: texts are much easier to parse (both for computers and humans) and also some irrelevant information included in the audiovisual format can reduce the entropy of a content (e.g. how a reporter looks like physically).
The videos that I speak of are ones that have replaced basic informational articles -- information that might only take a few paragraphs to disseminate, and which allow the reader to quickly glean the content. When given as video, they impose a time and data penalty just for the viewer to either get the nugget of information or to realize there's nothing of value for them. +Edit autocorrect
> If video content would be so "hostile", it would have failed on its own already. People would flock to other places where they can read instead.
Video ads pay a lot better than ordinary display ads. 15$ CPM vs 30¢ CPM on my media sites. It's not a 1-1 comparison on UX (you may lose half your reader base and still come out ahead).
Microsoft is the worst for providing content in video only form (Channel 9). There have been tons of potentially interesting content posted to HN from Microsoft but I'm not going to sit through an hour long video at work. And they almost never provide any alternative text content (an article) for what's in the video.
Same with Apple. There are some weird behaviors that don’t get mentioned in the docs, yet if you stumble upon the _right_ WWDC video from 2014, it’ll explain everything.
But at least the content is covered by search engines via asciiwwdc.com
Apart from the normal Facebook detractors, this is big part of why I deactivated my account. 95% of content on facebook is now in video format. Aside from the reasons you mentioned, it's also a huge drain on battery and slows the responsiveness of the site down considerably.
If I want to see videos, I'll go to youtube or vimeo. Don't force them on me when I'm trying to find quick info.
I cannot remember the last time I saw a video in my facebook feed (in the feed, not directly linked). Maybe your facebook friends were just particularly annoying.
I hate the trend to video as well (I can read and comprehend faster than any video can speak), but I wonder if it is just the inevitable result of the continued expansion of who is on the web. Many people in the world are not nearly as literate as HN readers.
I think it is the result of the reduced copyability of video compared to plain text. This makes it easier to monetize video. Since lots of writers don't have a secondary source of income and have to pay for housing/food/loans/etc, they have an incentive to spend the effort to write video scripts rather than essays/articles.
It's strange that text content needs to be semantic having all kinds of divisions for different kinds of text. Yet video can remain an unstructured unnavigatable blurb of content. It should have semantic stuff like menu, header, footer, h1, h2 or p as well.
I’ve noticed this thing on social media lately where a single image is turned into like a 10-second video...of nothing but the still image (and sometimes stock background music). This is usually done by low-effort clickbait sites, but I don’t get why.
I figure it's harder to download a video from Facebook (for the average person, anyway) than it is to download a still image, which makes it more likely that someone will just share the post instead of saving and posting the image.
>It seems increasingly that web content is being delivered in video form. That itself is hostile to some people. Some of us want the freedom to read (or scan quickly). But many of the providers of "content" know they have little to provide, so they drag it out in video form, saving the actual information for the last 10% of the video (if ever!) This I find incredibly hostile
Isn't that a kind of entitlement?
I might prefer text myself, but it's up to the content provider, who gives me FREE content, to put up whatever they like.
And they have a reason that they put out videos, as they are much more popular with certain demographics.
Yes, I think we cross a line when we begin making demands about the content itself. If you want content created to your specifications, you can produce it yourself or pay someone else to do it.
Video content isn't "user hostile" any more than a movie you don't like is "user hostile".
This was my main reason for leaving Facebook, almost every post in my feed seemed to be a video or an image with text in, why not just type the words instead of wasting all that bandwidth?
Generally the value of the content was extremely poor and very click bait-y. My analogy I use is I see using Facebook like eating junk food when I could be spending that time consuming more meaningful content.
I've probably been off Facebook now for a year and I don't miss it one bit.
>that is the websites trying to control exactly how the content is consumed by the user
You seem to be arguing against the content being served by websites, and by extension, the freedom of the owners of those sites to choose to serve content you don't like. I would agree with you as far as DRM and javascript dark patterns go, when sites try to take control over the browser in ways that are harmful to users' freedom, but if someone wants to serve video or ads (useless as they are) instead of plain text, then that's entirely their right, because it's their server, and they get to decide what goes on it, not you. It's not user hostility, it's merely a decision with which you personally disagree.
Of course, once the response gets to your browser you're free to block, filter or do whatever you like to it, but user freedom is only half the equation here. Publisher freedom is important as well.
It's entirely my right (depending on country) to glare at people, or to offer them a contract that is significantly skewed in my favour in the hope that some of them won't read the small print.
Speaking as someone who works for a site who produces a lot of video content and is trending more that way I can give you a simple reason why.
People consume it more.
They stay on the site longer, they tend to watch more videos than read articles, and they share videos more.
Now obviously the videos still need to be good content but the reason you’re seeing more video content is not because of some nefarious scheme: it’s because content producers see better user engagement with it.
As much as I dislike it, I don't understand your argument. They're the ones that produce the content and you consume it. They can make it however they want as far as I'm concerned as I always have the choice to be as discriminating or not.
Wow, I'm very surprised by the amount of people here who dislike videos. I absolutely love video courses, and I have learned 60-80% of everything I know about programming through them.
As a specific example, Stephen Grider's udemy courses took me through the process of learning full stack Node/React app development, and it was awesome.
I find it much harder to focus and be productive while reading books, videos (especially with good slides and diagrams) feel way more natural.
I wonder what percentage of people prefer learning from books to learning from (good) video courses. Is this HN being contrarian, or does the majority really prefer text?
I've got to be able to go through it at my own pace, rather than the pace dictated by the video/podcast.
The worst is anything that has terminal commands or code displayed in a video. Screenshots aren't much better, although at least they stay put without having to futz with the pause controls. Text - that is searchable and copy/pasteable - is king [1].
I can do podcasts and videos for other subjects; I've been loving Dan Carlin and the Great War youtube series. But technical stuff is too hard.
[1] Nothing boils my blood like a bug report with a screenshot of a logfile open in notepad, or a very low resolution, downsampled jpeg of the browser JS console... It means you worked harder to give me less useful information
I think there is a large difference between searching for key info you need and trying to learn a bunch of information through a course.
If I want quick information on how to install or troubleshoot something that realistically should only be one or two lines of code, watching someone's youtube video is a very inefficient way to provide that content.
I have no idea if it's actually majority - maybe there's just a lot of people here who share the discontent and wanted to add their two cents.
Video instructions are usually directed to people who are beginning their adventure, and in programming I usually need to just skim over some text these days to know what's relevant for me and what not. I guess many people have the same sentiment.
For me videos were insanely useful trying to get into Blender. Something that helped me a lot, but I guess mostly thanks to my 0% knowledge of the topic.
an example of controling how the content is consumed is gifs. gifs work great, there needs not be a replacement for them. one of the beautiful things about a gif is you can save it.
the current web hated that, it didnt have control. they are trying to 'wean' us off gifs through companies like giphy.
how many people cringe when you click on a link on reddit and realize its a link to youtube and you have to watch a commercial for a 30 second video? I am like omg, youtube, close
Consider that as of 1800 or so, perhaps 5-10% of the population were literate. That climbed to 90%+ throughout much of Western Europe and the US by 1900, but the level of education was still low: in the US, a high school diploma was an accomplishment only 6% of the population realised in 1900. That climbed to about 90% by 1950 or so. By contrast, more people have graduate degrees today.
Though the content and quality expressed by education ... has shifted. On the one hand, there's clearly been advances in knowledge and education, but at the same time, those are being presented to a much, much larger share of the population.
I've seen people (children, students, professionals) with widely varying levels of literacy and cognitive skills, ranging from frighteningly high to almost none at all. I think this may be underappreciated.
Or, TL;DR: yes, a lot of people are terrible at reading.
I'm sorry, but I cannot get behind the idea that a creator choosing to deliver their content that they made in a form they chose can be hostile to you.
> It seems increasingly that web content is being delivered in video form. That itself is hostile to some people. Some of us want the freedom to read (or scan quickly).
And what if some of us want the freedom to watch? Maybe I'm illiterate? Just like you, I could say that putting something in writing instead of a video is 'hostile' if it doesn't meet my preferences.
I think we are at a point at a species where, if one can't read, then one really needs to learn to read. It is such a requirement for so many things. Or get a screen reader...
It's fine to make a video, but if your work is serious at all, it should also be in written text. It's much quicker to read than listen to someone talk. I'm sure there are exceptions where video format makes more sense, but, as a rule, it's incredibly stupid.
There are certainly times when video is appropriate, but I feel like we can all relate to the times that it's not; when someone has a list of 6 things, and instead of just listing them, they make a snazzy video. The video is still text-based; maybe there's an image slideshow as well, but it's effectively the same information in the same format, just spread out over a 2 minute video.
But that's precisely the point. Just like HTML should be written with accessibility in mind, content ought to be provided with accessibility in mind. Obviously if you are going to a video-focussed site a la youtube you expect to watch videos. But what if I want to skim the news and happen to trust a particular organization? It would be ideal to have this information in a number of formate so I can consume their information in a manner best-suited for me. No one is saying "banish all video!", they are simply saying certain areas of information are better presented in text form for many people and it would be nice to easily consume info in that way.
"For many of us in the early 2000s, the web was magical. You connected a phone line to your computer, let it make a funny noise and suddenly you had access to a seemingly-unending repository of thoughts and ideas from people around the world.
"It might not seem like much now, but what that noise represented was the stuff of science fiction at the time: near-instantaneous communication at a planetary scale. It was a big deal."
I kind of yearn for the pre-web days... when the primary means of communication was mailing lists and newsgroups, without any commercial
interest.
The creation of the web was when it all started to go wrong. Corporations started to flock to it like flies and tried their best to turn it in
to an ad-laden, spyware-laden, dumbed-down, one-way broadcasting medium not too far from television.
Indeed, the Web became a juggernaut bandwagon, and got all the attention. Not for nothing. But I always felt the potential of the Internet was neglected as a result. There are other apps, notably MMOs, BitTorrent, blockchain and other P2P things.
I sincerely hope that the “re-decentralization” movement is able to attract hackers and gain steam.
That requires net neutrality. In general I think there's a danger that ISPs become "Web service providers" and refuse anything which isn't HTTP from rDNS-able addresses.
Of course people will just end up recreating TCP over HTTPS to get around these sorts of things, but I don't think we're headed toward a decentralised and opinionated (i.e. not heavily filtered based on traffic analysis) network.
I still remember the day that these assholes showed up and ruined a wonderful thing, and as you can see I'm not really over it.
Where things went wrong on the web, imho, was when business started leaning on people to put graphic corporate branding front and center, encouraging the abuse of things like tables and so on to create something that looked more like a magazine advert. Now, you could argue that such commercial pressures were got people to throw money at the WWW int he first place and rove technological development, and you'd have a point - the early web was pretty dull to look at. I wrote a book on how to use it for consumers around 1994 and every so often I take it off the shelf for a giggle at how primitive it looks in the screenshots. But at that time it was much better curated and the browsing experience was much more rewarding in many respects, although I'm obviously influenced by some nostalgia for a simpler era.
I really hoped to see the semantic web recapture some of the user-centric benefits of the early web, but development on that front seems slooooooow, and my ideas about a graph centric virtual space seem too sci-fi for me to even get meaningful answers from people I've asked.
Ironically the closest thing I've found to the hey-day of the internet(~'99) for me is Ham Radio.
It's hard to explain but it's got the same feel of people who tinker and enjoy technology for the hell of it. With HF you get communication all over the globe.
It's also explicitly non-commercial so it's stayed relatively undeveloped. Granted you'll never see the exponential of communication that the internet unleashed due to limited spectrum but that might be in some ways a blessing.
I generally agree, but while there's still a strong DIY spirit in the ham radio world, especially in the hardware field, I often find myself disappointed by many hams' willingness to surrender control and freedom to proprietary protocols and software (PACTOR, D-STAR, Winlink, Ham Radio Delux, to name a few) in exchange for convenience.
I think this is to do with the barrier to entry. You have to have a certain level of sophistication to get into Ham, just like you did with Internet in the early days. Then came the long September ...
Facebook, twitter had the same feeling of "exclusivity" for a while. Twitter lasted a bit longer because the capability to compose your thoughts in < 140 chars demanded a certain level of sophistication but then came #winning and shit-posting.
These days I find as a developer even, as that segment expands there's an increasing amount of noise but I've gotten into emacs recently and can appreciate the marked increase in tranquility there. Nobody's trying to make a buck off my questions and answers. Nobody has a commercial (or other) interest in keeping me clueless.
I love the fact that IRC is still alive and kicking. The #django channel on freenode is still pretty active as opposed other communities that flock to slack or gitter.
I never got into the pre-web stuff, so I don't know exactly what the differences are.
Don't those things still exist? Isn't the comment section of this HN post a form of async, text-only communication?
It's still centralized, and owned and run by a commercial entity that uses it to further their own interests, with a record of its users' interests and opinions.
The capabilities and features of web forums are also really dumbed-down and limited compared to what you could get with the mail clients and news clients of even 20 or 30 years ago.
Usenet and mailing lists are distributed. Web forums (like HN) are not. You can setup your own NNTP or mail server if you wanted, but there's only one place to post HN comments & that's right here, subject to all the pros & cons that entails.
The sweetspot was mid 90s to mid 00s. We had the benefit of the web without the all-encompassing corporate control. It was a more open and freer place back then. But as the internet got more popular and with more corporate/government involvement, the standards were lowered to accommodate the lowest common denominator.
Less free speech, more control, less privacy and more ads.
I loved the nested discussion of mailgroups. Compared to message boards and forums of today (yesterday? I think they may be passe?) they enabled interesting, meandering discussions. It's the way discussion flows between two intelligent people. Forcing discussion into an arbitrary topic has 2 problems:
* some people are unhappy because they feel constrained
* topics are an illusion anyway, people do post off-topic messages anyway, depending on strictness of moderation. People interested by the original topic are annoyed by the inevitable off-topic talk.
Luckily mailing lists and newsgroups still exist, some newsgroups are even still active. (Mailings lists too of course, but they are generally created for a specific purpose)
They exist, as do mechanical typewriters and bulletin board systems, but most people don't use them. The web "won" long ago, and newsgroups and mailing lists are now mostly a historical curiosity.
I use ublock origin and privacy badger not because I am worried about privacy but because the internet is basically unusable without it.
Because of this, I don't see many ads. But I have been an amazon customer since 1999 (according to what they say on their website when I'm logged in.) Looking at what they recommend for me, this personalization stuff is crap.
In music, Amazon recommends bands I never listen to like Montrose, Metallica, and the Doors (and to be fair, some people I've never heard of so I guess it is possible that I would be interested in them. Greta Van Fleet? William Patrick Corgan?)
In books, I do like scifi but they recommend a bunch of books with spaceships shooting each other on the cover - not what I have ever been interested in.
In the "humor and entertainment" section of books they do list some books that I would be interested in but, strangely, none of them are "humor" but are all academic books about videogames (which I am interested in). Even here the recommendation engine is very unsophisticated because in between academic books on videogames there are books on the art of Zelda and other coffee table books that I am not interested in.
And the first book in their recommended children's book section is 1984. (and I don't have any kids any way).
If this is the best they can do with 18 years of tracking my purchases then I am not worried.
> In books, I do like scifi but they recommend a bunch of books with spaceships shooting each other on the cover - not what I have ever been interested in.
You're making a huge mistake by judging a book by its cover in this case. The copy of the Foundation series that I had as a kid was very space opera looking too, and I've seen gaudy covers on everything from Dune to Kim Stanley Robinson. For Sci fi in particular, publishers have an incentive to trick a large chunk of the audience into thinking that its Star Wars-y, and there's not much incentive in signaling the things that you or I would get out these books.
To be fair, you sound like one of the harder people to track accurately.
However, I as well have been "disappointed" by the ability of websites to judge my interests. After reading about cases such as Target, who have "spooky" ability to gauge interest, I was expecting better.
So I searched for a very specific motorcycle jacket with very specific features and now my page is inundated with every clothing item that has the tag "motorcycle_jacket?" That's.... it? The same result I'd get for hitting google with "site:amazon.com 'motorcycle jacket'" ?
There is significant subtlety involved in realizing that if you bought a motorcycle jacket you are very unlikely to need a second one, especially a very similar one, until it falls apart, while if you bought apples you are likely to eat more apples soon.
Similarly, Booking.com recommends hotel room offers in foreign cities where I've been on vacation: it doesn't have any tourism detection and analysis, it just thinks that I'm indiscriminately likely to return to the same places without realizing I visit one or a few major cities in a different country every year and then the museums and monuments are going to stay the same for a while. To be fair, they'd need data about my habits they (fortunately) cannot see to do a good job.
The impression that I got was that Target thing wasn't some spooky self-learning AI product recommender, but rather they had the data to write some special-purpose analytics to detect a specific but common purchasing pattern. Your motorcycle jacket example isn't the kind of thing that would get that kind of special attention.
It's really amazing how bad those personnalisation engines are; AI seems pretty stupid for now.
But as I was making the exact same point a few days ago here on HN, someone responded to say that maybe it was on purpose, that if recommendations were too good they would creep us out.
Don't know what to think of it but I found the objection interesting...
another point is that you (the recommender, and, incidentally, also the user) are happy if there is at least one novel and interesting item in the recommendations.
This might apply less to music (list) recommendations, but in general that's how I (as a customer) also approach lists of recommendations.
apparently he has just released a solo album under his full name. weird. Smashing Pumpkins was never a band I was into but at least this recommendation is somewhat understandable
I have pretty much the same amount of history with amazon (2000) and it's even worse here.
Most of the recommendations are items that I actually already purchased through them ("How about a second electric razor or some more batteries?") or items that I literally was just looking at while browsing ("We recommend these jeans that you just looked at"). Utterly useless.
"Here are some videos you've already watched, mostly that you've already liked, but also a few from the same channel, and even a helping of some you've disliked but which other people have uploaded duplicates of."
And that's Google, the AI experts, with a crapload of data on my viewing and others' viewing habits, including in depth learning features such as length of time spent on videos, liked videos, playlists, etc.
I block far less than you do, but all recommendation engines appear to be crab: I brought a few books on Amazon that could be purchased by middle-aged women and now most of the books I get recommended are romance novels with a vampire, time travel or magic theme - meanwhile what I actually buy is mainly SciFi and a bunch of books about NK.
Come to think of it the recommended movies on Netflix is also crazy, but they may be screwing it towards their own selection.
But lets be honest even when I tell Facebook what my interests are, it can't give useful ads - and even mighty google assumed I was interested in Palaeontology at one point.
"...we have faster connections, better browser standards, tighter security and new media formats. But it is also different in the values it espouses. Today, we are so far from that initial vision of linking documents to share knowledge that it's hard to simply browse the web for information without constantly being asked to buy something, like something, follow someone, share the page on Facebook or sign up to some newsletter. All the while being tracked and profiled."
The author is absolutely right that the _values_ of the web have changed. IMO this is due to the much more vast penetration of the web and the bubbles which have been birthed as a result of attracting very aggressive profit-driven actors. Rebasing the web's economic model on advertising has fundamentally changed the conception of users, and the expectation of enormous profits has steamrolled the egalitarian principles of early web citizens.
I kind of hope that the web will reboot itself in dark corners, away from the mega actors, away from the tracking and surveillance, and the torrent of the current web can keep on going for the masses.
I think you're right, but one issue is keeping the problems of the "web of the masses" from spreading to our secluded dark corners once they pick up traction.
>If you use Chrome as your main browser, consider switching to Chromium, the open-source version of the browser. Consider minimalist browsers like Min (and choose to block all ads, trackers and scripts) to browser news websites.
no love for firefox? or for that matter, any non webkit browsers?
>HERE WeGo for maps (free)
i'm not sure that's any better in terms of privacy
It always astonishes me how many people who are ostensibly against the webkit derivative hegemony won't even consider recommending Firefox. It's certainly a competitive browser, and personally my favourite, and Mozilla does fantastically important work balancing out an otherwise entirely corporate, ulterior-motive laden browser market.
My experience has been that Firefox was unusably slow on OS X and Linux for a long time and they lost a lot of users because of it. Now it is faster but it is difficult to woo people back.
And even if it is faster, there track record shows that they found doing a release that slows down a large portion of users was acceptable. Granted I doubt they still have that attitude, and i think they are more performance based now, but a lot of us left for Chrome and never looked back.
I think trying to fight a browser engine monoculture is a lost cause.
There is no money in building browser engines and it costs a lot of time and money to create one from scratch.
The only reason Mozilla and Microsoft still use their own engine is for historical and technical reasons.
The fact that we are down to just three implementations should tell you were things are headed.
> i'm not sure that's any better in terms of privacy
Yeah, I would recommend at least checking out OpenStreetMap and any tools that derive their routing and tiles from it first. Of course its usability varies by country (and even by locality!), but that's no different from Google Maps or Apple Maps.
At least with OpenStreetMap I know that my contributions benefit people in general (due to the free software licensing) and not mainly (the shareholders of) Google or Apple.
Also, FastMail isn't any better for privacy, and you have to pay for it to boot. The article was more or less reasonable until the nonsensical recommendations at the end.
FastMail is much better than google mail because it's not fueling google's hegemony over the web. That you have to pay for it means their sustainability is not tied to abusing their users. If you want privacy in the way you seem to mean privacy (end-to-end no-trust async messaging) of course anything speaking SMTP isn't going to be "better for privacy", but those systems largely are incompatible with how 99% of the web wants to communicate with you.
No email solution will be better for privacy outside of hosting it yourself. I have it set up for my personal email because I thought it was a fun project, but there's no point in pretending that it's realistic for casual email users.
Email without outside encryption like PGP is fundamentally privacy by policy which lives and dies by the reputation and policy of the provider: it seems like Fastmail's is pretty good.
> Today, we are so far from that initial vision of linking documents to share knowledge that it's hard to simply browse the web for information without constantly being asked to buy something, like something, follow someone, share the page on Facebook or sign up to some newsletter.
I'm a non-user of all things social media. My Twitter account is purely nominal (for pinging company support), and I don't have a Facebook account. As a business owner, my peers think it's bizarre that I don't have a LinkedIn account. The problems this author talks about are chains of our own making. Yes, corporations exploit us, but they exploit human frailties. This problem will not go away, and more "open tech" will not solve it.
I've been active online since 1994. In my opinion, the start of the cellphone era (iPhone and up) was when the internet started it's way downhill.
All sorts of people who weren't online suddenly were there, and businesses took a lot more interest in the lest tech savvy types who've started to populate the internet.
At the same time, these same mobile users saw they could be anonymous and had no learned netiquette unlike so many others before them.
So because of this new-user saturation, the internet became no longer niche and now mainstream, to the detriment of everyone else online.
Yes yes, Eternal September and all that, but were they wrong about the similar assessment back then?
I agree with this author and implemented all his suggestions years ago, both as a consumer and creator of web sites. But sewers like Facebook and ad networks are low-hanging fruit. Search for something on the once-indispensible Google, and, after five or six ads, you will likely see a Wikipedia link. On the fifth page of results will be the professor's .edu page that the Wikipedia article plagiarizes from.
Google succeeded because their pagerank algorithm discovered useful sites. But now those same algorithms promote popular (or Google-profitable) sites at the expense of higher-quality sites (that often carry no advertising). W3schools, anybody? It was probably a natural evolution: the algorithm ate itself, and results that might actually be useful are buried under sites that are popular. I think sites like Wikipedia and Google feeding off each other is a more insidious problem - one with no quick technological solution, like installing an ad blocker.
Readit News
However, there's another element of "user-hostile" that I didn't see addressed (maybe I missed it in my haste?) -- that is the websites trying to control exactly how the content is consumed by the user.
It seems increasingly that web content is being delivered in video form. That itself is hostile to some people. Some of us want the freedom to read (or scan quickly). But many of the providers of "content" know they have little to provide, so they drag it out in video form, saving the actual information for the last 10% of the video (if ever!) This I find incredibly hostile, and it makes me eventually abandon that source as a matter of principle. Then there are javascript-jacked sites, sites that are unbearably slow and clunky because of a mix of javascript/ads. I won't mention any specific sites, but I stopped reading one similar to Mired.com long ago for that reason.
This problem isn't just limited to the web though. If you're unfortunate enough to see modern television (or movies, for that matter), it's clear that the amount of content has gone down, the noise has gone up, and the efforts to lock the audience in have increased.
There are some people who advocate avoiding all news and media. I think it's a bit extreme, but it may be more beneficial than harmful.
[1] The trend of support docs for enterprise software going video is horrible, stupid, and a negative mark when I'm evaluating products. If someone has to spend hours of eyebleed rewinding some bullshit video over and over while writing actually usable documentation for incident response, of course that cost is part of the cost of the product in question.
Same, and I've noticed this trend for quite a while now. Text can always be trivially copied, even by a granny, and inserted into an email or forum. A video? You can have a DRM arms race with video.
Videos also prevent skimming, and demand consumption of all content.
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0:00 - 00:10 Useless video animation
00:10-2:00 "Hey guys welcome to my channel. Make sure to like and subscribe and let me know how I'm doing in the comments. Also make sure to check out [sponsor] and use coupon code [code] for 10% off"
2:00-5:00 Useless personal story about why creator is making the video
5:00-10:00 Useless history of the subject matter
10:00-11:00 The actual useful content
This now makes up the bulk of 'content' and is heavily monetized and driven by monetization where the 'content creators' have a more intimate relationship with advertisers and platforms to essentially sell out their audience ie back to the old media model of 'influencers'.
The content is also derivative and repetitive but easier to access and consume. Thanks to the monetization the presentation and production values are higher. There is definitely some decent content produced by this model but it becomes harder and harder to find.
There is a certain desperation to capitalism that infects everything. Sell, sell, sell, make money, forget everything else unless it affects your ability to make money, and it becomes the primary driver.
Makes it harder to estimate where the information in the video is.
I'm happy when it's only useless. It's often useless and loud.
Binary search works well.
The video almost always is unrelated (different team, different story) to what I'm already well into reading. This is annoying 100% of the time. It's never useful to me.
Even worse. Some stories will be just a few words and a video. So I go to a site, read, play video.... and that same site's autoplay video will pop up and play ON TOP OF THEIR OWN CONTENT. I don't even know what to think about that, what could they possibly feel they're accomplishing?
Do they visit their own site? Do they feel like shotgunning content at me and having me fight to close different windows is a good thing?
I don't buy this idea where everything is always imposed on us by evil corporations.
More and more websites using video to me seems more like a proof that people prefer videos over written content. That's why videos usually autoplay, also on YouTube and Facebook: if a person starts watching and listening, it's much more likely that they will stay instead of closing the page.
We have taught things to each other by talking for as long as hundreds of thousands of years, probably more. By contrast, reading has been common among a large percentage of the population only for a couple of centuries.
We evolved using verbal communication, not written one. Written form has, of course, its advantages, but it does not mean that it's the preferred medium for most people.
Videos and audio are also easier to watch/listen to while you are doing something else like cooking, gardening or commuting. There are a ton of contexts where you cant read, but you can at least listen.
That's why even books are converted into audio formats nowadays.
The fact that a small crowd on HN prefers reading is not the proof that video is "user-hostile". HN is rarely the reflection of the general public.
Although I keep reading a lot of online content or books, lately I have consumed a lot more valuable information in a podcast/video lecture format than in a written one.
In general I'm not against video content in a web page, as it actually can be a good source of raw data that we can use to understand something in great details, but I would argue that in many cases video is objectively inferior to text: texts are much easier to parse (both for computers and humans) and also some irrelevant information included in the audiovisual format can reduce the entropy of a content (e.g. how a reporter looks like physically).
The argument sounds like, "If Comcast was such a bad company it would have failed on its own already."
Could there other forces at play that would explain how video as a format might succeeding despite not being preferred by users?
Video ads pay a lot better than ordinary display ads. 15$ CPM vs 30¢ CPM on my media sites. It's not a 1-1 comparison on UX (you may lose half your reader base and still come out ahead).
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That is not the slightest bit true and is in fact the entire basis for the conversation we’re having.
But at least the content is covered by search engines via asciiwwdc.com
If I want to see videos, I'll go to youtube or vimeo. Don't force them on me when I'm trying to find quick info.
Isn't that a kind of entitlement?
I might prefer text myself, but it's up to the content provider, who gives me FREE content, to put up whatever they like.
And they have a reason that they put out videos, as they are much more popular with certain demographics.
Video content isn't "user hostile" any more than a movie you don't like is "user hostile".
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Generally the value of the content was extremely poor and very click bait-y. My analogy I use is I see using Facebook like eating junk food when I could be spending that time consuming more meaningful content.
I've probably been off Facebook now for a year and I don't miss it one bit.
You seem to be arguing against the content being served by websites, and by extension, the freedom of the owners of those sites to choose to serve content you don't like. I would agree with you as far as DRM and javascript dark patterns go, when sites try to take control over the browser in ways that are harmful to users' freedom, but if someone wants to serve video or ads (useless as they are) instead of plain text, then that's entirely their right, because it's their server, and they get to decide what goes on it, not you. It's not user hostility, it's merely a decision with which you personally disagree.
Of course, once the response gets to your browser you're free to block, filter or do whatever you like to it, but user freedom is only half the equation here. Publisher freedom is important as well.
Hostility is not about rights or freedom.
People consume it more.
They stay on the site longer, they tend to watch more videos than read articles, and they share videos more.
Now obviously the videos still need to be good content but the reason you’re seeing more video content is not because of some nefarious scheme: it’s because content producers see better user engagement with it.
It's a worse experience, and I avoid that sort of site if at all possible.
As a specific example, Stephen Grider's udemy courses took me through the process of learning full stack Node/React app development, and it was awesome.
I find it much harder to focus and be productive while reading books, videos (especially with good slides and diagrams) feel way more natural.
I wonder what percentage of people prefer learning from books to learning from (good) video courses. Is this HN being contrarian, or does the majority really prefer text?
The worst is anything that has terminal commands or code displayed in a video. Screenshots aren't much better, although at least they stay put without having to futz with the pause controls. Text - that is searchable and copy/pasteable - is king [1].
I can do podcasts and videos for other subjects; I've been loving Dan Carlin and the Great War youtube series. But technical stuff is too hard.
[1] Nothing boils my blood like a bug report with a screenshot of a logfile open in notepad, or a very low resolution, downsampled jpeg of the browser JS console... It means you worked harder to give me less useful information
If I want quick information on how to install or troubleshoot something that realistically should only be one or two lines of code, watching someone's youtube video is a very inefficient way to provide that content.
Video instructions are usually directed to people who are beginning their adventure, and in programming I usually need to just skim over some text these days to know what's relevant for me and what not. I guess many people have the same sentiment.
For me videos were insanely useful trying to get into Blender. Something that helped me a lot, but I guess mostly thanks to my 0% knowledge of the topic.
the current web hated that, it didnt have control. they are trying to 'wean' us off gifs through companies like giphy.
how many people cringe when you click on a link on reddit and realize its a link to youtube and you have to watch a commercial for a 30 second video? I am like omg, youtube, close
People increasingly do voice messages.
1. Because messages are faster spoken than written
2. Your "listeners" can't interrupt you, like on a phone call
3. Your messages aren't searchable as easily as text-messages
Though the content and quality expressed by education ... has shifted. On the one hand, there's clearly been advances in knowledge and education, but at the same time, those are being presented to a much, much larger share of the population.
I've seen people (children, students, professionals) with widely varying levels of literacy and cognitive skills, ranging from frighteningly high to almost none at all. I think this may be underappreciated.
Or, TL;DR: yes, a lot of people are terrible at reading.
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And what if some of us want the freedom to watch? Maybe I'm illiterate? Just like you, I could say that putting something in writing instead of a video is 'hostile' if it doesn't meet my preferences.
Talking about 'hostile' is hysterical.
If you make a video, just include the transcript.
I can’t have an OCR system automatically translate a video into text.
"It might not seem like much now, but what that noise represented was the stuff of science fiction at the time: near-instantaneous communication at a planetary scale. It was a big deal."
I kind of yearn for the pre-web days... when the primary means of communication was mailing lists and newsgroups, without any commercial interest.
The creation of the web was when it all started to go wrong. Corporations started to flock to it like flies and tried their best to turn it in to an ad-laden, spyware-laden, dumbed-down, one-way broadcasting medium not too far from television.
I sincerely hope that the “re-decentralization” movement is able to attract hackers and gain steam.
Of course people will just end up recreating TCP over HTTPS to get around these sorts of things, but I don't think we're headed toward a decentralised and opinionated (i.e. not heavily filtered based on traffic analysis) network.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ep0ZIe6i10
I still remember the day that these assholes showed up and ruined a wonderful thing, and as you can see I'm not really over it.
Where things went wrong on the web, imho, was when business started leaning on people to put graphic corporate branding front and center, encouraging the abuse of things like tables and so on to create something that looked more like a magazine advert. Now, you could argue that such commercial pressures were got people to throw money at the WWW int he first place and rove technological development, and you'd have a point - the early web was pretty dull to look at. I wrote a book on how to use it for consumers around 1994 and every so often I take it off the shelf for a giggle at how primitive it looks in the screenshots. But at that time it was much better curated and the browsing experience was much more rewarding in many respects, although I'm obviously influenced by some nostalgia for a simpler era.
I really hoped to see the semantic web recapture some of the user-centric benefits of the early web, but development on that front seems slooooooow, and my ideas about a graph centric virtual space seem too sci-fi for me to even get meaningful answers from people I've asked.
It's hard to explain but it's got the same feel of people who tinker and enjoy technology for the hell of it. With HF you get communication all over the globe.
It's also explicitly non-commercial so it's stayed relatively undeveloped. Granted you'll never see the exponential of communication that the internet unleashed due to limited spectrum but that might be in some ways a blessing.
Facebook, twitter had the same feeling of "exclusivity" for a while. Twitter lasted a bit longer because the capability to compose your thoughts in < 140 chars demanded a certain level of sophistication but then came #winning and shit-posting.
These days I find as a developer even, as that segment expands there's an increasing amount of noise but I've gotten into emacs recently and can appreciate the marked increase in tranquility there. Nobody's trying to make a buck off my questions and answers. Nobody has a commercial (or other) interest in keeping me clueless.
The capabilities and features of web forums are also really dumbed-down and limited compared to what you could get with the mail clients and news clients of even 20 or 30 years ago.
If YC ever decide to destroy HN they can.
With an HN Usenet newsgroup it'd be distributed across all the servers that carry that group. You could download software and host it yourself.
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Less free speech, more control, less privacy and more ads.
* some people are unhappy because they feel constrained * topics are an illusion anyway, people do post off-topic messages anyway, depending on strictness of moderation. People interested by the original topic are annoyed by the inevitable off-topic talk.
If you want to use the web in that way, just remove YouTube, Facebook, etc. from your DNS.
Because of this, I don't see many ads. But I have been an amazon customer since 1999 (according to what they say on their website when I'm logged in.) Looking at what they recommend for me, this personalization stuff is crap.
In music, Amazon recommends bands I never listen to like Montrose, Metallica, and the Doors (and to be fair, some people I've never heard of so I guess it is possible that I would be interested in them. Greta Van Fleet? William Patrick Corgan?)
In books, I do like scifi but they recommend a bunch of books with spaceships shooting each other on the cover - not what I have ever been interested in.
In the "humor and entertainment" section of books they do list some books that I would be interested in but, strangely, none of them are "humor" but are all academic books about videogames (which I am interested in). Even here the recommendation engine is very unsophisticated because in between academic books on videogames there are books on the art of Zelda and other coffee table books that I am not interested in.
And the first book in their recommended children's book section is 1984. (and I don't have any kids any way).
If this is the best they can do with 18 years of tracking my purchases then I am not worried.
You're making a huge mistake by judging a book by its cover in this case. The copy of the Foundation series that I had as a kid was very space opera looking too, and I've seen gaudy covers on everything from Dune to Kim Stanley Robinson. For Sci fi in particular, publishers have an incentive to trick a large chunk of the audience into thinking that its Star Wars-y, and there's not much incentive in signaling the things that you or I would get out these books.
However, I as well have been "disappointed" by the ability of websites to judge my interests. After reading about cases such as Target, who have "spooky" ability to gauge interest, I was expecting better.
So I searched for a very specific motorcycle jacket with very specific features and now my page is inundated with every clothing item that has the tag "motorcycle_jacket?" That's.... it? The same result I'd get for hitting google with "site:amazon.com 'motorcycle jacket'" ?
Similarly, Booking.com recommends hotel room offers in foreign cities where I've been on vacation: it doesn't have any tourism detection and analysis, it just thinks that I'm indiscriminately likely to return to the same places without realizing I visit one or a few major cities in a different country every year and then the museums and monuments are going to stay the same for a while. To be fair, they'd need data about my habits they (fortunately) cannot see to do a good job.
But Amazon, in this case, doesn't need to track other surfing habits, just his purchase history. That history is not affected by privacy addons.
But as I was making the exact same point a few days ago here on HN, someone responded to say that maybe it was on purpose, that if recommendations were too good they would creep us out.
Don't know what to think of it but I found the objection interesting...
Billy Corgan was the lead singer of Smashing Pumpkins. also has a lot of solo stuff.
seeing the full names rather than stage names of artists can be weird.
Most of the recommendations are items that I actually already purchased through them ("How about a second electric razor or some more batteries?") or items that I literally was just looking at while browsing ("We recommend these jeans that you just looked at"). Utterly useless.
"Here are some videos you've already watched, mostly that you've already liked, but also a few from the same channel, and even a helping of some you've disliked but which other people have uploaded duplicates of."
And that's Google, the AI experts, with a crapload of data on my viewing and others' viewing habits, including in depth learning features such as length of time spent on videos, liked videos, playlists, etc.
Come to think of it the recommended movies on Netflix is also crazy, but they may be screwing it towards their own selection.
But lets be honest even when I tell Facebook what my interests are, it can't give useful ads - and even mighty google assumed I was interested in Palaeontology at one point.
"...we have faster connections, better browser standards, tighter security and new media formats. But it is also different in the values it espouses. Today, we are so far from that initial vision of linking documents to share knowledge that it's hard to simply browse the web for information without constantly being asked to buy something, like something, follow someone, share the page on Facebook or sign up to some newsletter. All the while being tracked and profiled."
The author is absolutely right that the _values_ of the web have changed. IMO this is due to the much more vast penetration of the web and the bubbles which have been birthed as a result of attracting very aggressive profit-driven actors. Rebasing the web's economic model on advertising has fundamentally changed the conception of users, and the expectation of enormous profits has steamrolled the egalitarian principles of early web citizens.
I kind of hope that the web will reboot itself in dark corners, away from the mega actors, away from the tracking and surveillance, and the torrent of the current web can keep on going for the masses.
Dead Comment
no love for firefox? or for that matter, any non webkit browsers?
>HERE WeGo for maps (free)
i'm not sure that's any better in terms of privacy
And even if it is faster, there track record shows that they found doing a release that slows down a large portion of users was acceptable. Granted I doubt they still have that attitude, and i think they are more performance based now, but a lot of us left for Chrome and never looked back.
The only reason Mozilla and Microsoft still use their own engine is for historical and technical reasons.
The fact that we are down to just three implementations should tell you were things are headed.
Mozilla seems to have become infected with the same ulterior-motive laden evil though. :(
Example happening at the moment:
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/10/09/mozilla_tests_cliqz...
> i'm not sure that's any better in terms of privacy
Yeah, I would recommend at least checking out OpenStreetMap and any tools that derive their routing and tiles from it first. Of course its usability varies by country (and even by locality!), but that's no different from Google Maps or Apple Maps.
At least with OpenStreetMap I know that my contributions benefit people in general (due to the free software licensing) and not mainly (the shareholders of) Google or Apple.
Email without outside encryption like PGP is fundamentally privacy by policy which lives and dies by the reputation and policy of the provider: it seems like Fastmail's is pretty good.
I'm a non-user of all things social media. My Twitter account is purely nominal (for pinging company support), and I don't have a Facebook account. As a business owner, my peers think it's bizarre that I don't have a LinkedIn account. The problems this author talks about are chains of our own making. Yes, corporations exploit us, but they exploit human frailties. This problem will not go away, and more "open tech" will not solve it.
Forum design is the new frontier.
you can buy hn upvotes, which is the same as buying a top spot.
All sorts of people who weren't online suddenly were there, and businesses took a lot more interest in the lest tech savvy types who've started to populate the internet.
At the same time, these same mobile users saw they could be anonymous and had no learned netiquette unlike so many others before them.
So because of this new-user saturation, the internet became no longer niche and now mainstream, to the detriment of everyone else online.
Yes yes, Eternal September and all that, but were they wrong about the similar assessment back then?
Google succeeded because their pagerank algorithm discovered useful sites. But now those same algorithms promote popular (or Google-profitable) sites at the expense of higher-quality sites (that often carry no advertising). W3schools, anybody? It was probably a natural evolution: the algorithm ate itself, and results that might actually be useful are buried under sites that are popular. I think sites like Wikipedia and Google feeding off each other is a more insidious problem - one with no quick technological solution, like installing an ad blocker.