- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.ml
The web is fucked and there’s nothing we can do about it. Kev Quirk looks back fondly at Web 1.0.
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Pseudo romanticizing of the old web. Yeah, I don’t like that we’re heading into a corporate super controlled web but as of now, that still vastly better than it used to be before search engines were a thing. I also only look back with a nostalgic eye at the time of gaming magazines because it was fun, but it’s so much better to be able to Google stuff now. I don’t miss dealing with web design out of order, wild west style.
Old website navigation was often bad and ugly. Everyone had a forum but you never found what you were looking for. And web design unavoidably had to change to allow better mobile access. You could no longer load in font size 6 blue on top of blue as that would (correctly so) annoy people and make them stop visiting your page, when ther was a better site available.
Now social media isn’t necessarily bad, we’re on one after all, but there are definitely harmful social media who are just made for ragebait, like Twitter and Facebook.
It’s a fact though that you need more googlefu now, to find what you’re looking for.
When you see an article dismiss problems with “but that was all part of the fun”, you know that usability isn’t high on the author’s agenda.
I disagree with his definition of web3. Some devs are working on decentralizing the web, that’s the real web3. IPFS is blockchain-less. My new peer-to-peer search engine is blockchain-less. Yes, blockchain people are trying to put blockchains everywhere, but we musn’t let them build their vision web3. And that means, you need to help the blockchain-less vision, you need to find projects to contribute to. Let’s make the web uncensorable and anonymous together
Special shout-out has to go to my local newspaper websites The Derby Telegraph and Nottingham Post .
They are a virtually unreadable mess, due to the layers of advertising and other JavaScript interruption.
With a raspberry pi and pihole you won’t see a single ad on both sites. I just tested it on an iPad.
It was kind of inevitable that it would go this way. The business model that people expect the Internet to work in is directly at odds with how people want to use the Internet. Tech companies have been enjoying a 20 year long honeymoon period where they have effectively infinite money and no regard for sustainable profit.
I think it’s time for a new standard to replace HTML and Javascript for the web that formalizes all the most used functions and gives developers way less freedom to make a crappy website.
Alternatively train AI to recognize crappy websites and severely punish them in search.
Or use AI to reformat websites into something user friendly. Considering the coding skills of GPT-4, I don’t think that’s too far away.
Between GDPR prompts, auto-generated articles, banner ads, normal ads, filler content, related articles, the web has become unusable.
Really it’s Google’s fault for not cracking down on these practices. And their competitiors for not doing so either.
Search engines in general have become beyond useless. I barely find anything anymore and it’s not just the fault of bad web design. Even if the search results followed human friendly design, they don’t even contain anything related to my search.
My only hope is that retrieval-augmented LLMs can fix this mess. Basically they read all these crappy websites for you and extract the actually useful information.
Replacing HTML and JavaScript does nothing to stop people from creating bad websites. People would still post auto-generated content or ads, filler content, related articles, etc… And having LLMs summarize bad content will only give you a shortened version of bad content.
This is exactly what I want. A simple text-based protocol. Sure, throw in support for images, too. Provide basic layout options so you can do proper wrapping and scaling for different size screens. Nothing else.
The web is too bloated for the basic use cases at this point. With HTML5 and JavaScript and CSS you can do anything, and honestly, that’s great. It’s great that I can run an entire OS emulator in a web browser. It’s great that I can run games and paint apps and everything you can imagine. But why the ever-loving hell is the same platform used for all of that and plain-text news? Madness.
AI-powered reformatting and extraction is bound to come, which is probably one of the reasons Google is pushing for their web DRM bullshit.
well there’s gopher or gemini, but I was thinking it should have some more modern features.
Like if you took all the features of all the best modern websites and apps, and condense them down into a fully integrated stack replacing everything from http up. Only allowing elements that don’t get in the way of UX.
Ideally it should completely preserve privacy and anonymity, so perhaps bolt something on like I2P. Make it pretty much impossible to track people beyond them voluntarily giving their information or doxxing themselves.
But then also have 99% of the conveniences of the best of modern web/app design. But beyond those fixed functions, you have zero freedom as a webdeveloper.
Fixing the content of the websites is then another problem entirely seperately. This is just to fix UI/UX.
Like if a zoomer designed gopher.
Together with more effective search engines, whose actual goal it is to bring quality content to users, you could fix the web forever. I think if you handed control over page rankings over to users, you could fix search engines too. You have to create incentive structures to align the interests of the search provider with that of the users. Currently Google has little incentive to actually provide you good search results, that doesn’t neacessarily make them money.
we all miss the blink element.
<marquee>For the win</marquee>
I agreed until the “fuck blockchain” comment in the article. How else would you solve the byzantine generals problem in computer science?
By using standard implementation of cryptographic message signing?
what? how does that solve a double spend?
