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On web as newspeak: limiting features to corral people

20180726

People use the web basically as an appliance. It is an omnipresent background item like a toaster. Whenever I am around a group of people, adults or children, most are on their phones. Nothing profound is being accomplished, games being played, text or instant messages, social media, etc.

In 1984, the book by George Orwell writes that Ingsoc had created its own language, [Newspeak](gopher://gopherpedia.com/0/List of Newspeak words), and the vocabulary shrank over time to steer people's thinking.

Today, corporations accomplish the same goal thru the removal of features from products. Lack of replacable batteries, expandable memory, lack of choices for cloud storage, etc. Along this vein, now we have Mozilla attempting to futher kill RSS.

Feeds are not desirable from a corporate perspective because you are viewing their content outside of their interface -- and without advertising. The end user experience is very desirable -- they are able to view the content outside of the corporate interface and without advertising!

The bloated, cluttered, bullshit interfaces most large websites have nowadays are terrible IMHO. RSS is a way to get straight to the part that's actually meaningful. Doubleplusungood...