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Re: Web considered harmful

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From: Doc O'Leary <droleary@2017usenet1.subsume.com>

Subject: Re: Web considered harmful

Date: Sun, 6 Feb 2022 19:21:53 -0000 (UTC)

Message-ID: <stp74h$rb6$1@dont-email.me>

Message content

For your reference, records indicate that

meff <email@example.com> wrote:

The Internet is as it always was.

It clearly isn’t, nor should anyone expect it to be. A *crapload* has

changed since the start of Eternal September. Non-technical people

don’t care *at all* about things like IPv6 or HTTP/3, though. They

don’t even care about the application layer, and couldn’t even begin

to tell you anything about how the WWW works beyond opening their

browser and entering a URL.

It's up to us to _educate_ folks about what's lacking.

Nope. You need to talk with more non-technical people. They are already

aware of the ills of the modern Internet, but they feel helpless to do

anything about it. I have friends who know that WhatsApp is toxic, but

can’t bring themselves to abandon it because the network effect is too

strong. Other friends leave their smart phones at the door along with

their shoes when they get home because notifications of all kinds have

become too demanding of their attention. People *know* they’re being

manipulated, but the FOMO is overpowering for them.

You can't achieve that by
calling names, in fact people are even less likely to listen to you if
you call them names.

Who advocated that? I *will* say someone is doing something wrong if I

think they’re doing something wrong, though. And there is *a lot* wrong

with the modern Internet.

I don't find it gatekeeping as much as complaining. My father loves to
lament times gone by but his memories conveniently edits away all the
downsides. Again I find this behavior unproductive and closed
minded. You'll never get people to care about freedom if you start out
by insulting them or complaining about them. My father remains
unpopular at dinner parties.

That’s sad. You have been successfully manipulated into thinking that

criticism is closed minded and should be viewed as unpopular. You’ve

fallen for the relentless positivity that pushes social media engagement.

The world will never get better if people are unable or unwilling to face

our problems head on. Maybe your father’s problem is that he’s choosing

to attend vacuous dinner parties?

The
trouble was middleboxes. Middleboxes would throw away anything that
wasn't on a few set of explicitly allowed ports (HTTP, HTTPS, SMTP) or
wasn't just TCP traffic.

And that is a problem that definitely should be solved, but the *right*

solution is not to ham-fistedly jam even *more* under the umbrella of

the WWW. If you want to make the argument of “is as it always was”,

you can’t just roll over for every power play to co-opt standards that

Google makes.

Most importantly I may be _wrong_ and the others may be right.

But you can’t actually sort that out unless you take a position in the

first place. And solutions can both be wrong *and yet* popular. Yes,

people are free to do what they will, but part of that should be the

adult responsibility of, as you have done, acknowledging that they *can*

be wrong.

Nobody can systematically silence
you. Others may killfile you, but nobody has power over your voice on
Usenet the way Reddit can just ban people and entire
communities. The same goes for other net technologies like email.

Yet another thing that isn’t “is as it always was”. Modern email,

despite still being based on open protocols, is largely controlled by

gatekeepers like Google and Amazon. You *will* be systematically

silenced for reasons of their choosing. Worse, cloud providers are

more than happy to mix traffic from abusive customers in with

legitimate users, turning them into human shields.

I'm hoping that if HTTP/3 can actually become a net standard that
middleboxes respect, that we can _finally_ start sending UDP packets,

And while I can respect that as the ends, I don’t accept that the means

of achieving it is respectable. History has shown that ISPs are more

than willing to drag their feet or completely torpedo technology advances

just because it is easier to do nothing new. If you truly want to open

innovation back up, as I keep saying, you should *not* be asking for

changes that can be restricted to *just* the WWW.

You mention spam, and that is another *great* example of how problems are

not getting solved on the modern Internet. I have *actual* solutions for

spam, which is why I can give a valid email on my Usenet posts. But the

big guys don’t really want to eliminate spam, because it gives them too

much control over users. Some people look at what Google is doing and

actually think they represent best practices!

So, no, I don’t really expect adding more to WWW standards is going to

make things better for anyone. Neither do I think nostalgia for a past

Internet is particularly productive. My argument remains that we need

to be looking at what is right and wrong about what we’re doing, and

make changes for the better. For me, that means moving away from the

WWW to systems that aren’t trying to act as the be-all solution for

everything online.

My aim for 2022 is to downgrade my web pages to be mostly static and

ideally serverless. I’m going to see if I can move away from HTML-only

and go with simpler text formats like Markdown, CSV, and YAML. I’ve

done similar projects in the past when I abandoned Drupal, so I know it

can be done. Then upside of browsers having a kitchen-sink approach is

that you can turn it around on itself and force it to function almost

like a usable information system! :-)

--

"Also . . . I can kill you with my brain."

River Tam, Trash, Firefly

Related

Parent:

Re: Web considered harmful (by meff <email@example.com> on Sat, 5 Feb 2022 23:24:15 -0000 (UTC))