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