Comment by _yosefk | Hacker News Reader

Comment by _yosefk | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

He also mentions the dominance of Google, Facebook and Twitter. Making a usable distributed alternative to these (or to Amazon, Airbnb, etc. etc. - even HN) is not an easy technical problem. It does not help that making money off such a distributed alternative is also not easy, but had it been easy enough to do, perhaps someone would have done it for free.

(Not to mention that for the average person, setting up a website and publishing something there is not an easy technical problem in 2016; most wouldn't know where to start. Personally, I'm not a web programmer but I am a working programmer and I can write a simple web app using a CGI Python script or Django or Rails, and for me setting up a website is fairly annoying in 2016. And anything involving non-static HTML is a PITA, and writing static HTML is no fun, either. The web is not the most pleasant thing, technologically, and this is one reason that a company amortizing the cost of dealing with the web over many users has an easier time than an individual trying to do something over the "bare" web without intermediaries.)

As a 'non-tech person' I can affirm that setting up a simple static website (to host my paintings) is far from a 'point and click' process unless I take the Squarespace/Weebly route, and they have annoying restrictions unless you pay a subscription. I investigated setting up a web server and serving from my ADSL connected desktop but in the end the downtime would be too much (power loss, regular maintenance etc.) plus configuring Apache seemed like something I shouldn't take on as a first task, so I took the Github Pages route, which still means I've to teach myself HTML/CSS3/Git. Fortunately I like tech, but what if a typical "grandma" wants to securely publish her site? Seems like the web is not quite at that level of intuitiveness yet.

Grandma can always ask for help, there's a high probability that she has nephews that can do it. IMHO this obsession with grandmas of the world has become our rationale for robbing users of control, privacy, freedom. But I ask you this: instead of worrying about our grandmas, shouldn't we worry more about our children?

Why should they be mutually incompatible? Abstracting some tasks to be easy enough for point-and-click use can definitely also co-exist with options that students, professionals and hobbyists can toggle to open up the underlying layers, at least with free software. With proprietary systems this whole discussion is IMO futile on the technical side. Vendors of proprietary systems can only be regulated by markets and laws, which has so far not worked except generally in their favour.

So I wasn't for an obsession with any one level of user but for catering to all levels of users, which seems to be technically possible now, so why isn't it happening? Instead we get closed-source systems with vendor lock on the one extreme or free systems which grandmas (which stands for any non-tech user) can't use as easily as their closed source counterparts. Why can't we have freedom (as in open development/transparency, not price) & ease-of-use together?

Children, grandmas and people of every other age cannot set up and maintain a website as you'd most certainly agree, and as a nephew or any other relative I would at this point refuse to help because of the maintenance part which they cannot do and which will never end.

People will use things which most of the time do not punish mistakes too harshly and don't present problems requiring actual thinking to solve. I think people are right in refusing to use the other kind of thing because the alternative burns too much of one's time and is too risky. Big web companies manage to build such artifacts over the infrastructure that is the Internet and the WWW; I'm not aware of alternatives.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com