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Comment by enraged_camel | Hacker News Reader

Stallman's issue is that he comes across as a fundamentalist extremist, and most of his suggestions require making huge sacrifices to one's quality of life.

Take Stallman's own website[1]. It is mostly text. While this makes it fast, it doesn't make it readable at all. And finding specific stuff is nearly impossible. Yeah, there is a search feature, but is extremely rudimentary and very user-hostile.

If it were up to Stallman, the entire Internet would look and work like this. This was OK in 1990. It no longer is. Sorry.

[1]https://stallman.org/

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>It is mostly text [...] doesn't make it readable at all.

that is the weirdest comment ever. On HN no less which is literally just text.

HN has a coherent layout, nice spacing, a sensical grouping of content and functionality per component and view or page. stallman.org is a pile of unstyled textual content which was clearly assembled without actually being designed. Regardless of the validity of his site as an example of what he thinks everybody else on the internet needs to do, the two examples are not not in the same ballpark for readability. Between the two, the ratio of structural elements to textual elements isn't even close.

"makes it not readable" would be a weird contradiction.

"doesn't make it readable" is not weird at all.

I think Stallman's website says more about Stallman's design sensibilities than it does about the ability of plain text to be readable or for search to be effective.

Like the progression from http://www.motherfuckingwebsite.com/ to http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/.

Low contrast text is a downgrade. https://bestmotherfucking.website/ is a true upgrade.

Agreed, I knew there were more but didn't want to find the rest.

Wut? That's his website and he makes it however he likes. I haven't ever heard him telling people to make websites with default HTML layouts or not use interactivity or better search tools etc. WRT websites his opinions regard the tracking they force upon the users and the closed-source-ness of them. Maybe you should read things before you link them, eh?

I think the website is a bad example, but the above characterization of Stallman being a fanatic who is blind to other's needs is not incorrect. There have been multiple cases with him recommending people forgo having working software and hardware if it isn't 100% free. That might be the ideologically pure stance, but it's also massively impractical. As a true believer he just does not understand that the vast majority of the users just want to do work with their equipment, and that choosing to forgo working drivers for some abstract right to modify that 99.9999% of users will never exercise is just utter nonsense.

Also, Stallman is a grade A asshole. I've met him, and he is a deeply unpleasant man to be around.

WRT your first point, well, he's an eat-your-own-dogfood philosopher, and he sets an example to what is possible with his own behaviour. And he just does not make trade-offs in his views. What we should collect from them is what's useful to us. It would be kind of hypocritical if he was telling non-free software is evil, but recommended some such software.

WRT your second point, that is subjective and ad hominem. I live in Emacs and without GNU I was stuck with Windows. Without GNU none of the good things we have today would've existed, Linux wouldn't have existed, we were all programming in ASP.NET or C# or what not. So even if he is an asshole, he's a very, very, very important one.

You need extremists like him. If he was a moderate we'd have stayed in the corporate moderate ecosystem we had: everything proprietary.

When you want something to change you can't have only moderates as they're in fact happy with the status quo.

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