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Comment by superkuh | Hacker News Reader

I started using reddit in 2008. Although I doubt it was intentional reddit was a refuge from the "Best viewed with Javascript" modern web for many years. It worked just fine to browse and read with no JS enabled and was very snappy and low resource usage that way. Sure, you had to toggle JS back on to vote or post but that was easy enough.

I left just before they pushed out the redesign due their increased censorship but from what I can see now it is a random chance that a sub will work with JS disabled. Half the time the post content in a div that only is rendered visible when you turn on JS. You can read it if you view source but not in the browser's native interface.

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I'm with you on the JS stuff, the redesign screams "I want to be an app!" so desperately, I'm seriously considering leaving after a good 8 years on the site as well. Everything has that Javascript-delay on it, like it takes 0.5 seconds to click anything, scroll anything, etc.

I gotta say though:

>increased censorship

That's ridiculous. They're "censoring" all kinds of bottom-of-the-barrel racist and disturbing shit which simply should not be on a mainstream website (which reddit simply is now). I don't see any idealistic reason to keep /r/fatpeoplehate. The "everything that's legal" ideal is cute for some edgy website you create out of college, but a platform of reddit's size simply gives too much room for content to fall on the wrong side of the line.

> That's ridiculous. They're "censoring" all kinds of bottom-of-the-barrel racist and disturbing shit

They've also banned people legally arranging sales of alcohol, tobacco & firearms.

Because it isn't possible for them to make sure all jurisdictional compliance is there. Do they have an FFL? Does the person they're selling to across state lines also allowed to accept?

They're just covering their asses; it's not possible for them to watch every exchange so they have to ban all of it unfortunately.

I can't get those things at CVS either but I don't find it problematic. A business doesn't owe me any category of service that I want.

Personally, I think the censorship happens in a pretty biased way. There is still a lot of very problematic content in places like /r/The_Donald that just gets let slip because there are so many users and the mods are very influential. Other political subreddits like /r/socialism however, even if they have a lot of users, will get treated much more harshly by site admins if they are ever reported.

Similar things happen with discourse on facebook and twitter, where calls for ethnic cleansing by white people are often overlooked, while angry posts by people of colour that offend white people will get deleted or get users banned. It's really no wonder that US politics has gone the way it has when there is so much McCarthyism embedded in the moderation of these public forums.

Troll?

I think it's a matter of perspective. The BBC here in the UK aims for roughly equal complaints of bias from both the left and right, and reddit seems to get the same (e.g. /r/altright and /r/leftwithsharpedge both getting banned). I've seen complaints of both overzealous and permissive moderation by admins for all types of content which leads me to think they're actually reasonably balanced.

The reason to keep r/fatpeoplehate is simple. You cannot run a site where you censor things that some people dislike without falling into the hole of censoring all things.

Just look at cloudflare. The CEO did it out of spite and now they'll have to censor everything. It's already being used in court against them to force it even though they don't want to.

Once you're not just a host for discussion or not just a dumb pipe your job becomes to censor everything.

I started using it after slashdot, digg and so on descended into noise and in particular after digg's universally hated redesign. There too site owners were deaf to user complaints. Reddit seems bent on learning the same lesson.

It's 2018 and you're criticizing a site for not running well with JS disabled. You're the one actively deciding to make websites harder to use, why should they design the site for you?

It's 2018 and web developers are still not competent enough to build simple websites (blogs, news, reddit) without forcing visitors to use JS.

JS is the technology responsible for most of the malware infections and spyware ad-tracking. It's not like people disable it just to piss off developers, there are very good reasons to turn it off.

Running content blockers have solved this problem for me while keeping JavaScript enabled.

>JS is the technology responsible for most of the malware infections and spyware ad-tracking. It's not like people disable it just to piss off developers, there are very good reasons to turn it off.

While I agree that JS is part of the malvertising problem but this statement is blowing things to an exaggeration. Chrome, Firefox and Safari are equally responsible for the infection that occurs because of JS.

> most of the malware infections

Can you give a source for that?

I keep asking for it and never had any good response. The best I have found is that it helps show phishing. A link that said "Install me" and trigger the download of an executable when you click on it doesn't make HTML responsible for malware infections.

https://labsblog.f-secure.com/2016/04/28/browser-and-email-t...

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=javascript+malware+vector&atb=v64-...

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=javascript%20malware%20...

Bad engineering in 2018 is still bad engineering.

JS can be used to enhance the experience, and even build things otherwise impossible in the browser, and it's totally justified. But taking the newest, shinest web application framework and turning what's a tree of regular web documents into a web application, with data unaccessible if you don't run the entirety of its JS? That's just wrong.

At the risk of snark I don't have a clear way around, your definition of "good engineering" appears to be the same one that thinks a modern toilet is no better than a hole in the ground. Nobody that pays for developer time in 2018 is going to optimize their site for people that go out of their way to willfully turn off part of the stack. It's not gonna happen. Effort for no reward.

The protocol you describe, just a bare tree of text links, already exists as Gopher. People mostly stopped using that.

I turn off a part of the stack (or rather, run it on a whitelist), because people are using wrong parts of the stack for wrong things.

If you use the right parts of the stack for the right things, the result is a lean, accessible and interoperable piece of software. That's what the Internet was designed for. Alas, few people care, and in particular, interoperability is actively being opposed.

RE the toilet example, current webdev is more like refusing to build toilets in apartments and instead building them into car seats, because it's 2018, everyone has a car and a driver's license (or, rather, everyone in the population we want to monetize).

> more like refusing to build toilets in apartments and instead building them into car seats, because it's 2018, everyone has a car and a driver's license

Or maybe even making all kinds of interactive, surprising and unhygienic features on the toilet?

Some things should be simple and just work. They should work in a predictable manner and in a way that minimises risk for the users.

> Nobody that pays for developer time in 2018 is going to optimize their site for people that go out of their way to willfully turn off part of the stack. It's not gonna happen.

FWIW it takes less developer time to make a decent website without Javascript.

Javascript also introduces risks that are non existent in static pages.

Now if theese JS sites were super snappy and worked well offline etc I'd say probably wort it.

But I guess they are often worse that a plain old web page.

- someone who has created static and dynamic webpages since late last millenium

Good engineering is robust and efficient. Requiring Javascript to display simple, static text is not good engineering.

Most websites are not just simple, static text.

I disagree, most of them are simple static sites. Gmail, Google Docs, etc. are the outliers, not the norm. Reddit is a static text site with images. Hacker News is a static text site. Blogs are static text sites (with a few embedded images or non-text objects.

Most websites should be just simple, static text.

It doesn't take a lot of genius, time, or money to set a link w/ url parameters or use a standard html form for e.g. upvoting or comment submission, and then override that with javascript for fancier UI / AJAX / avoid redirects, etc -- i.e., extra polish, rather than it being the only option and the site just becomes nonfunctional instead of degrading gracefully.

This benefits more than just one tiny group of users: it might also aid disabled users and accessibility software (not to mention the developers of that software), security nuts, people who turn js off to improve performance on low-spec machines (it's 2018 here, but more than a few countries have a four (or even three!) figure GDP/capita, so their machines aren't going to be 2018 machines. This is just off the top of my head, how many other groups might there be that would benefit?

You're thinking as a developer and not as a business. A website that works perfectly well for 99% of visitors and adds the pizazz to keep them on the site is the goal.

Complaining about decisions like these is a form of market pressure. A weak one, but still within the rules of the business game.

Correct: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exit,_Voice,_and_Loyalty

Will it help the businesses if they learned that plain web sites are easier to create (and update), are better for the users and needs less maintenance?

But that's not true, because they also need the fancy ways of doing things as a reaction to demand.

So now they have more code, more to test, qa is more difficult, more surface area for bugs, etc.

Adding features isn't easier to maintain.

"JS disabled" is just the consequent, tech-y angle to not requiring JS to display every damn text box. I get JS to load things like simple menu-pop-ups or expanding an image, but it's so infused in the new reddit layout, you need it to basically display simple, static text content. It's just bloat.

Bro, do you even have flair?

Reddit started sucking the larger it got. It was decent from 2005-2010, been a shitfest since and increasingly getting worse.

The early flame wars were fun though when they first got comments working.

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