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Comment by DanielBMarkham | Hacker News Reader

There may be a generational thing going on here.

I don't want to play the internet as if it were a video game. I remember the time before the net, and I want a tool that I use to drive my life narrative forward, not a tool that uses me to drain my attention span. After some thought, I really only need plain text for most everything I do -- but heck if anybody is going to serve that up.

I may be an outlier. I don't know. Perhaps people who don't remember the time before the net view their phones and information experience as just another form of video game, just with other real people involved. I'd love to read some more research in this area.

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I'll say what I think you're saying in a different way: The "internet" (really, the World-Wide Web) has been co-opted from its original purpose of information dissemination. The WWW's new purpose is now monetization of its users' time and data. Unfortunately, a combination of corporations and users themselves have made this reality. We as a species seem unable to wean ourselves from sweet social nectar (Facebook, Instagram, etc.)

Agreed. We are getting what we want...good and hard.

Looking at it from the outside, I wonder just how large the gap can become between what we need the net for -- and what we're getting.

What these companies seem to be doing isn't delivering value as much as it is preying on the ignorance of the average computer user. Even the innocuous-sounding "you get this for free, and all you have to do is see a commercial now and then, isn't that cool?" turns out to be a tracking system undreamed-of by any dystopian writer in the history of fiction.

Perhaps that situation of customer ignorance will change over time.

> Unfortunately, a combination of corporations _and_ users themselves have made this reality.

This is technically true, but in the same sense that "humans and cattle are responsible for climate change and deforestation" or "drug cartels and addicts are responsible for drug epidemics" are technically true as well.

It ignores the enormous power imbalances between the participating actors - more precisely that we have hierarchical, goal-driven organizations with clear objectives and vast resources in infrastructure, knowledge, manpower and money on the one hand and mostly clueless individuals on the other hand.

> We as a species seem unable to wean ourselves from sweet social nectar (Facebook, Instagram, etc.)

Nope, sorry. I've seen the excuse too often. If some Fortune-500 managers realize there is an enormous amount of money to be made by exploiting attention, that's not "we as a species".

> I don't want to play the internet as if it were a video game. (...) I want a tool that I use to drive my life narrative forward, not a tool that uses me to drain my attention span.

This is a perfect description of how I feel about the Internet today. Thank you.

AFAIR I'm much younger than you; the Internet I started using, in late 1990s, was already "rich" - though nowhere near as flashy as today. Yet I too find myself yearning for simplicity and plaintext. Your comparison to a videogame resonates on many different levels. The user experience of modern Web feels akin to interfaces common to videogames - optimized to look and feel nice, but not very functional nor accessible, and leading you through one carefully designed path. And when I reflect on my social media usage, I find the same phenomenon of "just one more level/mission/turn" that I find playing good games.

I'd definitely prefer a web - maybe a separate web - designed for helping me fulfill my goals. That would mean no shiny fluff in interfaces. Lightweight pages, high discoverability, both pages and underlying data available for automated processing. Alas, I believe commercial interests drive the web in exactly the opposite directions - as making a site too useful also makes it difficult to monetize users.

(Yes, monetize users. If this sounds like milking a cow, that's exactly how it should.)

This a 100x. All I need is text, images & video. With all the JavaScript madness the www has become a fundamentally untrustworthy medium. To wit: often the GDPR-compliant text-only web experience is better than the full-blown deal.

I've been dreaming about a text only network for a few years now. Haven't done a damn thing to make it happen but what I envision starts with a search engine that only indexes text/plain content. I've submitted a feature request to DDG a few times over the years to be able to filter by the content-type header, that would be a great start. There are few tricks you can do with any search engine but it's not enough to ensure what you're going to see is text/plain.

How am I going to navigate a text/plain web? Plain URLs inserted into documents?

What about text/markdown instead? Sure, having images means having banner ads, but I think it's naive to assume that a restriction to text would help combat ads.

I've been thinking about that too. Plain URLs, just like you said. Hypertext is out. Copy paste a URL if you want to go there. Bad URLs can't hide behind innocent looking text or attention grabbing images. I'm sure most clients already turn URL looking text into links, which is fine because it can't be disguised. Images would be fine, just not clickable ones, but I don't think we have a standard that specifies that right now. Ads are fine, trackers are not.

Edit: HTML/JS/CSS et al. can keep existing and be used where it's actually needed, I'd just like my client to default to telling me I'm about to venture into that hellish landscape first and I'd like a more secure by default standard that doesn't let this stuff get so far out of hand.

Younger generation here. Sometimes I want the internet to give me information, as you say. Other times I want to be entertained.

I sometimes feel like the second internet is trying to replace the former, but I think -- hope -- that both can coexist (preferably without today's ubiquitous surveillance).

Can I ask a question I've always wondered about?

What's wrong with having two different physical devices, one that helps you accomplish stuff and one that entertains you? Seems like by splitting it up physically like this you'd be able to keep the two separate. If nothing else, it'd be unambiguous to all involved what your personal goals were.

I do this, but it’s at the cost of portability and double the money. Presumably between those two factors you lose quite a few people who would otherwise consider this.

that seems excessive. any failure of your behavior to meet your self-generated long terms goals is really up to you to enforce. if we just cant stop ourselves from gorging on social media candy and click bait, that underlies a pretty serious question about free will.

since for the moment the internet approximates its initial goal of underlying ubiquitous connectivity, and the costs of running services is vanishingly small, doesn't it seem like well intentioned people with broader goals could create alternate content? (i.e. wikipedia, HN, LtU)

> if we just cant stop ourselves from gorging on social media candy and click bait, that underlies a pretty serious question about free will.

Existence and success of marketing and modern advertising is a stronger blow to the concept of free will. It turns out that people are very susceptible to manipulation, and in fact are being manipulated at scale.

(Also, even if humans had perfect free will, it wouldn't change much. If you see free will as a procedure taking in perceived world state, and putting out some decisions somewhat correlated with the input, you could still break it by poisoning the input. Which is precisely what most sales, marketing and advertising efforts are about.)

Two physically separate devices? I think one can just use Qubes OS instead.

I think what Daniel means is not about separation of data domains, it's about separation of mental domains. So the distinction between two separate devices would serve as a mental aid to separate concerns. In the same way that I like to work in the office rather than from home: It helps me to focus on one thing at a time (either work matters or personal matters).

Exactly.

I know several startup founders who ended up managing their time better by having only one machine for work and one for play -- and the machine for play they kept in a separate room.

It wasn't a capabilities question, it was a mental discipline question. When they went into the other room they mentally switched gears to have some fun and recreation. Over time the physical separation allowed them to separate the goals in their minds as well. The machine or tech had nothing to do with it.

Likewise I've been fortunate to work with some higher-level folks in traditional work in the 90s and 00s. They had their emails printed and read to them. It wasn't because they lacked computer skill. The physical act of requiring that the emails be printed and read to them limited the flow and increased the time they spent considering each reply. By limiting the time they spent on correspondence, it then created a small amount of extremely high-value correspondence where otherwise they could have easily spent all day slacking or whatnot. (I have no idea if that strategy works or not, I was simply fascinated that what originally looked like some kind of weird, old-fashioned luddite philosophy was actually based on increasing quality.)

The physicality of how we accomplish various tasks can have a great amount of impact on how well we do them.

+1 for text only information. I investigated this a few years ago with the intention of auto-generating a news podcast for my train commute. The audio part never happened but I auto-created a text document and synced that to my phone every morning and read it on the train.

I used RSS and a simple home brew page scraper to fetch the data and compile the document. However this was a pain to update and I found that news sites didn't always manage their feeds very well.

I wouldn't mind resurrecting this project so are there any recommendations for open source web scraping software that I could try, rather than rolling my own?

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