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Comment by userbinator | Hacker News Reader

Great, another feature that is probably useful for <1% of websites but will likely be used for anti-user functionality like tracking and surveillance more than that.

Maybe I'm just old, but I find this trend of exposing more to the outside over the network quite disturbing, and it's also becoming rare for me to be joyful about a new version of software instead of "what did they break or bloat this time"... the Web was far more pleasant when it was about hyperlinked documents and not this cloud-computing-inspired frenzy.

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the Web was far more pleasant when it was about hyperlinked documents and not this cloud-computing-inspired frenzy

It was also a lot less useful though, as it was mostly about consumption. All of the creating happened elsewhere. People made things on their computer in other apps and then published them to the web. Now though, the web platform is shifting towards being a creative place in itself. People can make and share things entirely within a browser. I'd think that's a significant positive change.

People can make and share things entirely within a browser. I'd think that's a significant positive change.

Forums and blogs don't count? Those were present long before this "turn browser into OS" trend started.

Forums and blogs don't count?

I've been making web things for a long time. When the grandparent posted "when it was about hyperlinked documents" I took that to mean "When we wrote things for Mosaic". Forums didn't really exist on the web back then. I'd say that comments, forums, etc were one of the first creative tools. We've come a long way since then, but there's much more to do, and it's all very exciting. It's definitely making the web better IMO.

> I've been making web things for a long time.

I've been making internet things since before the "web" existed.

> Forums didn't really exist on the web back then

Gopher didn't really have the necessary interactivity, but nobody cared at the time because if you wanted to talk about something in a global forum, you used NNTP (or email lists).

The web (HTML+HTTP) had comment/forums/etc from the very beginning, because it was designed with IBM 3270 style form submission features (<form>/<input> tags and HTTP POST). I used these (and other interactive features) regularly in text browsers over my 2400 baud modem. Even if I had better bandwidth, there was no way I could run NCSA Mosaic in the 4MB of RAM installed on my 386DX. Yes, it was slow, but submitting comments only required special support by the server, which then returned a new hypertext document to the client.

The feature that arrived later was Javascript, allowing some features to be done directly on the client. However, this was not a necessary required for writing forums software; that always worked as server side software.

Shoving everything into the client didn't create many new opportunities; a lot of that existed already in separate software. What did happen is we attached everything to the same single point of failure and created a lot of security problems because risk is transitive.

No, what we did was trade off one set of security problems to having dozens of clients for every TCP protocol (IRC, NNTP, SMTP, IMAP, FTP, WAIS, Gopher, fingerd, etc) with their own set of security flaws, but which had less oversight, and that gets you things like the Morris worm.

And because every one of these had their own rigorous protocol, and their own binary clients, if there was a flaw in the protocol itself, it could take ages to get a fix to the protocol from the IETF and all clients deployed with the fixes.

So for example, the obvious and horrible security of usenet led to the first massive spam bots, which then led to a bunch of even more horrible mitigations like Cancelbots, which led to a bunch of counter-mitigations like Resurrector-bots.

These days, with ephemeral, mobile code, a security hole in the client/server protocol of a particular app can be fixed in an instant and rolled out to everyone. And the Web is better at this than the native mobile or desktop platforms, now behind curated App Stores, with a lower update frequency, and whose very closed-source curation process means they don't get as much rigorous testing as the Web in running untrusted code.

The Web has been running untrusted global scale mobile code for decades now, and most of the exploits on the Web have occurred as a result of bad server programming, not holes in Javascript. So Web 1.0 request/response apps won't save you, all it will do is punish everyone with bad latency and higher server loads.

I would disagree that the web was more about consumption.

There where more personal pages because html was simple and there was little reason for large businesses to build pages around consumption or write html for you. Older browsers even had edit modes and would use the http PUT method to send updated versions of the document.

The original intention of the web was a sort of global wiki, not this tool to connect you to some coorperate service.

There where more personal pages...

Than Instagram accounts? YouTube channels? Facebook pages? Twitter profiles? No. There's far more now.

The landscape has changed and things look very different, but those things are personal pages where people publish what they want to say. The only thing that's changed is that the platforms people publish to have far less scope for personalisation.

I'd definitely agree that those pages are worse than homepages we had in the 90s as far as a personal voice is concerned. They're mostly boring, homogeneous things that only very close friends of the owner want to read (and even then...). Nonetheless though, they are homepages.

> All of the creating happened elsewhere. People made things on their computer in other apps and then published them to the web.

The interesting thing there is that most people use those tools (Instagram, etc.) through an app, not through a browser.

I'd argue that things like "likes" have created an environment where people generally publish what they think other people would want them to say (e.g. things that will be "rewarded" with internet points), rather than what they actually want to say.

That's just 'better' metrics. Back in the day we had hit counters and server logs, and some of us tweaked our content to drive them up. There were early forms of SEO, clickbait, content marketing ("content is king" was something every web person knew). The desire for recognition was there at the start.

I beg to differ. The web I participated in through the early to late 00s, most of which came before the web app craze, had a far, far better ratio of creation:consumption.

This held true both in meta sense (the web itself) with tens of thousands of individually run sites and blogs instead of a handful of hypercentralized content warehouses, as well as in the proliferation of numerous creative communities and individuals making things. I know because I spent the majority of the 00s on these sorts of sites.

Today, all of that’s died almost entirely and no subreddit or facebook group or anything can hold a candle to it. Today, the web is all about endless monetized entertainment streams designed to maintain the attention of as many eyeballs as possible as long as possible. It’s effectively turned into the modern equivalent of network TV.

There are already tons of features that are only useful for <1% of websites. You can't deny that this is useful though - this is one of the things that makes the physical web actually plausible.

Combined with Android's support for bluetooth beacons you can now have this feature, with no additional software installation required:

1. You walk up to a device.

2. A notification appears on your phone saying you are near it.

3. You tap the notification. It takes you to a website that lets you connect to the device via BLE.

4. You interact with the device via BLE.

All without requiring network connectivity for the device (which is always a huge pain).

You have to give permission for the website to access BLE. This is cool. You are just old.

What are you going to do in a year when you get hundreds of these notifications per day?

I definitely see the potential for harm in this, but I'm excited to program arduinos from a web ide with a statically-served text editor + toolchain. Personally I switched to Firefox. The ideology is only minimally better, but I'd sooner trust Mozilla to ask my permission to use a new web api.

>the Web was far more pleasant when it was about hyperlinked documents and not this cloud-computing-inspired frenzy.

The web was far more useful for you. I, for one, am glad the days of IE6 and the lot are over.

I think the GP is talking about long before IE6 was a thing. Even back in the IE4 days there were web based games, HTML chat rooms, etc. I remember writing vast interactive 3D landscapes in VRML which were embedded into home page even as early as the late 90s (~4 years before IE6 was released).

But aside VRML and other browser plugins the web was ostensibly just a network of hyperlinked documents. You'd make an action and get a fresh page. Make another action and get another fresh page. Sure it was primitive by today's standards but it wasn't possibly to do half the "evil" things we complain about today (user tracking, browser mining, etc) and there were still big social hubs like the Yahoo! portal too. What's more, because the barrier for entry as well as people's own expectations were that much lower it meant you saw a hell of a lot more individuality in the content posted. People would literally put a website up about their favourite designs of bridges, the shapes of snail shells, cartoon trivia no normal person should care about, or some local landmark. There were sites dedicated to the most mundane of things yet they were strangely fascinating topics because you get drawn into the topic through the obsession and wonder that drove the sites author to dedicate his on little piece of the web to it.

These days the signal to noise ratio is so far tilted the other way with people obsessing too much about contributing what they think people want read or boasting about stuff they feel is boast-worthy that it almost completely drains out the purist content from people who just post stuff that genuinely interests themselves. This is compounded by the fact that the web has been gamified by some big names to encourage the kind of boastful content I described earlier because that feedback loop of posting content then waiting for "likes" and/or means more screen time which, in turn, means more eyeballs on adverts. The fact that everything is so bite-sized hardly helps either; Facebook statuses, Twitter "tweets", Instagram posts - they're all short, direct, "shots" of information. Fewer people engage in the longer process of having a page dedicated to a subject. Which means we lose a lot of detail, creativity and personality.

The only good thing about the modern web is that while the barrier for entry writing a website has gone up, inversely the barrier for entry publishing content has gone down dramatically.

>What's more, because the barrier for entry as well as people's own expectations were that much lower it meant you saw a hell of a lot more individuality in the content posted. People would literally put a website up about their favourite designs of bridges, the shapes of snail shells, cartoon trivia no normal person should care about, or some local landmark

You can still find those types of sites if you want.

>These days the signal to noise ratio is so far tilted the other way with people obsessing too much about contributing what they think people want read or boasting about stuff they feel is boast-worthy that it almost completely drains out the purist content from people who just post stuff that genuinely interests themselves.

With more people joining the web, that will be a side effect of it. On the flip side, there has been so much massive positive change on the web too. Online transactions, many government services becoming online (many times reducing corruption), email and IM connecting people around the world in a way never before, and many many more things. Just focussing on the negatives by commenting a few types of sites like fb, insta, twitter etc is fainting a very one-dimensional picture.

>The only good thing about the modern web is that while the barrier for entry writing a website has gone up, inversely the barrier for entry publishing content has gone down dramatically

I actually think that is a bad thing, not good. What made the web the web was the low barrier to entry. Also, if you think that is the only good thing about the modern web, then I really don't think you truly realize the scale in which most people take the web for granted nowadays in their everyday lives, which affects them in a positive way.

> You can still find those types of sites if you want.

You can. And I made that point myself. The issue is the signal to noise ratio and the way search engines rank sites. Finding those gems I described above have become harder than it used to (in my personal opinion)

> less corruption

I very much disagree that there’s less corruption now the web has taken off. Or at least if there is, I disagree it’s directly related to stuff getting published on the web.

> email and IM connecting people around the world like never before

Email and IM have existed long before the web (decades before in emails case), nevermind being available around the period of the early web that we were talking about.

> just focusing on negatives like fab, Twitter, etc creates a very one dimensional picture

I totally agree.

The reason it was written that as was because I wanted to offer a counterbalance to the previous post rather than a balanced and impartial commentary. However you’re right that the reality is somewhere between the two arguments.

> I actually thing that’s a bad thing

I think you’ve completely misunderstood my point because you’re arguing the same point I made with using language that suggests I was opposed to those points you’re making.

Also you seem to be confusing “web” with “internet” in some of your previous remarks and also suggesting I’m totally against the web in its entirety; neither of those points are true (in fact I’m very much pro-web)

If you don't use these capabilities, they probably amount to less than a Megabyte increase in the file size of the binary, and the potential that you could be shown a dialog when a website asks for permission.

I fail to see how this might significantly cramp your lifestyle, or what this has to do with cloud computing.

(You can even disable these functions globally. Or at least that's what you can currently do with similar APIs like MIDI device access. (And btw: Did MIDI device access ever get you profiled by the CIA?))

> potential that you could be shown a dialog when a website asks for permission

First, I suspect that this is in itself annoying to many users (it is to me). Next, even at 1% of accidental clicks it would give out large unintended access. A cynical part of me says that if technology shows tracking benefits it would switch to "accept once, reject every time" and many users would be tempted to click on it just to make those annoying popups go away.

The main beneficiaries of this misfeature are advertisers.

I think Google tries to cram all this functionality (WebUSB, now Bluetooth) into Chrome because of the limitations of ChromeOS.

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