Sustainable Web Manifesto
sustainablewebmanifesto.com
sustainablewebmanifesto.com
If you required "open" and "honest" as defined by the manifesto, almost the entire marketing industry and the industries it supports would have to shut down. Even supposedly-altruistic nonprofits are tricking people into subscribing to their mailing lists and then stockpiling the emails in opaque databases these days.
I read this more as an incentive to improve, not as a requirement to operate.
The people actually fighting for these principles are Richard Stallman types that Hacker News generally considers fringe nuts. Talking about openness and honesty (as defined in this manifesto) at Hacker News is like talking about clean fuels at the place where people go to burn tires.
I'm not criticizing the manifesto. I'm criticizing Hacker News and hypocrisy here.
Most of the marketing industry is just as honest as most of the tech industry.
In fact, it's far easier to argue that many products labeled as "tech" are far more manipulative than your average marketing agency.
Yes. Both are generally pretty dishonest. Pointing to another industry's guilt doesn't make the first industry innocent.
Are you disagreeing with my example? How many companies actually DON'T try to trick people into giving them their mailing address, and then stockpile the emails?
Unfortunately, I feel like lots of things can be understood in a variety of ways. Take this:
> The products and services we provide will use the least amount of energy and material resources possible.
What does that mean ? Should I use C to create websites, so that each web request takes less energy ? What about the energy I use to code : is that accounted for ?
And this:
> The products and services we provide will support an economy that nourishes people and planet.
What kind of products and services does that exclude ?
The wording is unfortunate, but I understand this to mean that tools (e.g. programming languages) should be chosen with resource usage in mind. The last word, "possible", gives you an out to reasonably argue that C is not an option because of other concerns like security. But it sure means that something like Go or Rust should be preferred over something like Ruby or PHP because it allows you to run most applications on a much smaller footprint.
https://launiusr.wordpress.com/2012/02/08/why-explore-space-...
The modern web made possible to represent knowledge in completely new forms and to easily collaborate with people in your fields of interest. From your home you can now find a 3D animation of how some piece of engineering or science works. With AR and VR you can comprehend complex concepts faster. The barriers to enter science and contribute to solving big civilization issues are lower than ever. The parts are already in place. What I'd love to see is how to teach and organize people to use the existing web more efficiently.
this being said, one minor nitpick: “The planet is experiencing unprecedented climate change” is false. and by quite a wide measure. the planet experienced far worse climate change just in the past 500 millions years: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/05/500-million-year-sur...
that doesn’t mean the situation isn’t approaching dire levels for the current ecosystem. so the current wording might be necessary. it’s just that the scientist in me picked this up.
Disclaimer: I work there.
A list of sustainable hosts would be the very basic level of information surely?