Agreed, but what are you personally going to do, very specifically, to fight back?
1. Run my own personal web server. Starting on a cloud provider, but eventually from my flat.
2. Write my own blog on my own web server. Not using a platform. Not tracking users.
3. Push my side-project code to an open Gitlab repo
Way down on this list is "stop commenting on HN", so if you never hear from me again, be glad ;)
> Way down on this list is "stop commenting on HN",
I don't see how HN is what's wrong with the web. It's a very well managed online community.
I think he's saying it's a distraction. I agree.
On my list of "important things I need to have on my mind" whether my latest HN comment got upvoted is waaaaaaaay down there (possibly not enough emphasis there on how little this truly matters to my life). And yet it takes up a lot more mental space than that (evidence: this comment).
I don't seem to be able to not give a shit about it, so I'm probably better off not doing it at all.
But consider this a big fat upvote for your life in general, and not related to HN
https://jcs.org/notaweblog/2012/06/13/hellbanned_from_hacker...
It absolutely had everything to do with it. That's the reason lobste.rs is invite only forum. They had a rather big drama there recently as astroturfer still snuck in even through invite only system resulting in increasing of account restrictions on posting etc.
Personally I think their limits are a bit too strict though when you browse hacker news almost every day you can see how that's necessary.
The presence of a trivially bypassed invite tree completely invalidates the public, historical reasoning behind the founding from the founder themself in 2012?
Feel free to open those links I posted before replying.
Response was very quick as I have usually seen though.
I would say that, while what you're saying is true, it's also a very intense echo chamber. VCs, startup-culture and lots of the work generated by YCombinator has contributed to the hostility of the web in the first place.
The charm of the web of old is that you could own your space and if you wanted your pages to have animated gifs of rainbows and unicorns, you could. Likewise if people wanted to customize their view of the web, they could via things like RSS.
Contrast to nowadays, where we collectively consider experiments about omitting noise from HN API via AI something that is "cool". The very aggregating nature of HN that brought people together in the first place can also be a limitation against branching out onto your own directions/subcultures (e.g. the comments about echo chambers).
There are too many meaningful problems technology could be solving and too few programmers interested in solving those problems. Giving more people the tools to build their own solutions or adapt others is something that could really change the game. There are a few companies exploring this space but we're looking to create open tools that don't enforce a vendor lock-in and tools that defend user freedoms. Viva la revolución!
Build and sell simple, useful and if not open then transparent services or products in order to foster variety in the face of anticompetitive or monopolistic entities,
Help resellers/repackagers/... to configure, integrate or adapt such services even if not my own.
Y'know, "do one thing and do it well"-style.
What I was getting at was dead simpl,e: turn off JS and install a hostfile-based blocklist, or other. It really was that simple. I also enable cookies just for HN posting. Else no cookies of any kind ever accepted.
So are people doing that, because if you don't co-operate with their code, tracking you gets vastly harder. You can take back control of you machine - if you choose.
It's simple and you can do it now - if you choose.
@benjaminjosephw: can you give more detail? (glad you're not just all talk!)
@marcus_holmes, @zdkl, @saagarjha: you may need to get together with others to unify the idea of doing your own web servers. A collective not a commercial entity which you are trying to avoid being involved in. That gives you together much more power.
I think that's what @MaxBarraclough is suggesting looking at . I will to.
@saagarjha: writing your own browser engine seems totally pointless - it's the web at fault, not the browser that renders it. If you don't like bits of the browser, remove the code. Don't understand what you're trying to do.
It's a huge pain to make phone calls, or go to the store
But another way when you need not have to use the site to put pressure on the site by not bothering with it if it breaks without JS. Enough people do it and they will get the hint.
Or actually talk to the site owners and ask them - I have done this with a small publisher.
Or if someone post a link to their JS-requiring blog/site on HN, ask them politely to make it usable without (I do occasionally).
If you want to fight back, you have to pay the price. It's a pretty small one for me.
I've been playing with this idea recently. If you want to provide access to a database which is infrequently updated and no bigger than a few megabytes (like the catalogue of a library with 30 000 books), then provide the database with the web page and implement the search function in JavaScript. If you avoid using a JavaScript "framework" then you may find that the web page responds to your typing so instantaneously that you feel like you're back in the 1980s using a Z80-based machine. (You remember those Z80-based word processors that could keep up with a competent typist?)
But in general: I suppose what we need is a flexibly configurable JavaScript engine that stops and asks permission before any suspicious operation is performed. I don't know enough about JavaScript to know whether or how that might work. I note that the way tujavortaro.net downloads a dictionary is by adding a <script> element to the head of the document (https://gitlab.com/sstangl/tuja-vortaro/-/blob/master/app.js...). HTML+JS is naturally self-modifying, so it's hard to do a static analysis.
Your book-search idea is interesting. Another way is simply to display the list on the web page, minimally marked up, and let the user search using the text search in all browsers - no JS needed. Might be a sizeable page though.
There may be better ways that don't involve sucking bandwidth to deliver a huge list. Bloom filters? I dunno, needs thought and I'm busy - what do you reckon?
But your idea still needs JS. I'm fine with JS if I knew it was doing something minimal and it was highly constrained. That's the problem, not so much running JS as trusting it when it comes from somewhere unknown.
Keep up the good thinking though!
Of course, on the majority of websites I am not doing any interactions where that would be necessary to me in the first place, and on the majority of websites where JavaScript is used, it's used with little mind towards privacy.
That it isn't inherently evil is a pretty toothless argument that fundamentally doesn't address the proposed solution you're responding to. The fact that the web is a cesspool of scripts ranging from completely useless to directly user-hostile isn't nullified by use cases that are so rare that you from the top of your head can apparently only hypothesize about them.
There seems to be something wrong with a world in which it is in some ways easier/safer to run an untrusted binary, by putting it in a container, than an untrusted web page. You can of course put the browser in a container, but it's crazy that we have to resort to that.
Thanks to Spectre and Meltdown, if you want to be really safe when running untrusted code, you need separate hardware.
The Web started life as a means of publicly sharing documents and has turned into a network of walled gardens. Rather than trying to fix the web itself, I think the solution is to try to recreate something true to the original spirit where users are publishers and where openness is the default.
What I'm working on specifically is best described as another take on Mozilla's Open Web App project[1] where applications are actually distributed to users for them to run themselves. The difference is that by adding visual programming into the mix, programs are realistically user editable and software freedoms start to take on a real significance to a whole new audience of empowered end-users. If you're interested in finding out more, I'm planning on publishing a blog post outlining the details in a couple of weeks time - watch this space.
[0] - https://vimeo.com/71278954
[1] - https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2010/10/19/prototype-of-an-ope...
I don't actually use my own server to serve my website, currently, but I have the infrastructure set up to do so if need be.
> writing your own browser engine seems totally pointless - it's the web at fault, not the browser that renders it. If you don't like bits of the browser, remove the code. Don't understand what you're trying to do.
I'm suggesting contributing to an existing web engines, not writing one from scratch (which at this point is fairly difficult to do).
If, say 1 in every 1000 people knew how to maintain their own small Mastadon server, we could build a decentralized social network with federated identity.
I think that would be a noble first step and would not require too much moderation work for the admin: how hard would it be to moderate 200 of your friends and family? not very.