The time has come for a more human internet | Hacker News Reader

The time has come for a more human internet

morehumaninternet.org

12 pointswweiss123023 comments

The time has come for websites to tell me what it is that they do

The inhuman thing about the internet is that interacting with people has been replaced with interacting with organizations. Organizations that want to ignore you, and if you can't be ignored than to fit you neatly into a database schema where they can exact the actionable information necessary to continue making money, and then ignore you.

I'm sure your software is great at searching for help in a knowledgebase and falling back to soliciting bug reports.

I'm not so sure about your messaging.

Believe in what you've built! If it's valuable people will adopt it on the merits, not because of lofty prose disconnected from it's purpose.

> The inhuman thing about the internet is that interacting with people has been replaced with interacting with organizations.

That was happening long before the Internet, although the Internet has certainly made it easier for organizations to dehumanize their interactions with people.

Thanks for the feedback. Agreed that the platform will get adopted based on what it helps people do.

The goal is to create a direct link between the people on websites and the people building them, website maintainers.

Where that ties in with the purpose is that if all this information about how websites are doing well by their users (or not) is in public view, maintainers have an incentive to answer directly to them.

This seems like marketing for a customer feedback system.

Is it more than that?

We think so! The feedback mechanism will be public, giving people the ability to voice their feedback on a broader scale

From a company perspective I think this is a horrible idea, I don't want to push all my customers together so that they can all complain in the same place.

That would be too human. Better to keep them isolated and trapped trying to communicate through opaque dark patterns.

This is exactly why the internet is the way it is. I don't mean this as blaming you personally, it's just the incentives that exist under a capitalist system. The "problems" of the internet are structural in origin, and I'm skeptical they can be fixed with a chatbox.

I'm similarly skeptical they can be fixed with a chatbox. We're working toward a public platform where issues can be made visible on a broader scale. For those websites that would invite such feedback and be early adopters, we're creating a widget for them to do so. Eventually, people might come to expect this sort of public discourse.

It's an interesting project. Thank you for sharing. But I'm also confused as how the problem quoted below might be solved by an issue tracker:

"They have built powerful and private systems...amplifying our basest impulses and fears to drive clicks, contributing to a polarized climate where even basic facts cannot be agreed upon."

I agree it sounds interesting, but I’ll second the other commenter who asked how you’ll avoid it just being another place for misinformation to be amplified?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24769238

I don't understand what the end goal of this project really is. "civility"? To be honest, you can't really promote civility on the Internet, it really depends on what platform you're using and the userbase of this platform. And I don't see how this is connected to this feedback thing at all. But perhaps I've not truly understood the gist of this project.

It's weird that this talks a big game about being about promoting civility and dialog, but seems to be a bug reporting tool. Why would I use this one instead of one of the million others that are focused on my actual problems (checkout is broken) rather than lofty rhetoric? Alternatively, if I'm interested in the lofty rhetoric, why is a website feedback popup the solution?

Funnily enough, the More Human Internet demo about the broken checkout button is itself broken on my mobile device (I can't type "checkout" because the focus gets stolen and there is some relayout happening it seems). It doesn't work even when I request the desktop site.

It seems we need a More Testable Internet before we can build a More Human Internet ;)

Pixel 3, Android 10, Chrome 85.0.4183.127

I don't understand why the page says it wants more civility on the internet, but the demo takes me through a pretty standard trouble ticket process.

More Human, at least to me, wouldn't be an issue tracker for your end users to source your testing.

I can appreciate the idea of bringing an issue tracker for websites that are public for transparency, but I don't think this makes a website "more human" in the sense that your landing page would lead me to believe.

This is a great idea, I can't wait to see how it turns out. Really a tool that the internet has been lacking as a whole.

The demo failed. Won't accept "Checkout" as text. Where do I report this?

There's a feedback widget in the bottom right on the main page

right?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com