Peak Web Has Passed

It's so much worse than punch the monkey ads though. For example, W3C Service Workers lets every news website you've ever visited install a daemon on your computer without your consent. chrome://serviceworker-internals/ That can happen either by you choosing to go to the website, possibly by prowling the HN "New" page and bouncing, or possibly some other website loading Russia Today in an iframe, so now you've got Russia Today's service worker skulking in the background for all time. Service Workers MiTM your HTTP requests based on prefixes and they phone home every day. They're the reason sites like Facebook can show you notifications even though you don't even have a Facebook tab open. They've got a kill switch over your data where for example if a game author uses service workers to build a "local" game then they can remotely wipe your save data. Worst part is browsers don't provide us the freedom to turn the things off. I'm not even sure if extensions are allowed to block them.

There are things the author overlooks. Primarily, the incredibly massive amount of information and services that has gone online in the past 10 years. From taxing your car to entire digitized libraries of scientific magazines that are there now and weren't before.

But how accessible are they? These days it's hard to even find what you're looking for, and if you do, you probably have to pay handsomely for it.

And the interfaces... Oh god the interfaces... For a long time I thought it was my fault that I could read less and less of the content in any given page.

But loading a news website takes like 10 clicks and 45 seconds of irrelevant garbage loading. You have to ignore the self-playing video(s) at the corner of the screen and the animated ads. Even the articles themselves are written in a way the either keep you reading for longer or redirect you to other articles. It's just incredibly bad for everyone involved. I'm dying for a plain old HTML internet again. Just plain text, hyperlinks and optional media like photos and videos when needed. Combine this with the power of modern machine learning and the result could be incredible, but instead it's an ongoing nightmare.

I feel this too, almost daily. the "need" for web browsers to provide more than just the data I want to find/read frustrates me. I have no issues with reasonably placed adverts for content that is relevant. the performance of my pc is not so much an issue for me, as much as the continued stream of advertising/trackng/bloat/images/etc that are attached to the most basic of sites. while HN is as much of a social network I am willing to join, I do miss the days when email/newsgroups/irc/rss were capable of almost every task I needed online. email more and more feels like an invasion of privacy, a distraction from what I actually want when online. newsgroups were great as it was just a shitty text stream and I could read it without bells and whistles. irc was the same. rss I miss the most as the glory days of everything having an rss feed and it being text heavy, advertising light and focused are gone. who wants to be penpals in 2021 with me?

I was clicking another cookie banner today and had the same thought

reasonable post about certain site areas like banking etc being unchanged really, and the increasing landscape of bloat and downward spiral of dev options, but when it comes to using adblockers etc, I don't get it still. Why is it always the people who use adblockers are so complainy? You don't need an adblocker. You're visiting the wrong sites. Those news sites with unbearble ads? why are you on them? Go elsewhere for your news. Twitter ads? sure, they get annoying interjecting, but if you say "I don't like this ad" they mostly disappear/change. Same with instagram. It just takes a bit of training and then you won't remember/notice them. I am connected to the web constantly to get information and a wide array of it, but that doesn't mean I need to surf the whole array of the web because yes, a ton of those commerical areas are horrible. So I hardly notice ads/they are interfering really. Not enough to let it get to me. I can bear 5 seconds on an ad on YouTube once in awhile and for the most part you shouldn't be watching that much YouTube to begin with directly on the site - consume them via twitter and other embeds as needed.

Anyways, adblockers. Bleh.

And to the other stuff, the creative emergence of the web was glorious but then it moved with the internet in general to a more mainstream, utility use and of course commercial glut came with that. Getting back to more of the 'art' of web design and more personal blogs etc as everyone continually mentions for last number of years would be nice, but where we're at as far as technology and the 'resource' of the web is just part of the evolution and growth to the billions of people it reaches now.

Jup, so are my thoughts too...

But the web can become a lot more usable even on a raspberry pi 1: Just ditch the graphical browser and install something like w3m or links...

We've just gone from nothing to everything we have now in the space of 30 years, more or less. To complain that progress seems to suggest the author can't see the forest for the trees. Change goes in fits and starts, it's not constant. We've just experienced the most massive change since the industrial era and a little time for humanity to take stock and perfect the edges seems warranted, though I'd posit that now there is massive change happening in other areas, such as logistics as is mentioned. Granted, the money in advertising seems gratuitous and the results excessive but I expect this will transform soon into something even more sophisticated.