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Comment by greenhearth | Hacker News Reader

The tech is cool, but some of the language is so cringy. For example, the statement "websites are social constructs" makes zero sense. You could say that websites are material objects of a symbolic network of computer languages, like physical paper money is a material, fetishized object of the social construct of money. Websites themselves are not constructed socially. Maybe the author means how websites are perceived, or conventions of web tech itself, is constructed socially?

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I don't have the time to get into a hardcore semiotics discussion at the moment, but basically I'm using words in the ways that normal people use words, which generally treats perception of the conventions of a thing as the thing itself. People do this mostly for convenience.

A website is a social construct because it can only function by the agreement of everyone involved (i.e., we all agree on how to parse HTML).

The individual site may be constructed individually (maybe) but it can only work if the society of people-who-use-the-internet all agree to follow a series of conventions about how websites work; you can't start using \<soul\> instead of \<body\> and expect everything to work as normal, because the reason the \<body\> tag is used to define the body of a page is because we needed a way to make sure people can use a webpage without having to define an entire new language for each one.

Sure but that's as useful as saying shit is social construct because we as humans decided to name it that. Technically true, practically it's vapid useless speech that doesn't bring anything useful to the discussion aside from person using the term feeling smart

Sounds like waffle

Shit is not a social construct. A human being can produce shit without the cooperation of any other human, no matter what language that human uses to describe it. Bathrooms are a social construct; we had to all agree that it's not acceptable to shit in the sink.

Hey mate, you need to try a web browser. I found my experience using the Internet greatly improved when I stopped trying to parse the html documents myself.

I don't agree with this at all. What makes one set of frequency changes over a wire a website and another a voice call? A big pile of socially constructed concepts, from written language to Unicode to TCP and HTML. The electrical impulses are physically real; the website is a construct and makes sense only in the context of society.

Wow, NoraCodes! I just finished your Rust book! It's great and you're a hero!

But no, a website is not a social construct because you don't have to have a society to have a website. I can have two machines connected and host an html file on one of them and stare at it on the other one all by myself and it will still be a website on a web! No contractual agreement is necessary!

But anyway, it's amazing that you posted on my comment! I am a huge fan!

You can downvote all you want; this is the truth

Talking about cringe, the furry stuff does in my opinion also negatively impact impression of the article. Also I distinctly remembered extremely similar blog written by someone with different name, but apparently author changed it yet again.

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