Hacker News Reader

Comment by badsectoracula | Hacker News Reader

It is also possible that stuff are getting worse though. After all i remember friends of mine who were in university raging on how bloated the web was around 2000 and i'm 99% certain they weren't middle-aged men disguised as teenagers :-P. If anything i don't remember knowing anyone above 25y back then who even cared about web stuff.

After all having some people see and complain about things getting worse doesn't mean that said things will stop getting worse if most people don't care or even noticing them getting worse to do something about it.

View on HN

When you look back, you can notice patterns: Something new and amazing comes out and it promises to take the humanity to a new age. At first it is fuelled by enthusiasm where believers work for free on it just to make it great and pay their bills by working for money on the old-school stuff. Their prime motivation is not profit.

Then this thing starts becoming profitable in the sense of bringing street cred and money and new kind of people rush in with their new ideas how to use this new thing. These new people don't share the same ideas with the original believers but they know how to build machinery around it to make it profitable and appeal for the masses. The new thing that was supposed to change the world becomes a concentrated and optimised version of the things before it.

The believers then become bitter purists and try to fight the new order by disowning the current technologies or methods and cater for the niche hipster elitist circles when the rest continues do their thing.

You can see it in everything, you can see it in printing press you can see it in Radio, you can see it in TV, you can see it in things that are not media: cars, clothing, shaving, coffee - everything.

Things don't become worse, they just become mainstream and that mass adoption is run not by purists but by people with no regard to the original ideals of the technology and masses love it this way and stays this way until its made obsolete by something else.

The feature where the cpu fans run after a webpage displays a table with about 30 items in it is pretty swell. Others might cry w.t.f. and avoid using such bad software as much as possible.

The feature where Firefox repeatedly changed your preferences and helpfully showed PDF with the JavaScript jank was pretty terrible. Changing that preference a third time won't make it any more charming. Yes, yes, the cattle are supposed to be OK with the "movement" of their cheese, move along now, nothing to see here.

> ... clothing, shaving, coffee - everything

Uh, no. Coffee in America started out cheap and for the masses (following some sort of Tea Party, I think it was) and then even more for the masses (now with pre-ground beans, instead of using the mill in the stock of your Sharps Carbine) and only very recently has there been a movement towards not-mainstream "hipster elitist circle" coffee made by purists.

> Things don't become worse

This is not what I've read; for example, British church organ making went through a rough patch around the decade of 1900 or so. With a little study of history more such examples could doubtless be found. One might even be optimistic that the modern web might pull itself out of the "big miasma"[1] that it has sunk into. But if the powers that be are blind to criticism, and go on about "tooling issues" or whatever, eh, it might be a while before changes can be made for the better.

By the way, Arnold Toynbee said some pretty funny things about blind elites.

[1] gemini://diesenbacher.net/

We aren't complaining about cool new features that the normies like though. We are complaining about the fact that some of us have gigabit per second bandwidth and still need multiple seconds to load and render a page. We are complaining about the fact that it is literally infeasible to build a web engine from scratch at this point, by anyone in the world. The problem isn't catering to every day people, the problem is praying on their ignorance and forcing them and us to tolerate a worse tool because they don't know any better. And when I say don't know any better, I'm not saying "they'd use Linux if they knew better" I'm saying that they legitimately don't know that over half (and I'm being generous) the data they download to render a news article is shit they're not trying to access but they're paying for, they think it just has to be that way for some nerdy technical reason they don't understand.

This is not about ideals, this is about foisting crap on the world that literally nobody wants or needs.

"original ideals" is a bit of a fantasy. Technology has always been used for both good and bad (and which is which is is subjective). It's human nature.

We always complain about bloat and slowness, then we build faster machines and networks and bigger storage, and software and content promptly expand to fill it all up and make it feel sluggish again.

For a chuckle try running old software on a modern computer (fire up dos box and run WordPerfect or something) and be amazed at the speed of the thing. that is why we built a faster computer :)

We've made machines so much faster that a lot of old software is unusable because its too fast.

One of my favorite examples: Lego Island's driving mechanic is tied to frame rate, so on a modern machine tapping left or right will fling your car 90+ degrees: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2CmqbccCqI0

That's the Turbo button on older Intel machines, that could slow your processor roughly to the speed of a 8086.

I discovered this playing the old DOS RPG Drakkhen, where there was a tower with a shark in its moat, circling around. It would jump and eat your characters if they happened to cross the bridge at the wrong moment. The funny thing is its speed was based on the processor clock (the game was released in 1989) and if you played the game with a faster processor, the shark would be too fast to be avoided. Push the turbo button, reduce clock speed, problem solved.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com