Comment by rektide | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rektide | Hacker News Reader

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You should have a user-agent that respects your preference & lets you do that! These are good options that should be easy to make happen! You should be able to blanketly turn off these capabilities. And we should have protocols so you can tell websites you have these stated preferences, so they know it's not going to happen. We need to mature & iterate the capabilities/permissions negotiations that happen on the web. Yes.

What I hope we can agree on is that your desires are minimal. You have a big anti-feature urge for how you want to experience the web. (I respect that, and am in ways partial!) But there's other people out here who want other behaviors. And since it's obvious the two don't have to be mutually exclusive, I hope we can talk about how to get you what you want, without necessarily imposing your strictures upon everyone else.

Alas, your initial comment has a bit of zeal, forged in exclusionary dogmatisms:

> Anything Apple can do to discourage web apps and force more development of native apps I'm grateful for.

I dunno. I think every brand wants to spam me 100x more than I want to be spammed.

There is little appreciation in the industry for how people feel about this. I think the very idea of Pocket in Firefox drives a lot of people crazy, not because it is bad, but we are so used to vendors harassing us with crap products we just don’t want. Had they called it “Firefox Super Bookmarks” or something like that and not introduced a new off-brand they might have bypassed our defenses and we might have used it and liked it.

Microsoft schools us all by destroying very good products (OneNote before it went 100% cloud) by trying to shove it under our fingernails (three taskbar icons, added as a “printer”, etc.). Trouble is it normalizes this behavior for the rest of the industry which doesn’t see the value destruction Microsoft creates for itself since Windows and Office survive despite it all.

I want Github to send me notifications when Github Actions finishes running a build and it's broken.

Presumably a lot of people do.

There's just so many small & interesting possibilities. We should embrace & be excited for good uses. But negativity amplifies & builds, is a common thread, where-as possibility is dispersed & uncentral. Having positive moments is structurally difficult & society at large is suffering for this great deficit of willingness.

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