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Comment by __MatrixMan__ | Hacker News Reader

I mostly agree, but I do think we owe it to the normies to make our part of the web approachable.

I don't want to feel like we've fed them to the machine when maybe they wanted out and didn't know how.

There's nothing unapproachable about a 100% static site with some server-rendered navigation elements, much like livejournal was in the early 2000s. Much like HN is today.

Perfectly 'approachable' even on mobile devices.

The only thing that makes sites like this and that 'unapproachable' is stunningly high (genuine, not stat-massaged) levels of functional illiteracy.

Part of the promise of the web is democratized expression. So, not just approachable for people accessing content, but for people wanting to share. From their phone or tablet or XR device, even, since those are the computers people spend most of their time with. IME, "deploying" (I hate that word, we need another) from one of those devices is not indicative of functional illiteracy, but the lack of an approachable solution. Even just putting the instructions on a simple webpage instead of in a github readme would be a good first step.

Also that unless you play the stupid SEO games, your approachable site is never going to rank on Google. And as we know, the normies won't even scroll the search page, let alone go to page 2 (or use a better search engine). So they'll only get whatever scammy ridiculous clickbait the SEO agencies have put together for the corporate sites so they can rank for that keyword (and not even relevant keyword - ranking for any keyword is "good" now).

To be honest, I don’t give a shit about google anymore.

They don’t want to direct traffic to my website, I’ll get by on word of mouth.

For people who are accustomed to clicking "new post" there's definitely something unapproachable about mediating the relationship between your DNS registrar and your hosting provider.

I'm just saying that if it's gonna be a techies web and a non-techies web we ought to recognize that some of us tend toward toxic elitism and work to counteract it.

As much as I enjoy being a Linux snob and a person with Stack Overflow reputation and a pedantic nitpicker on Wikipedia, I don't think that those parts of me, left unchecked at scale, make for a nice community. I want other kinds of specialists around and I don't want them to feel like second class citizens because they don't know their way around a private key (or, if that's unavoidable, I want to have at least tried to teach them).

This is an honest question, please treat it as such. What is toxic about the notion that some things just aren't for everyone and that's probably ok? Is there a moral or ethical requirement to pitch to the lowest common denominator and if so why?

There's nothing toxic about acknowledging that some things are not for everyone.

I'm specifically interested in the ability to share your ideas with your peers in a way that resists tampering by third parties, provided you're willing to put in a reasonable amount of work re: learning to do so.

If we let that be the mark of a privileged class, then we might as well go back to the middle ages.

For a whole generation of gay men, the most important site on the web is Nifty, and that hardly looks slick! It's mostly Content-Type: text/plain.

> I mostly agree, but I do think we owe it to the normies to make our part of the web approachable.

You owe nothing to these traitors who actively sabotage the goals that you deem important.

They're victims of capitalism gone-astray, not traitors. If we abandon them we'll only have each other to talk to. I don't like us enough to do that.

Besides, we have to deal with the consequences of their votes, so it's in our interests to oppose whoever would manipulate them because those manipulators are threats to things that we care about. Things like privacy, and the ability to control the devices that we "own" in ways that contradict the vendor's wishes.

Your critique narrowly misses the mark. Nothing has gone astray with capitalism. This is the market doing market shit.

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