Hacker News Reader

Author here! I largely agree with you.

I love Del Taco. I love the speed and consistency I get from franchises.

At the same time, my best friend recently sent me a picture of a fancy swordfish dish he cooked up, and I'm bummed that we don't get to see each other as often as we used to.

And as my daughter grows older, I'm becoming a bit frustrated at how difficult it is to purchase foods that were not doused in neurotic pesticides. So I'm learning how to grow our food.

Growing food isn't easy, but the farming community is cool, and I've been having a good time of it.

And so sometimes I wish building a website could be more like learning farming, and I think it could be.

> Who cares if websites look the same?

A lot of books look the same too, but that works pretty well for me tbh. I do not find books to be homogeneous as a result.

Authors like Mark Z. Danielewski do more with the layout in their books than most and I love them for it. I like seeing people try out different ideas and do things that might be considered less-than-ideal to view

We're probably past the point in the web where formative experiments with layout are useful for most people, and most situations can be handled with a light CMS. That still leaves room for massive variance and personal control. Even just linktree levels of customization have a lot more spice than facebook. I think current big tech is still reacting to myspace allowing users to write raw CSS, and there's a lot of space for a swing back, especially given the current web's focus on "creators".

You can have all web sites look the same by setting reader view as default in your browser. It is a great improvement for browsing the web, both on desktop and phone.

If somebody invented a "forum view" to make all forums look the same on our browsers, then I think the circle would be complete. It shouldn't be too difficult either, since most run on similar software.

You should learn about the Gemini protocol! It's an alternative to HTTPS that uses a document markup language similar to Markdown instead of HTML, and uses a deliberately simplified, feature-frozen protocol with the explicit goal that anyone should be able to write their own Gemini browser "in a weekend". No scripting or styling support, just documents with links and images in them.

Here are some informative webpages on the topic, neither of them mine:

https://geminiprotocol.net/docs/faq.gmi

https://github.com/skyjake/lagrange

I think the Gemini stuff is really neat, and I've already experimented with Lagrange and Kristall browsers. However, the information I'm interested in isn't published on those networks, and I think that's true for most of us. Reader view is a seamless way for me to have control of how the web is presented to me. An RSS client + browser with reader mode is the perfect combo for most online stuff that is information (and not function, like an e-shop).

As I understand it, forum functions are not a feature of the Gemini protocol?

Forum functionality is possible; the protocol allows for user input in the form of prompting the user to enter a string and sending that to the server before loading the page. Example: gemini://chat.mozz.us/

> HN, Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, SMS, etc. all have a limited range of expression through form. Somehow we get by.

Disagreement exists as to how well this is going for us. (cf., content collapse)

> Webdevs need to get over themselves, and the wider world needs to stop letting them get by with (or encouraging) this kind of narcissism.

What a presumptuous statement! Authoritarian, even. It's one thing for someone else's website, such as HN, Reddit, Wikipedia, etc., to impose a homogeneous form on posts submitted by guests on the site. It's quite another thing to assert that "the wider world" should "stop letting [independent webdevs]" deviate from a similar standard of homogeneity.

If you don't like the appearance of someone else's webpage, maybe just don't go to that webpage?

Ironic take for a comment that exists only as a consequence of what started out as someone complaining about how boring other people's websites look; there's no way out of this—either you agree with the ability to criticize, in which case mine is fair, or you disagree, in which case it's not but then yours isn't either and neither you nor anyone else should bother yourselves or others about the sameness of anyone's websites (instead, focus on not going to the ones that bother you so much in their sameness).

(And choosing to read my comment as an "authoritarian" imposition on "independent webdevs"—not actually stated anywhere? How presumptuous.)

I'm going to put a tiled JPEG of an artist's rendition of the night sky in the background of my blog, to assert my liberties and affirm my right to be silly and have fun