Comment by tannhaeuser | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tannhaeuser | Hacker News Reader

You know when the Web Dark Ages are? They're upon us right now. With Google, Fb extracting all value out of the extant web, github & co having "educated" developers what to expect from software download sites and depending on network effects, StackExchange and a couple other sites covering "How To" material (not meant as a SE critique) and ad prices going down, the only "rational" incentive for new content is to publish polarizing clickbait. In the 1990s and 2000s, all kinds of Wikis and collaboration sites emerged; in the early 2010s, the nascent mobile web prompted a vibrant web design community, but when was the last time you went to a new web site? The web was once meant as an easy way for self-publishing, bypassing middle-men. Turns out we've just exchanged one middleman with another. I'm especially pissed at the staged HTML5 campaign to yield power over web standards to Google. HTML5 chose a shield as a logo, but who's going to shield us from Google and WHATWG destroying the web?

Facebook is perhaps the most frightening for me, because for many people Facebook is the internet!

Something I absolutely hate is when I want to learn more about a local business and search for them on Google, but all I find is a Facebook page with minimal info - what happened to websites?!

Facebook is like AOL in the heyday: a curated contained world complete with IM. Chrome is effectively IE6 as Blink makes up a significant portion of the browser engines these days and many only test against it. Need some "Best viewed in Chrome!" gifs.

I know. It would be okay if you could view Facebook pages without an account, but since I don’t have one, all of those pages (including many friends and family members) are entirely shut out for me.

Facebook is "free" (as in it does not cost money to open a profile and post info there). Websites are not, and even if they are, not all people know how to publish something to a website. I hate it too yeah, but for non-techie people Facebook is just plain simple.

This effect is even stronger in certain countries where Facebook pays ISPs to zero-rate their pages, so many people only have access to Facebook because they can't afford to access the rest of the internet. If you think clickbait headlines are bad, imagine not having the ability to even click through to the article. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_Zero

> Facebook is perhaps the most frightening for me, because for many people Facebook is the internet!

This reminded me the times of Mozilla Netscape, IE and Firefox. I remember having conversations in /. about how for "normal people" the big blue E icon is the Internet and that grandmas of the world cried that "the internet was gone" when that icon disappeard.

Then it was Google, and now it is Facebook.

At least then it was the means of accessing the web, rather than the web itself.

> what happened to websites?!

Did you ever think that many businesses never had a website.

Even fewer had one that was up-to-date and useful.

What happened is that the masses found their way in to the web, and they did it the easiest way possible.

There is still many independent businesses that have a small website. You haven't proven that the number of such independent business websites has declined.

Most likely, the fraction of small businesses that has an online presence has increased. And this may have skewed the ratio of websites to Facebook pages.

But in absolute numbers, I doubt there's fewer small independent websites today.

This is so depressing to read.

I'm a self-taught developer with no professional experience, but for over a year I learned everything I needed to know to build a massive web application to fulfill my own need: a collaborative annotation wiki. I poured my freaking heart into it and could never get a single user.

I drew on Jimmy Wales' experiences founding Wikipedia for a lot of inspiration. But got nowhere near the traction he got. As in, I got zero users after nine months since launch. Now it's largely a portfolio piece as I try to search for a real job in tech, by leveraging the 14,000 lines of code in Python/Flask to prove that I know how to develop an app. ( https://anno.wiki is the url if you're curious).

I can only hope that the real reasons I haven't gained traction are that (a) the interface just isn't welcoming enough (I tried too hard to do progressive enhancement with almost no experience in UX) and (b) simply not advertising. After a nine month break I'm getting ready to start re-developing a new front end in React to maybe make it more welcoming to non-techie lit nerds, and then maybe target advertise on Facebook, but I just don't know.

My deepest fear is just that the web is not an interesting place anymore, and Wikipedia just wouldn't get a foothold now, and that's why I can't. I just don't know.

Some comments on your wiki:

1. The contrast is way too low, I can barely read it.

2. The typesetting for Hamlet looks really nice.

3. Why would I want to use this?

Thank you for looking at it!

The basic idea was (is) to create a definitive resource for annotations on literature. Annotated information on any text is spread sloppily across different editions, from Oxford World Classics to Norton, and generally don't focus on the same issues. Much of it is commentary on textual issues, or only identify certain things. Entire passages will be detailed in one copy, but not in another.

Basically I just feel like there should be a definitive resource for deep reading. An ever more detailed pool of analytical interpretation. It's a dream, I just don't know that others are as interested in it as me.

There are certain resources, like Infinite Jest Page by Page[1] that were essentially a single book version of what I'm trying to accomplish and were super effective, but not very normalized or formalized. I really just hope to do something like that, on a larger scale, with more literature. My dream would be to also include copyright texts, viewable either through a token provided by a purchase of the text from the publisher, or by just searching for lines to see annotations. I really just want to create a super massive body of exhaustive and quasi-definitive annotations to all of the world's literature.

And yeah, the color scheme is apparently not very popular. It's really just my own implementation of Ethan Schoonover's light version of solarized[0], which is supposed to be what it's like to read a book in the shade on a bright summer day. But however romantic that sounds, it's not very popular.

[0]: https://ethanschoonover.com/solarized/ [1]: https://infinitejest.wallacewiki.com/david-foster-wallace/in...

More like, reading text printed in white directly on the blazing surface of the sun. ;)

You might find some interested parties in academia. I happen to have met a postgraduate once whose entire thesis was in the form of annotations. Apparently it's a big deal in lit academia, maybe you could become their Arxiv. Maybe when it comes time to market you could cold email a bunch of grad students.

I don’t mind the contrast, the design looks pretty good to me but I don’t get what it’s for. It looks like a cross between Reddit and Wikipedia, and I bet most people go “huh” and move on.

Congrats on building something. How about making landing page explaining what it is? Also you need to work on UI with some designer (I have similar problem when building apps)

Thank you! A landing page is something I've been thinking a lot about recently. I took a long break on it and am now getting back into it. I think I'm going to relegate this ui to old.anno.wiki and rebuild the front end in React. Will definitely be putting a landing page on there.

The truth is that millions of people can, just like you, develop an app like this and the world only needs a few of those. Hence, there are thousands of failed attempts just like yours. It resembles the writing/music market, where there's way more creators than the public's appetite for their creations.

I'm not that big on Google criticism.

I dislike targeted advertising, because I find it useless. I like context advertising much more: When I browse X then I find ads related to X sometimes useful. I use some of their products like gmail and drive sometimes. But for browsing and searching I use Firefox and DDG.

But as a web-dev I dislike Apple/Safari. They have become MS/IE 2.0. My not so generous assumption is that they try to restrict the web to make their app platform more appealing.

This issue is different from the things we criticize about Google. They neither restrict me as a user nor as a developer. I can avoid using their stuff and I can avoid aggressively targeted ads (in fact they have a psychologically negative impact on me).

As for personal sites and blogs: I still very much read personal blogs. The quality (whatever that means, but you know...) of articles on those is generally much higher than on medium/dev.to or whatever platform.

In fact there is so much good content on small/personal sites, that I don't have time to read it all.

> But as a web-dev I dislike Apple/Safari. They have become MS/IE 2.0.

This sentiment is inexact and incorrect. MS/IE was a problem once it achieved market dominance. Safari has never achieved such dominance.

More accurate is a comparison using Netscape 1.x-4.x and MSIE =< 6. Allow me to explain.

Prior to MSIE dominating with IE 6, MS was engaged in its campaign to "embrace, extend, and extinguish" Netscape. This is similar to where Google Chrome is now.

Google Chrome rolls in not-yet-ratified web "standards" before anyone, including Safari, has a chance to respond. Thereby, Google Chrome increasingly establishes its dominance.

Safari is in the position of Netscape, with a codebase that is increasingly perceived as inadequate when compared to Google Chrome.

Of course, such a comparison can only go so far.

My main point is that Safari is not flouting or disregarding established W3C/WHATWG web standards but, rather, being very careful about how it implements ratified standards, something that takes time.

Google Chrome, on the other hand, bakes in anything and everything to secure its advantage in the browser market, just as MS did with IE when Netscape was still around.

Once Netscape died, MSIE 6 was the problem.

First of all thank you for relativising my one-sided comment. Let me clarify what I mean a bit.

I agree with you on your arguments about Chrome. I don't support Chrome specific features. They even have broken things in the past.

My perspective on this is that iOS locks out non-Safari browsers, so users are forced to use it and as a developer I'm forced to make workarounds for it.

With IE11 I don't have this problem anymore. We're at a stage now where I can convince my clients of "This is a browser, which is losing official support soon. I can make this feature work/look better on IE11 if you really want, which costs me this much time". IE is being faded out just by the fact that more new stuff looks worse and works worse.

With Safari this is not the case. There is no "Oh this website works better with Firefox, you should install it" which is likely the biggest factor for browser adoption and my gut feeling says that Apple knows and uses this.

This particular statement seems questionable:

> My main point is that Safari is not flouting or disregarding established W3C/WHATWG web standards but, rather, being very careful about how it implements those standards which takes time.

In some cases their actions simply don't make sense, except if you look at it from a perspective of protecting their iOS App platform. For example breaking localStorage in the name of privacy (which is ridiculously paradox) and not supporting obvious, simple UX improvements like scroll-anchoring.

Safari is in some cases stricter/more standards compliant than Firefox and especially Chrome. But in some cases like above the feature intersection of Firefox and Chrome is the one that makes the most sense for the web.

> iOS locks out non-Safari browsers, so users are forced to use it and as a developer I'm forced to make workarounds for it.

> In some cases their actions simply don't make sense, except if you look at it from a perspective of protecting their iOS App platform.

Agreed 100%!

My earlier comment was in the context of macOS and might have been very different had I also considered iOS/iPadOS.

iOS and iPadOS are restrictive and mobile Safari somewhat slows innovation. Your objections regarding mobile Safari's deficiencies are worth considering. Thank you. I also agree Apple does this to protect the iOS App platform (I might just say "iOS platform"). Reasonable arguments exist about why Apple's lock on mobile Safari is good and why it is bad. (I personally think Apple could do better here, but I am not knowledgeable enough to comment further.)

Apple doesn't need dominance to hold back the shared web while driving forward its proprietary platform at full speed, it only needs veto power, which Safari-by-any-other-name on iOS gives it. I don't want Google to be able to just do whatever they want, either, but if Apple really cared about improving the web, they would be better known for making their own proposals for improvement than for mainly blocking others' proposals.

What goes around, comes around. Before IE destroyed Netscape, Netscape did it to Mosaic. Do you remember where the name Mozilla came from?

A parent comment is calling Chrome/Blink as IE6, but for the is evident that is actually Apple (yes, the whole of Apple) the new IE6 force.

The IE6 concept i think is now something that transcends just the browser, because it describes very well a trick to maintain market dominance.

Once you get into a position of platform control, as Microsoft did in the IE6 days, together with Windows.. and note here how you have to circle around the whole platform, not just the browser to get the whole picture. To maintain your control, you keep others from telling what the next steps for that particular platform should be.

So its clear to me that its Apple with its OS market share that through Safari will try everything they can to stop the Web to become a competing platform to their "kits". And in their case, this strategy is more clear, when they dont let any other browser engine to be used except the one they control and will never let to become a competing platform to their own app kit.

Because they know that once developers create more multi-platform apps, their distinction as something different, unique and better starts to vanish.

They will play the card of security, and about how they are thinking in they users well-being (and this is whats Apple does best). And of course that "for the sake of security" will be also right, because more features means more ways to exploit. So this is a 'joker card' that they can always use to resort to some excuse their users will believe.

Chrome for instance also use a trick, but its the total reverse of 'IE6', they put in a lot of features, and with this 'platform bloat' its pretty hard for the others engines to follow, requiring a lot of engineering and money to keep playing this expensive and exhaustive game,

People complaining about Blink here, didn't see that other players let go the infernal mission to keep their web engines in sync with the "modern standards" that are mostly proposed by Google, and where almost only them have the engineering and money resources to spend in this "platform bloat" game.

>But as a web-dev I dislike Apple/Safari. They have become MS/IE 2.0. My not so generous assumption is that they try to restrict the web to make their app platform more appealing.

Whatever Apple is doing with Safari, it seems much more resource efficient than Chrome on OS X. (Firefox is somewhere in the middle). Chrome can become unusable under a normal load, while Safari almost never does no matter how much I abuse it. Safari seems to hibernate background windows and tabs much better.

If the tradeoff for accomplishing that resource efficiency is not supporting all of the edge case features Google puts in its browsers, I'm ok with that. It's nice to have that option.

To add, a lot of practices that were considered "spyware" or "malware" during the web dark ages have become normalized as growth-hacks or the cost of using free (as in beer) software.

> They're upon us right now.

That was my first thought too, when I read the headline.

I assume you were being rhetorical - but it definitely still happens. Radiohead's website redesign being the last one I personally experienced earlier this year https://www.radiohead.com/library/#ir (mostly sharing because it's great).

Add to that a wast amount of shitty articles written fore the sole purpose of SEO.

This for me is what has really decreased the quality of the Internet. Geocities was full of really good articles about things like electronics instructions manuals, DIYs and whatnot.

Nowadays the Internet is full of spam disguised as content, but really not containing any content. The majority of the content you see on the web is actually written by marketing agencies, and even "white papers", "case studies" or other similar articles are nothing more than marketing material.

Our privacy is their serfdom to profit off of.

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