At what period of time was the web supposed to be at its best? In the 90s there was little valuable content and security was nonexistent. Today there is far more real content than ever. Some wish I would install an app, but I don't, and it still works. I've had a website running a business since 2002. It's no problem. I wish people would grow up and realise that things don't stay the same.
Another absolutely off the rails site full of perpetual nonsense crazy town that gets posted 8 times a month. It's ridiculous that there's no noospheric defense or warning when the source is fucking ape shit wild. Ever submission has to be re-litigated again, as though they deserve full credibility.
See also reason.com, quilette.com, I dunno, a half dozen others.
Yet, it's easier than ever to build a website of your own. The web is still out there, but Google can't find it. I think Google's incentives no longer align with my own so I am increasingly de-Googling my life.
It might crawl it, but without tons of "SEO" it will never show it on any results page. "Google can't find it" is shorthand for "Google is useless for finding it".
Exactly. The web is full of niche, high quality websites that aren't playing the SEO game. Google buries these so deep in the results (or chooses not to index them) that they effectively don't exist.
First JS now AI: "a wall between". Both JS and AI are for context loosers (you can't have memex). Clue: you don't need JS - but advertisers do, you had to use it because browsers were broken and are kept broken ( https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/blink-dev/c/zIg2K... etc.).
Faster JS engine is irrevelant, but extensions as we had before in Firefox, sacrified for that and Google money, wasn't.
It's absolutely false that JS only serves advertisers. JS is absolutely crucial for simple things like date pickers or popovers, or replacing parts of the page without reloading the entire thing.
It's also absolutely ridiculous to think that faster JS engines are irrepevant.
There is no point in trying to convince users of this website that JS is useful. They will remain fundamentally opposed because they don't like the bloat and abuse. They turn a deaf ear to the fact that users demand certain functionality that is only possible via JavaScript.
(.. because they can't do it with Style (lossless) or something else and that's because browsers are kept broken mostly (so it's not possible at all or without strings attached) or they don't know how - neither why they can't find no other ways and how the one only left for them disables any other uses than some programmer (that just happened to be there for a moment without any reflection) vision, neither think about it ?
Yes, there are cases when JS shine - but the rest are just patches.. that need patches.. if anyone follow.
Yes, it keep some ecosystem alive and good for business - but it's not the interface a thing to take away my focus, neither one more level, "AI", doing any different. )
Yeah this is pretty much exactly the take I'm talking about. People who use JavaScript do so without thinking because they are thoughtless morons, making sites harder to use for the tech elite. They create more work because the site will break soon, which is good for business.
> JS is absolutely crucial for simple things like [..] replacing parts of the page without reloading the entire thing.
not at all
- but you couldn't just.. use iframes because of IE 5.5 bug of ignoring their z-index and displaying always on top of everything - so: either JS to fix that by rewriting content to normal DIV, or the lowest common denominator for all browsers: XMLHttpRequest from.. Microsoft - mind, they had no clue about WWW at that moment - and were promoting Active Desktop and ActiveX technologies which had different purpose - XMLHttpRequest wiht all that mess came out from there.. ( https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions//ms53750... ).
JS disabled: movietitle TAB E [english] Enter - done.
JS enabled: movietitle TAB and.. react for nothing but.. SPACE or.. ENTER to open, now you can scroll with arrows (can't just press E WTF!? ), select with SPACE, press TAB ENTER - nothing, TAB ENTER and you hit.. an advert ! (fanfares) (there is no way to enter SEARCH with keyboard really ??) - what for ?
iframes ARE part of XHTML and The Web ( -> w3.org ). JS isn't - but it's making that wall..
( ..in big part by empowering young, unexperienced or resume driven developers when making The Web painful to use - if I would like it, how you could call that relation other than.. SM ? )
The article's top comment is definitely worthwhile:
Jeff Cunningham
16 hours ago
I have a web-server that has been running since 2008. It started out as a vanity website, written back in the days when a large number of websites belonging to individuals, before the monetization of the web. As that process developed, privacy issues began to rear up and my site went through a series of contractions, to the point were I almost shut it down. But it remained useful to me for several reasons. First, I had written a number of web applications that were very useful to me, personally. Writing a computer application for particular platforms takes a lot of work and must be constantly monitored for compatibility with continually evolving operating system changes. Web applications put that burden on browsers, who provide an applications programming interface which works (pretty much) across various platforms. My applications work on my native Linux machines, my wife’s Mac, our phones and tablets, etc. They enable me to interact with my own records, resources, references, stream my own music, transfer large files to and from wherever I am in the world – without Google, Amazon, Facebook, or any other corporate or government entity looking over my shoulder.
As security became an issue, I changed the site to require authorization to access most of it. The existence of most of it became invisible without authorization. But I left a small number of publicly accessible pages on the site. I had a pretty decent weather station I’d built and had online since I started the site. And I published some codes I’d written that a few people found interesting and led to some email discussions (and one exchange wherein a Chinese student tried to get me to solve his take-home Lisp programming final exam problem for him).
I regularly monitored my server logs – a record of the request traffic it receives. As the monetization of search took off my server traffic exploded. A large amount of it was the big search engines – both foreign and domestic. It got to be ridiculous. In any given period, only a very small amount of the traffic was from “real people” (me, my family and friends, and an occasional stranger steered there mysteriously by search); all the rest was search engines scraping the site – which changed rarely. There are methods one uses which are supposed to control them somewhat, and the big commercial domestic ones seem to obey them. Most of the foreign ones just ignore them.
But the biggest growth in traffic I saw from about the mid-twenty-teens was from hackers and from commercial operations looking for ways to exploit my site or data and sell it. I spent a lot of time learning how to track and classify these and the hackers. The emergence of geolocation techniques (which use multiple world-wide servers to triangulate actual latitude, longitude locations of IP sources based on transit delays) helped tremendously in this endeavor. China, Russia, the UK, and, curiously, locations around Washington, D.C., turn out to be the largest single sources of attacks on my U.S. located site. But there are waves of attack origin that temporarily roll through (lately, Ukraine, Hanoi, Tehran, Sweden and Hamburg, Germany have been prominent).
How my comment here ties in with this article is this: a while ago I relaxed my constraints on the big search engines. And what I discovered was that, while they came back around and sniffed at it, they just moved on without bothering to index it. They simply don’t care about individual sites like mine anymore. They would if I was posting ads on it. Or cross-linking to sites that posted ads. Or selling something. Or buying something. But just to put up information about various topics without any of that? Sorry, not interesting anymore. I am a non-entity to Goggle (in more ways than one). They just are not interested in the content anymore – not if will not be useful to generate clicks to their advertisers.
And I realized that this is what I’ve been noticing with search for quite sometime. It is very difficult to find non-monetized websites with search. There was a time when you could if you dove deep – meaning kept going through page after page of links. Eventually you’d get past the heavy advertising and find a few real, interesting topical pages. Now, after several pages the search engines simply say you’ve reached the end of their search results. The end of the Internet! It used to be a joke. Now it’s a reality. At a time when there has never been more websites online it has never been shallower.
Last edited 16 hours ago by Jeff Cunningham
To summarize: Google no longer cares about search users as customers, but rather treats them as a tool for extracting money from their ad business customers.
This is 80% nonsense - 2008 is not the halcyon days of the WWW, and most of the claims here are between strange and conspiratorial. I award you no points and may God have mercy on your soul.
