I’m losing my love for the web because it’s boring, not because of how it’s built. I am also guilty of this and contribute to the problem at my day job, but taking a limitless method of creation and churning out business apps and marketing sites until they inundate everything we do is a shame.
May get into a different kind of programming, web dev just feels uninspired to me right now. Note: this is my world on the web right now, I’m sure others disagree and have another opinion. Loving something is subjective.
Funny, I think the stringly-typed-ness is great. Turns out that’s actually a common aspect of a lot of software I really admire, like Unix pipes and spreadsheets.
I don't mind it when the data being pushed through is less-structured. Once it gets past a certain point, I just want types backing everything up and double-checking my work as I go.
What's great about Jquery is that it doesnt change. Nor does PHP . The worlds most popular sites still run on both.
Many years ago i found a jquery plugin for drawing a signature on a tablet. It still works. This would have never happened with any mobile app framework or any of the 'post-post-post-modern' html frameworks.
I love the web more than any time. It's 2024 and it's the only truly open platform, where you can plug in your thing and just leave it there. Every other platform is in a competition about who will be the biggest a-hole
People are responding to what you said about programming languages, but I think this was the more important point:
> I love the web more than any time. It's 2024 and it's the only truly open platform, where you can plug in your thing and just leave it there.
That’s what made me want to learn how to make websites in the 90’s as a child: you can acquire a domain, make a website, put it out there without having to pass through any gatekeeper’s filters, and it’s OUT THERE for everyone. That’s still true today, and no other platform is like that.
The beauty of the web is that the underlying browers are incredibly backwards compatible. If you don't change jQuery or your post-post-post-modern framework, it's very likely continue to work just as they ever did.
> What's great about Jquery is that it doesnt change. Nor does PHP .
PHP introduced several breaking changes in recent history and is continuing to do so for any foreseeable future.
New versions come out in a galloping fashion and old ones are phased out just as fast.
Personally I've already become allergic to forwards-incompatible churn, which many ecosystems are proudly introducing at a high pace, but deprecating and breaking old code regularly on top of it is exceptionally painful.
> Somewhere, someone decided that you must build your websites a certain way, or you're doing it wrong™ and some people have gone as far as to actually wish harm on people for the tools they decided to use to build their websites.
When was this ever not true? I remember people who wrote HTML by hand deriding those who used WYSIWYG editors 25 years ago, though perhaps not wishing them harm.
More hated than those editors were proprietary plugins like Flash, Java, Microsoft's not quite compatible version of Java, ActiveX, and the like. Some sites were unusable without a very specific configuration of client software, almost certainly requiring Windows. They were usually painfully bandwidth-intensive as well in an era when the average connection was about 0.05 Mbps.
There are lots of things to worry about the state of the web (and the wider internet) but this is not it.
I do dislike websites that require JS unnecessarily, but I just do not read them. Most people do not even know what framework you use. It comes down to "a few people are nasty about what I do". That is unavoidable if you do anything public.
Pfft.. JavaScript is usefull. Its not my fault that its heavly abused or even generated, turining into bloat. Just take a look at my homepage: http://borg.uu3.net/~borg/
It needs JavaScript, but will work on anything.. from IE 6.0 or FF 2.0 upward.
It simple, clean and fast. And imo looks nice :)
I mostly want to read information. Your site is clean and fast BUT its slower to navigate than a list of links and only works for a niche audience. It is also hard to use on a phone browser.
I mean this without any derision: who cares? There’s nothing wrong with building something for a niche audience. Yes, if we were evaluating it as a business or government website, we could point out usability and accessibility issues with the design. But it’s not any of those things; it’s OP’s personal homepage, and they seem pretty happy with it.
I agree there is no problem building something like this if your aim is to either please yourself, or to reach a niche audience. I have a webapp that only I use.
Most information websites (even things like personal blogs) are trying to reach a wider audience, so its not what most people should be doing.
He can. Literally no one is stopping anyone from building a website however they like. No one is putting a gun to anyone's head and forcing them to use a framework or a SPA. All of that is intended for enterprise and business anyway. Use JQuery and a simple grid if you want. Or just plain HTML. Or run off to geminispace and scream into the void.
Yes, people will criticize. Unfortunately you can't stop people from criticizing. That's no reason to just give up, that's just life.
> Unfortunately you can't stop people from criticizing.
Yes you can. Instead of ignoring it signaling that their criticism was acceptable, you can push back on it and remind them it's irrelevant and unwanted and they should probably just keep it to themselves.
Then more people will maybe stop and think before deciding to blast someone for not following some arbitrary rules you made up in your own head for how someone else should build websites and apps.
>Instead of ignoring it signaling that their criticism was acceptable, you can push back on it and remind them it's irrelevant and unwanted and they should probably just keep it to themselves.
Unfortunately, that won't stop many people, it will only make them double down.
I don’t know about that! A lot of my blog posts are pretty technical, and intended for a narrower audience than “people who understand how to use a CLI”. One of the best bits of writing advice I’ve seen is that you should write with one specific person in mind — like, an actual human being you know — which helps you prevent yourself from going too broad or too deep.
Obviously a homepage is not a blog post and the goal there is different. But OP gets to decide what that goal is — and again, they seem pretty happy with how it turned out!
It's unreadable on my phone. The font is microscopic, like 0.5pt. Dark mode is awful. Light grey on black makes it even worse. Firefox Reader mode is disabled. The pop up keyboard takes up half the screen and obscures most of the content. And forcing a commandline interface on a phone user seems truly sadistic.
No worries, I do NOT feel bad about it. My home page is not for general consumption like smartphone browsers. Im actually very supprised that such a website like Hackers News are being read on smartphones. Damn, world changed a lot.
Ironically HN is one of the few websites that works well on my phone, because it uses so little of modern web technologies. I use a 7-year old smartphone, it's painful or impossible to read many websites. I have to use old.reddit.com instead of www.reddit.com. Twitter stopped working on my phone a few years ago, good riddance. But my phone is with me everywhere, my laptops are not. So HN is one of the permanent tabs on the phone.
Sure, I should have been more tactful. (I was still groggy in bed while reading the post on my phone, and it's difficult to type lengthy diplomatic sentences with long words on a phone keyboard.) The commenter seemed to have intended for the website to reach a wide audience: "will work on anything.. from IE 6.0 or FF 2.0 upward". But it kinda fails to meet that goal.
Well, more retro focused audience.. But also point is, you can do decent webpage that is not bloated and work on older/retro platforms. Its sad what web become, if you do not run latest stuff from FAANG companies, you are pretty much excluded.
I still love the web. But in the 90s and 2000s, it was something that really interesting people were focused on as a platform for writing, design and creativity. These interesting people tended to gather communities of interesting people around them. Now it feels like something more akin to ham radio. Still interesting, still a good hobby, but the zeitgeist has moved on.
What would revitalize the web (and the arts in general) is a huge shift in focus in society to prioritize leisure and happiness over profit. Leisure time has largely evaporated in many developed countries, and the impact on the arts and the whole economy around the arts has been devastating. I’d love to see the whole country have a chance to get bored for a month, hmm when have we tried that recently, maybe it would be good to try again without anything terrible going on at the same time.
> it was something that really interesting people were focused on as a platform for writing, design and creativity
I've been spending less time there recently, but these last few years I've been part of various communities which were all about sharing creative writing; so it's still there, but maybe not as visible?
Exactly; the ham radio community still exists, too, and there are still interesting technical problems to crunch on in that area (I imagine, I haven't actually touched a radio since getting my license in 2001). But the "scene" is different. In the larger cultural scheme of things, it's a backwater, not an attractor of new talent and fresh thinking.
Somewhere, someone decided that you must build your websites a certain way, or you're doing it wrong™ and some people have gone as far as to actually wish harm on people for the tools they decided to use to build their websites."
His love for the web is dead, because some online people have weird opinions?
Well, I call that a weird opinion. Who cares. There are always weird and creepy people. And the cancer of the web today is rather ads and tracking in my own humble and weird opinion and not what tools you use. If you used the most awesome tools to integrate ads and tracking of 200+ company then I hate that and not the tool. And if you used jquerry with an other outdated inefficient libary to build an interesting experiment, then I might still love the result. Because the result matters to people visiting the site more then the build process.
I thought the article was going to go in a totally different direction and advocate for a return to simpler tools and the importance of content over tool obsession. I mean, who actually cares if you use React for your blog? If the content is good enough and you’re not fixated on proselytizing the framework, does it even really matter to anyone?
It’s not really an article is it? It’s more like a long twitter post about how having to use react and tailwind sucks. Which is weird because as you point out, you don’t have to use either.
I’d also argue that you’ll still need to know how CSS works even if you’re using tailwind. It’s still CSS it’s just that you don’t have to build everything yourself, but you do have to know how it works.
I thought the OP said the opposite: meanies on the web are calling you a bad person for using React and Tailwind when all you wanted to do was create something.
Anyhow, from my standpoint I just like to be able to make sense of something when I look at its source, and I like it not to freak out because I have a chrome extension or two.
I care. Simple text should stay simple, and should be readable without a 10 mile high abstraction layer. A blog is about text. I despise blog platforms which make JavaScript a requirement (React), which is just a totally silly approach.
So, do you care because of:
a) Load times?
b) Accessibility on different devices?
c) Philosophical grounds?
Because based on what you're saying (the 10 mile high abstraction level), it's about developer experience, which is not about text?
Text being what the end-user will ultimately see despite the underlying framework being React or a guy manually typing out the thing over TCP on every request.
Don't get me wrong, I despise it as much as you do, but I think it's important to recognize that ultimately the hate is only valid in the real world if it's about the user and not the developer experience.
Well, a) is a given, everyone cares about load times, even those that dont have the technical competency to name the phenomenon. And for me, personally, I guess its b and c. I am blind, so I do care about accessibility. However, I am also a old-time Linux command-line guy, from the 90s. I actually like Lynx, the load time and the simplicity, and the resource usage. If in my world a site could load in lynx (its all just about text) and it doesn't because of silly javascript framework, a kitten gets skinned and dies a horrible death.
I've been dipping back into native/systems programming lately and it's honestly no better over there.
I starting writing code in C again, because I really enjoy the simplicity. I wanted to use some nice-isms in C++ (function overloading, some encapsulation with struct) so I wrote C code, but leveraged the C++ compiler with a few features enabled by C++.
1) C++ programmers hate my code because I don't use the stl, containers, etc.
2) C++ programmers hate my code because I don't use referencing counting, "safe" pointers. Instead I raw dog it and wrote my own memory arenas (I alloc memory once at program start and free at the end).
3) C programmers hate my code because it leverages some C++-isms when it's convenient.
4) Rust programmers hide in fear and regard everything I do as unsafe, dangerous and borders on undefined behavior (they are like helicopter moms).
This year I regained my love for the web. Not related to technology about how the Internet is built.
My journey starts with writing my own RSS client, which required me to learn more about HTTP protocol. I had to find interesting RSS sources. So I did. I found some sources. When did you actively searched for a science blog? Science channel?
Then I transformed my program into web scraping machine. I captured domains from the web. Each domain can reference a other domain. Through references I captured new domains. Some are boring, some are not, but I live more outside of google bubble now. Since I use bookmarking in my software I can go back to interesting places. From time to time I check what new entered my program. Sometime websites from Singapore, sometimes a China state propaganda machine, sometimes some new 'reverse engineering' page blog, sometimes a blog that has been dead for several years, but contains funny articles.
Sometimes I test my database of links to check if it contains something new with 'hack', or 'reverse engineering'. My search as answer provides domain names, so I do not have to go through content farms.
I started checking Google results vs Yandex vs kagi, and other search engines. I used my curiosity to find many more search engines, like https://zarebin.ir, or https://search.seznam.cz, or marginalia search.
I search for anything related to old stuff. Therefore I try to find old fan pages about "diablo 2", or "quake", or "tomb raider" to see if anything exists anymore. Some things exists, but they hide at 6th page of results, and I have been there many times in recent months.
I opened my mind about search. I test myself to invent new search terms to find new stuff.
I know there is a lot negativity, about "build tools", or the approach, that does not stop me from searching new things.
When you have a great product, you can get away with mediocre or even bad internet presence. Take Starbucks, visa, Mastercard, Walmart etc who have at best average presence on the internet but their physical products are making them a lot of money because they are simply that good. Improvement to their online presence will only improve their product growth and sales.
The fluff you see on the internet is for bad products. The products themselves are generally nothing special and hence the whole marketing, analytics, social media presence is whats required creating this wave of websites and social media presence that is nothing but people trying to sell you stuff you don't need.
Take doctors for example. Good doctors can get a few bad reviews online but people will still go to them because the good reviews generally are a lot more than bad ones. Most great doctors don't even have a good online presence. On the other hand average or bad doctors tend to spend an awful lot of time improving their online presence to get new patients all the time because old ones tend to not stick around thanks to average patient care.
The web is what you make of it just like everything else. People looking for quick cash have existed for decades. With the web, it's become easier for them thats all. You can chose not to fall into this trap.
I think it's fair if people complain, the web has been getting bigger and bigger and websites start to weigh a ton. It's a shame if you can't read someone's blog because you have JS disabled and if you dare to enable it you have to download 200MB worth of data. Weird that the author misses the old web and doesn't want to stick to the old, html+css ways
The author loved the web because "EVERYONE could build on the internet". The problem isn't that how we build has changed, it's that everyone is on the internet and some percentage are opinionated assholes and people dealing poorly with their mental illnesses.
The author lost their love of the web because working in public has a lot of downsides.
The web needs a genuine "Web 3", a new era of decentralized creativity that will be brimming with possibility and attracting developers passion as it did in the past.
It does not look like such a rejuvenating phase is coming anytime soon. The centralized app era has cornered the web and its economics and will for sure perpetuate itself at least for the short/mid term future.
Still, to the degree people can afford it, its worth experimenting with fundamental web technologies and patterns (e.g., ideas like htmx, activitypub, linked data etc.) that might get us back to an interesting path.
While climbing out of the gravity well of centralization requires enormous energy, there is plenty of potential energy lying latent in the structure of the web... What we need is a spark.
They days where humans controlled discourse on the internet has flown past us. Anyone that attempts to decentralize will have deal with colossal torrents of attacking bots spitting 100s of gigabytes of data their way if they draw the ire of such forces.
There may be islands of refuge on this water planet, but from this day forth understand the ocean is made of piss.
One problem I've grappled with is how I could prove my humanity to you. I have a tiny little web page, some programming guides I've written, and no ads or tracking. So if you went there, you'd probably think I was human, or at least the site was run by a human who either wrote or had an AI write the material.
How can I prove that I'm human and that I wrote the material?
The closest I've been able to think of is some kind of web of trust thing, but that's only so good.
LLMs are that. When you use tools like perplexity you get the feeling of the internet circa 2004 back.
The future is here, currently it requires a credit card to access.
You can start seeing how you'd use it locally too, the hardware requirements are too high today, but within the next 5 years they will become widely available.
For me LLM's are on a different page of the tech book (the models/algorithms side). The Web as such being literally about computer networks, interconnectedness of people and machines and sharing information [1].
It is possible though that the more widespread adoption of data science / ML / AI stacks will make a newly decentralized Web more interesting (along the lines of federated learning etc.)
It may take a while. You don't need gigantic language models to create interesting things in this direction but the current environment is not conducive, that is why it is not happening. Five to ten years is not an unreasonable projection (assuming nothing extraordinary happens in the meantime).
[1] Perversely, LLM's would be much harder without the old Web making lots of data available, but that is a different story.
We're missing the open source search engine, but LLM + obscure web pages makes for some interesting reading.
Getting a mix up of different ideas is very much what first exposures to the internet were like.
You had your towns ideas, then we went online and you had a wild world of ideas you'd never seen before. For a lot of us it was the first time we belonged anywhere.
2) With all the tracking, analytics, commerce, calls-to-action, "funnels", etc., so many websites set themselves up as adversaries to their audience that it's mostly stopped being worth bothering with.
Nobody really cares about your tech choices except some /g/ turbo nerds, sounds like the author spent time in some toxic communities and projects this on the whole of the industry.
I write my own SSG in Python using Jinja2. I use normalize.css but other than that everything is from-scratch. I've never had anyone throw anything at me for not doing things a weird way.
>Those of you who still find it enjoyable to learn the details of, [...] if you spend time configuring your window manager or editor, [...] if you are doing anything beyond just solving the problem - you don't understand how fucked the whole thing is. [...] The only thing that matters in software is the experience of the user.
Why use anything but punch cards to write software? Using an IDE is not solving the problem after all, it's just adding unnecessary complexity that the user will never see.
I think the author is conflating technology with people.
To me, this is a natural effect of getting everyone online.
In the beginning the web was 'nice', because only a certain kind of people had access and interest in publishing content. Geeks, programmers, scientists, students, etc. The place felt more 'elitist' because it was. We worshiped those who fell asleep coding in a basement, fueling on left over pizza and coffee, so that they could give that software away to us all for free as 'open source'.
Those were the people building the early internet and then there was the rest of the people who were not yet online - on TV, on the streets, government, etc.
But the people building the internet were building it for the people not yet online. As soon as hardware got cheap enough for everyone to afford it and software got 'simple' enough for everyone to use it, the masses flowed, bringing with them all the 'bad stuff' from the offline world times 100. They also brought some 'good stuff' too, like better visual designs, fonts, icons, images and videos, online payments.. but we're focusing on the bad now, so let's ignore the good for now.
Trolls, criminals, swindlers, script kiddies, everyone was welcome and so the flood dissolved and even reshaped the original 'elite' and now every kid wants to start a startup and become a billionaire.
But whenever I think that 'the old Internet was better', I keep reminding myself that, hey, 'the old Internet' is still here and it's alive and kicking, nobody forces me to go to the sites I don't like (well, in fact, I'm often forced to interact with terrible UX of utility companies or airlines). There's a lot of noise, sure, but it's not that hard to access the 'good internet' if you really want to.
Maybe there's something else at play, maybe the dopamine hits less after all these years, maybe we're getting older and are just nostalgic about something we used to enjoy a lot more when we were younger.
As someone else said, author probably spent time in some toxic communities.
As long as they aren't my employer nor the things I am building are for them, IDGAF about what people think of my choices when building software.
The thing is, there is a massive difference between creating things for fun and creating things professionally. Programming used to be WAY more fun when I was teenager, but that does not have anything to do with the technologies or the web landscape.
The author prefers being an amateur to being a professional. Professionalism is often arbitrarily and highly standardised and somewhat boring. You find the same phenomenon in sports, for example. It's also a typical trajectory of any industry.
Which is fine, it's just not particularly related to the web.
May get into a different kind of programming, web dev just feels uninspired to me right now. Note: this is my world on the web right now, I’m sure others disagree and have another opinion. Loving something is subjective.