Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web - <AUTHOR> https://www.neustadt.fr/essays/against-a-user-hostile-web/ <comment><USER2> This is a good an informative essay.

However, there's another element of "user-hostile" that I didn't see addressed (maybe I missed it in my haste?) -- that is the websites trying to control exactly how the content is consumed by the user.

It seems increasingly that web content is being delivered in video form. That itself is hostile to some people. Some of us want the freedom to read (or scan quickly). But many of the providers of "content" know they have little to provide, so they drag it out in video form, saving the actual information for the last 10% of the video (if ever!) This I find incredibly hostile, and it makes me eventually abandon that source as a matter of principle. Then there are javascript-jacked sites, sites that are unbearably slow and clunky because of a mix of javascript/ads. I won't mention any specific sites, but I stopped reading one similar to Mired.com long ago for that reason.

This problem isn't just limited to the web though. If you're unfortunate enough to see modern television (or movies, for that matter), it's clear that the amount of content has gone down, the noise has gone up, and the efforts to lock the audience in have increased.

There are some people who advocate avoiding all news and media. I think it's a bit extreme, but it may be more beneficial than harmful.

<comment><USER3> If video content would be so "hostile", it would have failed on its own already. People would flock to other places where they can read instead.

I don't buy this idea where everything is always imposed on us by evil corporations.

More and more websites using video to me seems more like a proof that people prefer videos over written content. That's why videos usually autoplay, also on YouTube and Facebook: if a person starts watching and listening, it's much more likely that they will stay instead of closing the page.

We have taught things to each other by talking for as long as hundreds of thousands of years, probably more. By contrast, reading has been common among a large percentage of the population only for a couple of centuries.

We evolved using verbal communication, not written one. Written form has, of course, its advantages, but it does not mean that it's the preferred medium for most people.

Videos and audio are also easier to watch/listen to while you are doing something else like cooking, gardening or commuting. There are a ton of contexts where you cant read, but you can at least listen.

That's why even books are converted into audio formats nowadays.

The fact that a small crowd on HN prefers reading is not the proof that video is "user-hostile". HN is rarely the reflection of the general public.

Although I keep reading a lot of online content or books, lately I have consumed a lot more valuable information in a podcast/video lecture format than in a written one.

<comment><USER4> I do agree that not everything is imposed by evil corps, but hostile products don't necessarily fail by their own: cigarettes and junk foods are just one example of this.

In general I'm not against video content in a web page, as it actually can be a good source of raw data that we can use to understand something in great details, but I would argue that in many cases video is objectively inferior to text: texts are much easier to parse (both for computers and humans) and also some irrelevant information included in the audiovisual format can reduce the entropy of a content (e.g. how a reporter looks like physically).

<comment><USER3> Cigarettes and junk food are not hostile in this context. We are talking about things that people don't like but are forced to get anyway.

Cigarettes and junk food are definitely unhealthy, but people love them. So much that it's hard to take them away from them.

<comment><USER5> That's a very bizarre definition of love. Few people are happy about their addiction to an unhealthy habit. Don't you think it's disingenuous to talk about user preference without talking about reward hacking? I think the internet is actually worse in this respect because much of it is systematically designed to induce addiction with no upper limit.

Your evolutionary arguments are also pretty bizarre and reductionist. Maybe we did evolve using verbal communication, but we didn't evolve to be schizophrenic voyeuristic mutes without face-to-face nonverbal feedback.

<comment><USER6> Can we stop framing arguments as "bizarre"? It's unduly personal.

I don't think their arguments are bizarre, and it's better to meet them head- on than to insinuate they're weird.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> _" For many of us in the early 2000s, the web was magical. You connected a phone line to your computer, let it make a funny noise and suddenly you had access to a seemingly-unending repository of thoughts and ideas from people around the world._

 _" It might not seem like much now, but what that noise represented was the stuff of science fiction at the time: near-instantaneous communication at a planetary scale. It was a big deal."_

I kind of yearn for the pre-web days... when the primary means of communication was mailing lists and newsgroups, without any commercial interest.

The creation of the web was when it all started to go wrong. Corporations started to flock to it like flies and tried their best to turn it in to an ad- laden, spyware-laden, dumbed-down, one-way broadcasting medium not too far from television.

<comment><USER8> I never got into the pre-web stuff, so I don't know exactly what the differences are. Don't those things still exist? Isn't the comment section of this HN post a form of async, text-only communication?

<comment><USER7> It's still centralized, and owned and run by a commercial entity that uses it to further their own interests, with a record of its users' interests and opinions.

The capabilities and features of web forums are also really dumbed-down and limited compared to what you could get with the mail clients and news clients of even 20 or 30 years ago.

<comment><USER9> Could you expand on that second line a bit? I'm curious what features we're currently missing out on compared to decades past.

<comment><USER7> From a recent thread on _" Why kernel development still uses email"_: [1]

 _" This is one of the things that web-based forums have yet to get right. Email (and NNTP news) clients from 20 or 30 years ago are far superior in this respect, because they can intelligently deal with threading and folding. These features alone makes large conversations much easier to deal with than on web- forums.

To add to that, email (and NNTP news) clients even from 20 or 30 years ago have other powerful features that web forums have yet to catch up on:

\- kill files[2] (which you can use to filter out unwanted articles/mails based on content or metadata such as subject, user, etc)

\- scoring

\- user-configurable anti-spam filtering or other "intelligent" filtering (such as bayesian filtering not just for spam/ham, but for interesting/unintersting content)

\- tagging not just on a site-wide level but at the client level so each user can tag messages/articles the way they make sense to them

\- other advanced filtering and scripting based on any of the above

Web-based forums are just incredibly primitive compared to this many-decade- old technology."_

[1] - [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15373179](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15373179)

[2] - [https://wikivisually.com/wiki/Kill_file](https://wikivisually.com/wiki/Kill_file)

<comment><USER10> I cannot agree more. When one is used to thread and folding for email or usenet, the user experience of web mail/forum seems woefully inadequate.

When I first saw that gmail starts a new thread when you change a subject I did not believe it at first; I thought I have made a mistake in replying. Text-based clients of old (tin, pine, etc.) still outperform current monstrosities by a wide margin.

<comment><USER11> That's not an inherent limitation of the web or web forums, though - I've seen those features implemented in a lot of them.

And of course, there's nothing stopping anyone from building a web forum and offering an endpoint for third party clients, they just _don 't,_ mostly because web forums themselves have more or less been superseded by Facebook, Twitter and Youtube, and no one seems to care about them anymore.

The only pre-web feature that web forums can't really implement is decentralization.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I use ublock origin and privacy badger not because I am worried about privacy but because the internet is basically unusable without it.

Because of this, I don't see many ads. But I have been an amazon customer since 1999 (according to what they say on their website when I'm logged in.) Looking at what they recommend for me, this personalization stuff is crap.

In music, Amazon recommends bands I never listen to like Montrose, Metallica, and the Doors (and to be fair, some people I've never heard of so I guess it is possible that I would be interested in them. Greta Van Fleet? William Patrick Corgan?)

In books, I do like scifi but they recommend a bunch of books with spaceships shooting each other on the cover - not what I have ever been interested in.

In the "humor and entertainment" section of books they do list some books that I would be interested in but, strangely, none of them are "humor" but are all academic books about videogames (which I am interested in). Even here the recommendation engine is very unsophisticated because in between academic books on videogames there are books on the art of Zelda and other coffee table books that I am not interested in.

And the first book in their recommended children's book section is 1984. (and I don't have any kids any way).

If this is the best they can do with 18 years of tracking my purchases then I am not worried.

<comment><USER13> To be fair, you sound like one of the harder people to track accurately.

However, I as well have been "disappointed" by the ability of websites to judge my interests. After reading about cases such as Target, who have "spooky" ability to gauge interest, I was expecting better.

So I searched for a _very_ specific motorcycle jacket with _very_ specific features and now my page is inundated with every clothing item that has the tag "motorcycle_jacket?" That's.... it? The same result I'd get for hitting google with "site:amazon.com 'motorcycle jacket'" ?

<comment><USER14> The impression that I got was that Target thing wasn't some spooky self- learning AI product recommender, but rather they had the data to write some special-purpose analytics to detect a specific but common purchasing pattern. Your motorcycle jacket example isn't the kind of thing that would get that kind of special attention.

<comment><USER13> Really? Because I would expect Amazon to be like "oh fuck, this dude bought a motorcycle! Inundaaaaate!" and start seeing a bunch of ads for Senas, helmets, gloves, etc.

<comment><USER15> Unless you buy your motorcycle from amazon as well they don't know to send you that.

Target was able to get the spooky results because there is in fact a real correlation: girls who switch from scented products (soaps) to unscented are very likely to buy a maternity clothing in a couple months, and a few months latter baby products. Note that this all starts because then girl was buying scented products at target to begin with, and so the change in habit was the important part.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> FTA:

"...we have faster connections, better browser standards, tighter security and new media formats. But it is also different in the values it espouses. Today, we are so far from that initial vision of linking documents to share knowledge that it's hard to simply browse the web for information without constantly being asked to buy something, like something, follow someone, share the page on Facebook or sign up to some newsletter. All the while being tracked and profiled."

The author is absolutely right that the _values_ of the web have changed. IMO this is due to the much more vast penetration of the web and the bubbles which have been birthed as a result of attracting very aggressive profit-driven actors. Rebasing the web's economic model on advertising has fundamentally changed the conception of users, and the expectation of enormous profits has steamrolled the egalitarian principles of early web citizens.

I kind of hope that the web will reboot itself in dark corners, away from the mega actors, away from the tracking and surveillance, and the torrent of the current web can keep on going for the masses.

<comment><USER17> I think you're right, but one issue is keeping the problems of the "web of the masses" from spreading to our secluded dark corners once they pick up traction.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> >If you use Chrome as your main browser, consider switching to Chromium, the open-source version of the browser. Consider minimalist browsers like Min (and choose to block all ads, trackers and scripts) to browser news websites.

no love for firefox? or for that matter, any non webkit browsers?

>HERE WeGo for maps (free)

i'm not sure that's any better in terms of privacy

<comment><USER19> It always astonishes me how many people who are ostensibly against the webkit derivative hegemony won't even consider recommending Firefox. It's certainly a competitive browser, and personally my favourite, and Mozilla does fantastically important work balancing out an otherwise entirely corporate, ulterior-motive laden browser market.

<comment><USER20> My experience has been that Firefox was unusably slow on OS X and Linux for a long time and they lost a lot of users because of it. Now it is faster but it is difficult to woo people back.

And even if it is faster, there track record shows that they found doing a release that slows down a large portion of users was acceptable. Granted I doubt they still have that attitude, and i think they are more performance based now, but a lot of us left for Chrome and never looked back.

<comment><USER21> > and i think they are more performance based now, but a lot of us left for > Chrome and never looked back.

And you don't have the same problem with Chrome? I've found Chrome to be a terrible resource hog lately, and sometimes I have to kill it to get my computer back to a usable state. And of course, I have to dig through all of the Chrome process and try to figure out which is the one that will take down the rest of them.

<comment><USER20> > And you don't have the same problem with Chrome? I've found Chrome to be a > terrible resource hog lately

I'm OS X and I've had some CPU issues lately if I have a lot of tabs open but overall not nearly as many issues as when I finally decided to give up Firefox.

I actually downloaded Firefox lately and it seems pretty nice. If Chrome gets works I may consider it.

<comment><USER22> I usually have a few hundred tabs open in Firefox without issue; it seems to do a good job of putting unused/old tabs to 'sleep' until you come back to them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> > Today, we are so far from that initial vision of linking documents to share > knowledge that it's hard to simply browse the web for information without > constantly being asked to buy something, like something, follow someone, > share the page on Facebook or sign up to some newsletter.

I'm a non-user of all things social media. My Twitter account is purely nominal (for pinging company support), and I don't have a Facebook account. As a business owner, my peers think it's bizarre that I don't have a LinkedIn account. The problems this author talks about are _chains of our own making_. Yes, corporations exploit us, but they exploit human frailties. This problem will not go away, and more "open tech" will not solve it.

<comment><USER24> It's not unsolvable though. HN is an example of a technology that shapes the rules of the forum in such a way that a top spot cannot be purchased.

Forum design is the new frontier.

<comment><USER18> >that a top spot cannot be purchased.

you can buy hn upvotes, which is the same as buying a top spot.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I've been active online since 1994. In my opinion, the start of the cellphone era (iPhone and up) was when the internet started it's way downhill.

All sorts of people who weren't online suddenly were there, and businesses took a lot more interest in the lest tech savvy types who've started to populate the internet.

At the same time, these same mobile users saw they could be anonymous and had no learned netiquette unlike so many others before them.

So because of this new-user saturation, the internet became no longer niche and now mainstream, to the detriment of everyone else online.

Yes yes, Eternal September and all that, but were they wrong about the similar assessment back then?

</comment><comment><USER26> I agree with this author and implemented all his suggestions years ago, both as a consumer and creator of web sites. But sewers like Facebook and ad networks are low-hanging fruit. Search for something on the once-indispensible Google, and, after five or six ads, you will likely see a Wikipedia link. On the fifth page of results will be the professor's .edu page that the Wikipedia article plagiarizes from.

Google succeeded because their pagerank algorithm discovered useful sites. But now those same algorithms promote popular (or Google-profitable) sites at the expense of higher-quality sites (that often carry no advertising). W3schools, anybody? It was probably a natural evolution: the algorithm ate itself, and results that might actually be useful are buried under sites that are popular. I think sites like Wikipedia and Google feeding off each other is a more insidious problem - one with no quick technological solution, like installing an ad blocker.

</comment><comment><USER24> This is good, but simplistic.

Firstly the downfall in the geocities-web came in many phases:

1\. Spam Email Phase

2\. Phishing / Nigerian phase

3\. Popup phase

4\. Autoplaying Flash/ActiveX phase

5\. Pagerank phase (forums being ruined until rel=nofollow)

Now google, previously the main gateway to discovery, is pretty much useless for discovering new non-commercial content.

The way this could go away is only from a market shift; deleting your facebook won't bring back geocities. The fact is, if I had a geocities page it'd be undiscoverable due to pagerank, so I have no incentive to publish unless I have another avenue of attention (resume, Hn profile).

Can a non-commercial search engine ever exist? I suppose reddit/HN voting is one semi-successful method of content ranking...

<comment><USER27> A decentralized p2p search engine exists, though really nobody uses it.

[https://yacy.net/en/index.html](https://yacy.net/en/index.html)

Perhaps a bare bones donation-supported search engine could exist if it implemented the same protocol using WebRTC and served a single JavaScript- powered webpage from S3.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I totally disagree. It is not the web or www that is hostile but many websites and services out there.

I think no one will go back to the old web, although I agree it was an epic experience back then. For me it is totally logical that many people try to find a way to earn money on the internet, and in this economy there is in principle nothing wrong with that IMHO.

No one forces you to use Facebook, Google or any of the great services available. But people seem to forget that in life almost everything comes with a price. For Facebook and Google you pay with your (more or less private) data. So? If you think it's not a fair deal, simply don't use it! But please don't blame the entire web for that.

The web as it is now has soooo much more to offer than the old web that it is hard to even imagine! A few things I use that were impossible in the 90's, from the top of my head:

      listen music on youtube, learn and use any programming language for free, git, open source, read the latest news in online
      newspapers from remote countries, buy tickets online, airbnb, online banking, broadcast on twitter, social networks, slack,
      OS updates, World of Warcraft/games, crypto currencies, etc.. etc...

I'm happy to pay with some of my privacy to any of the services above, it's up to me to decide whether the balance is OK.

<comment><USER29> Maybe some of these things didn't engage us as much, but it is dubious whether that's for better or for worse. For what it's worth:

> listen music on youtube

True by definition, but listening to and distributing music via computer networks has been going on since the 80s.

> learn and use any programming language for free

There were plenty of resources on that on the web in the 90s and on bulletin board systems in the 80s.

> git

A complete side note since it has nothing to do with the web.

> open source

Many significant open/free software projects started in the 90s. NetBSD/FreeBSD since 93. GNU has been around since 83.

> read the latest news in online newspapers from remote countries

News websites surprisingly existed in the 90s as well. It is speculative to say that their increasing plurality owes anything to the current centralization trend.

> broadcast on twitter

Broadcast on your own personal website. Broadcast in a newsgroup. Broadcast by email. Broadcast on IRC.

> social networks

Bulletin boards. Email. Newsgroups.

> slack

IRC

> OS updates

Like, say, Slackware in the mid 90s?

> World of Warcraft/games

On-line, networked games existed before the web and don't really need to rely on it.

> crypto currencies

Again, not really dependent on the web.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> One factor that might be at play: the user base of the web has probably dumbed down considerably over time. In 1999 you had to have some technical chops to get your modem, PPP settings, ISP phone number etc. all sorted out, and know some arcane URLs to type into the browser to get started with (back when browsers didn't auto-complete the [http://](http://) for you). So it probably attracted more intelligent people on average, with nerdy/intellectual interests.

Better browsers, broadband, tech usability improvements, smartphones, easy-to- use websites like Facebook, etc. lowered the barrier considerably. So maybe a lot of this is the influx of "dumb" people who can't be bothered to learn HTML to put up a page, or understand the privacy implications of the 450 surreptitious HTTP requests streaming along as they read their news article. ("dumb" is a little facetious here - in other words just ordinary people not as tech savvy or focused on intellectual pursuits as the web's early adopters).

<comment><USER31> Honestly attitude like yours are a big part of the issue. Developers love to treat non technical people as dumbasses to ignore at best, or make fun of/exploit at worst.

Maybe try to put yourself in the shoes of someone who works 3 jobs as a single parent and uses their phone to look for new housing when they get evicted or sign up for online classes, instead of claiming broadly that "they can't bother to learn HTML". Not everyone is as privileged as the millions of teenagers who have hours and hours of free time every night and access to a computer+internet to learn how to code or the privacy implications of surreptitious HTTP requests.

If developers had spent the past few decades thinking of how to make technologies understandable, open, democratic - instead of insulting 99% of the population like you just did - perhaps we wouldn't be in this mess.

I am speaking as a former dumbass privileged teenager/engineer who thought he was smarter than everyone else.

<comment><USER30> I meant it a little facetiously, and not as condescending to "ordinary people" as it maybe sounded. Like you said a lot of it is just a factor of free time, not having the free time to learn PPP settings and HTML and all that (as I did when I was a teenager). I'm not suggesting that everybody should learn HTML or else they're an idiot, far from it, if someone just wants to focus on writing for a blog, etc. then there absolutely should be tools to make that simple.

One of the laments in the article is the way the web has changed from the early days of simple HTML webpages people put up themselves focused on astrophysics etc., and I think that does speak to a difference of interests and abilities in the web's community over time.

And people do have differences in intelligence, as touchy and controversial a subject as it is. I say that not to make myself feel like some shining genius, I'm not, but commercial interests tend to exploit whatever they can exploit (unfortunately) and the shifting audience of the web likely made it easier to get away with a lot of this stuff.

<comment><USER31> Yes. The web didn't get "dumbed down"; it got more diverse. This is a very good thing.

The issue is that technologists insist on making a clear distinction between the "user" and the "developer". If you hide the number of web requests away in an obscure, borderline illegible, "developer tools" pane, is it a surprise that the average user has no idea about what is going on in their browser? No one is interested about building a browser, or even an operating system for that matter, that focuses on making things understandable, learnable. That is part of the reason why we end up in situations like the ones described in the article.

Regarding differences in intelligence, that is not a particularly relevant point here. People have differences (plural) in intelligences (plural). Even one person has diffferences in intelligences throughout their life at many different scales - I was much better at physics back in college than I am now because I practiced it more, and yet I wouldn't say I was more intelligent 10 years ago than I am now even though I could solve physics problems faster. There are even pretty big fluctuations in my intelligence in a single day based on how tired/frustrated I am, if I have concerns at the back of my mind, etc. All of these statements aren't really relevant here, because we have systems that deliberately obfuscate how they work, which is a much bigger problem.

<comment><USER30> So more "users" should be developers? And some idealized Chrome dev tools should be shown to everybody by default? That's the kind of techy, unix-y shit that turned off average people from the early web in the first place. Turning that stuff off and hiding it is what made things like the iPhone so popular.

Most people aren't interested in learning about HTTP, security certificates, javascript AJAX requests etc., no matter how "learnable" the browsers could make them. It's just irrelevant to chatting with your kids or reading about what happened in the Dodgers game. Geeky tech people will seek that stuff out, average people won't.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> As a technical person I agree with a lot of this article. We were moving towards a data centric web for a while but now we're moving towards one where form is more important than function.

But with that said, I would have liked to have seen an article about accessibility have more talk about how the web is not only less accessible now for regular users but also even less accessible than it was before for people with disabilities such as blindness, color blindness, and even hearing loss.

</comment><comment><USER32> I remember when even some corporate web sites often had a misc site somewhere with something about who built the site, even a picture of the server, a cat.... it was personal. It was very human.

</comment><comment><USER33> Can we please, pretty please go back to using pages for the majority of web sites? There I said it. You have a web site, not a web app. At least most people do.

Remember the days of semantic markup and the CSS Zen Garden? When you could actually read and understand a web page's source? Now we have these javascript behemoths that are as clumsy as they are stupid.

I have a feeling we are in for a renaissance of simplicity, and its going to start with a page, and end with a page. Pages are scalable. Google has like 50 billion of them. Pages are nice. Now do me a favor and kill off react.js and every walled garden like Facebook.

Can we please just fix them from the inside? If you're an engineer at Facebook, why don't you take it upon yourself to actually do something about this mess?

</comment><comment><USER34> I started research on making of an alternative search engine. It would not index sites serving ads and possibly e-commerce. I would like to also penalize JavaScript use at least as an option. At the beginning I would use Adblock rulesets like the Easy List - if there is a match I do not index the site. I named it Abracabra.

I hope that this would remove most crap out there with some minor collateral damage. Also that the index would be small enough that a little fish like me could do it without massive cost or infrastructure.

Regarding JavaScript use penalization I have in mind at least lower ranking. Probably for the first version not including them at all would be the simplest thing to do. Some later version could attempt to classify used JavaScript.

I would like it to index information first and not care much about web apps. Sometimes within the information only site there could be a link to a webapp. I'm wondering if it would make sense to distribute whole index via torrent. Then search could be done locally. But for this too make sense it would have to be in an order of, at most, tens of gigabytes. The problem would be to make updates as small as possible and also to not use prohibitive amount of CPU time.

I don't have any monetization in mind as you probably should have guessed at this point. Probably if it would be frugal enough it could run from my pocket and hopefully some donations.

However I'm almost totally green in this area. I started a bit with learning how to index and search with SQLite's FTS5. I don't like dependencies too much and would like to keep the local version option available. So probably typical ElasticSearch and other Java apps are probably too heavy. You can safely ignore technical side of my comment if you know better. If someone is more capable to do this than me, please make it instead of me ;)

</comment><comment><USER35> I've actually become a bit put off on a lot of "modern" technologies lately. Every website tries to keep you on as long as possible with click bait, every advertiser tries to track your habits, video games just try to upsell you to the season pass, and every webapp is just an upsell to the paid pro version. Heck, even our operating systems are nothing more than data collection points.

In many ways, I feel like technology doesn't work for us anymore, we work to serve technology.

<comment><USER9> That's without even mentioning the "internet of things" phenomenon, standalone voice assistants, and so on. The advertisers aren't happy just collecting web usage data anymore and now they want into our actual homes.

<comment><USER36> I honestly don't get it. Some tech-savvy people I know are hyped up about Alexa and technologies like it, speaking to them about it it's like we live in a world where the Snowden leaks never happened. Either that or the interest from exploring new technology is hiding the downsides.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Yelp is extremely hostile to web users on mobile and shoves their app at you, actively blocking mobile functionality. You have to spoof user agent or request desktop site to use their service. So after realizing how hostile they are, I stopped using their service. Wasn't aware of their shady business practices in the past, and I think they've improved somewhat? My main issue with them today is their subverting of mobile web usage.

Similarly, Square Cash hides their login page on the mobile cash.me site. You have to request the desktop site and actually go to cash.me/login to have any chance of using their mobile site. It's fucking crazy.

<comment><USER38> Twitter and reddit drive me up the fucking wall. Twitter removed most functionality if you aren't logged in and hits you with a popup about once every 0.1 seconds as you scroll but gives up when you close it about 6 times. The mobile reddit site is just straight broken. Images disappear if you click in the wrong place, video doesn't work, can't change search options, posts act like they fail resulting in duplicate comments. Yet they have the audacity to push their shitty app down your throat every other page which is just a webview of the mobile site with the same problems.

These companies will do anything to inflate their user count and get more access to more data to sell. Instagram is particularly egregious about inflating user count. You can make an account without even verifying your email, but you can't log in again or even delete your account without linking a valid phone number. There is probably a 7 figure number of abandoned accounts like that.

<comment><USER39> Add Pinterest to that list of super annoying services who won't let you even look at anything without signing up/linking up/whatever else they could extort from you before letting you look at a simple picture.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Consumer's can't solve this from the ground up. What's needed is to prevent certain kinds of key acquisitions. The law around acquisitions is too permissive in an age of network effects; acquisition laws were fine pre- internet but don't solve their intended purpose anymore. Normally, the market corrects against the biggest players because the biggest players are slow to change culture and their business. But, acquisitions are the mechanism by which the big players are preventing themselves from being disrupted by smaller, more nimble players. If the big players can simply buy up any new comers (who will want a deserved pay-out for their efforts) on the scene, they maintain complete control regardless of what consumers want. Otherwise, any "alternative practices" you try to foster will simply be crushed, if they ever become a large enough threat.

Facebook acquiring Instagram is a perfect example.

</comment><comment><USER41> Stop referencing Cambridge Analytica. They grossly overstated their results with intent. Everyone seems to have taken the headlines produced from their first post-US-election presentation as truth, without even bothering to watch that presentation. Because when doing so even the most forgiving would get a sense of screaming suspicion. They brag about taking one Republican candidate (Ted Cruz) from the bottom of 20 candidates to... #3 in the Republican party primary. And then the logic of the headlines continue on to claim that this means with 300 likes they can predict you better than you mother. Candidate #3? I promise you there were as many data analytic companies as there were candidates but the difference is that only Cambridge Analytica came up with the clever marketing pitches to promote their strategy and only they had the guts to promote that strategy even though their pony lost the race. And it shouldn't surprise anyone because good marketing strategy, not good data, lead to such sensational headlines. Cambridge Analytica should be treated with the suspicion provided to all marketing firms, because it is clear when looking closely that this is what they are, and one with a rather shady history full of scams at that:

[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-03-23/trump- dat...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-03-23/trump-data-gurus- leave-long-trail-of-subterfuge-dubious-dealing)

[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=cambridge%20analytica&sort=byP...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=cambridge%20analytica&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story)

Stop referencing Cambridge Analytica. The headlines that their marketing produced just happen to fit so nicely in the techno-evil horror fluff stories we all as liberal leftists (myself included) so desperately want to eat. But find better references, please!

</comment><comment><USER42> Meet HN user megous, his fellow closed-source re-inventing co-conspirators (click a 'comments' link on the search results, then 'parent'), and potential open-source future fans:

λmegous(2016Dec): [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13226170](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13226170)

 _For each use case that is not a free browsing I create an electron app, that never executes any code from the web or uses any external style. It only uses XHR to fetch html pages /json data/other static stuff and then transforms that data and uses it in the custom UI designed for the use case._

[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=13226170&type=comment](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=13226170&type=comment)

Any references to similar projects (whether closed, commercial, or open- source) would be appreciated.

</comment><comment><USER43> The Web was doomed the moment we let Javascript initiate connections and (less significantly) modify form content.

<comment><USER44> Not really. It was doomed the moment it stopped being a place for _mere_ exchange of information and messages and turned into a marketplace. It is the profit motive that has given rise, directly or indirectly, to every good and bad thing about the modern web. Unfortunately profit motive is completely amoral. And it isn't going away. So what we need are more restrictions and regulations. And a paradigm shift back to doing more things more enjoyably in meat-space.

<comment><USER45> > So what we need are more restrictions and regulations.

Fully disagree. You cannot legislate this problem away.

<comment><USER46> Advertising tax, privacy law, monopoly breakups.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> A beautiful little tech-utopia where standards were open and everyone cooperated for the collective good existed for a few glorious years. The geeks had their way for a few years, but the show's over. In my cynical belief there is nothing we can do practically to reverse the trends. Tragedy of the commons, greed, masses following the path of least resistance, etc. will assert themselves just like they do in all other spheres of human society.

</comment><comment><USER48> I agree with much of this article, but at this point I'm dangerously close to falling into the camp of, "is it even worth it?" I have been using google accounts for almost 10 years, I'm very much locked into that ecosystem. Even if there was a privacy issue, I wonder if it is worth the monumental hassle to leave and spin up my own versions of everything I use.

Thanks to equifax, all my most important information is probably already out in the wild, and thanks to the US government (and how they deal with replacing identifying information) I'm likely screwed for the rest of my life. In the face of that, the harm that google or facebook (which I'll admit to using less and less of) can do to me seems trivial.

Yeah, as a user, I'm a commodity online. But I'll be damned if I'm not enjoying the bread and circuses they use to keep me there. There is little to nothing I can do to prevent anyone from doing anything with my information, so I might as well take advantage of what I've already "paid" for.

<comment><USER49> You don't have to do everything in one go; you can migrate out a service at a time and see how it works for you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> > You become a manipulable data point at the mercy of big corporations who > sell their ability to manipulate you based on the data you volunteer.

This might be the best summary of "why the world is fucked" that I've seen.

</comment><comment><USER51> I think many web apps are essentially closed source taken to the next level. Back when the war was Windows vs Linux, software could still be painstakingly reverse-engineered. This made making open source alternatives easier, as well as compatibility projects like Wine, Samba...

With online services, there's no chance. They can even take copylefted software, modify it, use, and don't release. This is technically compliant with GPL2, but against its spirit. (A)GPL3 was made to combat this. I agree the license is complicated, verbose and very hard to enforce, but at least it's a try.

I think the problem is two-fold: data and software. The article focuses on user data, but it's not hard to believe a culture of closed source breeds a closed approach to user data.

</comment><comment><USER52> I am ashamed of my generation.

We took a decentralized web full of potential, and we are leaving a wasteland of corporate garbage to our kids. If you used the web in the 90s you know what I am talking about.

</comment><comment><USER53> Irony: The web page that rails about the web being user hostile is coded so that Safari's user-friendly reader mode is disabled.

<comment><AUTHOR> Author here. Is it? It works on my end. Could you tell me which OS/Safari version you're using? Thanks.

<comment><USER54> Even on the latest Safari it doesn't work: 10.13.1 (17B48) with macOS: 10.13.1 (17B48)

Nothing about that page seems like it would stop Reader so I filed a Radar about it.

<comment><USER55> Reader readies Radar regarding Reader regression.

(Please don't continue this. I just had to get it out of my system.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> We need web browsers with good local & p2p indexing/search/bookmarking features.

Before I ever touch google, I want my search/address bar to look thoroughly through well organized, locally bookmarked content indexes.

The next stop before Google is indexes I've subscribed to. My friends, family, organizations, libraries, businesses, campaigns, wikipedia, etc.

After that, duckduckgo. If I haven't found it by then, google.

This kind of browser feature could make DAT/ipfs hypertext much more useful.

<comment><USER57> I've found Chrome/Chromium to be absolutely terrible at searching local history and bookmarks. It often fails to find even the simplest of pages which I know I've been to recently, while Firefox is capable of digging out pages that are barely in my memory.

It's one of the things that keep me on Firefox - it's simply more usable!

(Personally, I'm convinced Google does it deliberately to gain more user attention time on their search service.)

The idea of having subscribed indexes is interesting! I often just want to search Wikipedia. The idea of indexes from friends or family sounds more like "trusted sources", or the web of trust, or even GPG key verification. You're saying I trust these sources more because I trust these people more.

I think doing this slightly in the background automatically (vs actively asking your friend for recommendations, or looking at a bloggers recommended materials page) could make the internet safer. It risks creating "bubbles", but these should be a lot less significant than your own personal (Google) search bubble.

<comment><USER56> Yes, indeed, there is a strong risk for bubbles. In order to deter bubbles, there must still be a healthy social fabric and network applications that promote and incentivize cross-cultural interaction and knowledge sharing. That's a social, political, design & technical challenge.

Also...

I'm imagining the possibility "encrypted queries" between trusted parties. You could allow people to send you a search query that is encrypted in some way such that you couldn't read it, but you could still run it on your local index and send them back a result. Storing not only your own well-structured index but numerous other parties indices as well could be way too expensive. Instead, it makes sense only to maintain a relatively small local index for when you're truly offline. But to allow others to search your index anonymously, perhaps in exchange for the ability to search theirs anonymously. You could let trusted parties search your content without actually revealing their search terms, which may contain sensitive terms, like "cancer" or "schizophrenia symptoms". Maybe this could be done in a way that also obscures who actually ran the query. This sounds like a challenge for zero-knowledge proofs and some kind of anonymous traffic routing system.

In practice, it'd be like a hybrid of anonymous distributed routing and anonymous distributed search.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> This strikes me as rant saying; "For years I loved eating spam. 7 months ago I stopped eating spam. Now I think spam is evil. You should stop eating spam."

The decentralized internet of anonymous chat servers, mail servers, and communication channels aren't dead. Most people simply do not like them.

<comment><USER59> This is the "it is this way; therefore people must want it this way" argument. It ignores the power of money to manipulate through advertising (or, in the general case, of power to coerce).

To take the specific example of FB, most people don't want to be tracked and advertised to, they just want an easy social space to interact with their friends and family. Sure, they'd probably prefer an ad-free, non-tracking version of FB, but not if it costs them much effort. So, FB's growth hacking, advertising, and critical mass have pushed millions of people into something they themselves would consider sub-optimal (assuming it was explained to them, ofc -- many are plain unaware).

On top of that, the average user simply does not have the knowledge to make an informed decision. Not about what's technically happening, and certainly not about what the long term consequences will be, although arguably no one knows about that.

<comment><USER58> I use the "mom and dad test". My parents are completely non-tech savvy... by no means luddites... but they know very little of the details.

They seem fairly aware that Facebook and Google probably knows more about them than the NSA. And they don't care - because they can easily snap chat their kids or post pictures to their friends on pinterest. What's more, they sometimes even find the sales ads _helpful_.

Average users, in my opinion, are reasonably smart.

<comment><USER59> 1\. Your parents are outliers, ime

2\. That wasn't my point. The question isn't: "Will they put up with sacrificing their privacy in exchange for the value they get?" We know the answer is "yes" to that. The question is: "Would they prefer to get the same service for the same amount of effort and _not_ give up their privacy?" And I believe the answer to that is also "yes." And there is really no reason why that couldn't be the case. FB is not solving a technical problem that only they can solve.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> [https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence](https://www.eff.org/cyberspace- independence)

[https://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2015/07/stop_pushin...](https://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2015/07/stop_pushing_th.html)

[http://idlewords.com/talks/web_design_first_100_years.htm](http://idlewords.com/talks/web_design_first_100_years.htm)

[http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm](http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm)

[http://david.woodhou.se/email.html](http://david.woodhou.se/email.html)

</comment><comment><USER61> I would love to use a search engine that allowed filtering results by categories such as: personal, unincorporated, forum, news, contains ads, page size, blog, video, slideshow, contains javascript. Search is so cluttered, it's difficult to find small pages with excellent content.

I mention this because it's what obstructs my access to the Web I enjoyed so much before. I don't like reading news from whatever bloated sites news.google links me to, I don't like being redirected 3 times just to read a recipe, or getting movie recommendations in aggregate rather than from a single reviewer that I trust. But search engines lead users to these undesired things, and companies compete to get top search results, and the best way I find good websites is ironically offline.

</comment><comment><USER62> Exploring the early WWW of 20 years ago, I recall a cautionary sentiment to the effect of "This is all free today, but eventually, they'll charge for everything." It's funny how that came true in a way we never predicted: Everything is still "free," and yet everything is also monetized. Rather than a paywall in front of every website, a hidden "spywall" extracts payment in other forms.

They ended up charging for everything after all, only through an indirect and vastly more complex, opaque, and far-reaching system.

</comment><comment><USER63> Pushing of apps onto mobile users viewing sites inside browser has really gone evil. Reddit makes you click 'No, I don't want to install reddit app' or similar at least 3 times before letting you view the content.

Unrelated to that, as a HAM I've long (since 2000 or so) been preaching that if you want to know how internet will be changed by commercial and government interest, look into early radio history - it has many parallels with development of internet: an open, free to publish network primarily ran by enthusiasts that got progressively locked down until you had to be a major player to publish content on it, turned into ad-driven economy etc.

</comment><comment><USER64> This article nicely complements anither one: [https://staltz.com/the-web- began-dying-in-2014-heres-how.htm...](https://staltz.com/the-web-began-dying- in-2014-heres-how.html)

</comment><comment><USER65> Two missing recommendations:

* for those concerned with abusive ads/trackers, try Brave web browser, the browser most committed to privacy

* for those concerned about central chokepoints, start experimenting with 'decentralized web' technologies - the 'Beaker Browser'/DAT ecosystem is doing lots of interesting things; the blockchain-anchored namespaces, storage, or services promoted by Blockstack, Filecoin/Protocol-Labs, etc may soon offer compelling alternatives

</comment><comment><USER66> I agree with the author, if people would pay for the information they got over the Web then the providers of that information would be open to not selling information about you to people who wished to exploit it.

The challenge though is trust, and of course transparency. Even if PrivacyBook (the mythical anti-facebook product) had paying customers and no tracking, how could you really _verify_ that they weren't selling your information? And of course nation states always have a large hammer when they can put you out of business if you don't hand over data that they deem important.

In some ways DAO's are an interesting response to this, immune to pressure from nation states they may be able to provide a foundation for a distributed service that resists oversight. It might be a viable business plan if you could get more than the tin foil hat demographic to buy into it.

</comment><comment><USER67> > the page is 3.1 MB in size, makes about 460 HTTP requests of which 430 are > third-party requests (outside of its parent domain) and takes 20 seconds to > fully load on a fast 3G connection

That's a lot of ad-tracking and ad delivery code. More than that, it's also remarkable that so much of this code is essentially duplicated. It's all user tracking and ad delivery but with each separate company loading it's own "stack" to accomplish the same thing.

It's part of a larger trend from content-centered and user-centered to _advertising centered_. The problem is not centralization per se but business built on advertising revenue. Facebook is an extreme example - the news feed algorithms are optimized for generating ad revenue and not necessarily favoring news reports that happen to be true.

</comment><comment><USER68> I went to the "first web page" and saw this link to "etiquette".

[http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/Provider/Etiquette.html](http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/Provider/Etiquette.html)

Good pointers for making websites. :)

</comment><comment><USER69> I really enjoyed reading this essay, I've had this uneasy feeling for a few years too.

Most of my browsing habits these days centralise around HN and Reddit, with a sprinkling of RSS feeds via NewsBlur (although most RSS feeds are crap these days - truncated articles etc)

At home I use Pi-Hole to block DNS requests to known nefarious actors, so adverts are generally not a problem.

I can't help but feel that all these concerns are really not that much of an issue to the average user though. From a <insert corporation here> perspective, I'm wondering what their exposure rate is for their ads in terms of traffic - say if 10% of their users block ads - does the company even care that much?

</comment><comment><USER70> I browse mainly on mobile devices and forward link to interesting articles. Earlier I just bookmarked page after reading and it was fine, but now that linkrot made a mess of my bookmark list I tend to print to pdf.

It is amazing how much thought is put into looks and design of web pages that just ends scrambling everything during printout or just prevents to obtain any meaningful result (ie. imgur)

I look around and see options to share on tweeter, pinterest, tumblr, reddit, facebook. But no print button that would make it easy to archive. It is like articles are disposable and not thought to be of any reference in future (even highly technical ones).

</comment><comment><USER71> I share a lot of Parimal says in this piece.

Well worth a read if, you too, are finding ways to escape from and minimise the impact of this web-dystopia.

His suggestions are well worth a careful read. I suggest going further. Many of you are quite capable of making your own web based facilities, know people who you can collaborate with... In short you're in a position to actually make your own web environment. An environment that grows your own cognitive abilities, that enables you to learn well, that enables human growth instead of diminishing brain function.

It's a good idea to take control. Shape your own web, don't let it shape you.

</comment><comment><USER72> I have the same observation and prepare to do something about it. I am in China, the Web is terrible, quite hostile to anyone reading them. If you have the same idea and really want to improve it, welcome to contact me.

</comment><comment><USER73> It's not because the invention of typesetting lead to massive publication of tabloids that one has to cry on the death of paper. You can watch elsewhere. You're not entitled to watch video or have access to informational and free websites.

Many people here forget that all the things they got for free are often the result of hard work and lot a love from people who do it because they like it. So instead of complaining about the vicious tracking, just support those who build another web.

And too bad if it's too expensive for your activists to make a better youtube.

</comment><comment><USER74> One important factor of the success of Facebook/YouTube/etc. is that you have an admin every 10k people. Let's say instead of Facebook we have million of people hosting their websites. Then you'd need a lot more admins. A lot more of security issues. Facebook makes super easy for people to put content online and also interact between them. I wish setting up a server and securing a server to host your content would be as easy as creating a Facebook account.

</comment><comment><USER75> It's all about me, Me, ME!

The entire first screen is some guy blithering about himself. Cory Doctorow says all this, better.

Diaspora would be a good idea if it had any traction. Until then, we're stuck with Facebook.

Google, not so much. Most of Google's services have quite good alternatives. I don't use any service that requires a Google account. With Google reading and censoring what you put in Google Docs, that's probably a bad idea anyway.

</comment><comment><USER51> Videos (mostly video ads) are the pop-up windows of 2010's. It seems people have memorized that alert(); is bad without _understanding_ what made it bad.

</comment><comment><USER76> I'm saddened by this because despite agreeing with the essay I know that I'm complicit in it by virtue of working in e-commerce (same could be said of most if not all commercial web ventures). While I like to believe the people I work with respect the privacy of our users I know that the online advertising industry as a whole doesn't - as touched on in the essay. How do others deal with this moral quandary?

</comment><comment><USER77> This happens because people refuse to pay for anything on the web. And you get what you pay for.

I guess I'm just stating the obvious.

Now 100% sure how to fix this - but it hard problem.

</comment><comment><USER78> "A website on Doom level design on Geocities from 1999, accessed October 31, 20017 via Archive.org"

Glad to know Archive.org will still be around in 20017.

<comment><USER79> Brewster Kahle is my hero!

</comment></comment><comment><USER80> Tl;dr: places are lovely until you get millions of people, thousands of businesses and trillions of dollars in there.

Typical 'Back then xxx, we must yyy' talk. No, you can't, enjoy the freedom of average user to put his personal life on the internet, not think twice, create a market to exploit and exploiter to come. It is the essence of freedom on average, _you_ wanted it for "everyone".

</comment><comment><USER81> > Cedexis: a CND/ad-delivery platform

Cedexis is not an ad-delivery platform. It's a multi-cdn platform that allows you use multiple cdns under the hood and picks optimum cdn based on the user's location.

OP loses credibility when making such false accusations just to make their point.

<comment><AUTHOR> Fair point, that was an error on my part. I've corrected it with a note of the change right below it. Thanks for pointing it out!

</comment></comment><comment><USER82> In an increasingly capitalist world.

</comment><comment><USER83> We need to start making 'open web embeedded in this infrastructure'. I mean some open communities (outside facebook) and lists of websites containing useful and true information. Wikipedia helps a lot and I love this ycombinator news..

</comment><comment><USER84> Maybe Web 3.0 can be a movement to reclaim what we've lost - honesty and transparency in the interaction between websites and users.

Webbkoll ought to offer a badge the same way "Verified by Verisign" did when SSL was new.

</comment><comment> d--b Hopefully this kind of backlash makes more people disapprove of bad practices and look for crap-free websites.

Hopefully the internet follows the organic food movement. Too many people tired of crap push for a change.

</comment><comment><USER85> I love his punch line: "We're quietly replacing an open web that connects and empowers with one that restricts and commoditizes people. We need to stop it.". How can we stop it ?

</comment><comment><USER86> I agree the author's view but I have hard time convicting my friends or collaborator to use non-popular alternatives, especially those who are not technical

</comment><comment><USER87> Do you know, that you CANNOT use any of your google accounts if you turn your cookies off? that is just grossly invasive

</comment><comment><USER88> What are some companies (and initiatives) that are actively working to protect privacy online?

</comment><comment><USER89> > [...], stop and think about the consequences of that _shit_.

Anybody else read it that way? ;-)

</comment><comment><USER90> Leading by example, the author's site makes no external connections of any sort.

</comment><comment><USER91> When it comes to programming, video is a pretty difficult platform.

</comment><comment><USER92> Oh an essay about videos, or wait....

</comment><comment><USER93> It's weird to me that the author kinda meanders around a few key things without ever explicitly saying them and, in that regard, they kinda muddy the water around their point.

1) He blames the fall of the web on all the people (web designers, UX designers, developers, creative directors, social media managers, data scientists, product managers, start-up people, strategists) that works towards creating it but I think the problem is more the people that have changed the culture around the web, namely that it _has_ to be monetized. The aforementioned "architects of the web" are just there to create content but they're not the ones that need to load it up with tracking codes, tag managers, and DRM. The people that monetized the web are the ones that broke it.

2) The culture of the internet is completely different now and I think it's because the barrier of entry for the internet is so low now. Consider that, up until a few years ago (5-10 maybe, or longer?), it took some amount of knowledge and/or skill to use the internet. Everyone couldn't just jump on the web. You had to know enough about how to use a computer to install the software, you had to be educated enough to connect the hardware and install drivers, and you had to know how to find information. Even more so, if you wanted to _contribute_ to the web, you needed to know some kind of programming language and at least basic HTML, how to get those pages on to a server, and how to connect it all to a domain. It wasn't all just a Google search away from whatever word-vomit is advertised the most and pushed up to the front via SEO and Facebook/social media. Now, anyone can get on the internet. Almost every person on the planet has some access to the web and adding to the bucket of knowledge and data on the web is done via WYSIWYG editors and text comment boxes that require nothing more than the ability to use a keyboard. YouTube comments and Facebook comments are complete shit for the very reason that it doesn't take any amount of effort to post them.

3) Intellectual property on the internet is a mess and, as the article has pointed out, everything is starting to centralize instead of the decentralized web of the past. There is _severe_ bit-rot that happens that didn't happen before simply due to the fact that a YouTube video can now be automatically taken down, without cause, over even the suspicion or false claim that it contains copyrighted content. The amount of content that has disappeared off the internet because of a DMCA takedown is heartbreaking, especially when you consider that a lot of other content embeds it or references it. The web's greatest feature, the hyperlink, is now its biggest downfall because corporations and greedy assholes can take down content just by accusing it of violating copyrights. They don't even have to own it to make a claim. In other words, the ability to rot that content is far easier and more automated than the ability to protect that content. Politicians the world over have done their part to sell us all out and reinforce this negative cycle instead of protecting the backbone of the internet.

All in all, the internet used to be about sharing information. Now it's about cashing in on everything possible and, to the author's credit, he's at least identified that commoditization is a huge part of that problem. It's not the only problem, though. Tracking is a symptom, not the cause.

</comment><comment><USER94> This is a thought provoking read. I, too, have been meditating over this matter a lot.

Unfortunately, though, it seems to me that people generally adopt one of the 3 camps: * Don't care (that is, most users until their internet slows) * Business of humanity is business. Anyone disagrees with the previous sentence is socialist/communist/hippie/devil-spawn. * "GIVE ME LIBERTY OR GIVE ME DEATH." Ready to leave Google/Facebook/AWS at moment notice.

I mean, it's important to know what bad large firms have brought forth with the internet. But it's equally important to acknowledge what they (and commerce in general) have enabled, as well as what advantages they possess to users in everyday life.

To take a simple example: the article ends with a question: "Do we want the web to be open, accessible, empowering and collaborative? [...] Or do we want it to be just another means of endless consumption[...]?" Look, about 80% of the time, I do want mindless consumption. Maybe a stupid sitcom on one of the streaming service; maybe some cheesy pop over YouTube. I need that. And, you know what, the current arrangement is damned good at deliver that kind of consumption.

Thus, condemning the status quo wholesale is either useless or extremely risky. Look, the status quo is status quo for a reason. How did Amazon get so big? Not because they send out goons to smash windows of local bookstores! They get big because they provide genuine value (large selection, stellar customer service, fast shipping, etc.). Google got so big because they are very _very_ good with organization of information and extremely good with matching customers and advertisement. Apple got so big because they produce(d) beautiful products. Facebook got so big because they connect people together. Uber got so big because they make taxi-ing so convenient (and cheap). These businesses got there for good reasons.

Except the case where you find way to provide the same (or at the minimum almost the same) value with free and open ecosystem, status quo remains. Sure, you can host your own fonts and pictures and videos, but then they will be served from _your_ hosts. Have you invested billions of dollars in gateway to be near your customers? Have you invested many hundreds of engineering-years to test over as many browsers as you can find? And remember, you are probably a power user of the internet. How about everyone else? Does everyone need to learn how to administrate GNU/Linux to post views of the world?

Without providing the same value, revolutions tend to fall short of their promises. Take American Revolution. They proclaimed "All Men are created equal," killed a bunch of people (many innocent), then proceeded to keep slavery anyway. And that's one of the most successful revolutions. French Revolution produced an emperor to replace a king. English Revolutionary failed. Paris Commune failed. Russian and Chinese Revolutions were followed by famines. And so on.

Imagine the internet without Google, Facebook, and AWS. You know what will happen next? Somebody else will become Google, Facebook, and AWS. Look at China: sure, they are independent from Google and Facebook; and they have Baidu and Weibo. Google, Facebook, Amazon, AWS serve important needs. You can't not have someone like them.

In other words: all of these protests are useless and/or harmful without careful consideration of the underlining economics and usage. And I am not sure if anyone has gotten around to figure out an economic model for free web yet.

</comment><comment><USER95> The part where the author tries to tie Brexit and the election of Donald Trump to the user-hostile web is bonkers.

People, you have to understand this: There exists a large number of others out there who desperately want government reformed, want more localized control over their lives, and who voted accordingly. It wasn't some trick pulled on them by corporations or Russians manipulating social media. I realize that may be hard to understand, but it is the truth!

The rest of the article was well-intentioned, but somehow just a bit off. We can't go back to 1999 or 1993, but we can limit the walled gardens and censorship if we want to. But this is important: It's not the freedom-minded people who want to shut down free speech or filter and censor, it is the dyed- in-the-wool Marxist hardliners and the corporatists.

<comment><USER96> "died-in-the-wool Marxist hardliners and corporatists"

You really trying to equate Marxists and corporatists??? Dude...

<comment><USER97> Especially when what they really voted for was cutting the corporatists' taxes and regulations. It is one of the greatest tricks of modern propaganda that the super-pro-corporate parties have turned around the hate of corporations onto the, umm, less-pro-corporate party.

<comment><USER98> One party for the corporations, the other for multi-nationals.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER99> I think the problem is one of economics.

The SV culture made it valuable for startups to amass a large amount of users.

Where as before this bubble started, it was more profitable for development shops to build (and sell) software that anyone can use to host their own site/forum/whatever.

This might not be the entire solution, but I think it would be a step in the right direction:

We need more products that are developed for people to deploy on their own private servers. They have to have some very compelling points that I think are still lacking in many existing solution:

\- They have to be really really fast. Nothing in "python" or "nodejs" or whatever.

\- They have to be really really easy to deploy. No requiring a separate database server such as mysql. Just use SQLite. Also, no copying over of tons of files. Just a single executable. All other data should live in the database (sqlite file). Maybe have two database files: one for user generated content, and one for bundling application resources (images, etc). I'm not exactly sure what's the best setup, but something along those lines.

\- They have to be profitable for people who develop them.

This is more of a cultural issue.

I love open source, but requiring all software to be "free" means that it's much more profitable to create a product for yourself only and try to lure as many users as possible, just like facebook.

To this end, I think something like the physical source initiative makes a lot of sense: if you buy the software, you have the right to make changes to it. But you don't have the right to also copy it and distribute it.

<comment><USER100> sidebar: lots of easy to enjoy things are implemented in 'slow' interpreted languages. This site, for one.

<comment><USER99> Which I think is a big mistake, because even if it ends up being used in a low traffic site, it ends up complicating the installation process. Where as a compiled language not only would run fast but also have a very simple setup: just copy over the exe and run it. Nothing to configure. No dependencies to install.

<comment><USER101> Many applications I've used that come as an exe are hardly that easy to install and configure. Inevitably, something breaks because of my machine's particular configuration. On the development side, building to that magical executable is an even bigger nightmare.

Most packages in python or nodejs? Install and run through package managers just fine.

<comment><USER99> The more you depend on things to be right in the target environment, the more chances you have of breaking things.

Having a statically linked binary will not always magically solve this, but it's a great step in that direction.

The other step is not relying on any external servers or services, e.g. postgresql, redis, etc.

The rest just boils down to programmer discipline. Never introduce something that can potentially cause a headache to the end user.

If you're building on an interpreted language, you can't really do that. You will always at least require the user to have a specific version of python/node/whatever.

This can get complicated if the user has a different version, so now you have to introduce a virtualization layer that can manage several different versions of the environment. These tools are always annoying to use.

Not to mention that some packages could have native dependencies (e.g. a python library having a dependency on a c library) and this is almost always a source of headaches.

<comment><USER6> I mean, have you tried running arc? You can fire up arc 3.1 via racket and it runs fine.

<comment><USER99> I remember playing with it many years ago when I was still naive and at the time had bought into PG's promotion of lisp.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER102> I'm more and more convinced of the profitability of this idea I have come up with recently: WebAssembly pages which render their contents via WebGL. Adblocking would become impossible; content providers could disable text copy/paste too!

Brave new world, huh?

<comment><USER103> I felt a strong urge to downvote you to not give this idea any spotlight. (I didn't though.)

If this ever happens I will disable WebGL, and if this won't be possible anymore (corporate interests…), I will invent a web competitor where participants are legally bound to my terms. Terms that will forbid ads, spying and spamming. Misbehaving users will experience increasingly long cool downs for misconducts, which can end in quasi bans (cool downs longer than their life). … One can dream.

<comment><USER102> I'm glad you didn't downvote me! The faster we can get this thing going, the earlier we can get a tabula rasa ;)

Until then, keep riding the tiger!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER104> I used to have a boss who lived his whole life in Russia, and then moved here after his nominal retirement. He used to say this to me, often:

"That's capitalism, baby."

<comment><USER105> Here?

</comment></comment><comment><USER106> This essay is very informative

</comment><comment><USER107> -

<comment><USER108> I'm going to assume that this is a joke.

</comment></comment><comment><USER79> Talk about silver linings! Trump's victory certainly made the facebook/twitter/instagram liberals see what an obscenity this has all become.

Of course if the dems make a comeback in the midterms, watch them all go into full-blown social-media relapse.

<comment><USER109> Please don't post this kind of partisan flamebait on Hacker News. We're here to try for better.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

<comment><USER79> my bad

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER110> "I quit Facebook seven months ago. Despite its undeniable value"

Cant take this seriously right? You treasure the web, yet you are on facebook.</comment>


Sustainable "vertical city" envisioned for the Sahara - <AUTHOR> http://www.gizmag.com/city-sand-tower-oxo-architectes/36964/ <comment><USER2> > Bringing to mind XTU Architects' vision for a sustainable city in the > Sahara, City Sand Tower is also best taken with a pinch of salt and is > unlikely to be built.

Very vague information about something that probably won't even be built. With a planned completion date of 2075.

If this were a new idea, likely to happen, or had in-depth technical details, we'd have a story.</comment>


Reading for a living - <AUTHOR> http://www.steamthing.com/2010/03/reading-for-a-living.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Steamthing+%28Steamboats+Are+Ruining+Everything%29 <comment><USER2> Reminded me "Reader" the movie. Even it's not reading as a living, it's still reading for something _interesting_.

<http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0976051></comment>


The sad state of test frameworks - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/codr4life/vicsydev/blob/master/test_frameworks.md <comment><USER2> I have many bad experiences with DIY test frameworks. Please think twice about doing this, especially for something others might use. The problems are analogue to developing software without best practices.

At some point, that simple framework won't do what you need it to, so it grows. And grows. Specificity and "clever"/"smart" frameworks are initially awesome to avoid boilerplate. But the more specific you make it, the quicker you hit these limits. The more clever you make it, the less comprehensible and more brittle the tests are. Lack of documentation is always a problem, as is predicting what such a framework needs to support. For the most part, it will just end up an unmaintained mess that someone down the line will have to throw out, and rewrite all the tests.

For acceptance testing, RobotFramework seems like overkill, and the syntax is weird. But it's a super effective generic testing framework, and suits the needs of thousands of projects. It's not perfect and you'll probably never love it, but it'll get the job done, no matter how big the project.

I agree with the bad state of C unit test frameworks. We had to figure out how to add unit testing to C code, and in the end we just went with Google Test and all the headache that C++ brings with it. That was a while ago. After a quick search, I think I'd give µnit a try first.

<comment><AUTHOR> We couldn't disagree more if we tried ;) I've had way worse experiences with over-engineered, off-the-shelf, general-purpose solutions; there is plenty of room for simplification. And there's nothing wrong with owning your code, especially for something as fundamental as testing. The framework presented in the post clocks in at 300 lines of C, there's not much to document really. I would prefer spending my energy elsewhere, but uUnit and others lack what I consider fundamental features and try too hard to steal the show.

<comment><USER2> Okay, concrete examples then. I checked out your libc4 repository, and tried to build it. It doesn't even build, I get "error: conflicting types for 'c4suite_run'". (The code itself is a great mix of tabs and spaces with trailing whitespace for days, which to me is a red flag that it wasn't developed with attention to detail.)

The reason I was even trying to build the code is to get the output `./tests` produces, so I could rant about how difficult it would be for me to integrate this into e.g. Jenkins with decent feedback of which tests fail.

IMO, teamwork is essential, and I'd rather not work with somebody who is happy to put the burden on other developers just so he can save a bit of time by rolling his own. Thanks but no thanks.

<comment><AUTHOR> I prefer tabs, but it's not a religious thing for me. I don't get any errors building the library, and I never saw that error; did you check the signatures?

Jenkins integration is obviously not going to work as that was never the goal. I think CI is mostly a cover up for failing culture, an excuse to waste more time on ceremony.

I'm glad you got your rant.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> For C and C++, what's wrong with using assert() in an integration_test() function or many <func>_test() functions, called when passed a --test flag or compiled as a separate binary?

For me, benchmarking isn't really useful unless it's a profiler in a real world use situation. Otherwise you have no idea how often each API function is called.

<comment><USER4> For C++ I find both Google Test and Boost Unit Test Framework pretty usable. They both have some quirks but IMHO no show-stoppers. I prefer these to custom solutions because don't want to maintain yet another tool but to focus on my problem domain and it is nice when some fellow developers actually have experience with these tools.

<comment><USER5> I prefer Boost.UnitTest to Google Test, which I also like. Boost.UnitTest has very nice sugar, but the big problem is the very slow compilation times.

<comment><USER6> That's why I like catch [0]

Super easy to use, header only so no need to compile anything beforehand, no external dependencies, reasonably fast compilation time, and does everything I need.

0: [https://github.com/philsquared/Catch](https://github.com/philsquared/Catch)

<comment><USER7> Funny... I dumped Catch after a couple of days due to the terrible build times ;)

The fact it took over my programs' command line options and wouldn't give 'em back didn't help either. (Many of my tests are data-driven and use command line options to indicate where to read the data from - I already have a library to handle this! I didn't see - and still don't - why a test framework should be getting involved.)

<comment><USER8> I actually tried out Catch last night and dumped it almost immediately for the exact same reason. I was blown away by how slow it was compared to the rest of my (admittedly small) program in terms of build times.

I found using boost was a smaller hit to build times than Catch, and the suggestion of building catch in a separate translation unit didn't really help.

I'm guessing if your build times are already godawful you may not notice, but I sure as shit did.

Ultimate I found and went with dessert: [https://github.com/r-lyeh/dessert](https://github.com/r-lyeh/dessert)

It's stupidly simple and doesn't do a lot of things that other C++ testing frameworks due, but it builds lightning quick and does 2 things I expect out of testing frameworks.

1\. it tests, and 2\. it reports failures.

I'll probably run into severe limitations that I can't deal with/work around, but for now I'm pretty happy with it and even if I end up using something else in 6 months, I'll still consider it worthwhile.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Is this about the sad state of test frameworks or about the sad state of C test frameworks? There's a reference to JUnit I don't understand. Junit provides the ability to aggregate tests in suites (strict hierarchies wtf?).

Benchmark may be a different concern.. I know you can do something with rules but it may require more time to set up.

By the way: creating a small, self developed tool that just does what you need is sometimes a good idea, but it doesn't mean everything else is shit. Any library serving a large user base will serve somebody better than others.

<comment><USER10> I'm not sure if it's what the author was getting at, but you can't order test execution in junit, so you can't chain together integration tests.

Of course, that's why you use other tools like TestNG. Unit tests aren't _units_ if they're interdependent.

 _edit_ Looks like the author was trying to execute multiple overlapping test suites. Haven't tried that.

<comment><USER11> JUnit 5 [1], which is currently under development will include the ability to control test order. The whole framework was redesigned with a consistent model for extending almost all aspects of the system.

[1] [http://junit.org/junit5/](http://junit.org/junit5/)

<comment><USER12> I looked at JUnit 5 recently and it's super super promising.

The website design does rather give the impression that it's done. I know that if I read the text, I learn that it's not, but my brain categorises those paras as marketing fluff and ignores them.

But it looks very much like what I want from Java testing. My views have, admittedly, been warped by RSpec and Jasmine.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I use a roll-yer-own test framework that (I believe) strikes the perfect balance between setup costs, simplicity and flexibility. It's a small utility that just looks through a given directory tree, finds folders called */test, compiles and runs each .cpp file in that folder (taking cues from formatted comments inside the file if additional files are required), and compares the output to a stored 'good' output for that file, flagging an error if the files differ.

When developing code, you'll almost always end up writing some ad-hoc testing code anyway: Generate some input data, call the code you're testing, printf() some results. At development time, you read this output to verify your code's working well. My system just makes this a bit more methodical and saves a 'known good' result - if the output changes then the code may be wrong. Once you've fixed the issue (or determined that the new behaviour is in fact correct) you update the known-good output.

Dead simple, basically maintains itself, still catches any problems that the tests would catch.

<comment><USER14> If you like this approach, you may like Testscript even better: [https://build2.org/build2/doc/build2-testscript- manual.xhtml](https://build2.org/build2/doc/build2-testscript-manual.xhtml)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Interesting - I came to a similar conclusion from a completely different angle and blogged about it the other day:

[https://zwischenzugs.wordpress.com/2017/03/18/clustered- vm-t...](https://zwischenzugs.wordpress.com/2017/03/18/clustered-vm-testing- how-to/)

I've similarly rolled my own bash-based solutions, as testing is really as simple as running a script and getting a '0' or non-zero exit code.

</comment><comment><USER16> I rolled my own a while back [https://github.com/keithn/seatest](https://github.com/keithn/seatest)

I kept it very vanilla C and avoided having to maintain a suite structure in favour of a function call system which can be used on embedded systems without much resources.

I should probably do more to maintain that project and improve it as I have outstanding PRs it seems!

</comment><comment><USER17> I use Google Test, which integrates nicely with CLion and Jenkins.

</comment><comment><USER18> I haven't documented fully finished work on it yet (but its now running and working for me), but apparently like everyone else I wasn't very impressed with testing frameworks, so decided to attempt to roll my own for Common Lisp rather than C:

See [https://github.com/DJMelksham/testy/tree/master](https://github.com/DJMelksham/testy/tree/master) if anyone is interested, though I'm not sure how useful it will be at this stage.

Like the article author, I settled on tags for tests rather than explicit hierarchies.

Also somewhat like the author, I care about benchmarks to a degree so amongst other things, each test keeps its latest timing and results stats: and because tests serialise to text/lisp code, each test-code/test-run can be version controlled with a project.

My project has some slight diversions/additions to the article:

1\. Being able to capture previously evaluated code and returned results from the REPL and automatically package up the form and the result as a test. Obviously not as applicable to C, but i found myself interactively trying to get a function to work then capturing the result upon success as a regression test rather than the usual "design test up front" from TDD (although that's possible too).

2\. I had a long long internal debate about the philosophy of fixtures. The concept of environments/fixtures in which you could run a series of tests was in fact my initial plan, and although I've backed out of it, I think I could theoretically add such a thing back in, but I'm not sure I want to now...

It seems to me by supplying fixtures/environments in which you run multiple tests, you gain "not paying the setup cost/don't repeat yourself" and "flexibility of running tests in arbitrary environments". What I considered the cost was the tendency to move away from true test independence (the benefit of which is easier naive multi-threading of running the test suite), and no longer a full referential transparency/documentation of a test. Test 2784 says it failed in the last run. Is that because I ran it in context A or context B...and what else was running with it and what caused the failure? What is the performance/timing actually measuring? Sort of like lexical scoping, I wanted the reason for the test's values and failures to be as much as possible "in the test source" and no where else.

This philosophy of mine creates obvious limitations: to try to get around them a bit, while keeping the benefits, I made two more design choices.

3\. Composable tests: New tests can be defined as the combination of already existing tests.

4\. Vectorise test functions!: Most important functions work on vectors or sets of tests as well as individual tests. The function (run-tests), for instance runs a vector of tests passed in to it. The functions (all-tests), (failed-tests), (passed-tests), (get-tests-from-tags), etc, all return vectors of tests you would expect from their names which can then be passed on to the other functions that map across vectors of tests. (print-stats) for example can print statistics on the entire test-suite (because by default its input is the result of the function (all-tests)), but it also accepts any arbitrary set of tests, be it passed-tests, failed-tests or a particular set marked by a specific tag. And because each test is self-contained, all results/reports can just be generated by just combining the internal results/reports of each individual test in the vector. Copy a set of old tests as a basis for new ones, compose multiple tests or functions into one, and/or map new settings or properties across an arbitrary group of tests.

Anyway, I'm curious to hear other people's experiences and design choices in this regard.</comment>


Ask HN: How effective are "share this" buttons? - <AUTHOR>

In your opinion do buttons that assist users in publishing your content to other sources (digg, facebook, etc.) really work?<p>My general feeling is that they are a waste of space, but I'm wondering if anyone has any helpful experience/data to share.. <comment><USER2> In a non-technical niche, for the last 100,000 times I've displayed them, they've been clicked on 4 times and resulted in 1 save.

On the other hand, for the right sort of material (authoritative "you'll want to read this later" reference aimed at geeks), Delicious buttons perform VERY well for me.

</comment><comment><USER3> As I user I do use these buttons, when I am not on my personal machines.

If I am on one of my own machines, I use the wonderful Firefox plugin Shareaholic <http://www.shareaholic.com/> to easily share links.

As a developer would I use these buttons? Yes.

Why use these buttons when it is possible for users to manually share links using X service?

Because these buttons reduce the cognitive load of sharing that link. Making it more likely that lazy users will share it.

From <http://tantek.com/log/2007/02.html#d19t1813> "More specifically, all other things being equal, the cognitive load required to complete an action or task in a human computer interface is directly (probably linearly) proportional to the number of clicks and keystrokes required to complete that action or task. Cognitive load can be roughly defined as "how mentally easy/hard it feels to do something".

<comment><USER4> like another user mentioned, shareaholic looks pretty interesting. however, i think browser plugins are too high friction for an average user to install. has anyone implemented something similar as a bookmarklet?

<comment><USER5> I'm releasing a prototype in a few days. Sit tight.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> They don't do much. Nobody clicks them.

People who use those products already have bookmarklets or extensions or toolbars or whtever already installed.

It's more of a subtle way for publishers to tell their audiences to share with other people.

</comment><comment><USER7> This is a complete guess and have no evidence to support it:

I don't believe the buttons offer ANY advantage because the people most likely to use them are the same crowd of enthusiasts that already have the bookmarklets in their "bookmark toolbar" that offer the exact same functionality.

<comment><USER8> My complete guess is pretty much the opposite :)

My friends have no idea what delicious is, nor other tagging/bookmarking programs, but they love to find interesting/funny content on the web and share that on facebook. I do the same, even though I have delicious and facebook bookmarklets installed. Just lazy I guess

<comment><USER7> That's an interesting perspective I never considered. I guess I was restricting my domain to 'enthusiast' applications like delicious, reddit, digg, etc. Facebook, I agree, is one place where these links would benefit the user.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I don't know how effective it is. But, do you all know that there is actually a startup behind this "share this" button? <http://sharethis.com/>

And, they are doing quite well too - <http://siteanalytics.compete.com/sharethis.com/?metric=uv>

<comment><USER10> there's also addthis.com and addtoany.com

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> All this is speculation, we need data.

Someone needs to write a script for Share This which records every time someone clicks on it and then compare those numbers to the amount of actual traffic, to find out what percentage of visitors click that button.

Volunteers?

<comment><USER12> I can't speak for Share This, but here's some actual data for AddThis from my site, <http://onlineslangdictionary.com/> :

Past year: 1.5 million visits, 4.7 million pageviews, and 108 "saves" via AddThis.

In the past month, 40% of saves were for Facebook, 40% for Google Bookmarks, and 20% for browser bookmarks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Absolute waste of space. I've never clicked on one, nor do I intend to. If I really wanted one, I'd find or write a greasmonkey script, bookmarklet, or what have you.

Disclaimer: Obviously, different users have different habits. These are mine.

</comment><comment><USER14> I use them frequently when I want to share something. If I'm reading a newspaper story that's interesting and I want to share it with my gf or friends, I usually use the "email it" button. If it's something that I'm really passionate about, then I might submit it to facebook, digg, etc... Though mostly I mainly use the email it feature.

</comment><comment><USER15> Like so many things, the answer to do they "really work?" will be quite variable.

In the interest of optimizing screen space you might look into implementing something like this.

<http://www.azarask.in/blog/post/socialhistoryjs/>

</comment><comment><USER16> I can offer an alternative point of view in that they're clicked numerous times for other applications. I write tracking software for one of our clients who sends out hundreds of thousands/millions of emails to their 400,000 person email list (all legit/opt in). The emails have links to short movies that they can then click a Share Now/Send To A Friend button so their friend will get the movie link too.

I don't have any numbers off the top of my head, but they have a pretty decent click rate, way more than 10%. Most of these people are a non-technical audience, so I think that has a lot to do with it too.

</comment><comment><USER17> I'd tell you if we could log into addthis.com with the credentials their site provided as our current username and password. Or if they replied to customer emails. AKA if they weren't a shit pile.

</comment><comment><USER18> We use them by demand from the customer. They are also VERY helpful for viral growth. While most tech savvy users will probably not use the feature there are many other demographics that will.

</comment><comment><USER19> We are using a "share this" button for a video based startup, and in my experience it is not important how many people will click on that button, but the potential traffic that those link could generate. So my conclusion is that share this button is very effective for video advertising but less effective for social bookmarking.

</comment><comment><USER20> My AddThis and ShareThis have been used over 1000 times.

One of them got me to the front page of digg.

That's enough evidence for me. It's about maximizing space. AddThis is the best in that respect.

</comment><comment><USER21> When looking at music listings, the button to add the event to my G __gle calendar is kick-ass. I guess I could share my calendar with others too. I just thought I would share that with you.

</comment><comment><USER22> "Share this" buttons gently remind people to spread the word, even if they don't use the actual button.

(referenced from Word of Mouth Marketing by Andy Sernovitz)

</comment><comment><USER23> interesting topic!

my project will be launching soon, and it'll be interesting to see which implementation we should take:

a) share this buttons b) "email this" button c) no buttons

</comment><comment><USER24> Our stats indicate a 0.3% click rate

</comment><comment><USER25> Depends on your website's audience.

</comment><comment><USER26> Did Ghandi use Share This buttons? Does it matter?

<comment><USER27> The proper spelling is Gandhi.

<comment><USER26> Good point. I actually knew that and got it right at first, then seem to have picked up the wrong one from a comment subconsciously. Fascinating.</comment></comment></comment>