GeneralThe web doesn't exist :O

 

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 From:  Drew (X3N0PH0N)  
 To:  ALL
43054.1 
When I think of the web I *still* think of websites made by individual people and small groups and using a search engine to stumble upon them and ending up getting lost for a day reading about the history of the escalator or whatever. And losing hours here chatting about whatever tangent we got onto today.

When I think of the web, that's still what I think of. And I've only recently started to realise how disconnected from the reality of today's web that is.

These days I use youtube, fedi and google to find answers to things on reddit. I virtually never see personal/small community websites and I never get lost reading stuff - I search, get the info, close the tab. We went from personal websites to wordpress blogs to *fucking* Medium. Fuck do I hate Medium. Everything's bland and homogenised. I'm sure the interesting ideas are out there, still, but even then, the tone has changed. No one's writing about what they love for the love of it, it's a stepping stone to something, you're a brand now, you're building an audience, maybe even starting a business.

So the web that I think of as being the web doesn't exist any more. We just have a few web apps. And we use these gargantuan, heavy, bloated applications to look at text, images and videos. All web browsers are shit now. They're all made by for-profit companies who want to sell your data and show you ads, even Firefox. And they consume *gigabytes* of RAM before even opening a web page.

It's not just that the web has gone to shit, as I've thought for a long time now, it's that the web *as I think of it* simply no longer exists.

And I miss it!

My website's never been much cop cos I'm not a good writer and never know what to write about. But I do like chewing over stuff I've been thinking of and sticking the results up somewhere in case anyone else finds it useful. I've decided to delete my website and replace it with a bunch of links to other stuff.

I'm going to write about whatever I'm thinking about and put it up on Gemini and Gopher.

And I'm going to make a (telnet) BBS for people to play around with if I can get the fucker to compile.

I don't think looking to the past is the right answer in itself, it's not about nostalgia for these technologies (I never used BBSes back in the day, barely touched Gopher and Gemini's new), I just want to have *fun* on/with the internet again. And these things are at least free of all the stuff that ruined the web. And maybe I can have fun messing around with them with my friends.

If I have a point I guess it's that I've realised the web is actually dead and am beginning my mourning period. I will be dressing like Queen Victoria for the next year or so. And looking for others protocols to put my dick in.
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 From:  william (WILLIAMA)  
 To:  Drew (X3N0PH0N)     
43054.2 In reply to 43054.1 
It's far worse than just people trying to be a brand or whatever. It's the invasion of the voice-snatchers. It's the overflow of poisonous social networking into every aspect of the web. It's that point where if you want to understand what's happening you look at where the Venn diagrams of politics and psychology overlap. I run a writers' website and a couple of writers' asked me whether the site was still needed, because we get all we need from Discord and...and...so on. Not knocking that point of view (or Discord), but if you jump on that track then you have to be 100% alert to who owns the place where you're chatting and who wants to get in.

Anyway, it's your rant so I'll shut up.

But you make that BBS and I'll fire up webcrawler to find it. 

He May Be Your Dog But He's Wearing My Collar

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 From:  Drew (X3N0PH0N)  
 To:  william (WILLIAMA)     
43054.3 In reply to 43054.2 
I was hoping people would rant along, so thank you!

 
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 From:  william (WILLIAMA)  
 To:  Drew (X3N0PH0N)     
43054.4 In reply to 43054.3 
But, along with the rant, there's plenty in your post that I recognise as familiar parts of the web. Of course, so much was different simply because so much was new. Today I casually glance at something online as I check the time when I wake up. If I watch television it's more likely to be an internet stream than television. In the house, my phone connects through the internet, but I'm more likely to contact family and friends through a "website" like whatsapp or meta. Back then, using the internet was something you had to go and do: a special activity like cooking a meal or feeding the cat. From the days when nobody else in the house could use a phone if you were on the internet, to today when the cat's food bowl is online 24x7 seems like more than a lifetime. But the same applies to those who 'provided' the web: often the same people who used it. In the early days people had to work hard because it was new, unfamiliar, and their weren't a shedload of shortcuts. There was a ton of crap, but also a ton of jewels, because if you have to work hard, you're likely to try hard. And also you were likely to stick content you cared about out there. Today, if I put up a website at all, it's something I can do in about half an hour including buying the hosting, and have some bland pro-looking site ready to bore people rigid.

Yes, the internet these days is a vast commercial platform. It offers everything from honest trade to scamming food out of mouths on an industrial scale. It's a shithole of crap information. Some real, some fabricated, most copied many times. It's a public plunge bath where people have discovered they can shit and piss in the water and nobody knows it's them, even as the water turns putrid. And anybody who wants to know who's doing anything can spy on anyone else. 

He May Be Your Dog But He's Wearing My Collar

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 From:  koswix  
 To:  Drew (X3N0PH0N)     
43054.5 In reply to 43054.1 
I hate how everything's a fucking video now.

Search for how to do something (in a program/language/recipe/DIY/hobby) and I'm looking for something that's going to list out the handful of steps required to accomplish a task, in text form that I can easily scan back through as required.

But no, everthing's a fucking video now.

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If Feds call you and say something bad on me, it may prove what I said are truth, they are afraid of it.
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 From:  william (WILLIAMA)  
 To:  koswix     
43054.6 In reply to 43054.5 
Absolutely.

Unless it's the procedure to fix some complex bit of equipment when there will be no video and instruction 7 reads: "The correct widget is usually the outer one. Grasp it firmly and twist more or less in a figure of eight until it clicks loudly. Take great care not to twist any of the other fourteen very similar widgets as this may destroy your device."

He May Be Your Dog But He's Wearing My Collar

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 From:  Drew (X3N0PH0N)  
 To:  william (WILLIAMA)     
43054.7 In reply to 43054.4 
Yeah, I think that's part of the problem. *Everything* goes through the web. It swallowed (almost) all other protocols. Everything goes through a web API even when that's a terrible idea. If there were (still) other protocols 'competing' with the web, I think the web would have to be better.
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Message 43054.8 deleted 26 Aug 17:54 by X3N0PH0N

 From:  Drew (X3N0PH0N)  
 To:  koswix     
43054.9 In reply to 43054.5 
Yeah. The upside of that is that all the weird stuff I used to get lost in on personal websites is now on Youtube. The little channels with 100 followers who do nothing but review car park lifts (actual channel I found, it's great).

Video and podcasts are where the interesting stuff is now. And I *like* those. But I want explorable, text-based places too.

And yeah, tech instructions being video-only is an absolute fucking blight. Totally agree.

(replied to wrong person. I suck at old web)
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 From:  CHYRON (DSMITHHFX)  
 To:  Drew (X3N0PH0N)     
43054.10 In reply to 43054.9 
I hate podcasts, not that I've listened to many. I think I hate the idea of them, I much prefer reading (ok, skimming) and looking at pictures. I mainly use youtube to acquire musics. What I hate most of all is how all websites are CMS, and mostly wordpress. They're really fucking boring. Nobody can code a website anymore, it's all these dumb and highly insecure CMS plugins and addons that are an upgrade nightmare. Don't even get me started on influencers, kill them all.
“A man with nicotine, protein, caffeine, and creatine coursing through his veins is an unstoppable force.”
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 From:  Drew (X3N0PH0N)  
 To:  CHYRON (DSMITHHFX)     
43054.11 In reply to 43054.10 
Yeah I hate all the piss boring CMS websites. Wordpress and Drupal etc. were great in terms of democratising the web, but an absolute pain in the arse to work with. And facilitated the corporate homogenisation of web aesthetics and functions.

And we *really* took a wrong turn databasing everything. A blog site does not need to dynamically create the same fucking page for every user. We realised static generation was a good idea wayyyy too late.

I do love me a podcast though. Perfect for when I'm playing games. 
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 From:  william (WILLIAMA)  
 To:  Drew (X3N0PH0N)     
43054.12 In reply to 43054.11 
"but an absolute pain in the arse to work with".

I've put together a couple of "shit" websites as I think of them, because that's what people wanted. That's crap template things that took zero thought. More recently, only a couple of years ago, I took over a Wordpress site that somebody else had built, and reworked it because the users were complaining. I know nothing about website design, but I have a long background in programming, mainly IBM and systems programming, so I thought 'how hard can it be?'

I know why I found/find it a bit of a nightmare. If this isn't taking the thread too far off track I'd love to know what you mean.

He May Be Your Dog But He's Wearing My Collar

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 From:  CHYRON (DSMITHHFX)  
 To:  william (WILLIAMA)     
43054.13 In reply to 43054.12 
In three words -- too much code.
“A man with nicotine, protein, caffeine, and creatine coursing through his veins is an unstoppable force.”
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 From:  william (WILLIAMA)  
 To:  CHYRON (DSMITHHFX)     
43054.14 In reply to 43054.13 
Well, yes. That's what I find. That and FAR too many cooks. For instance, one of the things I wanted was a site menu that gave some sort of hover-over help/explanation for what each choice would do. Was it possible within the default theme? Of course not. But you can have hover-over sub-choices so I ended up building a proper kludge of a menu which at least did what I wanted. Now I see that the latest updates to Wordpress, or Buddypress, or possibly bbPress, have broken the way it works for mobile users. It shouldn't because I haven't contravened any of the rules. But where do you even start when there are a thousand places the problem could be?

He May Be Your Dog But He's Wearing My Collar

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 From:  Drew (X3N0PH0N)  
 To:  william (WILLIAMA)     
43054.15 In reply to 43054.12 
As a user I think it's decent. It provides a word-processory interface, which people are comfortable with (word processors were another wrong-turn imo) so they can easily post their posts and get comments and be perfectly happy. It's massively over-engineered for that, but from the user perspective it does it well.

But as a 'dev' working with a client it's horrible. First off, trying to find a theme that does *most* of what they want and they like the general look of. Sending them test-site links, explaining thoroughly that it's just a theme's test-site, and getting "yeah that looks okay but I'll want my name up the top and the text to be purple" back. Finding a theme is a tedious process and it's never perfect, so it'll need customising, which is where it gets *really* bad.

Some themes come with a (non-standardised, of course) widget to change colours and turn features off and on, which is *good*, except that these ones always end up even harder to customise if what you want to change *isn't* covered by the widget.

So to alter the look of the site it's CSS overrides. Which are always a pain. But WP's HTML and CSS are *nasty*, so it's kludges on kludges on kludges. I hate dealing with software where every single fucking goddamn element on the page has its own (unmemorably named) class. The cascading part of CSS really doesn't work in practise except for the most trivial stuff.

But that's all fine compared to altering functionality. In which case you're doing PHP overrides. Which the themes (if I remember correctly) are already overriding, so if you ever want to change themes you're starting from scratch. And Wordpress is made of one million PHP files and finding which ones (often multiple, to do one thing) you need to override to get the functionality you want is literally the worst experience I've ever had working with software.

And of course, all of these alterations are incredibly fragile. When Wordpress *or* the theme updates, any of them could break. So your best option as a 'dev' is to never update, which is a great thing to encourage.

I ended up refusing to deal with CMSes. I did a few sites, towards the end of when I was doing web stuff, with static site generators, usually Jekyll, which was much more pleasant. But only suitable for people who can get their heads around markdown (again, word processors were a fucking mistake). 

But even Jekyll is overly complex now. I ended up, for my own stuff, writing my own static site generator in bash. It's clunky cos I don't know what I'm doing, but it works great for me (and a handful of other people use it, which is gratifying).

I fucking hate wordpress. I wouldn't mind if the end result was amazing but, ultimately, unless you're using it to run an actually dynamic site, what it's doing is pointless. Databasing text so that you can pull it out of the database every time someone visits and dynamically recreate the exact same page for every visitor (yeah, caching will mitigate some of that but still).
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 From:  Drew (X3N0PH0N)  
 To:  Drew (X3N0PH0N)     
43054.16 In reply to 43054.15 
As to word processing being a mistake...

The vast majority of what word processing is used for (internal memos, letters and the like) would be better as plaintext. It'd be quicker to write and easier to read.

For most of the rest, where rich formatting is actually required, a (consumer-level) 'DTP'/page setting application would be better. It's telling that most of my friends, when needing to make a flyer or leaflet or whatever, will use Powerpoint/similar rather than a word processor.

For anything that's to be professionally typeset, I'm 100% certain the typesetter would rather work with plaintext documents than word processor output.

And now we've got markdown which does what basic word processing does way better than any word processor, in cases where you want some basic typography.

A world where we'd normalised around plaintext and had nice tools (and things like markdown much earlier) is a nicer world. Hopefully PDFs would never have become a thing.
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 From:  william (WILLIAMA)  
 To:  Drew (X3N0PH0N)     
43054.17 In reply to 43054.15 
Yes, that's the kind of thing I thought. I've never (really) been a dev working for a client. To a degree I was one of the clients, plus being the dev trying to get things as wanted. In short, it was a bit of a bugger. Working out what has to be done to get close is a learning curve, but also something of a waste of time, because it will all be different next time, when the theme or the plugins are updated or whatever.

He May Be Your Dog But He's Wearing My Collar

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 From:  william (WILLIAMA)  
 To:  Drew (X3N0PH0N)     
43054.18 In reply to 43054.16 
Oh yeah, and I almost forgot. All the shit that doesn't work properly in 2024. My site is set up as a site for members using groups, forums, chat etc. So Buddypress/bbPress/Wordpress. All fairly standard. But the handling of posts is infinitely better in Beehive. The pure embarrassment of explaining (again) to somebody who posts from a Word document or Libre Office that their post is full of tags in this part of the site , but not in that part. That their careful paragraph creation is fine here, but missing there... That sometimes their posts vanish altogether because the space-saving hide posts feature is broken sometimes and doesn't display the 'show all posts' option... 

He May Be Your Dog But He's Wearing My Collar

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 From:  CHYRON (DSMITHHFX)  
 To:  Drew (X3N0PH0N)     
43054.19 In reply to 43054.15 
When I was working, I always told clients ip front I could code them a better, more functional, performant, customizable, easily updated, and transferable to different hosting, web site with HTML5 (I used JQuery heavily for bells and whistles, but this would have not meant anything to the client). Clients liked the idea of being to make their own site edits but in truth they would hand it off to developers anyway, after they fucked it up good.
“A man with nicotine, protein, caffeine, and creatine coursing through his veins is an unstoppable force.”
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 From:  william (WILLIAMA)  
 To:  CHYRON (DSMITHHFX)     
43054.20 In reply to 43054.19 
Quote: 
after they fucked it up good

An occurrence that's made extremely likely by the ways that Wordpress with its themes and plugins can be modified. The official ways that is: odd, cumbersome, and varied ways, from mysterious editing functions to directly injecting HTML into a theme (additional CSS). 

He May Be Your Dog But He's Wearing My Collar

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