# Splitting the Web by Ploum on 2023-08-01
There's an increasing chasm dividing the modern web. On one side, the commercial, monopolies-riddled, media-adored web. A web which has
only one objective: making us click. It measures clicks, optimises
clicks, generates clicks. It gathers as much information as it could
about us and spams every second of our life with ads, beep,
notifications, vibrations, blinking LEDs, background music and
fluorescent titles.
A web which boils down to Idiocracy in a Blade Runner landscape, a
complete cyberpunk dystopia.
Then there's the tech-savvy web. People who install adblockers or
alternative browsers. People who try alternative networks such as
Mastodon or, God forbid, Gemini. People who poke fun at the modern
web by building true HTML and JavaScript-less pages.
Between those two extremes, the gap is widening. You have to choose
your camp. When browsing on the "normal web", it is increasingly
required to disable at least part of your antifeatures-blockers to
access content.
Most of the time, I don't bother anymore. The link I clicked doesn't
open or is wrangled? Yep, I'm probably blocking some important
third-party JavaScript. No, I don't care. I've too much to read on a
day anyway. More time for something else. I'm currently using
kagi.com as my main search engine on the web. And kagi.com comes with
a nice feature, a "non-commercial lens" (which is somewhat ironic
given the fact that Kagi is, itself, a commercial search engine). It
means it will try to deprioritize highly commercial contents. I can
also deprioritize manually some domains. Like facebook.com or
linkedin.com. If you post there, I'm less likely to read you. I've
not even talked about the few times I use marginalia.nu.
Something strange is happening: it's not only a part of the web which
is disappearing for me. As I'm blocking completely google analytics,
every Facebook domain and any analytics I can, I'm also disappearing
for them. I don't see them and they don't see me!
Think about it! That whole "MBA, designers and marketers web" is now optimised thanks to analytics describing people who don't block
analytics (and bots pretending to be those people). Each day, I feel
more disconnected from that part of the web.
When really needed, dealing with those websites is so nerve breaking
that I often resort to... a phone call or a simple email. I signed my
mobile phone contract by exchanging emails with a real person because
the signup was not working. I phone to book hotels when it is not straightforward to do it in the web interface or if creating an
account is required. I hate talking on the phone but it saves me a
lot of time and stress. I also walk or cycle to stores instead of
ordering online. Which allows me to get advice and to exchange
defective items without dealing with the post office.
Despite breaking up with what seems to be "The Web", I've never
received so many emails commenting my blog posts. I rarely had as
many interesting online conversations as I have on Mastodon. I've
tens of really insightful contents to read every day in my RSS feeds,
on Gemini, on Hacker News, on Mastodon. And, incredibly, a lot of
them are on very minimalists and usable blogs. The funny thing is
that when non-tech users see my blog or those I'm reading, they
spontaneously tell me how beautiful and usable they are. It's a bit
like all those layers of JavaScript and flashy css have been used
against usability, against them. Against us. It's a bit like real
users never cared about "cool designs" and only wanted something
simple.
It feels like everyone is now choosing its side. You can't stay in
the middle anymore. You are either dedicating all your CPU cycles to
run JavaScript tracking you or walking away from the big monopolies.
You are either being paid to build huge advertising billboards on top
of yet another framework or you are handcrafting HTML.
Maybe the web is not dying. Maybe the web is only splitting itself in
two.
You know that famous "dark web" that journalists crave to write
about? (at my request, one journalist once told me what "dark web"
meant to him and it was "websites not easily accessible through a
Google search".) Well, sometimes I feel like I'm part of that "dark
web". Not to buy drugs or hire hitmen. No! It's only to have a place
where I can have discussions without being spied and interrupted by
ads.
But, increasingly, I feel less and less like an outsider.
It's not me. It's people living for and by advertising who are the
outsiders. They are the one destroying everything they touch,
including the planet. They are the sick psychos and I don't want them
in my life anymore. Are we splitting from those click-conversion-funnel-obsessed weirdos? Good riddance! Have fun
with them.
But if you want to jump ship, now is the time to get back to the
simple web. Welcome back aboard!
From: <https://ploum.net/2023-08-01-splitting-the-web.html>
D:
That leaves me the problem of how to adapt since I do not
own a smart phone and I am paying more for certain things
due to my not having one.
Same thing with me in Russia: discrimination against people
without smartphones, or not wishing to clutter their
smartphones with the "apps" of every shop the visit.
On 12/24/23 14:19, IanJ wrote:
Personally I don't see that it is possible to split the web, the whole
idea behind it is that you can seemlessly navigate between sites, so even
with the best efforts and intentions, you don't really know what kind of
site that next link click will take you to.
Most commercial websites - by which I mean websites whose commerce *is*
the website, not just websites for companies - already block themselves
off from the free web, trying to make you pay to get in.
And people who use the free web probably don't get much value from them, either.
It won't be a complete split, but a network with two clusters.
immibis <news@immibis.com> writes:
On 12/24/23 14:19, IanJ wrote:
Personally I don't see that it is possible to split the web, the whole
idea behind it is that you can seemlessly navigate between sites, so even >>> with the best efforts and intentions, you don't really know what kind of >>> site that next link click will take you to.
Most commercial websites - by which I mean websites whose commerce *is*
the website, not just websites for companies - already block themselves
off from the free web, trying to make you pay to get in.
My personal gripe is that while web sites providing useful information
tend to have readable, well-connected text, those that actually want
to sell you something -- anything from books to industrial compressors
-- are burdened with arcane javascript and connective and/or
interavtive complexity that often defeats my browser.
In particular, I'm totally pissed off with Coles/Indigo/Chapters.
After their major system crash of a some months ago, they will no
longer let you come to a store in person and order a book. A store
clerk will, if prodded, look a book up on their computer a sell you a cash-card/receipt the ID number of which you an the use to pay for
your book that you must then order on line. They assure you that you
can opt to have the book delivered to your local store for pick-up if
you like.
To add insult to this stupidity, their on-line system is clever
enough to deduce you location from your IP address and offer stores in
your area as delivery destinations. Only their cleverness is borken;
it deduces that because the corporate address of my ISP is in
Montreal, they will only offer to deliver to their stores in the
Montreal area. I happen to be ca. 1,000 miles east of Montreal but
their web site seems to not offer any way for me to tell them that.
Looks to me as if they've signed a death warrant for their bricks &
mortar stores, working from the notion that spending $BIGNUM on re-implementing their crashed in-store network and ordering system is
way too much to service people such as I who read a lot, actually buy hard-cover books and prefer the process of buying from humans in a
real, non-virtual place.
And people who use the free web probably don't get much value from them,
either.
It won't be a complete split, but a network with two clusters.
[ groups trimmed to comp.misc, comp.infosystems.www.misc ]I gave up on Indigo/Chapters a long time ago. I've had too many issues
I gave up on Indigo/Chapters a long time ago. I've had too many issues
with them.
My last and final solution is to have my wife buy things for me. ;)
For me, I've chosen to invest my energy into irc, gopher and usenet,
where communities can exist and content is created because people want
There's a recent thread titled "Which groups are active?" over on alt.usenet.newbies that might have some good leads.
Hopefully one upside of Google leaving Usenet will be that there'll be
less spam, and the number of messages in a group will become a better reflection of how active the group really is.
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