future of ~the internet~

soo barrett brown just got 6 years, in part, for sharing a link to an IRC chat

http://www.theverge.com/2015/1/22/7871317/barrett-brown-sentencing-anonymous-stratfor

in other The Future is Terrifying news

One day in 2011, Moosa opened the Facebook Messenger app on his iPhone. What he saw was chilling: someone else typing under his name to an activist friend of his in Bahrain. Whoever it was kept posing personal questions prodding for information, and Moosa watched unfold right before eyes. He panicked.

"It was like, ‘What’s going on? What’s happening?’" he recalls. He changed his password, alerted his friend, and stopped using Facebook Messenger — but the intrusions kept coming.

In another instance, Moosa noticed that someone posing as him solicited his female Facebook friends for sex — part of an effort, it seemed, to blackmail or perhaps defame him in Bahrain’s conservative media. Facebook was only the beginning. Unbeknownst to him, Moosa’s phone and computer had been infected with a highly sophisticated piece of spyware, built and sold in secret. The implant effectively commandeered his digital existence, collecting everything he did or said online.

http://www.theverge.com/2015/1/21/7861645/finfisher-spyware-let-bahrain-government-hack-political-activist

https://medium.com/backchannel/the-failed-promise-of-deep-links-aa307b3abaa5

I think about this stuff all the time so it's annoying to see something so wrongheaded.

"Right now, though, we could be forgiven for worrying that deep linking is mostly about helping people sell us stuff."

Targeted ads are obnoxious, but it hasn't killed the web yet.

"Most apps are proprietary; you can only create deep links to them if the app’s creator allows you to."

Apps that don't provide deep links aren't going to show up in Google search results. Good luck with that.

"Meanwhile, back on the Web, the bulk of the links we encounter are lazy, manipulative, or mundane. Is it time to play “Taps” over the link’s corpse?"

I'm so sorry for wasting everyone's time here.

well this is the most dystopian commercial i've ever seen

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1yb-wWwAEQ

did everybody read this http://idlewords.com/talks/web_design_first_100_years.htm

cc iyo did facebook ruin the internet?

schlump - its a good piece (well designed, you just keep reading till you get to the end).

I am not sure how the pro-AI lot would destroy the version of the web we have at the moment. The 2nd version is tied into questions of 'well can we destroy most jobs so we can spend even more of our free time looking at cats?'. I think some of these things can co-exist.

Not fancying ILXor's chances of suriving till 2060, but it might outlast facebook.

Probably.

But it will be all 70-90 year olds then. Everyone younger will be in VR social networks.

cheers schlump, really interesting article

isn't it interesting. i really required that level of exposition on the divisions in 'progress' around cores, battery life, &c, but i feel like some of its takehome is pretty inspirational on a smaller scale, sort of along the lines of the geocities romanticism in the facebook thread.

the guy is a really beautiful & funny writer who also wrote this informative precis on transnational burrito delivery, & who peppered his talk on walden with amusing conference diversions like

I went back and re-read a book that had a profound effect on me when I was younger, that really lit a fire under me about being self-reliant and living a life on my own terms. I wanted to see if it still had anything to say to me now that I was actually doing it.

And to my relief, it was even better than I remembered. It turns out there was all kinds of stuff I had missed because I was too young, or too callow, to really understand it.

[at this point I troll the audience by displaying a huge slide of Ayn Rand]

So today I want to talk to you about one of my biggest heroes, whose work I think will have a profound impact on anyone trying to create something on their own terms.

Of course I mean this guy, Henry David Thoreau.

Not fancying ILXor's chances of suriving till 2060, but it might outlast facebook.

this will be such a vindication

kings of the world, that day

dang it didn't we have a recent death-of-journalism-because-internet thread that wasn't the facebork one

https://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/dont-settle-the-journalist-in-the-shadow-of-the-commercial-web

The internet allows for a lot of analysis, because journalists can comment on a story as it develops. That’s a good thing — analysis is really important — but the commercial web often promotes a kind of analysis that benefits platforms instead of readers. The problem is that democratic conversation, the kind that journalism needs to nurture, takes place between people, while the commercial web’s primary interest is presenting a conversation for people — a simulacrum, that can be used as a vehicle for advertisements and a means of collecting data about readers’ interests (to make sure those ads are well targeted). It’s not enough to engage readers, but it’s enough to draw clicks from readers wasting time at work, and clicks pay. This opens up a place for “analytical” writing that promises an argument, but doesn’t necessarily need to deliver it. It is the most prevalent modern way a good journalist settles down. And it leads to wasting a lot of readers’ time, which is a brazen violation of the terms of the journalist’s “contract.” More importantly, it reinforces the pernicious notion that there is no distinction between journalism and mere content, which helps build acceptance for other kinds of “settled” work — including the kind that merely repeats official stories from official sources. When journalists fail to engage readers, they discourage readers from critically engaging with journalism — and that diminishes readers’ ability to critically engage in democratic conversation as a whole.

Not completely sure I follow "promises an argument, but doesn't necessarily need to deliver it" -- in other words stuff with #slatepitchy headlines/concepts where the piece isn't actually all that well-reasoned or thoroughly worked through?

they are more like the internet journalism equivalent of those billboards that say "does advertising work? just did!"

yeah they're not putting it well but i think they're talking about those pieces commissioned to pick up whatever uniques are still on the table for Trending Topic (X) that don't actually do any research or interview anyone but merely rehash the top 7 stories that are already out there about it

headlined with something arresting, in an ideal world

ok yeah when I went and actually read it in the context it seems to be referring to the phenomenon exemplified by the piece about Amy Schumer (and also lol that I then went and responded to just the one paragraph without reading the article).

I sometimes refer to stuff like that Schumer piece (mentally) as the "OK/Not OK School of Journalism"

There was quite an outbreak of it after the Charlie Hebdo incident.

we sort of figured this stuff out in 2001 didn't we?

http://www.niemanlab.org/2015/11/meet-dialogue-the-new-front-in-the-internet-commenting-wars/

you mean we us

here

us'ns?

yep!

shoulda monetized this shit

https://www.flickr.com/photos/gwire/6655443487/

I remember that issue.

I also remember someone referring to Wired as "Mondo 2000 for business guys"

change that to "for obsessive consumers" and it is!

http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm?mod=e2this

Let me start by saying that beautiful websites come in all sizes and page weights. I love big websites packed with images. I love high-resolution video. I love sprawling Javascript experiments or well-designed web apps.

This talk isn't about any of those. It's about mostly-text sites that, for unfathomable reasons, are growing bigger with every passing year.

While I'll be using examples to keep the talk from getting too abstract, I’m not here to shame anyone, except some companies (Medium) that should know better and are intentionally breaking the web.
…

this has been like the week of linking to maciej ceglowski talks and now it's starting to circle back. good for him!

i don't know who that is i just hate having to restart my browser every few hours to force it to release its cache

Something I was pondering recently: why haven't large media conglomerates or traditional newspaper companies scooped up the more successful internet upstart media companies -- gawker, buzzfeed etc. Or have they tried to do so?

Scripps acquired the Earwolf podcast network

That's all I got

nbc invested a lot in vox and buzzfeed and hearst was an early investor in buzzfeed. and a bunch of those old media companies have money in vice.

huffpo > aol > verizon is kinda 'old'

p4k & conde nast also

I know this isn't a new thing, but I am finding the Internet increasingly unreadable. Drop-downs, pop-ups, scroll-overs, like every single page I go to to read something (except ILX) is so cluttered with moving parts that it is actively difficult to just navigate and read.

I know all the reasons for it, the desperate attempts to monetize clicks and content somehow someway, but it feels like it's approaching a breaking point. Though it is also possible I am just a middle-aged guy who doesn't like all the moving pieces, and the kids are just fine with it.

the kids don't use the web

not even Wikipedia for homework?

i can verify that students use the web quite avidly in order to locate the top google result for a variety of things

lag∞n wrote something kind of relevant last year: https://medium.com/@on3ness/the-nightmare-online-espn-go-com-475d1d31b391#.b05mvg94s

basically the internet is terrible and no one should use it.

Try one of these amazing new sites on an older iphone. 20% the time they crash completely - especially gratifying if you were a few dozen scrolls down your facebook feed at the time - if not you have to wait about 30 seconds before they show you any text, often stuttering or freezing completely for another 30 seconds when you try to scroll.

How about those ads which however gingerly you tread around them manage to register a click, and take you out of the browser and into the app store? Should be a hanging offence.

lag∞n wrote something kind of relevant last year: https://medium.com/@on3ness/the-nightmare-online-espn-go-com-475d1d31b391#.b05mvg94s

Exactly!Especially otm about the sticky headers. I hate when like 30% of the screen follows along as you scroll down. And I'm sure he's right that responsive design is partly responsible, but actually responsive design gives you good readability at any scale -- it doesn't sacrifice desktop readability for better phone/tablet nav.

lol, i was looking at a film festival website with sticky header AND sticky footer yesterday, and the actual film schedule was basically unreadable.

i'm still sort of baffled by the logic of "facebook is eating our lunch, nobody goes to homepages anymore" -> "making our website unpleasant to use on a pc is our highest design priority"

does everyone running a site have numbers that say they drive big traffic their own way by notifying via email or are they all just going gaga over some identikit javascript widget that lets them greet people w/ email signup bleg boxes? those fuckin things are a plague.

yes, sign me up!
no thanks, i love hitler

has there been a bunch of research that says that people really love to scroll? like i assume that including maximum scrolling must be good for revenue or people wouldn't be doing it, but i tend to just bail out if i'm not interested in the first few screenfulls of articles i see. the ringer is pretty much the worst offender in this regard, but it seems like most web 5.0 or whatever designs do this.

phones

sadly otm

yeah, but even on phones i don't find endless scrolling especially pleasant. i guess it is sort of compulsive, like as long as you give users something to do, they'll keep doing it. a guy i work with apparently got to "the end" of his facebook feed recently, and i didn't think that was possible.