chromodynamic

The term “social media” is already toxic. When I started using the Internet, socialising and media were two separate things. Conflating the two implies that every time we say something, we are publishing an article and should care about how many views and likes we get, instead of making a genuine attempt at connection. And it suggests that every reply should be some kind of review of the post it replies to.

In the days of forums, people would just post what came into mind. They were more honest because there was no number next to your comment rating how good it was.

Browsers should be designed from the start for the benefit of the users. There are too many “features” that only benefit the server owners. It’s been this way for a long time. Like the “Referer” header. Old as dirt, but how do I benefit from telling a server what page I was visiting beforehand?

Client-side scripting is a hack. HTML didn’t have all the tags people wanted or needed, so instead of carefully updating it to include new features, they demanded that browsers just execute arbitrary code on the user’s computer, and with that comes security vulnerabilities, excessive bandwidth use and a barrier-to-entry that makes it difficult to develop new browsers, giving one company a near-monopoly.

Besides the trackers and malware, ads can be categorised as a flaw in technology. A kind of software parasite that uses a computer’s resources without providing any additional functionality to the user.

The root of the issue is this idea that a web browser should be an “everything app” that can basically recreate the functionality of any other app on the system. It’s total feature creep, and in addition to privacy issues, creates a barrier-to-entry that makes it very hard for people to create new browsers because of the sheer amount of features they’re expected to implement.