Today I got a link to a tweet, which had a link itself. Twitter has the domain through a shortener (t.co), but when you click, you better not have javascript disabled, as otherwise it won't load. WHAT THE FUCK?!
Is it necessary, Twitter? For our "increased security"? Go fuck youself.
The same goes for most of the modern web: go fuck youself. It's pointless, and even worse: it goes against the fundamental philosophy of the web.
That's right. The fundamental principles for this is universability of access. Having a website that needs you to have javascript enabled is bullshit. Twitter should directly have the link as a href html tag. No "referrer" bullshit, no adtech shit, no nothing. Also, most modern web is also hyper-bloated. All the bullshit they add to it makes it look like a post on /d/.
Even worse, when one is constrained by a data cap, or by poor connectivity, as many people in other parts of the world, you're excluding them. But you fill your mouth with buzzwords like "free web" (by the same Mozilla that included DRM in their browser, no less). Fuck that!
Lately, however, I've noticed that the "anti-bloat" "movement" (or, more fittingly, "philosophy") is gaining traction. Maybe it's because web2.0 has been associated with californian suburbanites (and culture is swinging the other way), or maybe it's just resentment that the web has become way too fucked up to get fixed, but it's something that's more or less to take into account.
As more and more people start becoming internet savvy, "rich user experience" is starting to get more and more shunned, even though millenials are of the poke and drool variety.
The main problem is that lusers keep demanding "rich" websites that work on their iPhones. While it pushes handheld computing to its limits, the webdevs' answer was not to cut down and create lean mean kilobyte sites, but to make websites that are "responsive". Tell me, what's so bad about redirecting a user to m.website.com? Why does it all have to be served on the same page? "costs" is not a valid answer. And if you really, really need everything on the same website, then make your website measure kilobytes, or just bytes, not megabytes.
After Twitter popularized hashtags, shit's been pushed EVERYWHERE. It's annoying, on the level of neospeak. It marks pretty worthwhile movements as "just a product of millenial culture", which is bad for the movement itself, kills all seriousness it could have, and becomes a "thought-terminating cliche" in the mouths of their own movement-pushers. And, when used in posts... you just KNOW it's going to be used for data mining and marketing. The only solution is to actually anti-use hashtags, make them so they're useless, not correlated to what the hashtag means.
But of course, modern people are indoctrinated for the use of hashtags, everywhere, all the time. The media keep pushing a "join the conversation" message, a "join the hashtag" everywhere. But you know the rule of thumb: AROUND MEDIA OF ANY KIND, NEVER RELAX!. American people have let themselves be relaxed around media which almost never has their interests in mind (and if they do, it's coincidental). This marked their downfall, but they can still fix it this Tuesday.
Keep in mind this: the dotcom bubble destroyed the web. Once people realized there was big money to take from it, the web started being mass-manufactured and it stopped being about you, the user. It started being about companies. We, the users, should strive to take it back. It doesn't actually mean going for a bloatless web, but going for a web we can trust. As I write this, I read the common browser extention, "Web of Trust", actually sold the marketing profiles for millions of users. Is there nobody we can trust? No.
The web should absolutely be kept for non-profit use. Not because of some pseudocommunist thought, but because instead of using it to promote their products, they are abusing it to make of us their products. If the situation was different, I wouldn't be this extremist.
People are used to computers behaving in a certain way. Do you use a tiling wm instead of a floating windows one? Then your computer might as well be alien, and not only to a John Doe, but people well acustomed to using computers. I get this all the time. It's kind of awkward. But I just like my computer that way.
I was talking to a few friends the other day, on Telegram, about a few other friends who refused to install it and stood on an IRC server, and you know what? They are right. Telegram is superfluous. IRC is already perfect for what we have (A group chat for students). Telegram is not universal. Whatsapp is not universal. Group chats should be able to be accessed anywhere, without a fuzz, and with the ability to, for example, migrate the whole people to another server. Telegram doesn't offer this, so if we have to migrate, we have to start over, with a new, empty, log. But if we were on IRC, we'd have the logs as a text file, somewhere. And that's great. It gives you freedom.
Another thing, is that Telegram is not forward-compatible. By this I mean: Problem with encoding or something on IRC? you can change it, it depends on the server AND it's very likely you can pick the correct one. But on Telegram, instead of having just a text stream, with links to external resources just as needed (Or you get to download it through the protocol). On Telegram, I remember a few months ago, when .gifs weren't implemented with autoplay, I got "content unavailable" messages all the time. With IRC this doesn't happen. You download the file, you can play it with whatever you like. Or get the link to another protocol (most times http)
Of course, Telegram is GNU GPL and all that, but IRC is on par for this category, and it wins over because of the fact that the protocol is just a text stream, again, no need to include bells, whistles, or whatever. Also, you have way less implementations for Telegram clients (again, due to complexity of the protocol), and way less for Telegram servers (only one that I know of, and the code isn't available for us to see). With IRC you have a myriad of servers, each with whichever amount you want of features and such.
Further on, neither Whatsapp nor Telegram work on my Android 2.1 (yes, it just werks, or used to). But you know what works? Yeah.
This is more or less like striving for the Unix Philosophy, but for protocols. And it makes sense. It's literally a text stream, it lacks the huge amount of moving parts that other protocols have, and it's more local (i.e.: less prone to mass surveillance, which is hugely important in this day and age) than something that literally stores everything "on the cloud", and just tells you "we'll be super secret, we swear". So, why not pick that one? Is IRC too underground? Are normal people allergic to monospaced fonts? You can change them if you want, you know?
The worst part of this conundrum, though, is that peer pressure plays a huge role upon this. If your friends are all in a closed garden, what can you do? At least Telegram has bots which you can use to syncronize with IRC channels, but what about my friends who are left on Whatsapp? They aren't that technical, and Whatsapp doesn't support for bots natively. I could see how to make a bot for it, though, but it takes twice the effort it takes for Telegram (first you'd need a phone chip dedicated to it, and convince your friends to let the bot on the chat, which is the most difficult part). I guess I can at least be happy that Telegram is not as bad as Whatsapp.
Further on, today I got the news that a friend got her phone stolen, and she didn't have Telegram on her computer. This means she can't communicate in our Telegram group. Again, if we used a truly universal protocol for communication, she'd still be able to communicate with us. Really, it makes sense for a messaging "app" to be 100% oriented towards cellphones, but once you go into other devices, you should stop assuming every computer user has a phone, and viceversa. This means, drop the phone number requirement. And this isn't something unheard of: we already had this with MSN Messenger (remember?).
Good luck with your 30 seconds gap between changing channels, dumbasses! I'll keep yelling the goals before you get the image!
Small thought about "fake nerds" Whatsapp sucks! Don't use it! This site is in constant construction. I always leave a lot in the inkpot.