[EDIT]

> if all you have to contribute is moralising about the worth of other people's preferences

Definitely a complete characterization of my views on this, and of these posts. You've looked carefully, considered thoughtfully, and discovered the entire thing. Very good.

I'm not a bit worried we'd go without capable search engines, without ads. Very likely there'd be donation-supported ones that are at least as good, and maybe better for some purposes (IMO Google's utility peaked around '08).

The free side of Youtube is a UX problem to be solved by something like torrent clients (maybe plus some RSS). Or probably a dozen other ways. It's far from insurmountable, there's just no motivation to fix that now (because there's no demand for it). That's the story for most of the services that could be replaced by [two or three existing protocols] + [some not-exactly-rocket-science UX effort]. The commercial side of it is solved by... hosting videos. Yourself, or paying a service to do it for you (these services already exist, despite YouTube's dominance, all the way from simple video-hosting to full white-label video streaming services).

> Anything that's used by someone is valuable to someone. I don't like paella, but I don't propose to eradicate all paella restaurants for that reason. Again, this feels like a hand-wavey and not very wise answer to dismiss problems with your idea.

It's plain that a huge percentage of online content could be replaced with Snake Game on an old Nokia with ~0 loss of enjoyment for the consumer. A perfect replacement for them is a book of Sudoku puzzles. People look at the stuff but the value is extremely close to zero, in that nearly any other time-wasting activity is just as good. And that's after dismissing the ~75% of the Web that's spammy garbage of negative value (because it drowns out better material covering the same thing).

> You may have your own wishes and preferences, but it's not a good idea to let those invade the rational, evaluative part of your mind.

Beats accepting the wishes and preferences that created the bad situation that exists now, right? Why should that be privileged over what I'd prefer? Has zip to do with a lack of rationality on my part, though it's easier to dismiss ideas if one first paints them as irrational.

We can have useful, widely-used open protocols or we can have spying (ads may or may not also be on the table, but take away the spying and there goes much of the advantage of the huge tech companies, anyway). The two very clearly cannot co-exist. I'd prefer the former.

I remember thinking it was OK when I watched it when it came out. I watched it again just a few months ago, for the first time since then, and found it to be about as bad as a movie can be. Not even accidentally entertaining, like some bad movies are.

Why?

Without competition from free-but-funded-with-$billions ad-supported services, most of the valuable stuff would probably be replaced by volunteer and non-profit efforts.

Others would survive by charging (more) money.

Some would be replaced by protocols (several social networks would be among those replaced). Clients & hosting may be paid, or not. It'd work out fine.

Most of the rest isn't valuable.

New protocols are DOA until we significantly nerf the incentives to "own" the user.

IOW it's not gonna happen until we outlaw anything that resembles spying on users. And maybe also ads generally.

I was in high school.

That was the best time to build websites.

(Though at least "flat" trends and terrible UX out of several major companies mean my shitty designs are back to looking about as good and working about as well as "pro" designers, so that's, kind of, an improvement over ~2005-2014)

That's where a lot of the fun-for-greenfield ones are way less fun, including Rails.

Same played out with the college entrance scandal. "Bribery is great and we love it a bunch—unless you do it wrong because you're not rich enough to do it right, then it's a big ol' no-no" is the message a great many received from that one.

Overall, I think having the Internet makes my life significantly worse except for how it makes it possible for my family to participate in the modern education and the modern job market. It's a benefit mainly because you're shut out from things that previously did not require it if you don't have it.

[EDIT] ~$140/mo is my home Internet service and roughly what it costs for Internet service on two cell phone lines. I'd probably keep phone + SMS service even without the societal requirement to have Internet service.

I'd never heard of it until I watched Watchmen. So, I'd lived nearly half my life before hearing of it.

I spent my entire childhood in states bordering Oklahoma, and, for a while, in Oklahoma itself (though not in/near Tulsa).

Absent is any ground between cheap garbage and expensive shit that actually works. Some products are in that middle-ground price range, but they're actually cheap garbage that's been marked up to rip you off.

This seems to have increased over time, especially as factories became better able to produce goods that use barely enough material to work at all, without a too-high defect rate. I wonder sometimes how much inflation this is masking—goods stay the same price or even get somewhat cheaper, but are significantly worse than before.

And with Typescript, it's not a bit unpleasant to work with.

I have bad news: gaining security certifications mostly through pointless or even harmful measures is the norm.

They're on a bad streak.

This exists at the other end, too: I've seen a lot of people in management positions who had enough assistants that I can just about guarantee their average workday is also about two hours of actual work, though with some very long days and some near-zero-work days. I've seen founder-CEO types who know (and are) the right people so it's easy to get early funding for their ventures, and make an "executive assistant" for that company (so, paid with investor money) a very early hire so they can get away with barely doing any work on it (they're always doing like 5 things at once, if you check their LinkedIn, and that's how: they're putting very little time in to any but maybe one of them at any given time)

Counterpoint: battery life and, for the first time in my life, being able to treat my laptop as actually portable and not have to carry a power brick and mouse (because other touchpads were so terrible) everywhere is the main thing that sold me on Macs, initially, after ~15 years of my computing life being totally Mac-free.

It sold me fast. Turned me from "pft, Macs, OK, whatever, they're nothing special" to "huh, maybe there's something to this" to "I'm never buying anything but a Mac again until competitors can match [list of features I now wouldn't want to give up]" in like a month.

Sadly, no other vendors seem close to closing that gap. Macs remain a category of their own. Not a great situation.