cypherpunks

Notice how you automatically assume that the person pointing out bigotry is in the oppressed minority. This is not always the case.

If you expect a Christian on a site full of atheists to have to be thick-skinned, then by the same logic, you should expect an atheist in a high school full of Christians to be thick skinned. I don't think either of those conclusions is acceptable.

I was not proposing censorship. Reddit, as well as slashdot, HN, digg, etc. have a community process developed with the intent that the best comments make it to the top. The structure of that process determines what makes it to the top. Changes to that process can, very substantially, cut down on amount of certain classes of degenerate content. When bigotry began to appear on reddit, the reddit founders did nothing to combat it (and, indeed, slightly encouraged it). At the time, I think it would have been fairly easy to contain.

At this point, I'm not sure what can be done, since now bigots form a substantial portion of the reddit community.

For example, there was this guy named Lou Franklin who was probably the biggest bigot in the history of the site, and they took YEARS to finally ban his account.

I read reddit, but I would never buy a gold account. The site has too much hate speech, and it is hard to support that financially. Between the misogyny and the atheist anti-Christian bigotry, it's pretty bad. You don't have to be either a woman or a theist to see that's wrong.

The question of how to address this issue while maintaining free speech is a more complex one. The reddit founders, however, have shown no interest in finding ways to improve site quality from this perspective, and indeed, appear to support the bigotry.

Anyway, I bear a huge grudge against the site because they banned my account for sockpuppeting and harassment, so take all of the above with a grain of salt.

I might go back to Firefox when it no longer consumes gigabytes of RAM after a few hours of operation. Until then, I'm with Chrome. I don't care about speed as much -- so long as it's reliable, and doesn't grind the rest of my machine to a halt, it's all good.

I've seen swarms of employees get screwed in ways similar to this. It's not uncommon in Silicon Valley.

I kinda wish Google had better versioning in their infrastructure. While I used neither of these products, their disappearance makes me reluctant to adopt Google products for any core infrastructure. If I buy a program from Microsoft, and Microsoft discontinues it, I get to keep using it forever. If I do the same with Google, since I'm not managing my infrastructure, at some point, it just goes away. It shouldn't be that hard to fork off sets of servers to run frozen, legacy applications, or older versions of non-legacy apps.

I am aware of the current opportunities.

I think you (and most people here) underestimate what the "old web" could imagine, though. We had all sort of ideas for agents that would go out and grab and analyze data for us in all sorts of clever and interesting ways. Search engines got built, as did one or two other things, and then the web just got too complex.

Hell, even I had a simple app that went out and grabbed all my favorite comics and showed them to me, nicely formatted, and without ads.

Which only works for pre-intended uses, or standards that have substantial market share.

Again, read the literature on agents from the nineties, and see how diverse a technology tree was killed....

I'd love to see that extension. If you write it, I will use it. I use Chrome too, so it should work here.

As to what should and shouldn't be part of the browser -- the way to figure that out is experimentation and competition. When you make technologies and standards simple and easy, people will make independent implementations and try things. The vast majority will be dumb, but some (often unanticipated ones) will turn out to be useful, clever, or brilliant. That's how the technology improves.

When you make standards big and cumbersome, progress stops.

I'm glad. Thank you for taking the time to read and understand. Hacker News is starting to go down the decline that hit reddit 2 years ago, where people don't bother to try to understand different viewpoints, and just downvote anything they don't agree with. It's nice to see good people still on here...

Did you read what I wrote? I mentioned Google Maps as one of the two places I found AJAX useful.

The applications on my mom's PC do have much better UI standardization than the web does. Microsoft releases UI guidelines. alt-f4 does the same thing in every application I've used, and the menu structure is roughly the same too. Apple is even better.

> You mean bookmarks? Add a scroll %, assuming they're not nice enough to use anchor tags / IDs meaningfully, and you're golden.

Bookmarks in books work okay. You move them. Book marks in browsers don't. You have to remove the old one, add the new one, and the overall process is too cumbersome to be useful for the application I mentioned.

Not just scraping. Any sort of non-human parsing of web pages. Look at the 1990s literature on web agents for lots of applications.

The Google Spider grabs pages from other servers. That's a web client. It's a web client that was easy to write when Google was started, but is almost impossible to write today. If search engines hadn't been invented 20 years ago, they'd be impossible to invent today. The only reason they still work is tremendous work on Google's end to have its spider be able to spider complex AJAXy pages, and that content creators engage in SEO and develop to Google.

No. I haven't. I've noticed maybe 1 or 2 web apps I want to use (Google Docs and Google Maps). Beyond that, I don't see anything that couldn't be delivered more effectively without JavaScript that I want or need.

Usability is not up. Each web site has its own, custom, non-standard user interface. I could teach my mom to use the web circa '96. I cannot teach her to use it today. It's too damn complex.

Usability would be up if the browser knew more about what to expect. You can look at things like Readability. The browser ought to know more about the content, and be able to present it in a coherent, usable way. The server-side shouldn't dictate presentation.