08.16.20
Gemini version available ♊︎Everything is Becoming Slow When Users Aren’t the Top Priority
Summary: The Web in 2020 is a divisive click-bait machine with censorship and state/corporate propaganda; but there are things that we, collectively as Web users, can do to take the Web back and make it work for users, not monopolies and people in positions of power (with endless and ever-growing wealth)
THE news is slow, news sites are slow to load/open (too many spurious objects), and people are slow to type because they use lousy devices that lack something as basic as a keyboard. How did we come to this? Aren’t we supposed to become faster and more productive over time, given that technology is progressing and — one might hope — getting more compact?
“Well, adopting Free software is the first step, but it’s not enough.”Sometimes it may seem like technology is moving not in a positive direction, not for users anyway. People are measured by terms like “screen time” (the goal is to keep you staring at the screen as long as possible, irrespective of actual need) and to spy/shove ads rather than inform.
How do we get out of this unsocial/antisocial trap?
Well, adopting Free software is the first step, but it’s not enough. Suffice to say, using a 100% Free software browser to access the walled gardens of Facebook is like becoming a vegan who works in the slaughterhouse. It just doesn’t make sense, does it?
“For one thing, explore the use of (almost exclusively) RSS feeds and readers.”So, speaking in very general terms, software freedom goes beyond licences and tools. A lifestyle change or an online habits change (like Richard Stallman queuing downloads for pages he wishes to read, for a remote server to fetch for him) may be required. Nowadays I read E-mail only once a day — sometimes more, sometimes less — because streamlining like this is better for the mind, conductive for workflows. To Twitter I navigate at most once a day only to see replies that I receive but nothing else. Anything else would slow the mind down, or add endless clutter to it (Twitter is nowadays far more noise than signal; it is mental pollution and it makes it next to impossible to limit scope to one’s choosing, more so after they deprecated APIs back in summer of 2018, then blocked some RSS scrapers).
Do you feel like your navigating of sites is getting slower?
Do you feel like it takes you longer to separate the signal from the noise in today’s World Wide Web? Or the “Social Control Media” much of it became?
“Let’s flip things around and make the Web work again for surfers or users (not “useds”). It’s doable if enough or us do it and convincingly encourage others to do the same.”Looking for advice? For one thing, explore the use of (almost exclusively) RSS feeds and readers. There are many side benefits to them, other than eliminating cruft and stuff such as “likes” (which probably doesn’t mean a thing anyway; it’s proportional to popularity/scale of sites and status of people rather than the underlying message and its accuracy).
If the goal is to make technology faster, healthier, more informative and less conflict-fuelling, we need to rethink how we access it and how data is processed. Middlemen such as Twitter and Facebook view people as products (whom they connect with the real clients, their advertisers). Let’s flip things around and make the Web work again for surfers or users (not “useds”). It’s doable if enough of us do it and convincingly encourage others to do the same. █
ᶃ Gemini Space
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