I can finaly articulate my problem with apps. Facebook has an app, Youtube has an app, Jow Forums has user made apps like Clover Your average Geocities person with a 5-page website doesn't have an app One good thing the internet does (oldfags will argue, the only thing the internet does) is provide space for people to quickly and easily create so that self-selecting people can see what they made with ease - and that creation is freeform
Now that everything has its template, it requires a little less knowledge to make something (but really, learning a few programming languages oughtn't be this magical thing, surely people are intelligent enough that they don't have to use Wix to make their website) but what you create is defined by its surroundings, and that's usually a platform which treats everyone the same and has certain traits which define the possible arising cultures on that platfom so that some arts are more favoured than others (although I do find examples of formats which would be great for something that nobody's doing yet, the internet as an open space having loads and loads of as yet unfilled niches).
It's not a crying shame that you get limits, because the same creative spark that operates within narrower limits can create things as beautiful as or better than when operating within wider ones, given the infinite depth that the computers provide - like the fact that the new folder made inside another folder is just as roomy as the previous one.
Nonetheless, the app format gives advantages to people who have already made it in the website realm. New brilliant uses can be found for many formats when they first come out, like Uber and Shazam sort of were supposed to prove, but I still think there's (((some reason))) why things in that area still aren't as good as they ought to be.
And some time into the creation of a medium or topic, works within it get more generic because people begin to feel that its potential is being used up and there are no good ideas left, when anyone who's played around in DOS ir learned Lisp or just plain sat and stared at a blank screen in the last decade will rave at you about how much possibility there is here.
There is a kind of bloat which isn't so much to do with raw data space or memory or anything like that, and it is to do with shiny looking 'simple solutions' that take up time you could have used dabbling in the infinite creativity of these humanity's first tentative childlike steps in the fractal-cyberspatial realms.
So then the arguments come in. "You don't know how difficult and important it is to establish security AND privacy at once"; "we need those extra cores for daddy's secret stuff"; "you don't have an answer, you're just complaining" ~ and it's bewildering that anyone could think these things when everyone remembers the moment once when they were younger and they first ccreated a new folder and stared for a moment, thinking 'wait, is this something to do with sets? I could do something with this' and then sort of forgot about it and navigated away. That's where the good stuff is! The really good stuff. And it doesn't even begin to have to do with some kind of kowtowing to omniscient AI or trying to get something out of computers that they don't really have. If it's your job to talk to computers you probably ought to at least take a moment or two just once in a while to get up and feel the surface of the machine and get the idea that your fingers are touching the external hardware that hosts the images you see on screen.
>pic related because what I'm saying is hippie garbage
The web should be simple with some PHP to make it dynamic. Everything turned bad after smartphones became popular, approx after 2006.
Daniel Thompson
I'm probably going to go to a nightclub tonight. I STILL can't find a girlfriend who loves me back, and we are now 30-40 years into a time when that should have had a service made especially and exclusively for that reason. I mean, everyone wants to have sex. ASL should be as fundamental as WWW but we don't quite have that because ARPAnet was intented by the DOD which is a compleely different kettle of chips.
Surely. SURELY it wouldn't have been so hard to make it so that you input your details of who you are and whom you love and then the sorting algorithm sends you a person you love within a week. But no! Facebook and awkwardness and Instagram and social implications and Twitter and politics and /soc/ and rules and on and on and on, why the fuck are we using these gigantic servers with terabites flowing bounteously to download and watch pornography every single day when we could find LOCAL SINGLES WHO WANT TO FUCK IN YOUR AREA within minutes for real and it literally doesn't happen?
Who's benefiting and getting laid and provided for at the expense of the rest of us? Don't say, 'the rich and powerful', they haven't really had a bigger breadth that the rest of us for a long time because of their responsibilities.
Ah the old smart phone boogey man I have a conspiracy theory: a smartphone is what happened when they boiled dpwn every single complaint anyone ever had about computers that meant they were unwilling to believe they could do everything a human can do, and figured out how to make a machine that can handle all of it at once. Surprise, surprise! Nowhere near as fun as they had in the 90s playing around with computers when they were thing cool new thing. Name three games as different from each other as Tetris, Minesweeper and Pac-Man made in the last 20 years and I'll consider my point disproven. Games are supposed to have genres, that's what regular normie-with-an-acoustic-guitar media have!
Terence McKenna was right that linear print was a sad limitation and McLuhan was right when he showed that every additional letter read by you makes your life one experience poorer. I propose that this has been transcended by the categorisation and shifting around of text that digital manipulation makes possible, especially the part where you see an idea and then you see it again and your mind makes a link and then you see it one more time and now you have an idea of your own because it can't have been 'mere coincidence' that these things all happened so you have to communicate that they did because surely nobody else in the tribe got it exactly the same. I mean suppose they did! Then you have a collective idea you can share with another tribe, and so on, like a cosmic network.
this is advanced schizo, i cant make a coherent thought out of any of the shit you've said.
John Brown
Here's my other conspiracy theory: Old people couldn't handle a completely paradigm revolutionising technology so they made it impossible to do anything cool without massive loading times by having us make everything really simple and slow with big buttons everywhere. The reason moderns invented the word 'meh' is that it's the completely neutral emotion. It means, 'I am far more intelligent than is expected of me so I have to do most of my time waiting (for the new tab to open, for the game to load up, for the _downloader can show up so I can download what I actually want_), which is why I shirk to experience any authentic emotion at all becausr the last times I did so it was out of time and out of place because someone couldn't handle the velocity and frequency with which my nervous sytem has been trained to deal by the inherent way the screens I spend most of my life looking at work'
Apps are good. The majority of things that actually DO something should be an app. The real issue is that mobile devices are so locked down that only certain kinds of application are really allowed, compared to how things used to be when we only did things on computers we controlled and could choose to fuck up with any kind of app we wanted.
The web would be better off with fewer apps and more regular documents and resources. We have clearly shown that the social networks that exist and are the most popular "apps" are a net negative to society as a whole, so sticking to this model would hardly be a real detriment in the long term.
Obviously we will never have this, but people can dream.
