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“Why is it that people keep inventing so-called “revolutionary new ways” of doing the same old thing? And they do that by adding more and more unnecessary complexity on top of existing technologies.” ⤴️
“requires about 3 times as much electrical power even though you’re only serving text and perhaps a few images.” ⤴️
“Why in the world has this idiotic trend of abstracting everything away by layers upon layers of unimpressive complexity gained such a strong foothold in the industry?” ⤴️
“It is irresponsible to keep throwing more hardware at a problem that doesn’t need to exist in the first place.” ⤴️
“Everyone is experiencing the pain of using the web daily.” ⤴️
“Simple websites that contain nothing more that text and images takes forever to load, they only work in a few major browsers, and they are suffering from a flood of almost daily security issues. Turn off JavaScript and nothing gets displayed even though no is JavaScript is needed for anything.” ⤴️
“yes you can get something running quickly, but they always pay a heavy price in the long run.” ⤴️
“because friends and family complain about how bad this or that website has become, but mainly because I, as an independent contractor, am faced with clients who, as a result of this mess, have suffered greatly at the hands of so-called modern web developers.” ⤴️
""Modern” web development has standardized in tool stacks which are insanely complicated, far beyond anything that is warranted in most cases. We have forgotten how to make simple things in simple ways.” ⤴️
“At a minimum you need node, npm, webpack, babel, an spa framework, a frontend router, a css transpiler, a css framework, a test runner, a testing functions library, and a bunch of smaller things, and that’s just what is “needed” to build a static website with a bit of interaction. We’re not even talking about the dockerized insanity that happens as soon as you want to slide an API under that beast.” ⤴️

Whilst often conflated with Web3 due to crossover in designation and terminology (eg ‘federation’ and ‘distributed’ and ‘peer to peer’), Web 3.0 forms a distinct movement whose goals are wider-reaching and more socially valuable.

high-tech tunnel vision

How technical people can get so interested in a certain technology, or money spent, sunk cost fallacy, prioritisation of ‘innovation’ over experimentation and iteration with actual feedback, that they deprioritise low tech with big impact on non technical people, getting technical solutions of yesteryear in the hands of people who can really benefit, and considering the ethics of unbridled ‘growth’ (seeded by Answer in Progress YT video on The entire history of the YouTube algorithm)

Mentions

“when you create a piece of tech to do a job, it becomes more difficult to ask, ‘should this job be done?’” ➡

Web3

The tech bros’ vision of a new Web - some interesting innovations but not nearly as widely-relevant or socially impactful as the potential of Web 3.0. The two are often conflated due to crossover in designation and terminology (eg ‘federation’ and ‘distributed’ and ‘peer to peer’) but they actually form distinct movements with differing priorities.