All this pseudo-hipster "the web became a worse place when designers got involved" stuff really annoys me.
Seriously, if all the web looked like this it would be more complicated to use for 99.9% of the world, so it would have remained a niche, so its overall usefulness would have remained limited.
Instead, talented hard-working people put lots of effort into making the web look a much more friendly place. This has made the web a much more inclusive place, and thus, much more of the world has started to use it.
RMS is a brand, and this 'zero design' is part of his brand. You already know who RMS is before you visit his site, and if you don't, you probably aren't part of his 'target market'. The jarring "Oh the CSS hasn't loaded" moment is precisely what he wants you to experience. The kind of people who visit his site know how to use reading mode on their browser, are comfortable adjusting the line width in whatever client they are using, so it doesn't matter.
It doesn't mean that the rest of the web would be a in a better place if it had remained looking like this. It would have remained an obscure corner of the world where a group of geeks met, and so many of the benefits of the internet would never have transpired.
To me -- someone reasonably tech-savvy and with questionable artistic taste -- the whole "web became a worse place when designers got involved" has a lot more to do with the entire ecosystem and a lot less to do with the design itself.
I don't really miss Geocieties. I do, however:
* Think it's unpardonable that web pages are about as snappy as they were ten years ago, despite including about the same amount of information, while the available speed and bandwidth have increased at least ten times, not to mention computing power.
* Have to keep a full array of extensions and browser hacks in order to keep my own fucking choice of font types and especially sizes. If I wanted to see brilliant examples of typography and calligraphy, I'd have gone buy a book or visited a bloody exhibition.
* Miss the days when I could move around without having my ass tracked at every corner and having to keep an array of extension and browser hacks just so that I don't get spammed with questionable, sometimes outright tracking-based scams at every step.
The web can hardly be called "friendly" when the experience of browsing it without at least three or four extensions that deal with innovations in e-marketing, web design and development is so painful.
Saying that the web "got worse" in the last ten years is certainly midway between "you're not sure what Netscape is, right?" and "I bet you also think Motif was fucking sweet". But a lot of people who have seen it grow (myself included) are certainly disappointed at the huge, gaping chasm between what we dreamed it would be and what it turned out.
The web experience is optimised for the average user, who typically prioritises features over privacy, aesthetics over performance, and ability-to-use over ability-to-customise. Your priorities may be different, but you can run your own website which does meet your priorities, and even a search engine of websites of which you 'approve'.
And yet practical experience shows the complete opposite: the average user prefers something simple from an aesthetic and functional perspective, and does not believe that there should be a trade-off between features and privacy (which is, in fact, correct).
I guess we need to establish what we're talking about here.
All those one-page ThemeForest sites with their whizz-bang animations, parallax scrolling and gazillion custom fonts are not the kind of sites I am holding up as good examples. There is a happy medium between RMS and those sites, and you can see it on sites like Facebook, Google, BBC, Trello, Basecamp, etc. It's no coincidence that the most successful sites are all rather well-designed.
If you walk into a cafe in the middle of London (or Mumbai or Rio de Janeiro) and showed three random users in a coffee shop, say, RMS's site and a BBC news page about an equally esoteric subject and asked them questions like:
* What did you learn by reading this page?
* What are your opinions of the author of this page?
then they are more likely to have positive thoughts about the BBC page than about RMS, because they are more likely to struggle with parsing the information on RMS's site, and because the RMS site simply looks 'broken' when compared to the rest of the internet.
> does not believe that there should be a trade-off between features and privacy (which is, in fact, correct)
There _is_ a trade-off between features and privacy. If I don't implement analytics, my resources are less likely to be spent efficiently, resulting in fewer features. Implementing an alternative to Google Analytics will use resources, so that will come at the expense of a feature. True, if you ask a user "should there be a trade-off between features and privacy?" they will say "no". But if you look at user behaviour, the majority of people don't care enough about privacy to give up the features. That's why Google and Facebook can be enormously popular despite their privacy invasions.
"Ordinary people" or whatever were quite capable of enjoying web sites, even personal hand-made terrible HTML pages on GeoCities, back when web sites were primitive.
I don't take it for granted that random people the world over would prefer BBC's site to rms's. It's an interesting claim, and I'd love to see actual results from such an experiment if someone were to try it.
It should be viewed in an evolutionary perspective. If you had an equally functional amazon website that used only basic HTML elements, which is orders of magnitude lighter (but still loads in about the same time for most users), which one do you think would succeed?
Do (most) users need all the shininess? Nope. Do they (most) prefer it? Absolutely.
Each product has an optimal "clutter" (in competitive terms, maybe a "Nash equilibrium"?) -- a good example is the Google homepage/search results; anything more complicated is clearly unfavorable in terms of competition, unless you offer a qualitative improvement.
Have available speed and bandwidth really improved 10x?
I feel like it's more like 2x, maybe -- I got broadband in 2000, and it was 1.5MB (12Mb) down / 768KB (6Mb) up dsl with sub 10ms ping to most of the internet. It took me more than 10 years to get significantly better, and I pay more than I did then.
The design work we see in the modern web is (IMHO) a result of making the web marketable and thus monetizable. You have a point that is would have remained an obscure geek meeting ground, but the reasons for the modern web aren't to make it easier to use, it's to make it not feel so much like reading.
Logos and colors, design and layout are designed to make the web appealing and inviting to some group. Black text on white feels too much like a book and an amazingly large segment of society is put off from that.
Yet his page is fast, responsive, standards compliant, easy to navigate, accessible (screen readers have no problems with it). I don't have to addblock it, turn on readability, or any other nonsense to focus on the content. We've succeeded in simply trying to reinvent what we already have.
> The design work we see in the modern web is (IMHO) a result of making the web marketable and thus monetizable.
What you call "marketable and thus monetizable", I (and I'm not a designer, though I do a little of my own print and web design) call "human-friendly." It's not that people don't want to read, it's that we have learned over the span of human history how to present information in a more accessible way, culminating for now--though surely not terminating--in high-signal, short forms: lectures, web content, stuff like that. I'm not saying that's an unequivocal good; as this post might show, I like to write, and I have more than occasionally been told that I like to "lecture" because I have and share thoughts that take more than a few sentences to get to their conclusion. But it's not purely for marketing, it's because this is how most people think. It's not a new thing, it's not Those Kids And Their Short Attention Spans, it's why a catchy slogan has always done better than a reasoned argument. You can speak to them in your language, and get mad that they Just Don't Understand, or you can speak to them in theirs.
There's a reason the absolute best work on the NSA and spying was John Oliver asking Edward Snowden if the NSA can see pictures of his penis. That one interview did more than literally every electron perturbed by the EFF and other groups to get this into people's heads.
That's more than marketing. That's human communication. And dismissing it is fashionable in nerdy circles and absolutely tragic at the same time. We need to get out of our own heads and understand other people, dammit. It's the only way we can really do good.
> We need to get out of our own heads and understand other people, dammit. It's the only way we can really do good.
What you call understanding people is what I call pandering to the least common-denominator.
Most of those web-pages aren't better, they are objectively less informative, and harder to access useful information on - maybe the problem isn't that plain white on black isn't exciting enough but that people are so accustomed to being served low quality content packaged with frivolous design, explosions or 10 second sound-bites.
I'm sure you do call it that. How many people listen to you when you do?
A one-sentence summary has grabbed people better than pages and pages for as long as people have been people, and that's not going to change because you want it to.
I would thank you, my supercilious friend, to not fucking put words in my mouth, okay? What I am asserting is that it has not, "as a matter of fact", changed. You can point at Presidential elections as oh, hurr, shallow, and I'll even agree with you. And then I will point at Obama's convention speech in '04 or even Bill Clinton's in '12 as modern examples of long-form rhetoric. Because that stuff happens today, too. And people watched, and listened, and talked about those, too (but they had the temerity to talk about it on Twitter, so I'm sure it didn't count).
Lincoln-Douglas looms large in the retrospective eye because it was important (and was at the confluence of a number of factors, not the least of which that it was a geographically diverse set of venues but mass communication was still the newspaper and the telegraph). Perhaps it is worth reflecting that modern presidental elections may not be so important--I mean, the gap between a right-wing and a center-right party is, on balance, very small--and the level of discourse may reflect it. Consider also the consular elections of the Roman republic during times when very little of importance was happening. They're venal, they're often populist, they're regularly pandering and stupid. They look like--well--today's. Because nothing is as stupid as fights when there's nothing of meaning to gain.
I mean, shit, dude. You know what came most of a century before the Lincoln-Douglas debates? A little speech by a dude in a church in Richmond. It's about fourteen paragraphs long. I've read it. But there's one sentence from it that you actually know: "give me liberty or give me death." Patrick Henry laid the groundwork for that sentence. It's a good speech, if you care about that sort of thing. But nobody was reading it then (it wasn't published for forty years, and nobody's actually sure how much of it is the original speech). That sentence is what caught, because it is distilled sentiment and meaning and requires no attention span at all.
You are arguing against history as well as the tide, to heroify dead people and pretend they were other than how they were. I don't understand why.
People that are arguing to treat popularity as the primary metric by which to gauge quality and importance of content are doing two things:
a) being dishonest
b) performing an active disservice for the human-race.
To address point a: Take Gawker - it's popular, ok, maybe Gawker is just as good as a well-written article, I'm sure there are at least a few people that would argue that; but eventually that argument reaches a dead-end - you might never want to read an academic paper, but you're probably damn glad someone wrote it if only for the scientific advances which provide for your material comfort. You might prefer to watch a sitcom, to reading about economic policy, but you probably would prefer the president should do the later.
That is no matter how people may argue (e.g. Why is a Video Game any less a work of art than Shakespeare play) the kind of absolutist-populist position, they will eventually back-pedal on that argument when you run it out to its furthest point, I mean hell Hitler was resoundingly popular, and so was slavery in the South.
Since it's on topic consider RMS - he's rather a secular nut now -- and that's after NSA/Snowden revelations -- 20 years ago he must have appeared as a complete crackhead (the new printer at MIT was closed-source and I decided I could no longer participate in that [not-verbatim]) to 99.9% people and significantly less-popular than idk: Tele-Evangelists, who probably have much more compelling presentation and better websites and public image.
The active disservice part is where people that don't want to be educated, and don't want to read, and would rather watch a sitcom (there is nothing wrong with these in an of themselves) argue and promote their intellectual laziness and ignorance as important values, and accuse those who disagree of being out-dated, elitist, or whatever other such bullshit.
> People that are arguing to treat popularity as the primary metric by which to gauge quality and importance of content are doing two things
I am done with your disingenuity, but for the readers I'll clarify to make it unmistakable: while you can keep on being you all you want, it will not change that to have people listen to you, you must approach them with something they want to consume. You must understand people, and to actually deign to do that instead of to try to lord over them with imagined superiority is not pandering but communicating.
John Oliver understands this. Stallman doesn't. That's why Oliver did in a week what the second guy couldn't do in thirty years. So you can keep arguing and keep sneering. I'm pointing at the elephant and saying it's an elephant. It won't stop being an elephant because you don't like elephants.
> John Oliver understands this. Stallman doesn't. That's why Oliver did in a week what the second guy couldn't do in thirty years. So you can keep arguing and keep sneering.
Yes, Stallman really hasn't done anything. GNU, GCC, GPL and Free-software are really worthless contributions compared to comedy routines, we should all quit working on things that we care about just because you and Joe say we aren't ever going to be popular or important.
We've made the consumer web look like TV and magazines. Not much more complicated than that. People find color, icons, animation, and video engaging.
Sure we may be going overboard with some of the latest javascript effects. That's just Flash all over again. But there's a reason that the web no longer looks like academic journal articles. Those are boring.
I agree with what you're saying, to a point. If it hadn't become monetisable, then services like Youtube and Netflix etc, would never have taken off. I wouldn't have been able to convince family to use email. I would still need to stand in a queue on my lunchbreak to transfer money from my savings account to my current account.
Instead, the web evolved, some people took advantage of that for their own ends, and we've ended up with a system which is better for most people, though a long way from being perfect for each individual group.
I don't think any one is claiming that design is bad and designers should never have "got involved", your parent comment is saying that we've gone too far.
Today, lots of websites use full-width images and videos on their landing pages, make multiple requests for all sorts of assets and use all sorts of tracking and analytics code. More and more often I find myself closing a tab in frustration because the page is taking too long to load. Blogs, e-commerce sites, this is getting quite common.
I interpreted your parent comment as a call for minimalism, nothing more.
> The jarring "Oh the CSS hasn't loaded" moment is precisely what he wants you to experience.
But I honestly don't experience that moment. I see some text and I start reading it. You're over-thinking, IMO.
That you didn't notice the lack of CSS is precisely why you need to see this from the point of view of a non-technical person. If my mother-in-law saw this page, she would probably call me screaming that her computer had broke or she had been hacked.
No, he's a person, trying to live the life he wants - just like everyone else. That he is talked about does not make him a brand. GNU is his brand.
> The jarring "Oh the CSS hasn't loaded" moment is precisely what he wants you to experience.
Actually, Stallman's website has been around for decades - as has the GNU project - and his sites have always been very plain. I don't think I'd describe consistent apathy for gimmick as a gimmick.
> The kind of people who visit his site know how to use reading mode on their browser
"Reading mode" on Safari is an integrated support for Readability (http://www.readability.org), which presents a minimally styled, highly readable, Web page.
I prefer a strongly similar design for my own sites.
I think that it is something invented by the people that have pushed for huge javascript monstrosity websites so that they can avoid the javascript monstrosities...
It's funny how anyone we don't like is a hipster. You think they're the people who like plain web pages. I think hipsters are the people who insist on using a dozen artisanal hand crafted fonts on every web page.
I see what you mean, and re-reading my comment I was wrong to use such a cliche. What I was referring to is the 'everything 20 years ago was so much better' mentality. If I were to rewrite that sentence I would talk about nostalgia and a self-centred worldview.
"Hipsters" nowadays are people who shun trends and only want in on the "underground" stuff. "Hipsters" are also those that are all about being trendy. "Hipsters" are also those who care about the new-and-shiny, even if they don't bring anything new or useful to the table, or if it's a reinvention of some wheel. "Hipsters" are also those who indulge in retro stuff, even though they may be archaic and not useful any more...
Agreed, the minimal design does have its place but I don't think the web as a whole would be any better for it. Pretty much all the webpages for the modules I study on my CS degree are of a similar kind to Stallman's, because that's all they need to be.
Odd that none of your parent comments mentioned designers, yet you felt they were being criticized.
Why does looking like this (rms's website) equate to unusable? It is unfancy, unadorned, a bit unorganized, yet it is highly usable. The default unstyled look of the Internet was "designed" to be highly readable: paragraph blocks, list items, contrasting and underlined links, line separators, etc.
You've already been corrected on your derogatory use of hipster and why reading mode is just a kludge. What I wanted to point out was that the "CSS hasn't loaded" moment is a symptom of a broken Internet. The layers added to the Internet fail, they fail noticeably, they fail ungracefully, and people are annoyed by the failure.
It's not about designers vs. hipsters vs. raw HTML, it should really be about adding layers to the Internet in a way that isn't so broken and/or breakable. The fact that you can't zoom some websites on mobile means someone is breaking the Internet (either the page creators or the mobile browser devs). The fact that your browser can refresh a page with unsubmitted input and lose your work means someone is breaking the Internet (again, it's a conspiracy of page creators/designers and browser devs).
No, the real problem is when people invent new layers and extensions that aren't robust and don't support all the functionally of the old layers, but everybody adopts them because new and shiny and they allow some new features. Since you bring up designers, I will say that all too often the designers are the ones pushing these new extensions, without enough consideration for usability and compatibility.
The first is nothing but HTML and text, the second is a fully functioning web front end to a DVCS with issue tracking and documentation, plus metrics and graphs, all only possible due to the 'worsening' of the web with Javascript, CSS, Flash and so on.
I know I prefer GitHub, and the same is true for most modern web applications where there is a choice. And apologies for the shameless Apache Brooklyn plug ;)
Why would you need JS, CSS or Flash to have issue tracking, documentation, metrics or graphs?
An issue tracker is essentially a forum where the threads have an open/closed state attached. People have built such web applications before JS even existed.
Documentation is even simpler, just a bunch of HTML documents, maybe with an HTML form to edit them.
The problem with your first link is not the lack of CSS, it's that the information listed is less relevant than what Github shows.
But instead of comparing with that, try disabling the CSS in the GH page. Ignoring the header section, I think the file list and README look just fine, and I wouldn't be bothered at all to use it as such.
You'll notice though that the main documentation on github is basically just what we already had in the web 1.0 days and not much more.
We had most of those other things in the web 1.0 days too.
Here's a directory hierarchy that's just as navigable as github's
ftp://modland.com/
in the old days, ftp sites used to even have some kind of readme that browsers would autoload and put at the top of the directory list as documentation.
Graphs have been back-end generated and served in web 1.0 days as well and just inlined as <img> tags.
It was basically the same, with less control of look-and-feel, but about as usable and hundreds of times quicker. Responsiveness and accessibility just sort of "happened".
I agree with you, but it's not about what you prefer, or what I prefer. It's about what can be done. The great thing about the web is that we can have BOTH of these designs. If Jack prefers #1 and Alice prefers #2 then there's no problem as they can both co-exist.
But if Jack starts saying design #2 is awful, so we should remove the ability of browsers to display that kinda stuff, then Alice has to use #1 and may well stop using the issue queue entirely. That doesn't seem like a good outcome.
Let's optimise so that the maximum amount of utility can be had by the maximum number of people, instead of trying to push our own worldview on what the web should look like.
The first one is at least kind of responsive. I can zoom in my web browser and get a text size that I'm comfortable with.
On GitHub, I vastly prefer the mobile site. Unfortunately you have to spoof your user-agent to get at it on desktop.
I use a lot of mobile versions of sites, even on desktop. They're usually much better for me. To a large extent because they're simpler. Even news sites tend to have mobile versions that are somewhat human-friendly, easy to understand, fast to load, etc.
Who knows why the built-in Git web UI is so abstruse? Whatever the reasons, they have nothing to do with Javascript, Flash, or even really CSS. A skilled and dedicated designer or typographer could certainly come up with a simple text-based layout that conveys the necessary information, if that were the restriction. Probably git's web UI is not the result of professional designers?
Most web pages "guilty" of this are owned and operated by corporations and they're doing it for a reason: visitors apparently trust websites more if they look professionally styled, so they prefer those over simpler looking competitors at first sight. Market pressure forces websites to polish their UI so it becomes attractive, usability is only an optimization (if you don't have a significant number of users due to the website's initial impression, it's not as important to optimize for maximum profit).
Some early movers got away with crappy visual aesthetics for a long time (like my former company), but today an 'RMS-style' (or old craigslist style) website would not stand a chance upon entering a competitive market.
This works a bit like we judge other humans, perhaps: based on appearance, before they even open their mouths (and maybe that's the reason why we have better haircuts now but whether we are better characters than a few generations ago, is debatable).
People might choose websites with a "more polished UI", but better converting isn't always better for consumers. Most websites are like junk food: clearly optmized for getting users to "convert", but lacking in any real substance.
