[api]

It's not just Facebook. Every sales, marketing, or product person in the world basically has an unlimited appetite for data and will push to suck up as much data as possible.

There is a logical reason for this: one of the toughest things is knowing what your users actually want and what their actual pain points are. In advertising there's an analogous problem often summarized as: "I know I am wasting 80% of my ad spend, but I don't know which 80%."

Every single incentive on the business side incentivizes data grabbing. This will never change unless users vote hard with their wallets or unless there is protective legislation.

[Ticklee]

I wholeheartedly think http/s is irreparably damaged, for example it is impossible to find good information on search engines, even the free ones like Searx. If you are able to find a website you can bet it includes 10MiB of trackers and ads.

Hopefully someone writes a better protocol with no third party cookies and heavily restricted javascript.

[elzbardico]

Hate to nitpick but those things are not features of the HTTP protocol from the IETF but of HTML from the W3C

[Ticklee]

Nitpick away, when I am ignorant I'd rather be told than stay ignorant.

[phailhaus]

As the other poster pointed out, those are properties of HTML and not HTTP/S. But what I'd like to point out is that this:

> heavily restricted javascript

Is basically impossible. Any useful subset of javascript would be turing-complete, and therefore enough to do whatever's necessary to track the user. Literally all you need to be able to do is make an HTTP request and bam, you can track.

[a1369209993]

Turing-complete is (kind of) irrelevant, the question is what (equivalent of) system calls is has access to. Eg, javascript should not be able to set cookies or cause network traffic after page load by default.

> all you need to be able to do is make an HTTP request

Precicely. Inability to do this is (part of) what > > heavily restricted javascript means.

[phailhaus]

Haha yeah, never going to happen. No network calls = no real-time dashboards, which is a no-go for basically any company. Not only that, it doesn't really solve the issue. You can just make the user click a button which triggers the network call anyways, and bam you can track again. Restricting javascript wouldn't work.

[zo1]

Blogs were a major death blow to the web. Before that web pages were more like books, references, unique compilations and compendiums of knowledge, random non-sense, and individual people's musings for no other reason than to put it out there. Now, 99% of all "blog" content is just there to somehow sucker a poor soul into typing an unfortunate series of terms into a search bar out of desperation for knowledge/info, such that the semi-random search results gets the person's eyeball to fall on said "blog" content so that an ad can be sold.