[alluro2]

I share your views on the topic. Early days of web were amazing from the perspective of people trying to express themselves despite the technological limitations. <img> and animated gifs, tables, CSS, not to mention Flash... Obviously romanticizing to an extent, but to me personally there was value in people striving to set their content and themselves apart - vs today when it's so much about "streamlining" experiences and conforming to current trends.

There is a fundamental conflict in human nature between the need for freedom of expression and need for structure - and a balance to be found. The latter won in Facebook vs MySpace, and while I liked the clean UI and structure to content that Facebook brought, today I would very much prefer to again see chaos of people's expression in MySpace pages than chaos of bland, ad-riddled, and structurally overpopulated Facebook profiles.

But in what I said above, the shift is actually between something else entirely - from web being individual, to being corporate. It seems to me that we got to where we are on the web solely because of hyper-capitalism seeping into it, like into all other pores of society. There is a string of reasons Slack is 440MB - it starts with it being pushed to use a combination of technologies that are deemed to ensure quickest iteration, time-to-market, interoperability with user tracking systems etc (in this case, Electron / JS for multi-platform coverage etc); then you have more and more people using those technologies because they are sought after; then companies want to use those technologies even more everywhere because it means you can grow your teams faster on the market. Btw, all exactly the same reasons as to why almost every "website" today is a React app. All the while, the more information you can collect on people, the more attractive you are, even if you have absolutely no need for it or way of using it in your product for now - so almost every website also comes with 50+ XHRs on load to every imaginable tracking service. All in function of marked words above - "growth", "market", "faster", "user tracking" since those are the ones that are exclusively rewarded (not even with actual money any more - with market evaluation and other perversed and illusory constructs).

So it's not the technologies or the "web" themselves that are the problem at all - it's that hyper-capitalism hijacks them, requires targeting widest market, being quick to monetize on it in any way etc - which means experimentation and individual expression lose value, and any benefits for the user that don't obviously result in benefits for the corporation (e.g. user's disk space usage for banal Slack example) are cut off from consideration. It's only expected then that, when you look from individual perspective, the web is not individual-friendly anymore.

[fartcannon]

(The)Facebook used a sneaky trick to create scarcity by requiring you have an educational email address. It was an elite club, compared to the normies who had to use MySpace.

The force of FOMO that built up behind that wall, once removed, flooded the population.

You can say it was their style or whatever, but I think it was that one move.

[mattcwilson]

... so why doesn’t Hacker News do any of that? Isn’t it ironic that it was built by a Silicon Valley VC?

[rchaud]

Likely for the same reasons that many of the architects of social media UX design and recommendation algorithms don't let their kids use those apps.

[krapp]

It's an intentional design choice on the part of the author to only attract a certain kind of user (the kind that cares about information and nothing else) who likely conforms to pg's ideal culture fit of a 'good hacker,' and scare away everyone else.