[krapp]

In today's modern age of always-active surveillance, cancel culture and advertising, clickable URLs seem harmful. They can be logged, tracked and profiled. And most URLs are spam anyway, meaning most clickable links on the web are actively malicious. Just observe how few people on HN are even willing to click on links submitted to HN. At worst, you're taking your life into your own hands, at best you're probably just wasting your time on clickbait.

Making links clickable also forces the user to use browser or browser-adjacent tools of near infinite complexity, all of which are owned by surveillance and advertising megacorps associated with the American military industrial complex. By only having bare URLS in plaintext, I can use any tools I want to process them in any way I choose. Those tools can all be simple and free.

Maybe it's best that we be done with hypertext altogether. Clickable links were the original sin of the web. Maybe they were a good idea decades ago, in the naive cypherpunk days of the early web, but now they just provide another way to feed the panopticon, and form the basis for all of the unnecessary complexity, dark patterns and bloat in the modern web. Maybe we should just go back to plaintext and open directories.

[gitgud]

> Clickable links were the original sin of the web. Maybe they were a good idea decades ago

Clickable links are literally the foundation of the world wide web...

[ctxc]

Fancy words, but would it even be...an open, accessible web making differences in the lives of billions?

All mobile carriers in my country (or any, I'm guessing) go to great lengths to extract every last penny from my call plans. Should we go back to letters then?

[krapp]

What difference has it made in the lives of billions, other than inciting hatred and addiction? Indoctrinating the masses with disinformation and propaganda? Eliminating our attention spans, reducing our literacy and regressing us culturally to the level of spoiled children? I mean sure, maybe here or there one or two people have something interesting to say, or there's something worth watching or listening to, but the vast majority of it is at best objectively garbage and at worst actively malicious and harmful.

Maybe we should go back to letters. Physical, hand-written letters. A world in which everyone is forced to deliberate over their words and where the pace of information and progress is slowed down to what a human can comprehend, as opposed to the schizoid mania of constant noise we have now, seems objectively better.

[ctxc]

We could go back to letters. And then scientific findings will be silos, our medical progress would be in the stone age, people would find out their loved one is sick after they've passed, and so on. There are wonderful things technology has enabled us to do.

But the sampling of the internet we're exposed to is heavily biased to hate speech and nonsense - the internet is pretty much social media for many. Looking through that lens, I'm leaning towards your view.

But there's also that other side.

[atoav]

So instead of banning dark pattern you'd rather turn the web into a stack of papers?

[krapp]

What better way to ban dark patterns than making "patterns" altogether infeasible? Why assume trust in a model already proven untrustworthy? Too much of the web is built on an honor system as it is.

Structure begets hierarchy begets conformity begets tyranny. Eliminate structure from the web and tyranny over the web can't emerge.

[formerkrogemp]

I have a solution to our expensive computer problems! Blow up all of the computers! Boom. No more computer problems.

[_dave]

Welcome to the Gopher/Gemini mindset, thinking technological restrictions can solve a policy problem.

[marssaxman]

With what magic wand do you propose to enact this ban?

[Angostura]

Wait until you find out about IP addresses.

[krapp]

Unfortunately, IP addresses are unavoidable but we can at least minimize the damage they do to privacy.

[batch12]

It's a good thought experiment, but just that. The world isn't going to go back to text documents and rss for everything or give up the internet willingly. To make this happen we would either need to make this law (worldwide) or suffer some kind of unthinkable event that damages humanity significantly.