I mean that artists are unironically using bing as a better alternative for image searches, academics have gone back to tracking citations + libgen/scihub to find information and programmers are using duck duck go to debug their code.
This is a huge problem since these people used to be the core of googles search user base.
I was about to post about wechat miniprograms because in my opinion they seem to be the best platform for these kind of games. Games like "bounce and bounce" and 挑一跳 always appear in wechat groups and you see people playing them on public transport.
Since I live in an area that isn't very plugged into the tech world at large, seeing blog posts aggregated on HN can clue me into some interesting technologies -- I started using grafana and prometheus for something at work and it ended up being the right choice that other coworkers would not have figured out. Without HN I probably wouldn't know much about these technologies.
I grew up playing minecraft and got into a medieval role-playing server. This RP server taught me a lot about having moderation responsibilities and politics between city-states of users. Also coming from a small town, it was fascinating talking with people all over the world (mostly Scandinavians though)
One server you might be interested in looking at is 2b2t[1], which is a vanilla server which had the same map since 2010 and has no rules -- Hacked clients are "allowed" since nobody gets banned for anything! Me and a large group of people from another forum tried creating a republic there and I learned a lot about how to organize large groups that would split off into peripheral bases in a very hostile environment. Reading stories like this really makes me nostalgic for those days!
If anyone knows any servers that have trading communities and mechanics like the OP, please let me know!
That's not how (modern) science works. The null hypothesis is that there is no causal relationship between masturbation and (ailment of choice). Until such a link has been proven, there is no reason to believe it exists.
Just showed some of these to a generally non-tech-savy friend who said he didn't like them because they looked "too 90s." Personally I love them because they load fast, are easy to read, and don't require a knowledge of a bunch of different frameworks to write.
I have been fighting for years to get people used to "90s aesthetics." Then again, I think (bitmap) aliased fonts, bitmap gif patterns, classic bitmap icons (susan kare, early KDE, IRIX, BeOS, Plan9, Mac OS 9, etc.), Netscape, CDE etc. were all incredibly beautiful. I have railed against complexity since as early as I can remember.
It's even more important for web design. Give me simple HTML with a touch of css, and javascript only if it's absolutely necessary. I can think of hardly any websites that I would consider "beautiful" these days for exactly this reason.
If youth trends are any indication, the 90s are officially a "retro" aesthetic now for those of us that spend too much time on tumblr, 4chan, and all that. While it all isn't classified as "vaporwave", the entire 'windows 95'/purple-pink pastels/tron-grid/gifs is seeping into media. I can pull up some examples if anyone's interested.
A lot of websites we're making nowadays are HTML/CSS with a touch of javascript out of necessity since nobody wants to just use some wordpress template or have it look like every other AngularJS webapp. It might just be the particular sort of sites I stumble upon or my strict adblocking though.
But I'm not sure it could ever be fully 'mainstream' since there's enough people (particularly older) that need big buttons and familiar design to browse the web. But for smaller sites that cater to generally younger people, it could take this direction. Only time will tell!
PS: I agree that it really isn't brutalist, but there really should be a better word to describe this sort of aesthetic.
You can make something that doesn't require tons of frameworks and loads fast while NOT looking like a relic of the days of Kazaa. The fact that so many developers are too lazy to do so does not mean we should throw the baby out with the bathwater and go back to times new roman black-on-white.
As a "developer" of one aforementioned Times black on white sites, I think some people are trying to do this to push the whole spectrum a certain direction.
If you go on designernews you'll see small portfolio sites that require a motherfucking loading screen.
I made my little site (albeit not very portfolio oriented) because I could convey what I wanted to in that way, and I hope to encourage others to reassess what they're actually conveying and what they need to do so effectively. Usually not a loading screen.
I get the utilitarian site viewpoint, but I think there's a certain minimal level of design you can put in that requires very little code, and nothing beyond garden variety CSS. IMHO if you don't go to at least that point it's pure laziness and has nothing to do with what you're trying to convey, but I fully expect other people to disagree about that.
No surprising, for the most part it is bad design, and have 0 thing to do with brutalism. And good design doesn't require any framework or even loading a third party font aside from the "websafe" ones.
Amazon isn't going to win any design awards. Neither is ebay. Then there's the Google home page, which while not quite as free of "design" cruft as it once was, is still pretty minimalist.
All of those sites have been around forever (in Internet time), and they all rake in tons of money, despite their lack of (indeed, willful indifference to) trendy design esthetics.
Someone mentioned drudgereport.com above. That's just plain black text on a white background. It has an Alexa rank of 130.
They rake in tons of money because many users care a lot less about the look and feel than they do about the service/content they provide.
But many is not all. If they were designed to be beautiful as well as functional, they might well see a bump in transactions.
The reason they don't is either deliberate branding (Drudge, I'd guess) or incompetence (eBay), or because it's not obvious the bump in traffic would be worth the expense and time (Amazon.)
And also history. When you've been around as a brand for a decade or more, you don't need shiny.
But it's really not a good plan for a startup to have an ugly site now unless it's making some kind of ironic retro point about itself.
> If they were designed to be beautiful as well as
> functional, they might well see a bump in transactions.
More people would visit, or people would just buy more when they were already visiting?
I find it amusing that some of the most popular sites are considered bad designs by people who think they have all the answers to web site design (at least, they're getting involved in this season's look), whereas the sites which apparently demonstrate good design are ugly, less pleasant to navigate, and harder to extract information from.
>If they were designed to be beautiful as well as functional, they might well see a bump in transactions.
They might also see a drop. Existing users might be confused or upset and leave. The site's performance may suffer. Blind people might hate it. Bugs might surface. Tools might fail.
I'm a bit younger than many of you (talking about your grandchildren and sons playing this game!). I'm 20, and played a lot of Roblox and then Minecraft before they were this popular. I even interviewed Notch on a cute little podcast called "MineCast" I made back then.
Administrating a medieval-themed role-playing server back then taught me a lot about server administration and general diplomacy (handling bans and choosing admins), chatting on the MinecraftForums and its IRC showed me how to function well in online communities, and now children are experiencing this all over again.
I'm a lot older than the majority of fans, but it's a great touching stone when chatting with younger cousins. My haircutter's son was playing Roblox on a computer a few feet away from me last time I got my hair cut there, and she went on and on about how much time he spent on that game. It really brought me back to those days.
It's going to be fun watching these little nerdlings growing up with such a great toy. Minecraft's popularity goes to show that we don't need to worry about a lack of modding-friendly games (Doom/Quake/Garry's Mod), the kids will find them :)
