Your "counter" is nonsensical - if you are referring to the concept of a logical "red herring", something to distract by introducing an irrelevant topic, this is not that.
Your comment pertained to your (dislike of) use of wikipedia in contrast to the relevant site (X.com).
My comment pertains to both of the relevant websites you had related (wikipedia is no more related to x.com than governments, neighborhoods, etc. that you have brought up), and to the specific reason why x.com came to be (it's current "authorship"), and how the directly related collary (grok) is not the thing you randomly brought up...
Which if there were a red herring here, it would be wikipedia (as it is not a site whose primary purpose is as a commentary website, nor it used in the same fashion)...
But for the topic you specifically brought up, this is entirely relevant, namely, your dislike of another website, and it's direct relation to the general topic at hand.
As for the rest, further nonsense. I can just as easily flip the subjects in each statement and they will remain true...my (factual) statement stands.
You substituted a different question ("who owns the platform") for the one I originally raised ("how its information and narratives are governed in practice"). Call that a red herring or simply a non sequitur; the label isn't important. It didn't rebut the argument.
You're missing the point of those examples. Of course you can reverse them -- and that is precisely my point! Organisational form or ownership tells you very little, by itself, about whether an institution behaves well. My criticism of Wikipedia concerned how authority over contested information emerges and is exercised. "But Wikipedia isn't owned by an evil oligarch" doesn't answer that criticism.
> Consider that you probably didn't have such an intense response to WIX templates or substack articles
Apologism at best. People have been bemoaning this issue for a while now..., pre-AI even.
First time I'm seeing this defended from an "oh you're just anti AI" perspective (which, ironically, is exactly the sort of bare minimum a couple comments over was bemoaning)
The slop machine gives answers to your questions. It hallucinates so it's recommended to verify what it says. Shit in, shit out. If you have no idea whatsoever and can't use other sources to verify claims, well, get a different job I guess.
This entire comment section is almost entirely people bemoaning AI output, calling AI a "slop machine", and you posted your regressive religious screed against it as if it were something to be proud of, seemingly to the approval of others. nearly every comment section with AI involved is like this, and many comment sections where AI is not involved. It deserves pushback.
People are indeed proud of remaining humans and resisting becoming AI corp appendages that are lost in slop at their own expense. Get over it. Your pushback is exactly as religious.
That framework did more damage to web design than any other framework. Yeah, its nice that you can spin up a page in a second that looks like every other page on the internet, wait a minute...
Technical answer:
CSS
It was a nice idea, and it sure beat hand-designing each and every page (wait a second, weren't/aren't we doing that all over again?).
It did/does too much, and was mostly in lieu of a common repository of UI stuff, so people found One Way that it would work reasonably well on most browsers/devices, and so bootstrap was born...
I was hanging around during the bootstrap era. It was fine, no i think theres some blend of where UI/UX/marketing that were way overblown that really blitzed all sites into looking the same. Every component framework or helper framework under the sun is barely doing anything different. Shadcn, daisyui, tailwind, all of that.. it's all customizable but people aren't interested in making something fresh and new using bootstrap/daisyui/shadcn/whatever, the components aren't the problem. Anyone could if they took the time and effort put together something pretty unique using any of these, but they don't. Outta the box yeah they are particularly bland (flat buttons and rounded everything literally sucks I'm so tired of it), but it's _what_ the page is and how it's arranged that is reeking with sameness / pointlessness / enshittification. And that abomination is... landing pages. These pages are fkn awful. Career UX/UI folks will defend them, and this just feels like they smoked too much of their own shenanigans.
Every SaaS under the sun, hell half the things here that end up with some sort of VC backing... the first thing they do is spin up a nothingburger landing page that says a whole lot of jack diddly squat that all have a familiar feel where everything's centered, there's meaningless bulletpoints and info cards, but no real meat or information that describes what you're after... that feeling = "how do i beat gd level 1 (this landing page) so i can find what im looking for" and yeah. This has bled into documentation spaces as well, somehow rendering documentation (the thing that is supposed to help you get oriented) feel like you can't actually find what you're looking for.
UX/UI in the past decade was blown way out of proportion and I can't help but feel like it's been shaped by way too many imperfect half theories / stupid market research and is way too heavily influenced by marketing and adspace to be taken seriously. In general there is certainly a taste for what makes a good UX and that to me is typically a blend of utility and looks-cool. But without any utility everything feels like a goddamn waste of time & I'm mostly assured that websites that sport pages like this have way too many financial strings attached driving their every move. They all try to drive you towards filling out a sales inquiry form. It's ironic and hilarious that a lot of times if I want to learn about some platform or product, the last place I can reliably go to is their own website. These days you just gotta go digging, ask claude to go collect a bunch of user feedback from around the net or something.
> Career UX/UI folks will defend them, and this just feels like they smoked too much of their own shenanigans.
Of course, people are a part of the problem, never said they weren't. But when you ask how did Bobby from marketing commit murder, it's pertinent if he used a crowbar or a glock. Sure, neither are "evil" on their own, and I'm not saying that bootstrap is bad.
It's just the footgun that made it that much more likely...
If you want a "why" for the human side of the equation, well I'm not a marketing guy, the TV show Mad Men seems to offer an interesting perspective as to what makes a marketing department "good", vs just another latte drinking "vibe" shop. My hypothesis being, I have a strong suspicion certain parts of that culture no longer exist, and have mostly been replaced with number-seeking.
I think the obvious answer is, that you are the product, and you are worth $$$$, possibly $$$$$, even $$$$$$
When did you agree to be sold without representation and a contract, again? Something about malicious contracts nobody reads? Pretty sure that behavior remains...criminal.
Not only is this not really correct (obscuring pertinent legal information on purpose is a crime, e.g. such that it cannot be recalled), it isn't even applicable.
Its been long documented that these systems are attempting to monitor you, even if you did not sign up for the service or interact with it.
This is an interesting take, although I'm not sure the legacy -> modern evolution is perhaps quite as significant as you make it out to be. Smart pointers and better std library constructs are absolutely welcome, metaprogramming is nice, but perhaps out of reach for many programmers (so not the "fun" or "successful" part of the language)...
If you were to compare the transformation with another major systems language, or a popular dynamic language, it doesn't feel like the evolution is quite as dramatic as is made out to be?
Rather, the staying power comes from elsewhere, and the language continues to modernize, perhaps at a slower pace than other contemporary languages experiencing similar staying power(s)...
That's what Grok as for.
Apples and Oranges...
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