Comment by jijikuya

Comment by jijikuya 3 days ago

36 replies

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I'm on the other side of the planet so it's not my place to comment on the content of any of this. It seems to look like a good resource clearly made with the best of intentions.

I understand the people/person behind this wants to quickly and easily impart information, so the best format for the job is whichever one they can distribute info in as quickly as possible -- but I also see this as a sort of indictment of the World Wide Web as we know it.

This should be a website. This should be at the top of search results. This should be viewable on mobile devices and desktops. And yet, it's being shared through a proprietary office suite service in the form of a spreadsheet that can't be quickly referenced or copied without loading an entire webapp.

If you're one of the many people who wonder why Google stopped being useful, if you're one of the many people who think it's getting harder to find stuff online, here's your answer as to why. All the good, salient, pertinent, well-formed information that you want to find, is being shared like this.

This is what's easiest for people, and that's at odds with how we find content these days. This comment came out kind of half-baked, but I think it's interesting to think about, and it's not a viewpoint I see here often.

nicbou 3 days ago

The same thing happened with the Russian invasion of Ukraine. In Berlin, the entire effort to support refugees was coordinated on WhatsApp and Telegram, backed by Google Docs. It still did a marvelous job until the authorities could catch up and prepare resources. Even then the unofficial resources were far better.

I run an information website for a living. There is nothing I could have done that would have beat the speed and flexibility of that response. My own response was just to give those resources more visibility.

My takeaway was somewhat opposite to yours: it's marvelous that we can do so much, so fast, for free, with minimal computer skills. We should aim to make the independent web this easy.

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  • Cthulhu_ 3 days ago

    Spreadsheet software and in this case specifically google docs are great tools for getting something off the ground fast; often it's good enough that no replacement needs to be written. I'm reminded of a contract some of my colleagues had at some point where a company's core business was all in a shared excel sheet, their job was to replace it with a proper application; iirc it took like 2-3 years to get it finished, at significant cost / investment. Of course, the excel sheet was no longer fit for purpose and not a good long term strategy to have.

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  • cduzz 3 days ago

    These ad-hoc efforts are wonderful and extremely effective and are the utopia we all strive for.

    Ultimately, I think, the distinction between "products" and ad-hoc effort is that one is tolerant of abuse and bad actors (the "enterprise" or bureaucratic system) and the other simply isn't.

    I think I read it somewhere here, that any large project eventually turns into a moderation system.

    I'm not sure what actions to take as a result of this observation... except perhaps to be a little bit sad.

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  • WesolyKubeczek 3 days ago

    A potential problem with a website in a wartime scenario is that once you publicize it, it has a huge target painted on its RJ45 (or SFP) ports. Google Docs and whatsapp are huge and resilient.

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  • jijikuya 3 days ago

    > It's marvelous that we can do so much, so fast, for free, with minimal computer skills. We should aim to make the independent web this easy.

    Actually, I'd argue that our takeaway is the same. That's exactly the wider point I'm making, I'm just using this emergency as a synecdoche for it. This is good, the independent web would be better. Why is the barrier for entry to the 'normal' web so high that these people didn't consider it?

    Lots of information that should be hosted by local, independent groups is being hosted in these closed un-indexable platforms. It does the creator a disservice and the end-user a disservice.

    Had this disaster happened 10-15 years ago, I wager that this information would (I think) likely be displayed and posted here as a website (or at least turned into one).

    And zooming out, how much good info is tied up in Google Docs alone? Indulge me.

    - Here's TaranVH's (The editor from Linus Tech Tips, and a very technically skilled, impressive person) guide to colour grading.[This one hurts particularly because it's such a good document and desperately wants to be anything but a Google Doc.](https://shorturl.at/InI89)

    - Here's a great resource for buying products for [Curly Hair.](https://shorturl.at/ZbNF9) This should be a blog.

    - How many times have you seen YT drama or open letters be Google Docs? (https://shorturl.at/fJapj) If they were here, it'd be <motherfuckingwebsite.com>

    - Here's a guide to video game stats. This should be on a Wiki. (https://shorturl.at/db49s)

    - Here's a worldbuilding calculator. This should be a tool website.* (https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1AML0mIQcWDrrEHj-InXo...)

    Whatever your opinion on whether or not these should or should not be documents vs. webpages, can we at least agree that they have information that people would be interested in? This stuff makes up the internet, this is where all the cool shit is. 10-15 years ago, these would be in search results. They're not anymore. It's all here, in undiscoverable Google Docs, unsearchable Discord servers, slow meandering Reddit threads, locked-down Facebook Groups and anti-discoverable TikTok feeds.

    I keep hearing too much about good content leaving us (AI Slop in search), and not nearly enough about where it's going. If you find out where the good, creative stuff is going, you'll get your good, creative internet back.

    *: I've said 'should' a lot, when what I mean is 'it would have been one when I was a kid'.

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tempworkac 3 days ago

strange comment - this should be a website that would presumably be hosting, where exactly?

the average person would not be able to make something even close to this sheet. where are they going to host it? do they have a domain? certs? do they even know how to write html? css? during a spiky event such as a wildfire, will their website even stay up?

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  • IanCal 3 days ago

    In addition this includes tracking your own info in it. So now we're going to need auth and a backend to store the data on top of that.

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  • the_sleaze_ 3 days ago

    I don't think it's strange at all.

    Wouldn't this be a near perfect use-case for AI generated websites?

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    • jasode 3 days ago

      >Wouldn't this be a near perfect use-case for AI generated websites?

      A non-tech user prompting ChatGPT to write out HTML+CSS+Javascript still doesn't cover the other logistical challenges of hosting it on a server somewhere. E.g. Buy a domain? Then buy web hosting package? Or use Netlify? Amazon S3?

      Maybe someday OpenAI will have AI agents with authority to pay with customers' credit-cards and opens Cloudflare or DigitalOcean accounts on the users' behalf. That's a long time into the future where such a workflow would be trusted by non-technical end users. And then you still have the irony of using another proprietary entity of AI to empower users to put up web pages.

      Whether the internet was 1990s Geocities or something like Github Pages today, a user sharing content on a personal webpage is not a trivial task. So non-techies compensate with commercial services such as MySpace pages, Twitter tweets, Facebook pages, or examples like this thread's Google Docs spreadsheet. A common theme of all those commercial services is: they handled the complexities of web hosting.

      EDIT reply: >I feel like this response contains within it a great deal of contempt for average people

      No, you misinterpreted. I was trying to get techies to empathize with typical end users and understand the reasons why they don't host their own web pages. If that empathy was fully internalized, we'd already predict that a ChatGPT-CoPilot assisted HTML tool isn't the only issue. The gp you replied to highlighted that in his first paragraph.

      I have true admiration and not contempt for the end users at this charity using Google Spreadsheets to empower themselves to share a doc without waiting for a "real programmer or webmaster" to do it for them.

      >Could you not just ask an LLM how one could host this website for free somewhere,

      What's the current best answer for "website for free somewhere" that doesn't have the same criticism of being a proprietary entity that this subthread's gp was lamenting?

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      • the_sleaze_ 3 days ago

        I feel like this response contains within it a great deal of contempt for average people and their problem solving ability.

        Could you not just ask an LLM how one could host this website for free somewhere, and do the same for any logistical challenges that arise beyond that?

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      • jijikuya 3 days ago

        I think you're the only one who understands what I was trying to say here, which means I didn't say it nearly clear enough. But thanks.

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kzalesak 3 days ago

I think that the biggest advantage of the spreadsheet is that it can be modified easily, even democratically and also on the go. No website offers that kind of ease of use for _adding_ information

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  • acidburnNSA 3 days ago

    You may be right, but it's still an indictment of the web. After all, the first browser was an HTML editor as well as viewer.

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  • _Algernon_ 3 days ago

    Wikipedia is literally a website that does this and has existed for >2 decades at this point.

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    • wruza 3 days ago

      ### Regular _users_ cannot edit [Wikipedia](<url>)

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    • IanCal 3 days ago

      Yes, let me just go pop my personal contents and insurance details on wikipedia as myself and my family track, update and modify the structure of the page.

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      • _Algernon_ 3 days ago

        Not sure why you feel justified in this level of snarkiness, given that i responded to a very specific claim:

        >No website offers that kind of ease of use for _adding_ information

        Obviously Wikipedia isn't great to upload your social security number to, but it does allow democratic adding of information which I cited it as an example of.

        Please read the HN guidelines. You seem to require a refresher:

        https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

        >Don't be snarky.

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        • IanCal 3 days ago

          Perhaps it was a little snarky - it was intended with good humour to point out how drastically far away the suggestion was.

          Wikipedia is nothing like what this is for adding information in the way the comment says. Particularly because one of the very key points about this sheet is that you can copy it and add information. It's explicitly for that and Wikipedia absolutely does not offer the ease of use of filling in forms and adding your information on the go.

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    • dewey 3 days ago

      Most wikis are not very user friendly (UI, not about the rules and moderation), most people have used Word / Google Docs before so it's much more natural.

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  • teddyh 3 days ago

    Have you heard of Wikis?

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    • egberts1 3 days ago

      Have you tried to edit just a tiny section of a Wiki while being updated by thousands of Wiki editors?

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ksynwa 3 days ago

It should be theoretically possible for Google to display a public Google doc as a search result. Google doesn't show good search results because they do not want to at this point.

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  • Cthulhu_ 3 days ago

    Public spreadsheets (and forms) simply aren't indexed by Google; I'm sure there's a reason somewhere but I haven't been able to find it.

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meshweaver 3 days ago

The plot thickens.

At the time of writing this, the linked-to Google Sheet redirects to an html-only view with this message: "Some tools might be unavailable due to heavy traffic in this file." In this html-only view, while the user can still see the entire list of sheets at the top, in-document links to other sheets do not work, and some text overflows its cell and is not visible.

Most important information appears to be visible still, but those who wish to add to or edit the document seem to be out of luck.

What went wrong? Perhaps each Google Sheet has access throttling, not ideal for users of high-traffic docs like this, especially if the users have critical information to share.

And yet, what other tool should they have used?

We need collaborative, easily-shareable, WYSIWYG document editors for situations just like this, except of course, their access should not be throttled, and their content should be discoverable by search engines.

Do we need a new web? A web whose content is able to be directly manipulated? A web that is collaborative by default?

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  • entropicdrifter 3 days ago

    Perhaps some sort of Fediverse Google Docs/Sheets equivalent? Where each user can host their own copy (if they want) and the pub/sub algorithm ensures that it's all eventually consistent, if higher latency than something inherently centralized like Google?

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throw8923982398 3 days ago

I guess author does not have much resources. It is probably single person, with no government backing. There is not even spanish translation!

In 2015 refugee crisis, website had much better organization. It had nice graphic and translation to 5 languages. It had upto date information about police locations, border weaknesses, and how to use free trains (avoid ticket checks). Volunteers were even giving away free phones with SIM data plans, bolt cutters, single use tents...

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lazide 3 days ago

How is a Google App being useful representative of how Google stopped being useful?

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IanCal 3 days ago

And how do those people enter their information? Where is it stored?

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elzbardico 3 days ago

This should be a lot of things, but this is a spreadsheet that was done probably by an end users, and thus is a superior solution to all the potential options that were not done.

There are a lot of sheets on this worksheet that are intended to be edited. Sometimes we forget that spreadsheets are popular because they are useful for the people who use them. They have an incredibly low barrier of adoption, are intuitive and pratical for editing, and frankly, for the average users, they do tables far better than HTML.

Why the fucking web has to be the measure of all things and everything needs to be hypertext? Why the web has to be everything and absorb all other applications?

There must be a reason why Visical was the killer app that really popularized the home computer for non-nerds, followed by 1-2-3 and why almost 40 years laters excel is still one of the most used tools.

Yeah, not everybody in the world is a developer, not everybody has to think like us, and frankly, sometimes we are pretty limited in our way of thinking, and way less creative than our users.

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dataflow 3 days ago

> And yet, it's being shared through a proprietary office suite service in the form of a spreadsheet that can't be quickly referenced or copied without loading an entire webapp.

I wish this was made obvious to users, but FYI: you can change /edit to /preview at the end of the URL to get something more like a webpage.

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