gnar

the other example i think of is minecraft modding. modern minecraft modding sucks! everything is really complicated and customizable and its super impenetrable. but like, all of that stuff exists because people wanted to play with more than two mods installed. people did not like manually dropping .class files into their .minecraft install and hoping that the mods didn't somehow overwrite the same files. people wanted mod interop, so they built frameworks to facilitate that. people wanted mod managers and launchers to automatically download, configure, update, and run modpacks, so people built FTB/that dumb Twitch launcher people used for some reason/MultiMC/etc. people wanted to make the renderer, crafting system, UI, combat, world gen, and every other aspect of minecraft more moddable, so they built frameworks to facilitate that. it is because Modloader/Bukkit/Forge/Fabric exist that those 100 mod kitchen sink modpacks work at all.

and like, i do think there are a lot of aspects of it which are bad for stupid, money grubby reasons (in particular I hated when everything required the CurseForge launcher or the Twitch launcher to run anything, which really mostly existed so that Curse could show ads or Twitch could advertise Twitch) but critically those are also usually fixable! (thank god for multimc/atlauncher/the dozens of other alternatives)

and on the modding side, things did get simpler--if all you want is a tiny mod that adds three items, you can probably do it now with resource packs and command blocks! it used to be so hard to make interesting adventure maps and now every minecraft map has seems to have custom loot and effects and lore and what not, which is utterly amazing!

also like, the runtime comes preloaded with so much! you think python is "batteries included"? the browser has it's own builtin GUI library with a host of highly polished and customizable widgets. an async event loop that is integrated into the language! it can save pictures and video without importing any external libraries! it does network requests! it can render 3d environments! legit, it was actually easier to implement some of the features in BROKEN_FIELD in a browser than with Rust purely because the browser has so much built in.

there's a difference between not the content it was intended to carry and not the structure it was built to be well suited to. and just because nothing unqualifiedly better currently exists doesn't mean it's good. what other application platforms are there where all of the runtimes suck in different ways and a lot of users have no control over which runtime they're using

that said i am now reminded of that thing about how twitter was losing its "heavy tweeters" in which a "heavy tweeter" was someone who looked at twitter almost every day and tweeted four times a week, and how these people only make up less than 10% of twitter's monthly users.

basically: more than 90% of people on twitter actually just use twitter as some sort of conksuck feed reader, i guess? with that context i'm not even sure how meaningful it is to talk about what features people want from social media if 90% of "active" users don't use even the core features

like you said, i feel like the web is in the state that it is not because people wanted it to be like that, but rather the fact that the platforms offered these features, people got used to them and now want them everywhere because they got used to them. it's also worth saying, i think, that the majority of web users don't know much about the technicality of what they're using, so it's not really reflected upon until something goes wrong. so like, companies just do their thing and people just go with the flow not because it's necessarily better or easier, but because... it's there...?