> A raspberry pi is $25 and far exceeds the home computer of the 80s and most of the home computers sold in the 90s.
But what Moore's law giveth, web developers taketh away. If you want to use a computer to participate in the modern society, you need much more than a Raspberry Pi, due to web bloat.
This first struck me in 2008. You could get a lightweight Linux distro running on just about anything. People'd spend all this time arguing over which windowing system used fewer resources. But, it never mattered. None of the windowing systems performed more slowly than a standard web browser on a modern webpage. Worse, most of the bloat is stuff the user explicitly doesn't want: tracking, advertisements, even more tracking.
It's easy (and trendy) to point the blame at web developers and businesses who bloat their webapp with advertisements and trackers, but for many of those businesses, that's the only way they would make money.
There are many things consumers are willing to pay for with their time and patience, but not their cash. As it turns out many of those things are web "services". If they were truly valuable on the same level as say, food, people would gladly pay cash for the service.
YouTube is a great example for me personally. If you told me I had to pay a monthly subscription of $10, I'd stop watching YouTube instantly. But since it's "free" I'll sit through a few ads. I don't mind paying with my time.
Plenty of people still write travel blogs and think pieces without getting a salary for it. The thing that drives me crazy is twitter / facebook etc showing me content produced for free and STILL put it next to an ad.
Your point is taken, and I agree that very many folks are not being reasonable about what they want. The money has to come from somewhere.
That said, I think I'd be perfectly happy if most websites went under. What we're getting out of it (novelty, entertainment) isn't worth the cost (attention span, loss of privacy) in most cases.
I think that’s kind of flippant. The reality is that it’s very difficult to apply for jobs or even do banking effectively without internet access and a capable browser. I think this is what the parent means by “engage with society”.
Although, I think a rPI is capable, even if it would be frustratingly slow.
Flippant or not, it's a good demonstration of how a prerequisite of participating in a Twitter-and-Facebook-driven modern society is using a computer that's powerful enough to handle all the garbage those two companies insist upon running on said computer whenever you so much as think of participating in said society.
The World Wide Web would be a much better place if web developers/designers showed even the slightest bit of restraint when it comes to shoving arbitrary Turing-complete code down my throat. Statistically-speaking, 95+% of it doesn't benefit me in the slightest, and there's a special place in hell for those who write websites such that I have to put up with that 95% that's garbage just to use the site at all.
Loading 10 or 20 or even 1000 140-character tweets should be possible even on an old DOS PC with dialup, and yet even 10-year-old PCs with multiple orders of magnitude more processing power and network speed/bandwidth struggle with that.
At the very minimum, using the sites of your local and national government, and your bank. Normal levels of participation involve using e-mail, search engines, information sites, reading news, buying things on-line and social media.
Most of those sites are incredibly bloated. Even bank dashboards have become increasingly heavy (for near zero value added).
I am taking his statement in good faith. The "homebrew" application I created runs the exact some frameworks (Javascript with React/Flux/etc packaged with Webpack and calling Ajax based services inside of a browser based on Chromium) that any other modern web application would use.
But what Moore's law giveth, web developers taketh away. If you want to use a computer to participate in the modern society, you need much more than a Raspberry Pi, due to web bloat.