Randi Harper, founder of the Online Abuse Prevention Initiative, posted a few things Twitter could do to prevent abuse. In the same threat, she also justifiably rips on Jason Calacanis and Vivek Wadhwa for their weak-sauce solutions to a very real problem that rarely affects them. And when it does, it certainly doesn’t get to the level that many—mostly women and people of color—face every time they log in.

In some deference to Calacanis and Wadhwa, as successful VCs, they have experience and skills that help companies succeed, grow, and overcome many of the hurdles they will face. They’re also avid Twitter users, so they have a vested interest in keeping the platform alive. (They might also be investors, too. I couldn’t confirm in a quick Google search.) They don’t get human psychology. They don’t get how systems can be twisted for their own ends—only “disrupted” by something more efficient.

Jason and Vivek care about Twitter, but they care about the wrong thing. The values of the technology industry as we start 2016 are still about rapid growth and high returns, damn the cost. It’s why we have nearly 150 startups valued at or over $1 billion. When your priority is getting a big return for your investors—and a nice little bonus for yourself—anything that doesn’t directly contribute to that is not a concern.

That includes diversity. That includes tools to prevent abuse. That includes, above all, empathy.

That needs to change.

As tech eats more and more of the world, the companies doing the eating will eventually have to confront these problems. We’re already either seeing it happen, or seeing them stick their heads in the sand. For the companies that address the problems head-on, with real inventive solutions and ideas, I predict real success. For the companies that keep their eye on the valuation, and not the quality? I predict nothing but gloom. It’s not too late for Twitter to pivot in this, but first they—and their investors and advisors—have to care.

It’s easy to want to blame Reader’s Digest, or Yahoo, or Forbes, or Daily Mail, or any of these sites for screwing viewers by serving them malicious ads and not telling them, or not helping them with the cleanup afterward. And it’s a hell of a lot easier when they’ve compelled us to turn off our ad blockers to simply see what brought us to their site.

But the problem is coming through them, from the ad networks themselves. The same ones, it should be mentioned, who control the Faustian bargains made by bartering and selling our information.

— Violet Blue – “You say advertising, I say block that malware”

Programmatic ad networks are sometimes the only game in town for sites with general audiences. That there’s no quality assurance process for the ads they push out, nor is there incentive for them to check until something blows up in their faces. When an ordinary user can be infected by clicking a link on what should be a safe and trusted site, like Forbes, like Yahoo!, like Reader’s Digest, can you blame them for taking steps to protect themselves.

In an ideal world, it would be impossible for an ad to inject malware into a system, but in an ideal world, advertising could be trusted to be secure, not privacy-leaking and more infuriating for people who just want to read some content. I work in online publishing, and I block ads. If the risk of supporting publishers is that your computer becomes compromised by malware, I’d suggest you do the same.

When you write about technology, you have to write about Apple. They’re one of the prime movers in the technology world, along with Google, Facebook, Amazon, and (amazingly still) Microsoft. You can’t avoid it, whether you like Apple’s products or not. And, seeing as there are five Apple branded products on my desk right now—and one on my wrist—I think I would put myself in the former category. I even keep up with Apple news and rumors—though the two are conflated so much it’s hard to tell them apart.

But not everything Apple does is important to me. I don’t have a TV, so I don’t have an Apple TV. I don’t drive a car, so I don’t care about a theoretical Apple Car. I own a pair of bluetooth headphones, so if Apple does drop the headphone jack on the next iPhone, then I’ll be prepared. Not that we even know Apple’s going to do that. The degree of Kremlinology and tea-leaf reading in the Apple community is mind-blowing and often frustrating. How many hot takes and think pieces were written on the Smart Battery Case alone? How many words were written about Apple Watch Edition pricing, when it had no bearing on the product?

I use Apple products because they are the best tools for what I do, not out of a sense of loyalty to the company. I could probably do the majority of what I do on my devices with Android and Windows, or even with Android and Linux. My investment in Apple is only to the degree in which they continue to make the best tools for what I do. I don’t see that changing any time soon, though I sympathize with Marco Arment’s concerns. I also see no reason to worry about Apple’s hardware yet.

I’ll keep writing about Apple when I feel there’s a need. That doesn’t mean I need an opinion on every move the company makes, every company they acquire, and whatever rumor is floating around today. It feels like a distraction. Expect me to write less pieces on future device features, and more about the developing role of new hardware platforms. The latter gives me much more to chew on.

The conversation about the tech industry has changed profoundly in the past few years. It is no longer radical to raise issues of ethics or civics when evaluating a new product or company. But that’s the simplest starting point, a basic acknowledgment that what we do matters and actually affects people.

— Anil Dash – “Toward Humane Tech”

That we’re finally asking questions and starting the conversation about what the technology industry has become is a great start. All too often we treat technology as its own thing, something with its own sense of agency and purpose. We cannot forget that technology is created by humans, and it is controlled by humans. It also inherits all the flaws and foibles of the people who create it. Technology should serve and benefit everyone, not just the bottom line of companies that leverage it. And we start changing this by challenging assumptions to the contrary.

A few days ago, I mused on how we put the Web on a diet, by way of Maciej CegÅ‚owski’s excellent “The Website Obesity Crisis” talk. The conclusion I drew from Maciej was:

“[W]e people who make stuff on the web strip this crap down and focus on making awesome stuff everyone can use without compromising a user’s computing power or their privacy, and make it easier for someone to get started making that awesome stuff.”

But doing that is going to be very, very hard, and there’s many reasons why this is the case. I’m going to single out two big ones below.

The Audience of the Web has Changed

I got on the Web for the first time in 1996. I wanted to, because I was a 12 year old geek, who loved computers, and fascinated by this whole Internet thing. So, I begged, and pleaded to get online. My parents finally relented by buying a 56K model to slap in my 486 and signing up with our local telco’s ISP. A few weeks later, I’d set up an MST3k fan site on Geocities, learning HTML out of a book.

Back then, the only way to put anything on the Web was to find hosting—either by setting it up yourself, or through paid and free services—write HTML, and upload it somewhere. By 1996, there were tools, like Geocities, that made this easier. If memory serves, Geocities even included a web-based FTP tool so you could upload your pages and images within the browser. It wasn’t difficult by any stretch, but it could be quite intimidating to the new user.

Over time, hosting platforms of all stripes developed page building tools to make the process easier. Now, you didn’t have to learn HTML, or pay out the nose for a WYSIWYG editor, to build a web page, This made it easier for less technically adept users who were joining up to stake their claim.

At the same time, web technologies became more powerful, letting you do all kinds of crazy stuff. For a while, my personal Geocities site had giant images, several pieces of embedded audio, a scrolling text Java applet, and a CGI script hit counter—pre-broadband! (I didn’t keep it this way very long, though.)

The history of popular web platforms, ever since, has been tools that make it easier to put something in front of people, while reducing the amount of effort needed to do it. Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Instagram, YouTube, Medium, whatever web-based platform you want, they all operate on that same basic principle. The easier it is to put something in front of people, the more likely a person is going to do it.

I don’t think that the people who spend their time writing on Medium would be the sort of people who would go through the hassle of setting up hosting and blog software fifteen years ago, because it was such a hassle. I should know—I did it. But even if you want to go through that hassle in 2016, it’s still harder to get started in 2016 because…

The Technology of the Web has Changed

In 1996, the fundamentals of the web were HTML files. Fancy folks might write Perl scripts and have a cgi-bin folder on their web host to summon them. Maybe there was a FileMaker database to spit out flat HTML files as a proto-CMS. I don’t know. I wasn’t a professional web person then. Whatever you were doing, you could likely hit View Source in your browser, and see HTML code that could be saved and tweaked. Not so much now.

Even if you’re building something basic in 2016, you need to factor in multiple screen sizes: phone, tablet, desktop, etc. JavaScript is essential for nearly everything. Heck, if you’re viewing this site on a phone, I’m using JavaScript to do the little slide-out navigation thing, and this site is almost 100% pure text content. In 1996, you could have one person, with a title like “Webmaster” who handled the whole thing. In 2016, you need a team for anything larger than a basic weblog—unless you’re offloading it to Squarespace.

We’ve incorporated a ton of dynamic crap into the Web. Flash might be dead, but its ghost lives in on Adobe Edge and other technologies for animation and interactivity on the web. These things didn’t just happen—we asked for them, and we built them. Some of them became standardized. Some have not.

There are sites on the web whose HTML files merely call a series of JavaScript files that generate the entire page on the fly. That’s insane, when you think about it. The stack is huge and complex. No wonder people go to Medium if all they want to do is write words.

Jeffery Zeldman, a web guy of the old school, recently wrote that:

“[T]oo many developers and designers in our amnesiac community have begun to believe and share bad ideas—ideas, like CSS isn’t needed, HTML isn’t needed, progressive enhancement is old-fashioned and unnecessary, and so on. Ideas that, if followed, will turn the web back what it was becoming in the late 1990s: a wasteland of walled gardens that said no to more people than they welcomed. Let that never be so. We have the power.”

I don’t recall the late 1990s on the web being that terrible, but he’s got a point about the technology stack. The more complicated we make the Web, the harder it is to participate, the easier we make it for companies to create walled gardens for us to live in.

Is There No Way Out?

My hope is that we’ll find a way out in time, much like we did in the 90s and early 2000s. I’m looking on this debate as a technically inclined hobbyist user, not as a developer or designer. We’re at least having the discussion, which is a good start. What worries me is that any solution requires buy-in from the people who actually make what we see on the web. Back when that was largely other geeks, it was easier.

Now so much “content” is from media companies who call themselves technology companies, and technology companies who call themselves media companies. Other companies control access to the audience for those content companies. They all will want a cut, and they will all want ways to lock down any solution to benefit their platforms, not the audience or the creators. Not that most people creating stuff will even notice, if only because they are having an easier time of it.

Any solution will have to take both of these into account. We need to make it easy for people to participate in the Web, and we need to make the tools and technology to do it open and safe. Otherwise, we might be able to participate, but only on Facebook, Twitter, Google, or Apple’s terms. At which point, is it even the Web any more?