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Mistaking the order of this causality is a common error. The community of people developed secondarily to an overarching economic process -- money being spent to build websites. Now, Wix and Squarespace and Facebook are "good enough," so that huge middle market market doesn't exist anymore.

They imagine that it was the other way around, that the economic process is secondary to the community, that the community created the economic process of web development, and can now control the economics of that.

This is backwards. The web dev community only ever existed because there was a large and distributed economic need for lots of custom websites. Now that there is no economic motivation -- no outside money flowing into that community -- the community cannot sustain itself, except in greatly reduced form among a few hobbyists and high-end specialists.

You might compare it to the community of horse saddle manufacturers. It was a huge industry 150 years ago. Today, only a few hobbyist and specialist shops still make saddles, because there is not much economic need for them now as compared to the previous period. It wouldn't have made any difference if all horse saddle manufacturers organized their community in 1910 or so -- most of them would still have gone out of business anyway, because cars took over the economic niche that drove their industry. They were disrupted, in startup-speak.

No amount of wishful thinking or movement-building on the part of the community can change the underlying economics. The broad middle market for custom websites simply no longer exists. The best way to help the community of middle market web developers is to help each other retrain on other skillsets.

That was very well put, great stuff :)

Between VPs trying to predict the unicorn bubble burst, the end of half of Yahoo, and the fall of the website design market, they're starting to convince me that a lot of developers will soon be on the market and the crisis is back. Now, I'm an entrepreneur, is it a good time to hire ;)

Sounds like you misspelled vulture. I say that knowing the downvotes are seconds away.

He just suggested that now is a good time to give jobs to people who are losing them as a result of market conditions beyond his control. That is a strange definition of 'vulture'.

I read the statement differently. The implication I picked up on is demand is slacking off so now's a good time to hire developers for reduced wages. I may have brought some baggage to the table.

>I want everything online sold through amazon, events posted on facebook and news posted to a single platform

That, as a trend, will be disastrous for everybody.

First, it will make you and most people you know unemployed AND unemployable, as ever more markets get into the control of some monopoly player or another.

Then it will fuck up the monopoly players themselves, as it's tough to make money off of people when they don't have a job providing them with money to give you in the first place.

Between those two stages, the monopolies will abuse their powers to pad their profits and skew the market even more.

I think you've described the current trend of affairs pretty well.

The faster and more aggressive the trend, the more likely a positive shift is to occur.

I've heard that if you decide to boil a frog, if you gradually raise the temperature, it won't ever jump out, it'll cook to death.

That's where we are at currently and I don't like being slowly cooked - I want to jump.

>>I am glad it's over - who needs a billion bloated wordpress sites? I want everything online sold through amazon, events posted on facebook and news posted to a single platform (I use an RSS reader which makes dozens of websites look exactly the same).

Really? You want a few private players on the market controlling all interactions and commerce through their closed-source platforms?

It's already happened. Whether we want it or not is now beside the point.

Sure, there will always be a few specialist sites, but the vast majority of commerce and interaction for most people has long since moved to Amazon and Facebook.

We're more interested in your original statement, that you want it that way. I think most people educated on monopolies would probably not think that way. We're hoping you have some interesting insight here.

But I'm starting to suspect what you really mean is: "Oops, I didn't meant I want it that way. I mean it is that way, and if it's going to be that way, why not take it to its logical extreme?"

Which, if correct, is still an unusual sentiment.

EDIT: I mis-read the comment tree and am conflating two commenters.

I didn't make the original statement. Someone else wrote the grandparent post.

I'm not sure if you can say that most people have moved to Amazon and Facebook. The majority of their customers didn't move there because they started there. Amazon and Facebook were the first things they used on the internet.

There are so many more people and companies on the internet now than there were 15 years ago. There are probably more people running custom sites and shopping at sites other than Amazon than their were back then.

Even in the US, Amazon still controls less than 40% of e-commerce spending. Outside the US, it's even less.

40% of ecommerce spending is a staggeringly high percentage. There are very few large industries where a single player controls 40% of the market.

For comparison, Wal-Mart, the largest US brick and mortar retailer, has about 11% market share.[1]

1 - http://www.scdigest.com/assets/newsviews/13-07-26-1.php?cid=...

I still can think of a lot more types of business that need websites to maintain a minimum level of apparent professionalism than need a Facebook (or Amazon) account at all. Sure, 80% of them could knock something very serviceable together with Squarespace or the right template so the designer might be a luxury, but the individual web presence still is.

That's true. Most businesses still need their own website. But now they build it in Squarespace, talk to their customers on Twitter, and send physical goods with Fulfillment by Amazon.

Who do you think makes the internet possible to begin with? Competing entities? Or people working together?

I want one currency and one universal language too.

That probably sounds radical to a lot of people but really, look at your life - do you want parents competing to raise you properly or do you want them working together?

Why do we have the same parents our whole lives? Because it works well that way.

Competition as a means of arriving at the best solution to complex problems is an unfortunate artifact that'll be looked upon as barbaric not too long from now.

Working together works much better in my experience.

I think arguing for the Bolshevik abolition of the family is going to go down even less well on HN than the abolition of Wordpress.

Irreconcilable differences of opinion on what the best way to do things are the reason why we can't all just join in one big cooperation; the alternative requires either total stagnation or the squashing of dissent.

(See also The Tyranny of Structurelessness)

> I want everything online sold through amazon

I don't think this is a good goal. We could want everything available through Amazon, but not sold through Amazon. Monopolies almost always trend towards anti-consumer.

Yes, I'm sure we would all love to go back to the days where our access to the internet was limited by a gatekeeper who insisted we only need their services, and told us wanting a billion websites was madness.

RedBubble has definitely wrapped up that "last frontier"