‘The Internet Is Broken’: Ev Williams Is Trying to Salvage It | Hacker News Reader

‘The Internet Is Broken’: Ev Williams Is Trying to Salvage It

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46 pointsVannatter46 comments

Ev Williams is not trying to fix the web: he's trying to kill the web and to replace it with his own vision of what it should be.

> We never realized the potential of it that we saw with blogging and the open Internet. In the next three years, it’s going to look massively different and it will do well.

> The idea won’t be to start a website. That will be dead. The individual website won’t matter. The Internet is not going to be about billions of people going to millions of websites. It will be about getting it from centralized websites.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthof/2015/09/09/mediums-ev...

I'm sick of people deciding that the problem with the internet is other people.

The internet isn't "broken." The internet is the only mass communication and media paradigm which doesn't have to present a facade for the sake of commercial interests, but an honest, unfiltered glimpse at the zeitgeist. It's a mirror, an honest mirror. If we don't like what we see, it's because we had a naive understanding of what we are.

> It's a mirror, an honest mirror.

While I partially agree with you, I think there's a tendency of those (us) who work in a deterministic universe to under-attribute technology's ability to shade or shift pre-existing things. In the same way that propagation models matter in neural networks, the nuances of how the internet is consumed, shared, cross-linked, and presented all influence the zeitgeist that it creates.

If HN had no moderation or anti-spamming code, our comment threads would look very different. Would that be a reflection of our truer selves? I say yes and no: it would reflect our opinions of the moment more accurately, but by virtue of altering the comment content on the site we would then make different comments to those comments.

So an algorithm shifts our HN world, despite the fact that we remain the same people. (At least over the short term)

And when it boils down to it, I refuse to live in a world where technology is impotent in reminding us of and appealing to our kinder, aspirational, better natures.

> If HN had no moderation or anti-spamming code, our comment threads would look very different. ...

No argument there.

> So an algorithm shifts our HN world, despite the fact that we remain the same people. (At least over the short term)

Yes, over the short term. But longer term, HN's policies shape its user base. They select for people who prefer them, and against people who reject them.

So anyway, I do believe that the Internet is an honest mirror. But I wouldn't want the sort of moderation that some countries impose or plan. Maybe people will eventually learn to use it responsibly. I'm not optimistic, however. It's just ongoing Eternal September.

I think it's honest in the same sense as a poll with an inadvertently skewed sample. It's honest, but the scope of conclusions that can be justifiably drawn from it is limited.

Without the internet, opportunities to be simultaneously social and anonymous are few and far between. Situations where you're also unencumbered by hard-wired social instincts (e.g. being able to say something without any reflexive responses to body language or the sound of someone's voice) are practically non-existent.

Having the ability to socially express yourself with such a degree is good and bad, but it certainly isn't natural. One could say that this shows who we "really" are, but I don't know how anyone could argue that our social behavior while isolated from society is the truest definition of the character or the individual. Maybe you could, but absent a convincing argument I'm certainly not taking it as assumed.

Yes, I am arguing that there are far too many sociopaths, and that only fear of consequences keeps them in line. Whether that's in meatspace, or online.

But I do agree that the Internet provides more "opportunities to be simultaneously social and anonymous". Overall, that's a good thing, notwithstanding harassment.

I worry far more about social control through targeted propaganda.

> social control through targeted propaganda

That's more along the lines of what I was talking about. Albeit from a double-edged sword perspective and with an emphasis on passive rather than active influence.

Anonymity / lack of consequences causes individuals to do certain things, yes. But above and in addition to that, I'd say the nature of their network connectivity (e.g. none, newspaper, coffee shop, phone, app, etc) also fundamentally influences the behavior you get in aggregate.

Or, to put it another way, we could design a network that caused everyone to become an asshole, just as we could design one that caused everyone to become an angel.

Without the levers of totalitarianism, realistic outcomes are probably between those two extremes. But how we connect people still strongly influences their experiences and behavior.

About social control, I'm thinking of recent elections. I suspect that targeted propaganda is now the new standard. It's an active panopticon. Adversaries have surveillance-based models for everyone, and can individually shape their experience as desired. Or at least, for the weak-minded.

> Or, to put it another way, we could design a network that caused everyone to become an asshole, just as we could design one that caused everyone to become an angel.

Well, one could do that as described above. But then, who gets to define "asshole" and "angel"? The Internet is becoming increasingly fragmented, with each culture attempting to impose standards. I can not imagine a common standard for the Internet.

> Without the levers of totalitarianism, realistic outcomes are probably between those two extremes. But how we connect people still strongly influences their experiences and behavior.

I prefer relatively totalitarian forums, such as HN and Wilders. I do occasionally lose it, and get spanked. But that's cool, in order to have discussions that are civil and interesting. The rules for some forums seem crazy to me, so I avoid them.

But overall, I believe that, by default, the Internet should be anonymous and censorship-free. As a global agora. If that leads some to be assholes, so be it. Because it's the next step for humanity.

Basically, we need to learn how to ignore the assholes. I mean, who cares what people say in alt.talk.bestiality? Or post on Encyclopedia Dramatica? The problem has been seeing that bullshit migrate to Facebook and Twitter, and visible to the naive and susceptible.

It is a hard problem. But it's not a new one. Many countries became chaotic during industrialization, as the masses moved from farms to cities, and were less constrained socially. But that was transient. So we just need the Internet equivalent.

We're talking about two different things. I agree that what you've said exists, but it's not what I was referring to. I probably muddled my intent by mentioning moderation. Automated, network-level tweaks are more interesting to me, because they scale. And because I believe they're just as or more effective.

F.ex Facebook de-weighting sharing of articles that a user hasn't read. HN allowing user flagging. Whether a website uses an "angry clickbait sidebar". Etc.

OK, that makes sense. Thanks.

Thank you, this comment is uplifting and thought-provoking.

I agree. In particular, the NYT and other large media organizations seem to talk as though the internet became abruptly disharmonious during the election. It wouldn't be an NYT article of it didn't have "Trump supporters are evil" undertones. Our country isn't going to get better if we are constantly demonizing those with whom we disagree.

what's an example of a trump supporters are evil? keep in mind that demonstrating that someone is uninformed, perhaps willfully, is not the same as evil.

I agree totally agree. This is the same org that told us Bush was right about WMDs, whose reporters didn't know what a CDO was when the financial collapse happened, and spent three years unable to believe Trump could win the election. This is why nytimes.com is pointing to 0.0.0.0 in my hosts file.

The internet removes individual accountability for your beliefs and ideas, and very much influences the zeitgeist. It's not an honest mirror but a funhouse mirror, because it exacerbates not only genuinely held extreme views, but also the appearance that others hold extreme views.

Yes it's tiresome, but it's not 1995 anymore. Other people are exactly why we can't have nice things. Spam, abuse, and fraud keep the feudal Internet in business - because nobody wants to do it themselves anymore.

Unbearable read. Overflowing with intellectual elitism. Completely out of touch with reality. If this is PR [0], Evan Williams should demand a refund. I don't know, maybe this crap appeals to yuppies living in the coastal big cities? Tools like Twitter and Facebook have done more to connect more people of all income and education levels than anything else. Medium is not going to reach these people, who don't read the New York Times, let alone frequent quaint used bookstores.

Long form anything is going to continue being dead until we find a way to fix society so that families don't have to spend every waking moment struggling to pay the bills. All indications are that this problem will only accelerate as automation wipes out more jobs, with self-driving cars and trucks at the vanguard of this revolution. Stay tuned.

[0] http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

If we had this attitude --- nothing of greatness or substance or length will be tolerated until everyone can have unfettered access to it --- we'd still be living in caves. The future is always unevenly distributed. The solution is not to demand everything stop until everyone is equal, but to make sure no one is left behind in the long run.

Rejecting intellectual elitism is a huge mistake.

I have no problem with Medium existing for the people who have the time and inclination to read it. I've enjoyed reading it myself. What raises my hackles is the suggestion that it'll replace Twitter.

Edit: Please don't conflate intelligence with intellectual elitism. One is a net good that is universally valued. The other is a form of patronizing and dismissive behaviour that leads to political polarization.

I've got no problem with intellectual elites. Too bad that most Medium writers aren't such people, despite whatever they may believe about themselves.

I don't think Twitter and facebook have allowed people to communicate across social/educational/economical boundaries. Yes you do get an odd an interaction here and there, but by and large both these platforms have become giant echo chambers where you only hear echoes of voices and opinions like your own.

Honest question, do you think an average internet user, interacts with and actually enagages in an intellectually honest way with people outside their own educational/social strata on any sort of regular basis?

You can lump YouTube in there with the echo chamber accusations. At the borders of these networks there is a huge amount of debate going on. It's moving forward. People do get bored of the echo chamber though. It just takes a really long time because people let their identity get caught up in it (identity politics).

To answer your question: yes. I think this goes on far more often than it ever did before the internet and these social networks came into being. A lot of it is invisible though, because online identities don't carry that info around.

Many interest type forums have off topic/political sections that are deeply polarized. At times this can bleed into other sections but for the most part everyone gets along on topics of the interest.

> Mr. Williams — a Twitter founder, a co-creator of Blogger — set everyone free, providing tools to address the world. In the history of communications technology, it was a development with echoes of Gutenberg.

Uh, hmm, no. That's a bit too much of a stretch.

It's hard to take an article seriously after a claim like that.

Quotes (and subsequent commentary) on HN comments are a great way for me to decide what to read or not. Yours is a great example of that, thanks for that. I wont read it.

Great phtograph of a beautiful kitchen, complete with a chef providing catered lunches, captioned with a description of how the company had to lay off staff because the company executives can't figure out how to make money. Perhaps that should come before the chef? Why is it such a badge of pride to provide perks on other people's dime? Silicon Valley in a nutshell.

I read the word "pivot" and later in the article, it mentions their raise and valuation. It doesn't read like the layoff was money related, rather pivot related.

If that was SV in a nutshell Bay Area after the Dot Com bust would look much more like Detroit.

> Why is it such a badge of pride to provide perks on other people's dime? Silicon Valley in a nutshell

If you really want to make the bile rise, read the Wired piece on the new Apple campus (although to be fair, I believe everyone at Apple involved with the project is being somewhat embarrassed at having to erect Jobs' grotesque intellectual mausoleum).

It seems like everyone I know likes to hate on Medium - either because the content is lousy or because the business model is broken. And yet, I end up clicking on something that takes me to Medium on a weekly, if not daily, basis.

Medium feels like it's ubiquitous and mildly despised at the same time.

At the scale of Comcast or Facebook that might be a sign of success. But I suspect it's a pretty bad sign for a company in Medium's position, given what they're trying to be.

Medium's customer shouldn't be readers but publications. Medium should be a new AP and sell content to publications around the world.

I'm getting tired of people saying "the ____ is broken" for everything, and always at the beginning of a pitch for a new vision of the world. I suppose having an alternative is better than an empty critique, but the business interest usually makes the new vision ring hollow to me.

"* is broken" is the ultimate expression of a highly potent mixture of ignorance and narcissism. It assumes that everyone but you is an idiot, that the answer is simple, and that you have it.

"Toxic" seems to be its moral equivalent, and it was also featured in this article. This word gets thrown out when someone wants to call some other group "evil", but the actual rationale invites too many parallels to be drawn to the accuser's own tribe.

I found the juxtaposition of these two statements odd:

>"Twitter is a hive of trolling and abuse that it seems unable to stop."

>"Then came Twitter, which wasn’t his idea but was his company. He remains the largest individual shareholder and a board member."

Why is it - "it seems unable to stop" and not "we seem unable to stop"? Does he really have no influence or power as an outsized share holder, board member and founder of Twitter? He can't help fix that "broken" bit?

Silicon Valley season 3. I love how that TV show is skewering the entire Valley and shows how ridiculously predictable we are.

Summary: the guys behind Twitter and Hot or Not created Medium to atone for their sins.

More like society is broken.

…said someone somewhere pretty much every second since 3000 years.

... even though there are indeed many broken society's all the time. Just like there are many working ones. And alltogether it is somewhat mixed.

In this article: Ev Williams reveals his disdain for human beings.

Yeah, no. Entrepreneur states "X is broken, and my solution Y will fix it"

News at 11.

Ev Williams is trying to save the world with a blogging platform that is slightly better than blogger.

Meanwhile Elon Musk is over there being a selfish little bitch keeping all the cool toys to himself.

I am pretty sure the internet exist before Twitter and Blogger.

And i am sure, that people were able to exchange information and definitly more anonymous as today with twitter and everything else.

Seems that fixing Internet with Medium already clearly failed. It's the blog service with the least "diversity" ever, Medium is used mostly by people like its creator: narcissistic developers from Silicon Valley. Even its post creation UI and page look is designed for this audience and causes disgust for others, even for hipsters. And I can't remember any interesting post on Medium, only graphomania about newest js things.

You fail to mention how medium's UI discourages non-"narcissistic Silicon Valley" developer from creating posts? As far as I can see they have tried to remove cruft so you can just focus on the writing. What about that is alienating?

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