Ev Williams helped create the open web, now he’s betting against it (2016) | Hacker News Reader

Ev Williams helped create the open web, now he’s betting against it (2016)

theatlantic.com

106 pointsTomte29 comments

Words have lost all meaning when the asshole that introduced twitter's tracking url shorteners is said to have helped create the open web.

Ugh I hate those things. Enable scripts because the link behind the text 'domain.tld' is actually t.co/stupidtwitter and now you want to (track and) redirect me to the thing I clicked on in the first place?

Lame. I often stop there.

What's amazing is that none of his ventures were ever profitable that I know of. He made all of his cash off of acquisitions.

Of all the American internet industry’s critical events (other than that fateful night in Mark Zuckerberg’s dorm room), odds are good that Williams was there or knew someone present.

That's why in my opinion. He probably has the best network in the valley.

You're probably correct. It's always about who you know.

He came from outside the valley, started from zero, and earned his way to this so called "network" by building things that got people excited.

> He came from outside the valley

who didn't? It's not Hollywood, there are no legacy cases

and your point is?

you'd be surprised how many legacy cases there are in the valley. the right internship, first job, quick promotion ....

Nah it's not just pure coincidence that a 4/5 vcs and founders have similar economic backgrounds.

Ev came from an unusually humble background for Silicon Valley.

Steve Jobs was from Silicon Valley but grew up poor.

Reid Hoffman's mom hooked him up with vc money and a network, cause she was a rich lawyer at a fancy firm iirc.

Very few people that grew up poor are successful in Silicon Valley but they may be the most impactful as a population.

Everything is timing.

nah, everything is parents

Does Airbnb and Instacart have a lot of patents? Or was it their timing?

> Steve Jobs was from Silicon Valley but grew up poor.

"Poor" may be stretching things a bit.

Compared to most Silicon Valley founders he was, his adoptive parents were blue collar with no college education. His dad made most of his money as a repo man.

Part of the agreement his biological mother made with the Jobs family to allow them to adopt was that Steve had to go to college.

I was surprised recently that my wife knows who Ev Williams is (she's not technical at all, doesn't blog, and doesn't tweet). Surprised because he's not Gates/Jobs/Zuckerberg famous. Yet, I guess it makes sense because being responsible for blogging and Twitter is a pretty big footprint of influence even if he's a lot more low-profile and non-aggrandizing than those other guys.

Twitter, a centralized walled garden, can not be an example of the open web.

> and a communication tool so powerful that it could abort war.

Ha. If anything the clash of cultures that the web facilitates is more likely to start wars.

Communication can spread many things. If used to connect people and promote understanding, people can keep governments from war. If used to spread rumors and fear, people will push government towards war.

That doesn't contradict GP. I think it's quite uncontroversial that telecommunications can do both of those things. The more controversial and, not coincidentally, more interesting question is, on balance, which one of those things does it do? Or is its marginal effect negligible compared to other forces?

I think I'm somewhere in the "negligible" to "good" camp, but since I indirectly promote the Internet, I'm interested in reasons to believe it might do more harm than good. Remember The End of History? It's hard to deny that many Western liberal democratic institutions have at least superficially appeared to decline since then, and that at least superficially it appears that telecommunications played a non-negligible role.

Certainly all those points are debatable, but it's hard to deny why someone would argue for them, right?

Its not the web. Its the like/retweet/upvote/view counters and their impact on human behaviour. Delay or take away the stimulus and herds start behaving very differently than they do currently.

I wonder how this article would be different had it been written after Medium introduced its new funding model. For one thing, a bunch of those publications, like The Awl are no longer there.

“(A similar sentiment sparked the creation of public broadcast media in the 1970s.)”

Something to ponder. May be the only alternative option. But on a global scale, cuz the internets know no national boundaries.

Also, notice how so not focused on the actual tech this article is. How it's all about ideals and grand sweeping narratives. It is this that turns text-boxes into something with cultural value. It's simultaneously bathetic and comical.

It's interesting to think about what global public media might look like. Does Wikipedia offer a decent model?

The trick is balancing public-service operations with the ability to make quick decisions and maintain a user-centered design. Many open source projects go off the rails by adding too many layers of bureaucracy, and it's important that something like this is able to react quickly and compete with non-public versions. (How the BBC competes with ITV in the UK is analogous: the quality and finger on the cultural pulse is at least as good.)

I think the time is right for someone to try this. The question is, who, and where does the initial funding come from?

(Maybe it can come from Ev?)

I have always thought that Bill Gates and Warren Buffet should give at least 10% of their donations to PBS/NPR or even start their own not for profit media organization. The nation/world needs a public broadcasting service that isn't dependent on advertising. I have actually stopped listening to NPR because it full of commercials now (I now listen to BBC Radio 4 instead). There were hardly any commercials a decade or two ago on either NPR or PBS.

That gets called globalist (or nationalist, or whateverist) propaganda

https://www.forbes.com/sites/larrybell/2013/05/05/billionair...

https://knightfoundation.org/ seems to avoid getting hate, though

It's Ry from wufph.

"Shitty pop reference headlines for 100, please"

"This is Rick Astley's most famous song"

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