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Comment by altotrees | Hacker News Reader

I like the idea of "rebooting the web". If things continue in the direction they are going now, I could see many forms of the internet existing. Just as the Darkweb exists, I could see other splinter networks and technologies taking shape as the internet we know now becomes more homogenized, whether it is because of giants like Google and Facebook or government control (oh god pls no) or any other factor.

I still fondly remember looking at Nike's newest shoe offerings in 1997, waiting for the photos to download and listening to my dad complain about the phone line being tied up. I looked at my girlfriend the other day in fact, and just went "god, think of how different the internet is now compared to when we were younger. What the hell will it look like in twenty years?" She called me a nerd, but still considered the question. Exciting and sightly terrifying thought to ponder, really.

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It's worth remembering that there is an important difference between "the Web" and "the Internet". This is the only way to understand something like when Alan Kay says, "The Internet was done so well that most people think of it as a natural resource like the Pacific Ocean, rather than something that was man-made. When was the last time a technology with a scale like that was so error-free? The Web, in comparison, is a joke. The Web was done by amateurs."

If you're less clear on what this distinction is: HTML+CSS+JS transmitted over HTTP based on domains looked up via DNS -- this is the Web. Things like email and BitTorrent and peer-to-peer networks and older things like Usenet newsgroups have always existed on the Internet parallel to the Web, to say nothing of, say, SSH and ping and other developer-friendly utilities, or newcomers like BitCoin.

I've given a chunk of thought to how we might reboot the Web as a new service living on the Internet and I've come away with more questions than answers. What the Web has done extremely well is to convince a bunch of companies that they need to have a Web Server living on the thing and hosting their content. What it has done extremely poorly are these problems which maybe we don't even think about: link-rot, the fact that you can't throw a dime at a YouTube video you liked and trust that the content creator will get 8 cents and YouTube will get 2, the fact that nobody can directly advertise to you, "watch this video and we'll throw a dime at you!", the fact that you can't actually just fire up your browser and start publishing a feed of videos and articles that you like interspersed with a bunch of content you're writing -- you instead need to sign up with some social network or blogging platform and then play by their rules. The problem gets even harder when you think about systematically purging illegal content and discouraging spam and so forth -- indeed the key trait is to be able to say "I want to identify who is holding onto this content and go after them via non-technological enforcement measures" and such. One gets the impression that the Web is a very niche tradeoff in a vast configuration space and that there are many other possibilities -- but it's hard to see one that does something so fundamentally different to the Web that people will instantly be addicted, "THIS is what I want."

I have always wished that more people understood all these things you've written, for the sole reason that I believe the Internet has vastly more room for innovation than the Web. Oh well, at least we got MMO games.

Alan Kay and project Xanadu are well worth studying in detail for anybody interested in the web and what made it successful. The web is essentially an extremely watered down version of what it could have been.

I have read about Alan Kay, but never looked into Project Xandau. This sounds like something pretty interesting to check out and I will most definitely do so. To the parent reply, thanks for the clear, concise writeup, enlightening, it is appreciated.

> The web is essentially an extremely watered down version of what it could have been.

At the risk of starting a flamewar, this is largely due to the profit motive. Profit inherently causes focus on specific areas that may or may not a) have lasting social benefit, and b) be technologically robust.

There's something to be said for purely philanthropic projects. They promote us to explore things that profit might not otherwise encourage.

I do not think that is the reason. The web in its original form, long before commerce came along was already a watered down version of Xanadu.

Part of the effect that the Web specifically has had over the past decade is to adjust the general personal computing public to the idea that programs and files are more ephemeral than they were, say, 10 years earlier. We don't really worry about "will such and such computer be compatible with my [whatever] files?" as much as we used to. This is actually quite big. What it means is that any system designed for personal computing needs to have one key program in order to be truly usable: a web browser.

Now, how does that get us past the Web or to the "next" web? Well, if a web browser is all you need, we can go about designing personal computing architectures that are very different from the current offerings. This means we can experiment with new programming languages and environments. Imagine making a computer optimized for something like a Smalltalk system. Sure it would be hard to catch on at first, but if the system came with a web browser and internet access, you'd be ahead of the game.

I'd be hard pressed to find examples in history in which they were able to go back to a time before the consolidation took effect.

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