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Comment by evmar | Hacker News Reader

Though I disagree with many of the points made here, I love that this person is taking a position and putting in the real work to to lay out his argument for it.

I think the main point he's missing is that most platforms die due to lack of adoption. The ones that succeed must attract developers and the current state of software regrettably shows that developers (and users) aren't generally motivated by security concerns -- they're motivated by more fundamental questions like "can I get the job done quickly" (users) and "can I get paid" (developers) and (importantly) "can it run on an iPhone" (which kills most new app platforms immediately).

This post focuses a lot on tech, but platforms rarely succeed for having good tech. If history's any guide, they succeed by having adequate tech and a huge pile of marketing money.

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Thanks!

I agree that most platforms die due to lack of adoption. However isn't this stating the obvious? All new platforms start out with no users. Some clearly gain adoption and don't die. That's not a reason to not think about new designs.

I disagree about marketing budget. The web came from CERN as an academic project. It didn't have a marketing budget. Its primary competitor at the time (AOL) had an enormous marketing budget. In the end it didn't matter.

I also agree that security doesn't motivate developers much right now. I'm thinking about this in terms of both security and productivity for that reason.

However, I think it's possible and likely for people to care more about security in future for three reasons:

1) The consequences of breaches seem to be getting worse. The Equifax C-Suite was just completely cleaned out due to, apparently, a fairly pedestrian XML deserialisation exploit in Apache Struts (which has had lots of them). Corporate America will be sitting up and taking notice of that. When top people start losing their jobs because of mistakes of programmers at the bottom, they'll start to care about security more.

2) The ultimate consequence will be the first major conflict in which 'cyber warfare' plays a part. I hate that term personally, but it's the one governments understand. The day a major industrial nation's power grid is shut down by a much smaller and weaker country is the day that everything will change with respect to computer security. If you have never considered what happens in such a scenario, google the term "Black Start" and learn just how difficult and complex it would be to bring a country back from the brink if its entire national grid had tripped out.

3) Part of the reason nobody seems to care about security is the sheer hopelessness of it. It's impossible to care about security when you know you're going to fail. All developers who aren't delusional know that sooner or later they will fail (and probably they'll never find out). The tools are so bad that it's pointless even trying to keep up with new exploit types. I hadn't even heard of SSRF exploits before last weekend and I read tech news obsessively. If I can't keep up, I don't trust anyone who isn't a full time security specialist to keep up, but unfortunately security isn't something neatly compartmentalised into a single person.

So what can we do?

• Prepare for the worst. There will be more major breaches and eventually some sort of water or grid collapse; it seems inevitable to me. Make sure you have plenty of paper cash at home in case of a breach of payment networks.

• Prepare for the day after the worst. Figure out tools and approaches we can start to use if/when security does become a more important issue.

First of all, great article, regardless of outcomes I've never considered an alternative web would be a possibility.

At first I was skeptic like most here, but it doesn't sound impossible at all. If you fix the most pressing issues regarding security, improve productivity by orders of magnitude (with great UX by default, even at the expense of some customizability), and can make it run on an iPhone, it might be a path worth exploring, yes.

Have you heard about Urbit? It seem to be also a "new internet" kind of project, but more focused on decentralization, which is very important too. I'd be interested to know your thoughts about it, as well as any progress about the "NewWeb" in case it becomes an actual project.

The name Urbit rings a bell, I think I read about it many years ago. But I just checked the website and it seems totally different, so I guess I need to refresh my knowledge of it.

edit: oh, they're doing an ICO. first impressions: not good

I don't know enough about Urbit's implementation or team to vouch for it, but I do find the basic idea promising: that we should have control over our own data, and should be able to do whatever we want with it.

I'm not sure why you though an ICO is a bad first impression. Yes, there were several scams but the blockchain space is full of very exciting opportunities. Some other commenter mentioned that a "new web" would have to provide sufficient value to the end user that the current version does not/can not. These experiments in decentralization are worth watching and probably where the "sufficient value" will come from to justify the use of new tech.

I think the web is the lone exception.

Consider the other big software platforms from the last few decades: Android, iOS, Java, Windows. The trend is adequate-but-not-exceptional tech with rich companies pouring cash into their success. (iPhones have better than average tech in the hardware, so maybe there's hope that great tech will make up for lack of cash, but iPhone tech also required massive amounts of cash to develop and the software is also middling.) You can highlight any number of parallel attempts at platforms that arguably had better tech but failed.

I guess another way of phrasing my point is that good tech doesn't seem to be much of a factor in succeeding; ok tech with money succeeds, good tech without money fails. (Where "money" here maybe stands in for a bunch of related things, including "marketing", "building a market for developers", "attracting paying users", etc.)

I am sorry for the random sniping. I wish you luck and I will read your subsequent posts with interest. I write my comment because I would like to read some higher-level analysis (e.g. why will your project succeed when similar attempts X,Y,Z failed, what is different about the state of the market today vs last time).

> they succeed by having adequate tech and a huge pile of marketing money.

The key to the web's success is its completely unparalleled levels of accessibility. All you have to do is remember a domain name and you have a portal into anyone's personal network application on any device; that feature can never be topped regardless of the tech's quality or the marketing budget.

Surely there is an app for that.

I think it's called a web browser. ;)

Search, actually, hidden within the browser, aka 'navigational queries'. Significant portion of all search queries are just that.

I don't think most people or maybe even anybody remembers the domain name in order to access the pertinent network application.

I don't think that's true, certainly people rely on search engines more now than ever, but people still know the domain names of their most common destinations e.g google, facebook, reddit, amazon, gmail, ebay, github, youtube, pornhub aol etc. It's also pretty common to see people visit domains directly after being instructed to do so by advertising provided the domain name is easy to remember e.g. hotels.com, indeed.com, apple.com etc. Also, individuals quickly become familiar with sites that they visit habitually; certainly most users of gofundme pateron, paypal etc are not doing a google search to discover these URLs, they just type them in (and often the browser autocompletes it for them)

On the flip side, I've seen and heard of other people who have seen kids who type facebook in to the search bar to go to facebook.com. What fraction of people do this right now? What fraction of new internet users do this? It would be interesting to find out. Perhaps in the not too distant future, most internet users will be doing this.

I was perhaps hyperbolic, after all I remember the domain name to access the network application, but I'm a programmer and I only do it for a limited number of applications. Otherwise I use one of the applications I remember to find the ones that are not among my most frequently used. In this way it calls into question the whole killer app thing of having a domain name, because in most cases you need something sitting between you and the domain name that gives you the right domain name for what you want loaded.

> that feature can never be topped regardless of the tech's quality or the marketing budget.

Never? That's a silly thing to say in the computer industry. I'm going to guess that we'll have an alternative to the web sometime in the next 20 years.

"Never" should really be "not in the foreseeable future", but certainly not within two decades. The web is the apex of incumbent systems and there is just no clear path, desire, incentive or business need that would facilitate a transition to an alternative, especially as the web approaches full feature parity with "native" code. The only people that have irreconcilable problems with the web are a certain subset of programmer, but for most people an alternative is unnecessary and perhaps even the opposite of progress.

> The web is the apex of incumbent systems and there is just no clear path, desire, incentive or business need that would facilitate a transition to an alternative, especially as the web approaches full feature parity with "native" code.

I don't know about that. Considering the possibilities with AR/VR, quantum computing, machine learning, smart fabrics and environments, and the like and seems to me there could be an incentive for an alternative inside a 20 year timeframe. Will all that run over the web, or have a web interface? I tend to think at some point big technological changes will make an alternative appealing.

But maybe not and it will all be web assembly apps writing to a canvas container ;)

>possibilities with AR/VR,

The possibilities for multimedia and gaming are quite interesting, but there is no reason to suggest that this technology will have any impact on an any possible alternatives to the web.

>quantum computing

Quantum computing is in the "unforeseeable" category, we're not even entirely sure that quantum computing will ever be practical (as far as general purpose computing goes), certainly it has no implications with regard to an alternative to the web.

>machine learning

Same situation here. The machine learning discipline is expanding quickly and yielding very interesting developments, however, there's just no reason to suggest that machine learning will provide the impetus for a transition into a web alternative.

> smart fabrics and environments

Same here too.

All of these developments are orthogonal to the state of the web and none of them really provide any mechanism or incentive to create or move to an alternative.

I'm going to guess that you are correct, and that alternative will be called "world wide web" and run over HTTP(S). It will just be different somehow.

> "can it run on an iPhone" (which kills most new app platforms immediately).

That nails it.

Going off tangent here:

On a macro scale, the devices in our hands are executing output from another machine. This output is usually processed by a browser or a native app.

To make our lives easier, browsers need to be more like OSes, otherwise, we have to write code for each platform for executing the same thing - like the present native app scenario. (aware that we can use hybrid dev, but they aren't entirely satisfactory). WebAssembly holds some promise it seems. Or does it?

Browsers will become more powerful and perhaps would become the most important part of an OS. Maybe eventually, the borders between the browser and the OS will merge and the huge collection of devices and servers would look like a distributed OS of sort.

Another thing is the tooling for present web dev scene which needs to lighten. Setting up tooling takes more work than actual dev at times ;)

Yes. The web succeeded in the early days because it gave people a way to put their thoughts out in the world when it was previously impossible. No one cared that the design was awful, that you had to code html by hand, that the urls where very readable and followed strict conventions. A new web does not have to be an object of technical beauty. It has to enable some form of human desire that is not fullfiled by the current web. One thing that I've thought about frequently is how the web enables global communities but how little it does to enhance local communities (based on physical closeness).

Maybe the future history of the web will be Chinese made. Multiple independent app platform on Android there. Also if standardization is slow and mired by incumbent company interests maybe something capable of a unilateral forward thrust into a big Market will have success

I'd also love to see him come up with some sample code, assuming the platform he envisions, with the types of APIs that he thinks should exist. I think the juxtaposition will be a lot clearer that way...

Yep I agree with your last paragraph. Just look at how Commodore went down the drain despite having superior technology.

I didn't see any work besides writing? It seems like he's working on a financial company, not advancing the open web.

I didn't see any mention of a plan to make it happen. It seemed more like "It would be nice if..."

Writing, thinking, researching, some coding.

My company is developing Corda and we're putting some of these ideas into practice there, although Corda is not a web competitor. In particular around RPC and serialisation.

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