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Comment by inglor | Hacker News Reader

Andre, you're a swell developer and running into you in open source repos and here has always been educational. I would love reading what you write a lot more if there was less click-bait and sensationalism.

This problem (the fact Google has a large majority in web browser and mobile device sales) is very concerning to me - the data is interesting and the points are relevant but I have a very hard time reading past titles like "the web is dying". I hope you read this with the intended respectful tone I wrote it in.

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When a thread becomes as much about a title as this one has, it's in HN's interest to have a different title on the front page, so we've changed this one.

Suggestions for a better replacement are welcome. 'Better' in this case means accurate, neutral, and using representative language from the article itself.

I'd rather the original title of the article if it's not too long or is deceiving the HNers. The original title is kind-of clickbaity but not really deceitful at all, so I suggest we keep the original title here.

The site rule is "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I have to disagree with this sentiment. He's describing a future in which the web no longer exists and only google, facebook and amazon's network exists. This is a very literal interpretation of the term "web is dying", the web will no longer exist. If he's providing evidence that this is the case then the title is descriptive. That aside, we don't even really need additional evidence that this is the case, these companies have made it clear their intention to pull the ladder up behind themselves time and again, just look at Google's reversal of being opposed to net neutrality in general, this can only result in the consolidation of power in their hands. At most you can accuse this title of being apocalyptic.

I.e. If people generally knew that Bono was dying already through other sources, a headline of "Bono is dying" would be shocking by the nature of what it is, but ultimately not clickbait.

This is not the first time consolidation of power has happened. Intel and Microsoft pulled all kinds of stunts to hold on to their monopolies. Are you worried about your chip and OS today?

I don't see Google(Search/Chrome/Android) and Amazon in the same sphere as Facebook/YouTube/Twitter in doing damage to the web.

I am much more worried about the societal chaos that Facebook/YouTube/Twitter are producing across the globe than any net neutrality issues.

> Are you worried about your chip and OS today?

YES! with my cpu running 2 kernel rings deep that the OS is not aware of. What is even worse if you try to disable it and the cpu kernel detects it will disable the hardware. Makes me truly worried where person computing is headed, aka I'm not in control of my device I paid for!

> Are you worried about your chip and OS today?

As a matter of fact, I am. And we have palpable consequences today, with that trusted computing débâcle (backdoors on CPUs that threaten to turn into full blown vulnerabilities…)

As a GNU/Linux user, I'm not too worried about my own OS. But I am scared that Apple managed to locked down its systems in a way that would have Microsoft sharded into oblivion. Numeric prisons are now not only acceptable but downright fashionable.

There was a good reason to be worried about Intel and Microsoft back in the day, and it's good we didn't let them get to full monopolies. Remember the Microsoft anti-trust trial?

The anti-trust trail didn’t result in much in the end. The market forces that clipped Microsoft’s wings were a magnitude larger, and would have been the same regardless. The DOJ was nothing compared to Ballmer laughing the iPhone off, or Linux dominating embedded devices and internet servers despite all the FUD.

I don't think the picture is quite that clear. There's a fair bit of anecdotal evidence that Microsoft was genuinely gunshy about wielding its monopoly power thanks to the trial.

Yes, Google and Apple found ways to break that monopoly, but a chastened Microsoft wasn't prepared to wage the type of scorched earth campaigns that it became famous for.

Are you worried about your chip and OS today?

Yes, Intel is still pulling these stunts and there are not many viable alternatives.

> This is a very literal interpretation of the term "web is dying"

Does smtp 'exist' now that most of it is over google, yahoo, and microsoft? Or linux considering RedHat/Cent/Fedora and Ubuntu/Debian are responsible for most installs.

I think its rational to accept that big players will, naturally, take big slices and that doesn't mean you're kinda sorta making a 'x is dying' argument. If anything, the natural distribution of the network effect probably falls onto a ~80/20 relationship where the bigger players take 80% of the market and many smaller players take the remaining 20%.

The web will be no exception to this. It just took a little while to get here. Its already happened to ISPs, remember early on when every city had multiple competing DSL resellers? PC operating systems (is anyone even pretending that Windows and MacOS as a distant second will ever have real competitors anymore?), PC GPUs (two real players now), 3D game engines (2 non-in house engines dominate), does Linkedin even have competition now?, etc, etc.

Worse, the network effect for Facebook is tremendous. Its power isn't that its a great service, its mediocre at best, but its a such a pita to get everyone you know to switch over that it'll probably never happen.

Back in the old days, bloggers had to get their own domain names, find their own hosting, write their own html/css/whatever, manage their own CMS (and install it on a linux system hosted somewhere and via the commandline/ftp/whatever), etc. This meant a lot of the early web was techie-oriented types who could perform these tasks (endless sites and discussions on who is the best Star Trek captain or which was the worst Star Wars movie, not many on fighting childhood malnutrition in the 3rd world). I'm not sure how this was 'better' than what we have today.

Democratization will often lead to a network effect which will lead to consolidation. Philosophically, to some, a perfectly distributed system is 'better' but to pull that off you'd probably need communist-level social and economic controls and if you had that you most likely would never had the internet or the web.

Just the fact that we use aggregators like HN or Reddit means that we accept a whole lot of consolidation without question and often see it as better than the old system of managing a dozen different topics spread on on various specialist sites and usenet. Or are we giving special exceptions to techie approved sites like Reddit (the 4th most popular site in the USA), which is missing from the article?

The web thrives on competition, but the author is suggesting that the major tech companies just stopped directly competing with each other and focused on their little bubbles. That shift, as posited by the author, happened around 2014 based on certain strategic decisions by FB and Google. And as a result, the competitive forces tapered off

This is the most out of context invocation of the 80/20 rule i've ever seen.

The 80/20 rule comes from the pareto distribution, which applies to things like hard drive error rates and the sizes of meteorites: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_distribution#Applicatio...

> does Linkedin even have competition now?

Glassdoor shows job opportunities side-by-side with company reputations. I'm certainly more inclined to use that over LinkedIn!

This is one of the caveats of debating in the HN echo-chamber... People start making bizarre analogies using 'parallels' from tech (in this case, SMTP), for the sake of it, hoping that the blatant inaccuracies of their comparison will fly over the heads of the audience, in favour of their esoteric appeal.

Take some figures plucked from thin-air and you have a recipe for retort success!

Thankfully, it's only a caveat that happens 20/80 of the time, sort of like how TCP does such a good job of filtering out the riff-raff. /s

"People start making bizarre analogies using 'parallels' from tech (in this case, SMTP), for the sake of it, hoping that the blatant inaccuracies of their comparison will fly over the heads of the audience, in favour of their esoteric appeal."

I thought the analogy to SMTP was a very good one and, considering the audience, was not esoteric at all.

My mail usage is far more agnostic to its protocol than my web usage is. Google may hold far too much data to generate a profile of me and relevant ads, but using GMail doesn't fundamentally affect the content of my email or inbox, or even how I use email. But if I switch tabs to YouTube (i.e. The Web), targeted content and traffic funnelling is immediately apparent.

You proved my point about esoteric appeal because my argument was opposite to how you viewed it: that us techies get blinded by irrelevant concepts because we can relate to them, that are otherwise esoteric outside the HN bubble.

Respectfully disagree. The end of the post is absolutely true and supports the title:

> On the Trinet, if you are permanently banned from GOOG or FB, you would have no alternative. You could even be restricted from creating a new account. As private businesses, GOOG, FB, and AMZN don’t need to guarantee you access to their networks. You do not have a legal right to an account in their servers, and as societies we aren’t demanding for these rights as vehemently as we could, to counter the strategies that tech giants are putting forward.

This specific part (that dominant companies can ban individuals with no recourse) shouldn't be tolerated.

I'm sorry, but I can't get behind the idea that you're entitled to an account on a private company's site. Are they obligated to protect accounts for shitposters, to the detriment of everyone else's experience?

Nobody is stopping you from starting your own blog and posting your views there. But, just like no one is obligated to seek out a flyer you post on a telephone pole, no one is obligated to seek out your writings.

Hi, thanks for appreciating some of my work.

Click bait titles have a bad reputation because they either lie or don't go in-depth into the topic. That's not the case here. I wrote with depth and research, and the body of the article is truthful to the title. I believe the title is, although sensationally shocking, true.

And yet, reading the title I was waiting for the "reason number 7 gonna blow your mind !"

And I hope it won't stop others who are allergic to clickbait titles to read your article, because it is very well documented and very insightful.

I am, too, afraid of the end of net neutrality and the future you describe is really scary.

I'll be honest, I took pause at the title. I only ventured into the comments because I was baffled how such a click-bait title was in the #1 spot.

It's _not_ click bait if it describes exactly what the thesis of the article is.

It's a simple explicative sentence.

Maybe you folks have just been conditioned enough by click-bait now that you can't distinguish the difference, and I don't mean to denigrate you by stating that.

I agree with what you're saying, but you can't know if the title is sensationalist until you actually read the article. Which is the point of click-bait titles.

Not remotely true, the web isn't dying, it's changing, but that's less clickbaity :) For such a hard claim you have to specify what do you exactly mean by "the web".

"The original vision for the Web according to its creator, Tim Berners-Lee, was a space with multilateral publishing and consumption of information. It was a peer-to-peer vision with no dependency on a single party."

This web is still alive and well, nobody stops you from grabbing a domain name and launch anything you wish. Tim was a bit naive that he assumed profit seeking won't mess with his creation.

The underlying protocol is still the same as it was 20 years ago. With 3,885,567,619 internet users this dying platform is the best thing in computing we had so far. Of course it's changing, but the web is much larger than GOOG, FB, AMZN.

Yo are ignoring the long tail and that tail is very long.

> nobody stops you from grabbing a domain name and launch anything you wish.

plenty does!

if you don't rank on google for whatever it is you're launching/publishing -- you don't exist.

you could try sharing it with friends on facebook and hope for a social network effect, but just ask the journalism industry how organic reach is working out as of late

selling something online? your only hope is FBA. where the A stands for Amazon. I guess etsy might work too. so, okay...duopoloy!

and even if you don't care to be found, and aren't selling anything, it is TRIVIAL to take down any kind of not-expensive hosting (your raspi @ home, your DigitalOcean VPS, or colocated server) with a DDoS attack.

AWS, GCP, & Azure can weather most attacks, but it will cost you. And if it's large enough they'll shut you off anyway. and then send you a bill you can't pay.

so no, there is plenty stopping you from launching anything on the internet. the cost structures (be it time or money or both) greatly favor the massively entrenched incumbents. and not a little bit of favor. they favor them....bigly.

You're confusing "making money" with launching/publishing. I can publish anything I want to the web in under a minute. Who's stopping me? Getting people to read what you've published has been difficult since the early days of the web, but publishing is trivial.

And, yet, network effects being what they are, how does anyone with an independent thought rise to visibility, outside of someone else's platform, when the "web" completely dominated by 100 web properties?

I don't know, make it be the individuals problem to spread their individual and original thought. That might sound harsh so I clarify a bit.

If I have a big, world changing individual thought and I create something good, then it will probably be picked up by the endless blogs, magazines, journals. I can place it on GitHub or buy a $10 server and I'm good to go, in that case I manage almost everything about it. It's not the web's jobs to filter out the gems.

If my individual thought is not much better than "Mondays suck" then Twitter is probably a good place for it to be forgotten.

That's a different question and has nothing to do with the web dying, which it isn't. The freedom to put your voice out there has never included the right to be heard or popular. You have more ability today to be heard than ever before, but you're one of billions, it's not supposed to be easy.

if fb and google don't like you, you can't put your voice out there if they control everything

They don't control everything, they never have, and they never will.

"This web is still alive and well, nobody stops you from grabbing a domain name and launch anything you wish"

True, you'll be able to do that, but if most of people will have "free internet package" that will allow them to access GOOG, FB, AMZN only, having the domain will not make much sense.

Exactly. This reminds me of the 1990's AOL's walled garden model that ultimately lost to the open Web.

I wonder though, if we really descent into a multi-tier internet and if a version of a "legacy" internet survives in some form (even though not accessible by main stream FB/GOOG users), if that legacy part of the internet will become cleaner and once gain open to grass roots innovation?

Today most people have a paid access to the internet. How many people do you think will downgrade to free and get rid of 99% of the available websites? For newcomers it can be problematic, but I don't see it happening on a mass scale.

> the body of the article is truthful to the title

With all due respect, I don't see how the article backs up this utterly exaggerated claim.

Unless, of course, you're using the word "dying" in the sense that everybody and everything will die at some time. But I don't think this is meant here, as that wouldn't be "shocking" at all.

huh? He's describing a future where the web no longer exists. Only Google, facebook and amazon's network exists. This seems pretty representative of the term dying.

But then he would need to describe the context in which the word "Web" is used in the title also.

Not really. You wouldn't call Prodigy Online or AOL or the other walled networks 'the Web.'

Your argument is that the web is now mainly controlled by two companies, not “dead”.

The technology is still there but the diverse hosting options and the creativity that many of us associated with it (what could be called “the spirit of the original web”) could be in peril.

I don’t think that you are arguing that Google and Facebook are fighting HTTP/HTML - although they are offering alternatives that they present as technologically preferable.

Agree - Staltz seems to assume that nobody will disrupt GOOG-FB-AMZN. It does feel like it's getting harder to disrupt over time, because the incumbents are ever more powerful. But technology's lever also becomes more powerful over time.

Companies' have achilles heels. They are built into the way they think in the era when it was started, when it was agile and fit in the mind of one person, before it got big and cumbersome, impossible to steer, profit-magnetized and impossible to even think longer term than a quarter. This business cycle is inherent to our laws and culture, it happens to all companies eventually.

Startups 20 years from now will be built by today's toddlers who pinch-zoom magazines and "Alexa, play Spice Girls" an empty room. The incumbent generation can't imagine what the next generation will bring, almost definitionally. But they will have disruptive ideas too. They will probably look stupid to us old people and we won't see it coming until it's too late.

Open-data-web is a good today-generation example. There are chickens and eggs to be solved, maybe the economics are impossible. Or maybe just nobody figured out the path yet. There were a hundred crypto currencies before bitcoin that went nowhere. But if someone figures out a strategic path that gets there, we know that person won't be Facebook, because open data will wreck Facebook's core business.

The key concern here is the collusion from ISPs. If they were to truly sell prioritized traffic to GOOG-FB-AMZN at a hefty discount, then it stands to reason most businesses will stop wasting their time trying to build things that don't leverage those avenues. Even as it stands today, how many "SEO gurus" are optimizing for Bing? If you want to be seen, you optimize for Google. So while I agree that all companies have an Achilles heel, this one is fairly sturdy for the foreseeable future.

Good point. I generally share the same view. On one hand, there were so many corporate consolidations in the past few years. On the other hand, people's discontent probably also led to the rise of Blockchain tech.

Are you saying sensationalism is killing modern journalism?

Why do you have a hard time reading that? It's generally better to solve problems before they happen. An dead Web isn't coming back, and we are trending very much in that direction.

this is the very essence of middlebrow dismissal

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