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Comment by bunderbunder | Hacker News Reader

Moving to another protocol, like Gopher, seems like an economic solution to me.

A parallel protocol and hypermedia format that's restricted enough to prevent tracking isn't going to attract everyone. It's going to attract the subset of users who care enough about stuff privacy to give up "rich Web" features like single page applications and animated HTML canvas elements in return.

That's not a group that's likely to start immediately demanding to to build in the features needed to create infiniscrolling Pinterest feeds. And it's also going to be a much restricted group, meaning businesses won't stand to profit much by pushing for it. So there might not be any economic incentive to do it.

At least, that's how it might be at first. If it remains a nice place to be for 5 years, I'd call it a decent run. 10, and I'd be ecstatic.

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Why not just put up a web page or forum without the features you hate? Build a search engine for non-JS pages or whatever Why do you need gopher?

You need the user agent and transpory layer to enforce privacy protections.

The modern web cannot do that.

(I’m not convinced gopher can either — I think NNTP was actually better at that — but like the thought experiment.)

Usenet is still going strong! It's weird the looks I get from "techies" when I tell them I still use irc, usenet, and rss... and it's shameful.

Ironically, on HN you got the local equivalent in the form of downvotes.

The downvote/bury mechanic makes HN just as poor as SN or Reddit. If one must implement downvotes, at least provide tally, such as on Ars, rather than the default silly text fading (which one should disable).

Someone already did:

http://wiby.me

Precisely. This is leveraging the “network effect” that has thus far mostly been a tool of corporate profit for mass benefit.

I yearn for a future where knowledge is distributed in a practical, organizied way such as via Gopher or similar, along with tapping the full potential of email as a one-to-many, many-to-many, and many-to-one communications medium where data is distributed and address ownership is maintained.

>I yearn for a future where knowledge is distributed in a practical, organizied way such as via Gopher or similar, along with tapping the full potential of email as a one-to-many, many-to-many, and many-to-one communications medium where data is distributed and address ownership is maintained.

We already have that, it's called the World Wide Web.

You seem to be under the impression that the popularity of the web is due to centralization by and commercialization by corporate interests, but that isn't the case. It's still entirely feasible to distribute knowledge in a "practical, organized way" using HTML and HTTP, and people do use it for things besides the three social media sites people now mistakenly believe comprise the entire web.

I started using the Internet at a time when HTTP traffic already exceeded Gopher+FTP traffic, but not by orders of magnitude.

I'd start nearly any session with Gopher, and it would end in either some web pages or an FTP server. Gopher was the go-to because it was organised unlike the rat's nest of links you had to deal with on the web.

This wasn't really fixed until the advent of big centralised search engines (and even then, the early ones weren't worth damn).

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