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Comment by scrooched_moose | Hacker News Reader

This has been on my mind a lot recently and I really think the biggest failure was not making the internet easy to use. Facebook et al won by finally organizing all of the people/companies/organizations you care about in one place, and being a 0-friction publishing platform to interact with them.

Pre-Facebook "Grandma" either had to remember 1stbaptistchurchSTL.org, grandsontimmysawesomeblog.net, granddaughtersara42931.wordpress.com, nissanusa.com and countless other baffling URLs; or go to Google, which as good as it was for a while was a crazy bandaid. Now all of these things can be in one place and she can talk to them effortlessly.

The closest that "the community" ever came to solving this problem was what, bookmarks and guestbooks?

The privacy implications are unfortunate side effects, but have nothing to do with out these companies got so dominant to begin with. They solved real usability issues for the majority of users.

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Your comment takes me back to AOL days of “keywords”. Then I realized that’s essentially what Facebook (and co) is: modern-day AOL.

The similarities are striking:

- Keywords instead of URLs? Check.

- Chat within the app? Check.

- Standalone chat client? Check.

- Marketplace? Check.

- Advertising? Check.

- News aggregation? Check.

The only real difference is Facebook doesn’t offer an internet service, and doesn’t charge a subscription fee (and ok, doesn’t send out floppy disks or CDs).

If it wasn’t so sad it would be comical how much engineering effort is wasted on reinventing the same things.

> The only real difference is Facebook doesn’t offer an internet service, and doesn’t charge a subscription fee

They've partnered with Telco's. At least in my country, you get Facebook for free in "Free Mode". Then there's various promos to get you a few megabytes for Facebook.

The only real difference is Facebook doesn’t offer an internet service

Well... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet.org

Grandmothers used to love email. Mine had some sort of 'email appliance' for years that was basically a keyboard with a phone modem and an alphanumeric LCD screen. Basically a 90s era terminal, dedicated to email.

It was dead simple, much easier for the proverbial grandmother than even a modern iPad with the Facebook app.

> Grandmothers used to love email.

Sure, until grandmother's email started to fill up with spam, making it unusable. I think that is a big part of what killed the kind of dirt simple email you describe. Now you can still use email, but it's not dirt simple any more.

The other thing that I think stopped grandmother from using email is that all of her grandkids grew up on social media, and if they even know what email is, they think it's too uncool to use. So grandmother has no choice if she wants to communicate with them.

Hitting the "Junk" button in Thunderbird is not so hard and the filter catches most spam after a while.

Pocketmail[1]. There was a fairly brief period of time when those were great for emailing out updates from backpacking adventures, perhaps to an early blog. Of course, their utility relied on available (pay)phones, and they were only good for text.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PocketMail

There's a great review from 2000 linked from that page:

http://www.dansdata.com/pocketmail.htm

> This has been on my mind a lot recently and I really think the biggest failure was not making the internet easy to use.

Why do people forget RSS?

RSS was awesome. RSS was "feeds" but in your own hands and under your own control.

Of course, it was doomed since it couldn't be monetized.

Exception that proves the rule: daringfireball. Puts a weekly ad in the RSS that users don't care enough to filter. Collected an audience that advertisers will pay to reach without microteageting.

RSS is still awesome. I use it constantly.

Maybe ya. Though does grandpa (he's no better than her) go to Facebook to check in on Nissan or does he go to check in on her grandkids? Feels like the latter to me and Nissan is only on Facebook to advertise to her.

Facebook did / does well because its an easy way to spread your photos / updates to a (mostly) private set of vetted people. Everything else came for them to monetize people once they were there, I don't think many are super passionate about the Nissan facebook page, not even Nissan.

I do notice small businesses using Facebook in lieu of a website - I find myself having to check Facebook to find today's specials menu at the two cafes I normally buy lunch from...

I don't have facebook and have no plans of ever making an account. These Facebook only companies are nearly impossible for me to interact with, so I just don't. Facebook used to let you look at stuff without an account but they eventually reached the tipping point and now a lot of stuff is inaccessible to me.

Not sure who is on the wrong side of this garden's wall...

Its the same for clubs who may have a website but for event details you have to check Facebook.

Agreed, I keep reptiles and there are few active reptile communities outside of Facebook.

Speaking of "garden's wall", even the bigger problem is when our local communities organize some event where everyone is welcome (everyone who's used by fb that is) and this digital fence is becoming taller each year. RMS calls such people "useds", I just simply call them neighbors.

My local consulate (I’m an immigrant/ex-pat/whatever) uses FB for all announcements and Messenger is _the_ communication channel. If you need to talk to them, you need to either go personally (3h drive for me each way plus waiting lines) or you send them a message on FB. They usually reply within 5-10 minutes.

Many small businesses also seem to depend on FB for communication.

I can avoid the latter, but my consulate is why I can’t delete my FB account.

I always tell those businesses that if they're only on Facebook, then they have no internet presence that I can use.

As much as I want to, I also like not being a jerk to my friendly local cafe owner who's already busy enough without having to figure out how to do a web presence.

I don't think it's being a jerk to inform a business of what works for me in terms of customer relations. That can be done in a jerky way, of course, but it can also be done in a polite, reasonable way.

I don't demand anything of a business, but if they direct me to a Facebook page, I see nothing wrong with letting them know that's not something I can use.

The problem is about money, not standards. There's no money in the free and open web. Capitalism is fundamentally antagonistic to the web as a platform. It wants to build barriers and walled gardens and spam the system with advertisements, because without all this junk, there's no money to be made. We need to realize this fundamental antagonism and look into nationalizing or strongly publicly funding / regulating the web in a manner consistent with public good, like we do with other utilities (rail, electricity, water, etc)

This may seem radical, but this antagonism will only get stronger over time. The capitalists who run these businesses are certainly aware of and worried about this future, & at least one presidential candidate (Elizabeth Warren) is thinking in these terms.

Capitalism involves private ownership, voluntary exchange, and competitive markets. These are all things "the capitalists who run these businesses" are trying to undermine. Netflix/Spotify are built on a stream-don't-own model. Apple wants to lock you into their walled garden where you have no choice but their products. And all the FAANG use regulation and corporate buyouts to keep the competition at bay.

If capitalism is really what you're after, the answer to that is an open, free, and private web where people own their hardware/software/information, have total freedom of choice thanks to free and open standards, and can compete on the strength of their service without fear of antagonistic regulation or buyouts.

The key problem with regulation is that all the large tech companies want the same kind of regulation which helps secure their position against competition and they're all well off enough to afford sizable lobbying budgets. So any regulation will have their say on it, while having little voice in that discussion for the public good (we have, what, the EFF and the CDT?).

If you think that's paranoid, simply review the history of the railroad barons.

Capitalism itself is actually supportive of the web as a platform and it's just that the aspiring "internet barons" are the antagonists. If we let them define more regulation of the internet, we're only securing their position for them and reducing the likelihood of real competition.

Capitalism as a theoretical, static picture of a well-functioning economy is somewhat supportive of the open web. Capitalism as seen from the inside, accounting for its dynamics, is absolutely against open web. It's also against free markets (you can make more money by making markets less free), against competition (the end-goal of every company is monopoly) and against voluntary exchange (the less voluntary the exchange, the more likely it is to happen and be profitable). The tension between what we need for a well-functioning economy vs. what economical actors want is the very source of growth and innovation in the market economy. Left ungoverned, unbalanced, the desires of market players are self-destructive.

Capitalism would be great, if it wasn't for those damned capitalists.

It's exactly like that.

To overextend the usual analogy of capitalism as the ICE of innovation - gasoline itself is toxic, volatile and dangerous. By its nature, it just wants to violently oxidize. Its true value for humanity is only realized under extremely controlled conditions - those of an ICE, where correct amounts are injected and burned off with appropriate cadence. Deviance from those conditions causes issues ranging from annoyance to fiery death.

Capitalists are like gasoline.

I like this summary, as it captures how much it's an overloaded term that lumps all sorts of things good and bad together.

The point I was trying to make is that regulation is being posed as the antidote to the self-destructive desires when it will merely legitimize them because it's those desires that will influence how the regulation turns out.

If we had a government free of corporate lobbyist influence, I would probably agree that legislation would be a good approach. As it stands, I'm not currently convinced.

> If you think that's paranoid, simply review the history of the railroad barons

The end of which was an extremely regulated market with partial nationalization -- exactly my point

On that we agree. Where we seem to disagree is whether that would be a good thing when applied to the tech industry.

Wasn’t this AOL?

AOL tried to wall people in too much and lost? I remember in 1998 connecting to a friend's AOL internet through some proprietary software that had built in chat and a browser. This was on a Windows 95 machine. It didn't use the standard networking stuff on windows, so there was no way to find out my IP address, no way to play Quake II games online, no way to use any internet software that wasn't part of the AOL package really, which made me start looking for an alternative immediately.

...Yes, It did. The dialer was proprietary but it fully initialized the network stack on the OS. You just had to leave it open like you would any PPP or SLIP client. IP? winipcfg

Maybe your friend had some ancient Win95 build without a full TCP stack installed by default?

It was at one time, but their model relied on being a dialup ISP as well as an online platform. That model collapsed when a different set of big corporate ISPs captured the broadband market.

"The community" has had such a hostility to a broadly-accepted user experience ever since there was a web to browse. (I used to be one of them, back when <center> was a netscape-only tag. Follow the standards! Write for content! People don't need that visual jazz!)

There's still a non-negligible contingent on here that insists that the web should be browseable without javascript; that ship sailed well over a decade ago. The users decided, rich interfaces are the way to go.

We did fail the world, and this is what we get.

The users decided on rich interfaces? Or the developers did?

I'm honestly not sure which. My favorite local fish place has a webpage with a "menu" link at the top that goes to .. a long scrolly list WITH PRICES. HOLY SHIT.

Why can't more places be like that?

Your local place probably doesn't have enough competition yet to be forced to become customer-hostile.

As for who decides, it's always the developers. Mainstream users have no context for tech, they accept what they're given, thinking this is how things are supposed to be.

> doesn't have enough competition yet to be forced to become customer-hostile.

This is an amazing statement of the post-consumerist economy. It sounds contradictory but it feels like it has to be true.

I guess it might sound contradictory if one assumes that more competition is always better for the consumer, without considering how competition works. What competitive pressure does is continuously minimize everyone's margins, forcing companies to figure out new strategies of making money in order to survive. Being the best vendor from customer's point of view is one approach, but not the only one - and not necessarily most efficient. Other effective approaches include: reducing quality, marketing, more marketing, dishonest marketing, dark UX patterns, planned obsolescence, vendor lock-in, increasingly complicated business modes. Now the kicker is, once somebody uses one of those "dark" approaches to get ahead, everyone else is forced to follow suit or risk getting outcompeted.

The users did, proxied through PMs and designers. It's a classic arms race; can't be the worst looking site/app on the block.

PMs and designers are famously terrible proxies for actual users.

I don't think the users decided on anything. Browsers are just prone to insane feature creep as a result of the game theory involved.

If you are a browser vendor, you don't want your browser to not support a feature that other browsers don't. Otherwise, users go to a website, and it doesn't work properly on your browser, and they blame you. If this website is something important like a bank, a news website they like, anything popular that their friends use, they might well ditch your browser. As a result, to some extent, browsers have to support all the features that other browsers do.

On top of this, browser vendors want to remain "innovative", show leadership, so they keep pushing for new features that other browsers don't have. I mean, imagine working on some browser team, having the opportunity to push your web project and having it become a standard web feature, your legacy would live on forever, the hubris of it is just irresistible. Fuck taking the time to properly design this API, think of possible use cases, and design something solid and extensible, let's push WebVirtualReality2000API out before other browsers do, otherwise they will push theirs first and start gaining traction!

So, back to JavaScript. Brendan Eich worked at Netscape and implemented the original version of it in two weeks and it was rushed into production. People started to make use of it. Eventually other browsers had no choice but to support it, otherwise they were faced with lots of webpages that were broken without it, webpages that only work in Netscape. Microsoft definitely couldn't let that happen.

> Eventually other browsers had no choice but to support it, otherwise they were faced with lots of webpages that were broken without it, webpages that only work in Netscape. Microsoft definitely couldn't let that happen.

And then, some time later, when they had this one opportunity to rip JavaScript out and replace it with something better (and, once again, Scheme was a candidate), competition with Microsoft didn't let that happen.

There was no such later opportunity.

Developers didn't, Product Managers did.

I’d love to see some new standards, something like an iframe you can control from the parent page with minimal js, decent date/time pickers built in, autocomplete, etc

As it is people ask for this stuff and the only recourse is to bundle tons of js into your page.

> There's still a non-negligible contingent on here that insists that the web should be browseable without javascript; that ship sailed well over a decade ago. The users decided, rich interfaces are the way to go.

Users decided no such thing. Users spoke QUITE loudly that even 100ms of delay results in lost attention and sales.

The FAANGs didn't give a shit--Javascript was a vector for advertising monetization. Anything which got in the way of their selling you advertising or selling your information got trampled mercilessly. No company cares about your user experience--delivering an ad takes priority.

I don't mind Javascript for rich interfaces. I do mind it if it's required to load a page that is just text and images.

As others said, users didn't decide shit. There's no meaningful way for occasional user feedback to reach the webdev community at large, not in a way that outshouts the desire to abuse users with flashy UIs and hostile monetization schemes. And most users don't give useful feedback anyway, because regular people have no context around technology. No mental model to tell them "this website is shit because A, B, C". They can only accept what's served on the market, with all frustrations that come from it, as the way the world is supposed to look ("after all, so many smart people are working on this"). They can't even "vote with their wallet", as almost all websites are non-substitutable, if you account for vendor lock-in and geographical limitations.

> I really think the biggest failure was not making the internet easy to use

Browsers (uniquely mozilla) can have a major role here. If they would provide a universal way to share identity, or even a fricionless cryptographic sign-in, and an instant payment solution that would already open up new avenues to compete with walled gardens. However they don't seem too eager to do such things, perhaps aided by the funding they get from said walled gardens.

>If they would provide a universal way to share identity, or even a fricionless cryptographic sign-in

Can you elaborate?

They tried to do that with Persona, but imho they did not push enough for its adoption. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Persona

> baffling URLs

Yikes. No more difficult to understand than a phone number, and people managed to memorize the most important ones and keep an archive of the rest. I'd argue domain names can be even easier to remember as they're just words, not just a string of numbers.

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