Tech giants have hijacked the web – Some innovators are developing new platforms
wsj.com
wsj.com
Also the article is only accessible through a subscription, so I couldn't finish it, which is ironic because this is exactly what's broken with today's web.
People (Ad people) simply noticed that the ads were a communication channel in and of themselves, and using the (for example) facebook tools to lazily target a particular demographic, they got huge numbers of eyeballs. Stir in some classic astroturfing and social-media influencers (Derisively known as shills), likes, comments and you've got a quick minilove and truth. Except even better because anyone with cash who resides in any country on earth can buy in.
The author was pointing out the now obvious fact that "tech companies" look like an information service for connecting friends but are actually ad generating theme parks. Since the value of the data your users bring is only very useful if you have a lot of it, the organizations who have replaced both Nielsen and News Papers have simply followed the incentives and coalesced into larger and larger gravitational bodies. By having all the content, users, tracking pixels, sales data, and ads, it increases the value of all of those things if you can meaningfuly connect them together by engaging with users through next-generation enterprise-grade disruptive orthogonal innovation at-scale.
They're saying a centralized web is more valuable to its corporate sponsors, because when there are fewer places you need to advertise or track/monetize user data in this world, the corporate value compounds even more. Likewise abusing these themeparks will be even more effective, because whatever mechanism sells soda pop will likely also sell antidepresants and anything else.
Walking into the stables might get you a big sack of oats, but you wont find anything other than what they hand over the gate.
I strongly disagree. the author has noted the connection between popularity and centralization and points out its impressive drawbacks. The pluses are disruptive corporate profitability, the minus makes Church and Pike look like Tuskegee. Or maybe the other way around.
Accepting this flow of information as true does indeed seem like idiocy
Two people who live near each other, work together, shop at the same stores, send their children to the same school, et al, will have completely different experiences when they go on the internet. And each person's experience is hidden from the other, so there is no way for one person to get a glimpse of how the other is seeing their news. That means if those two people were to talk to each other about what they've seen on the internet, they will be confounded by the lack of common experience. What shared experiences exist are likely banal topics such as sports or movies. Each person will be convinced that their knowledge is the dominant viewpoint because it's the majority of the things they find on the web. It's the other guy who is missing the big picture.
Instead of me choosing the newspaper. It's the newspaper choosing me.
Imagine there being competing interpretations of God? How could we form a community? Wont people have completely different experiences in life if they don't have the same experience with God? If we let someone get exposed to the "bad media" before they are exposed to the "good media" how will they ever know what the "good media" is? Can someone please think of the children?
It turns out not a lot of people are actually in favor of freedom when push comes to shove.
[1] There's long been a place in political philosophy for acknowledging that it's possible for the masses to have too much direct power
If you're talking about a central authority choosing what information people get to see, wouldn't that make Facebook and their algorithm the Church in this situation?
Anecdotally it feels that way in modern society.
Ask a random person if they believe Fox news.
This is a much harder task in a scenario of multiple interconnected systems of varied design. They represent parallel solutions to the same problem; implementation and values.
Compare to the necessity of genetic variation in agriculture, a single fungus or virus can now do more damage due to uniformity from optimization. Eventually we will (through trial and error?) probably figure out why nature is organized the way it is.
Do you work for free?
Do you have proof of a better business model?
I personally find the subscription model to be broken, I can't economically subscribe to the wsj, the nytimes, washingtonpost, etc. I'll also probably only read one article of each per month on average so it's not even interesting to me as a deal.
It will be interesting to see the evolution of movies and tv shows streaming now with Apple, netflix, amazon, disney all offering a subscription service with exclusive content. My guess is that pirating is coming back.
But having to subscribe to the whole newspaper to read text that is accessible for free if coming from a different referrer - for example Google - is something that sound broken to me.
Aside from OP assumptions - IMHO, if online news companies were happy with ad model, which was barely one cent per view - why not try a model sort of equivalent.[0]
I might be a minority, but I have an Apple News+ subscription[1]. If Apple created a browser extension that allowed me to browse the same content they let me in the News app, I would be pretty happy with that. And I'd bet I wouldn't be the only one.
[0]: Please spare responding with examples of "X Micro-payment" company that failed. This works best with agreements between major players. Not, "here's the Github, add it to your site" (not that I disagree with that model entirely)
[1]: I subscribed to News+ mostly for the tech and art magazines. It's barely usable at best unless - and probably even if - you are using a Magic Trackpad or an iPad. No two page full screen scrolling, and the weirdest, most unintuitive, slowest page navigation UX I have ever eXperienced for any reader. If you aren't using a touch mouse, horizontal navigation is a mini-game.
One of my favorite web sites is https://www.sheldonbrown.com/
It captures the promise of the web and accessible boutique information. I hope there is a rebirth of that early web movement for high quality highly curated content and knowledge. It starts with people though. The tech is just a tool.
The styling is, let’s say utilitarian. :)
Accessible in the dictionary sense of the word. Everyone can access the content. I am not sure about the handicap accessibility, however it would not surprise me if it was “accessible“ in that way given Sheldon’s attention to detail.
Though, the website seems to have been updated by other people since Sheldon died so I am not sure about its current “state”/quality.
Hopefully this clarifies my post.
While supported by pay product links, this site contains no ads other than all the copy. His content has no dumb pop ups or any janky junk, however it will still satisfy a startup chief-of-design's checkbox by loading extremely slowly (due to the many full size image examples on every page, in this case)
I love it when Noscript has little to do.
Don't get me wrong: I agree with the rhetoric against tech giants. But in real life, looking at measurable behavior, no one cares.
Whereas community on the Web used to be a favorite hobbyist PHPBB forum or mailing list - it’s now just a business. (Are you on Instagram or TikTok?)
I think you're mixing up the medium and the message here a bit. There's still plenty of "community" on third-party platforms. Just because the hobbyists are on Reddit now rather than someone's PHPBB instance running on a shared host doesn't mean the nature of the community being hosted has become fundamentally more commercial.
I can pull up some reasons people cite (ease of use, mobile apps, network effects) but at the same time, it feels like the sentiment of the masses acknowledges that these networks are shitty.
A bunch of shittier smaller isolated networks sounds exactly like what we transitioned away from, you yourself bringing up phpbb. Are you asking why people don't want to register for yet another silo'd community every time they want to talk about a different subject? Or why people may want to talk about their cycling hobby here and there but aren't so fanatical about it that they want to register for bikeforums.com nor mingle with the zealots that post there?
Just sounds like you're romanticizing something that wasn't all that great for most people. A lot of those types of forums still exist, btw. Probably even more than ever. I run one. My forum fills a niche that doesn't translate well to a place like reddit (longform collaborative writing). These communities are still here for the people looking for them, but it's no mystery to me why they have limited appeal.
Frankly, the modern web has enabled more people to participate that aren't as nerdy or fanatic about a niche nor willing to jump through hoops like joining a new forum with its own rules and nobody they know irl. Not everything is going to shit, there are simply always trade-offs.
I mean let's say we forked the Web before social media and simply had unified accounts for the variety of small sites we participated in. That seems like progress to me.
That wouldn't stop the network effect of social media, or centralization. Facebook, Twitter, etc. would still be built and people would still congregate to them, just using whatever their "unified accounts" were.
And remember, Google tried unifying accounts with G+, albeit just within their network. One day everyone on Youtube found their G+ comments merged with their Youtube comments because Google decided Youtube was just the video-sharing part of G+, and a lot of real names and data were exposed, because the two platforms were designed around completely different social paradigms. The obvious questions with something like a unified account is who controls them and defines the standard, and how do you make the rest of the web comply with using them?
All of the potential problems of centralization are still there, anywhere you have an attempt at a common standard.
I’m not trying to make a strict decentralization argument either - it’s just this draconian closedness to the larger network. (At least we’ve been able to hang on to email - imagine if we had separate email networks!) RSS and REST were great advances - and then our good open protocols stopped or something. Thank you for reading and responding, though.
But there are more, and more varied, communities on the Web now than there ever have been... the Web has grown, not shrunk, over the years.
Also, even on the "old" web, most people tended to gravitate towards a few sites.
>I'm trying to sort out how we went from a giant, flexible network to a bunch of shittier smaller, isolated networks.
I think for reasons similar to why a country can have a sprawling network of highways and roads connecting lots of cities and small towns, each with its own unique culture and history, but most people will still tend to gravitate towards a few large cities.
Social media sites did a better job of providing the features that people who weren't interested in web development actually wanted, and they're designed to host millions or billions of people, as opposed to smaller forums. In other words, the infrastructure was better.
Most people care more about convenience and functionality than they do the openness of a network, or even where it's hosted. Most people just want a curated network of friends to talk to, share things with and a place to publish content. And whatever negatives the silos might bring, they do make the "networking" part of a social network ridiculously easy. Add network effects to that and I think it's easy to see why they won.
>it feels like the sentiment of the masses acknowledges that these networks are shitty.
People leave these networks for other, similar networks that serve the same needs, or different niche needs, but those needs are still currently better served by centralized networks. They're not rejecting the model itself, just specific implementations.
I mean where do we go from here? I think if you view social media positively, then you just continue down the current road - another new app icon, another dot-com, another account, some new video gimmick to go along with it - but I wonder if it's possible to shift the perspective back to the Web as the network - and protocols as the connecting tissue. I wish I could easily follow what my sisters or parents or friends are doing - but they are all on separate shitty closed networks now.
For anything in that space to catch on though, it will have to provide a benefit to the webmater. Facebook provided visibility and extensive distribution, that's why so many media chose to move their content in there
I think if Facebook was just an account system or just a discovery mechanism, then it could be amazing. It just sucks that every network tries to do it all - and in a closed way.
I think a lot of the privacy and mob mentality issues stem from the fact that current systems don't support multiple disconnected, pseudonymous identities, which we had ~15 years ago. We should make it easy for laypeople to have that again.
I don't know if decentralizing the web is worth the effort since it's less efficient. We need however to steal back identity from those identity barons.
Email is already the decentralised identity protocol.
I think such a system is needed, we need to teach people that they are in control of their identity and that it is independent of facebook. Kind of like how mobile apps do it with numbers.
Oh I’m with you.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/09/23/opinion/data-...
people should get paid whenever their information is used
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/delete-your-account-a-co...
Also, I don't believe that getting something for free is "getting paid".
But I wanted to follow on here because I think the Web's dynamics around cost/money apply a lot of selective pressure once most things grow bigger than a hobby until they're big enough to leverage network effects.
Of course i'd prefer to have neither, but that's a different conversation...
Information is a public good, in an economic sense. It is not, generally, something people pay for, and historically hasn't been
The initial age of directly-paid content -- a small number of largely business-oriented, small-circulation newspapers, of which the WSJ is a descendant -- existed only from about the mid-18th through mid-19th centuries. By the 1850s, mass-circulation advertising-supported penny papers had become a norm, and a problem, as they were driven by oitrage, hoaxes, scandals, and direct manipulation, the clickbait of the day.
There's a wondrful contemporaneous account of this I cannot recommend highly enough, Hamilton Holt's Commercialism and Journalism, from a UC Berkeley lecture delivered in 1909:
https://archive.org/details/commercialismjou00holt/page/n11
During the 1930s the new medium of radio saw huge debates on public vs. private control of the airwaves. Notably, the US adopted a private model, the UK public, with the BBC, citing the dangers of private and foreign influence. Robert McChesney has covered this in Telecommunications, mass media and democracy: battle for control of US broadcasting, 1928-35:
https://www.worldcat.org/title/telecommunications-mass-media...
Nobel laureate economis Joseph Stiglitz:
"Thomas Jefferson, the third president of the United States, described knowledge in the following way: “he who receives an idea from me,receives instruc-tion himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me”. In doing so, Jefferson anticipated the modern concept of a public good. Today we recognize that knowledge is not only a public good but also a global or international public good.We have also come to recognize that knowledge is central to successful development. The international community,through institutions like the World Bank, has a collective responsibility for the creation and dissemination of one global public good—knowledge for development."
Joseph Stiglitz, "Knowledge as a Public Good"
http://s1.downloadmienphi.net/file/downloadfile6/151/1384343...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Stiglitz
Micropayments fail for the reasons highlighted b Nick Szabo and Andrew Odlyzko two decades ago:
http://szabo.best.vwh.net/micropayments.html
http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/case.against.micropaymen...
A media readers are required to pay for directly is one that's available to few (especially on a global scale), which is incentivised by that revenue stream, and which seeks other forms of revenue, notably advertising, with all the ills that entails, again covered 110 years ago in Hamilton Holt's little book, an summarised by publisher John Swinton, quoted anonymously in that work:
There is no such thing in America as an independent press. I am paid for keeping honest opinions out of the paper I am connected with. If I should allow honest opinions to be printed in one issue of my paper, before twenty-four hours my occupation, like Othello's, would be gone. The business of a New York journalist is to distort the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to vilify, to fawn at the foot of Mammon, and to sell his country and his race for his daily bread. We are the tools or vassals of the rich men behind the scenes. Our time, our talents, our lives, our possibilities, are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes.
Just by being public good does not make something necessarily free. For example street lightning.
If you seek information on "Does God exist?" you can get different answers depending whom you ask. Some of these sources made a lot of money in the process, because their information had certain non-zero value to those receiving it.
Also certain types of information cost resources to produce. I pay for Youtube because I want to support certain kind of information creation that I consume while not having my intelligence insulted with ads. The same for MIT Technology Review and Nautilus.
IMO there is nothing wrong in information costing money but the two problems I see are:
- Absolute pricing models create inequality. $1/week for WSJ is very different to someone making $5,000/week vs someone $50/week and they both 'deserve' to have access to it.
- The user experience of walled gardens is terrible, as you have to subscribe to each independently
A public good:
In economics, a public good is a good that is both non-excludable and non-rivalrous in that individuals cannot be excluded from use or could be enjoyed without paying for it, and where use by one individual does not reduce availability to others or the goods can be effectively consumed simultaneously by more than one person.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good
The problem then is that attempting to enforce per-use payments for access to public goods is tremendously inefficient.
You cannot effectively and with low consequences restrict access. The cost, particularly at a global level, will mean that there are many, often billions, who won't have access.
Your own ability to pay for content means that you've got an influence that those who don't lack. This ultimately gets us to a Patronage model of content. That's an option, but what you end up with is the patron's interests unduly represented. If you lived in 18th century Europe, your preference in large-ensemble music or visual artworks would best be strongly similar to that of the Catholic Church. I had the realisation, watching a computer animation festival in the late 1980s, that the role of the church in modern computer graphics was largely replaced by tobacco companies, who'd financed a large share of the entries.
There is also the contrast of information which the audience seeks vs. that which the creator or publisher wishes to have distributed. The former is copy or content, the latter is advertising and propaganda. They are not always clearly distinguished. And the economics of each are dramatically different.
The world I'd like to see is one in which a means-to-pay funding model, some semblance of a universal or basic income, a modest performance bonus, and universal access, are strong if not global norms.
Effectively, markets and information play together extraordinarily poorly.
https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/2vm2da/why_inf...
These sites have to make money somehow or they won’t exist for long.
First of all, they are probably doing both things today.
Second, not necessarily the same people that complains about adds complains about paywalls.
Also, If you don't live in the US, 99.99% of wsj' contents is irrelevant, excepting that one article you read once an year. So subscribing is not worth it.
Meanwhile it excludes a ridiculous amount of people of a very important subject for the whole world.
Please track the hell out of me but don't paywall on subjects that matter.
Crowdfunding (Kickstarter, Patreon etc.) provides a successful model for funding content quite directly, without slapping a hefty paywall onto it. This stuff is not rocket science, it actually works quite nicely.
I'd like to see platforms act as utilities, not systems for enforcing opinions or curating content. I want to be given the tools to decide for myself what type of content I see, who gets to contact me, and I don't want to be force fed ads.
Are you suggesting there is a way to make people pay to use these platforms? If you are, I call BS.
How are you going to get 2 billion people to pay enough for social media use, that those payments can cover the costs of planet wide network and infrastructure supporting 2 billion people?
[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall;_or,_Dodge_in_Hell
We usually call this sort of thing a "user agent" FWIW. Your usual web browser is one kind of user agent, but there could be others.
Replace hip with sane and we can accelerate the transition back to offline content (one way communication) and come to the conclusion that a two-way stream (a direct connection) to crazy is not healthy.
Even if a one way digest or hierarchical approach works better in an instance for a scale approach (summarizing to congress or instead of a live feed of literally everyone) a lack of agency is /not/ a good thing.
Sanity is acknowledging reality not hiding away from it.
"Curated by Crazy" may have better explained the current power struggle online and how low they'll go for your attention (hijack your connection).
How is packaging data in offline formats not more convenient? We have to do something with the gobs of storage and blazing fast transfer speeds while reclaiming our privacy (maintaining control of our attention).
Also, being "always on" allows you to be compromised by netizens far and wide. On-demand has far reaching security benefits.
It's the WSJ, they're not writing for a technical or particularly tech-savvy audience
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/these-technologists-t...
People keep submitting urls with it (and this article's url also has it) so submitters probably don't realize it doesn't actually work anymore.
Also, disabling Javascript on wsj.com also used to work to bypass the paywall but that trick was blocked around the same time they blocked "?mod=rsswn".
One of the workarounds is to emulate behavior of googlebot but I don't think that's easily translatable to a simple modification of the url string: https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome/issues/...
https://www.fullwsj.com/articles/tech-giants-have-hijacked-t...
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HTTP hyperlinks FTF. Vannevar Bush hypothesized much a higher-level “mesh of associative trails”, with relationships formed directly and largely automatically. The closest today’s WWW has gotten to this is search engines, but again these are centralized, controlled, and first and foremost in service to vendor, not users.
However, I would argue a far greater problem was the early lack of editability; Berners-Lee originally conceived of his WWW as a network of editable documents, where every user could read and write with equal ease. His prototype web browser was, to use a desktop analogy, a “Word for the Web”; a true web editor, Opening and Saving documents stored online, just as Microsoft Word directly opens and saves documents stored locally.
But Tim got lazy and impatient, and shipped his first public browser as a cut-down web viewer. Which Mosaic then copied; and, before anyone knew any different, the web was recast as a read-only medium of the masses, with web editing the exclusive domain of technical and corporate elites only.
A single thoughtless corner-cutting mistake, creating an artificial bottleneck upon which trillion-dollar global empires have now been built. You can still see the remnants of the original direct interaction model in HTTP’s PUT and DELETE verbs, like the hindlimbs in a blue whale, rendered just as powerless from the ignorance and avarice of this new web’s Intelligent Design.
Tony Hoare named NULL his billion-dollar mistake, but that’s a rounding error on the scale of TBL’s fuckup.
--
Which isn’t to say that had the web’s architects not completely FUBARed manual document editing/publishing and automated relationship-building that various self-interested parties wouldn’t have locked it up in other ways.
But look at SOAP and Dropbox and even Facebook; were the basic building blocks working as designed, none of those would exist because the key services they provide are just standard everyday operations that a correctly-functioning web would already provide to everyone for free. But they don’t, so again and again we end up with this instead:
https://thedailywtf.com/articles/The_Inner-Platform_Effect
Honestly, our modern “web” can make a Matryoshka doll blush, it’s so anything but.