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Comment by theboywho | Hacker News Reader

It feels like the author was exposed to the rhetoric of the web having been ruined by tech giants due to centralisation, and decided to write an article about that, expecting clicks and views, all without trying to first understand what the people behind such a rhetoric actually mean. I mean the article discusses the issue of a centralised web by stating the russian inference in the US elections. How does that illustrate the centralisation issue of the web platform, and how can a decentralised solution prevent that?

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.

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I think the author was arguing that the siloing off of internet users, combined with hypersaturated markets is what made that election scandal possible in the first place. To be clear about what I mean by that I am referring to unregulated political advertising that nobody checks. An example of the bad advertising would be: Running an ad campaign referring to the wrong date of the physical vote to a target audience of 9-to-five 18-35 wage workers with kids and no college education hoping that it tricks some percent of them into not voting because they requested the wrong day off. Oops!

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.

Thanks for reporting back about what is discussed in the rest of the article. I still think the author is confused about two different things: popularity and centralisation. The issue is not that now, a bunch of very few popular services is where most of online activity happens, the issue is that these services have access to users’ data and privacy, by design, and most of all, they are not censorship resistant.

>the author is confused about two different things: popularity and centralisation.

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.

The bigger problem at times of elections is that every idiot now has an amplifier the strength of which allows them to reach the rest of their country, including all like thinking idiots. This makes idiots less likely to change their mind based on their environment because they feel vindicated in their beliefs.

Honest question for you: how is this different from criticisms of the early days of the printing press?

Which criticisms are you referring to?

> every idiot now has an amplifier the strength of which allows them to reach the rest of their country, including all like thinking idiots

I think the actual problem isn’t the idiot (the issue isn’t that different from having access to a printing press a few years ago - in order to reach a considerable audience in both cases you would need a good amount of capital in the first place), the problem is the fact that it’s hard to tell for ad consumers if these ads are right or wrong, these ads are also shown inline with the usual flow of information they accept as true and that the users are rarely informed about how well targeted these ads are.

> these ads are also shown inline with the usual flow of information they accept as true

Accepting this flow of information as true does indeed seem like idiocy

But misinformation in advertisements is illegal in many countries and so is misrepresenting information as actual information rather than it being ads.

Provable misinformation is legal, which is a much higher bar. That's why we'd consider it insane if someone took (legal) ads at face value and believed all their claims.

Part (or the whole?) of the problem is the amplifier isn't reaching the "rest" of the country, but rather selectively isolating who does and does not receive the message. Newspapers were visible to all. When I pick up a broadsheet to read I know that I'm choosing a particular source of information; and choosing not to read a different source. But I'm aware that there are other newspapers and that knowledge influences how I weigh what I read compared to what other people are reading.

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.

Right, and my point is this is the exact same argument the church, and other centralized publishing powers at the time, made about the printing press:

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.

Right, all this hysteria about tech companies' irresponsibility is simply "how dare you give the average person an easier route to expressing themselves and connecting to each other". Hell, it might not even be wrong that this is a bad thing[1], but the discourse around it is so dishonest.

[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

Except news isn't religion. The fake news sources will have you believe that their lies are of equal stature as others' facts.

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?

> news isn't religion

Anecdotally it feels that way in modern society.

Ask a random person if they believe Fox news.

> The fake news sources will have you believe that their lies are of equal stature as others' facts.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmodernism

https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.wsj.com/articles/te...

The irony....

This really is the cherry on top. Thanks to the influence of a centralized tech giant whose services are invaluable to WSJ, and who indexes the open web, we can get equal access to WSJ's centralized resources that they wanted to pretend were open, when it came to Google crawlers.

A centralized register is more valuable to those who need access and control, also true for malicious actors of the unwanted kind; a single transformation can affect the whole or precisely targeted parts.

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.

You think that being required to pay in order to consume a good that was produced is what’s broken with the web?

> 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.

Do you work for free?

Do you have proof of a better business model?

I'm not saying the content should be given away for free, I'm just observing the ironic case of what sounds like a call to action to "save" the web ("Time for a reboot") being hidden behind a paywall.

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.

I don't agree with your assumption that OP thinks the author shouldn't be paid for this article.

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.

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