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Comment by shantly | Hacker News Reader

If we want a (return to the) boom in open-source and paid standards-based solutions, we gotta ban collecting & monetizing user info. Monetized user info & related advertising paying for "free" walled services are keeping those down. We won't see widely-successful standards-based social networks or messaging services until that option is gone.

[EDIT] and wide success/adoption matters for those in particular because much of their utility is in "everyone's on it" (where "it" may be some other, but interoperable, service)

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The "old" internet was all static or lightly server-rendered pages, that can be developed and hosted at minimal cost today. Back in the day we didn't expect that "everyone" would sign up for whatever niche forum you were hosting, it was enough to have "everyone who's into that niche".

These services don't need "monetization", they can be kept up with minimal amounts of crowdfunding, while federating through well-known standards (ActivityPub, etc.) can help them achieve a network effect that might ultimately rival the big walled gardens and incent them to open up in turn.

Sure, and those old sorts of forums still exist (well, the ones that didn't get eaten by Reddit and Facebook—OK, so I guess they kinda don't) but if you want the Web as it exists for most people to go back to standards and competing paid & free+libre solutions, I'm pretty sure banning spyvertising is gonna be a necessary, since those are the two main "services" most people use online, other than email (the rest is mostly shopping and reading news-type sites, both of which would also be improved by banning spyvertising).

The actual "old" Internet is the stuff that predated the web: Gopher, IRC, Usenet, MUDs, Public Access Unix systems, telnet...

I agree with this. It was when we designed protocols with consensus thru RFC, and apps communicating with those protocols.

And companies started dropping that when it became very important to their business model that they maximize the amount of data they can collect about a user. 3rd party clients for my service? Unacceptable, can't spy on the user as much there, and can't advertise at them. Communicating with users on other services? Unacceptable, I need those users on my service so I can spy on them too, and besides those other services won't talk to mine for the same reasons.

Don't know why you're being downvoted when this is exactly the case in my experience. They never said "spying" outright but it's definitely why walled gardens like AOL popped up like wildfire in the 90s and why stuff like AIM was the exception and not the rule.

AOL was not about spying on you, it was about collecting that sweet monthly fee.

And anyone who lauds Apple for bringing tech to the masses should consider that AOL did the exact same thing for the Internet and really brought a glimpse of the Internet (not just the web!) to the people. Yes, real techies might want to install their IRC client of choice and fine tune settings and all that, but Grandma just wanted to click on Chat from her home screen, go to the "Recipes Room" and talk about cookies.

It was the same "less choice/more consistency" of technology that let Apple get so big, with the same huge mass appeal (but with less panache).

AOL was more 'spatial' vs. the netnerds obsession with everything has to be (ASCII)-text delivered by simple but sometimes obscure to the average user, means.

I sometimes think one could easily replicate large parts of that with

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citadel/UX

which evolved out of

{2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citadel_(software)

but then it lacks mastodon/matrix like federation, i guess.

Sigh. Maybe this year i get to try it out... ;-)

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

also called 'siloing'

All of those things are still in use, although perhaps not as much as before. I suggest to continue to use it.

(Do you know my first post on Usenet (using a NNTP client program I wrote myself, actually) was in 2019? I still use it, although there aren't a lot of messages on there, but there still are some.)

I suggest if you wanted to make up a web forum or mailing list, to set up a NNTP instead please. I also invented Unusenet which is a way to form newsgroup names which are not part of Usenet (you can have both on the same server; the names never interfere). You could also have multiple interfaces to the same messages if wanted, making more use better.

With other protocols too (such as IRC), a bridge can be done. For many kind of text-basedinteractive uses, telnet (or SSH) is much better than using a web page.

The problem isn’t hosting, it’s discovery. Discovery was easy on the old internet because we weren’t yet drowning in spam, link farms, and cloned/scraped pages. To bring the old internet back we need search that filters out all that commercial noise and we can’t rely on Google et al to build it. Why not? Because those companies have a conflict of interest due to their ad-driven business model.

A new “Old Internet” needs to be non commercial. I don’t know how we do that.

Bring back webrings, "favorite links" pages and the ODP/DMOZ. Good niche forums (both on Usenet and elsewhere) tended to gather FAQs and information pages that would ultimately aid discovery. That whole dynamic is quite dead these days.

Webrings were great but you still need search as a starting point. Now we've got all this spam out there which essentially creates fake webrings (private blog networks [1]) as a form of black hat SEO.

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

I feel like content discovery in those days didn't primarily happen via search so much as word-of-mouth though. Blogs kept a blogroll on the side which had an overlapping network of other bloggers, people in IRC channels or BBSes would recommend other places for you to check out if you were interested in something, webcomics would host guest strips so other artists could cross-promote each other, etc.

In that respect, I feel like Reddit and Instagram are much bigger culprit than Google for sucking up all of the space for socializing and referrals. At one point several of the forums I was on all basically just focused on linking to or talking about Reddit posts, which is when I realized those forums were not long for this world.

There was a Golden Age when Google would actually return results for interesting small sites on a regular basis. This was before they declared defeat in the Great Webspam War and (apparently) just upranked major sites and downranked minor ones ('08 or '09?), giving up on usefully indexing the "lesser" parts of the web. Also back when content that wasn't frequently updated didn't suffer badly in search results, so niche "evergreen" content on small sites could actually be found by search pretty often.

> a Golden Age when Google would actually return results for interesting small sites on a regular basis

Yes, I miss the days when Google search was actually useful.

08, 09 that was the time they introduced service to figure out typos in queries. That was the time that I noticed drastic reduction of usefulness of their search. When the team responsible for it visited my university, I asked about this. Their response was: we don't show results that you asked for, but the results you want.

I goddamn know what I want, and it is so annoying that Google returns sites that don't contain keyword that I explicitly want, doesn't matter that I put + in front or write it in quotes.

>There was a Golden Age when Google would actually return results for interesting small sites on a regular basis. This was before they declared defeat in the Great Webspam War and (apparently) just upranked major sites and downranked minor ones ('08 or '09?), giving up on usefully indexing the "lesser" parts of the web. Also back when content that wasn't frequently updated didn't suffer badly in search results, so niche "evergreen" content on small sites could actually be found by search pretty often.

This is useful for things like research or product reviews, but less of a thing for the sorts of current events and opinion pieces that blogging was used for (and then got moved to "social media").

But yeah, prioritizing stuff that's updated often has really killed the ability of sites to actually be useful repositories of knowledge and has probably intensified the trend towards opinion, editorial, and hot-takes of everything rather than well-researched articles about how to do useful/practical stuff.

> we gotta ban collecting & monetizing user info

anything that runs across a network can be monitored, and such data is valuable when you are able to merge it across several data sources. It's very unlikely tracking can even be banned or un-monitized.

Making it illegal so no legitimate business can do it without incredible risk of being sued/charged out of existence seems quite feasible.

You really don’t think companies would figure out a way around any such “illegality” or just use it anti competitively as is being done throughout the EU with its ham-handed policies?

I find this kind of defeatism entirely baffling. Regulating corporations is hard so we shouldn't try? This is a lot less complicated than many sorts of regulation we attempt. Just give up on all of it, it's pointless? Where's the bottom on this line of thought?

Yes, it's pointless.

There is nothing illegal about what is going on now, and nothing which should be illegal about what is going on. In this context, "regulating" simply means making a behavior we didn't see coming illegal.

It's a short-sighted, unimaginative, and blatantly violent way to solve a problem which stems entirely from the consumer public, not from big bad corporations. It will be used by major corps as an anti-competitive weapon against smaller up-start competition - an outcome we should expect from all such attempts at "regulating" the tech oligarchy.

> There is nothing illegal about what is going on now, and nothing which should be illegal about what is going on. In this context, "regulating" simply means making a behavior we didn't see coming illegal.

When we don't like they way corporate-driven markets (so... all of them, really) are developing we should attempt to change things until they develop a way we like, where "we" is any interest group. If we're not harnessing the activity of companies to the collective good, why let our democratic states charter them in the first place?

> nothing which should be illegal about what is going on.

I think that collecting data about people without their informed consent should absolutely be illegal, for exactly the same reasons that it's illegal for companies to install surveillance equipment in your home without consent.

The same spirit was what kept slavery viable for so long. They said abolishing slavery wasn’t practical. Many had conflicting interests, as do many here.

So are you suggesting there's no way to defeat the tech oligarchy and we should just surrender to them?

We are the ones that enable the tech oligarchy. We are, therefore, surrendering to them right now. My suggestion is to use our brains and not rely on the useless and frivolous "services" these tech oligarchy participants provide. We give them their power.

If one builds something better, people will use it.

The challenge is that it's actually quite hard to build something better. Centralization has huge advantages of common-goal, ability to curtail and exclude antagonistic actors, and decreased barriers to flow of resources.

I think the lack of alternatives to Facebook has a lot less to do with "evil" practices Facebook undertakes and a lot more to do with Facebook actually building a good tool that's easy to use for most people. Alternatives haven't hit that level of simplicity.

> We are, therefore, surrendering to them right now.

Who's "we"? I am not surrendering to them.

Isn't that the same "just don't get addicted to nicotine" argument, but updated to the modern era?

Worst case, such a ban would be a speed bump. But even just a speed bump would be an improvement over the way things are now.

How do you make illegal monitoring access to services? Because at the core this is what tracking is based on.

Even if you trickled tracking down to IP addresses and time of usage only you could still have a very useful database of users across services.

Oh and by the way, tracking was not invented by Internet companies, all payment systems and credit cards have been doing tracking for ages before that and selling their data to third parties.

Oh yeah, I strongly agree those need to be stopped to. We keep hand wringing over all these leaks and such and "oh gee how to we improve security?", when the clear solution is to not allow it in the first place. That way a leak doesn't become some lame civil matter, but "oh, you had this plainly-illegal-to-collect info? Looks like your business is over" (which would be a rare occurrence, if it were actually that risky to do it, since it'd be hard to keep such collection secret given how many people would be involved and so how many potential whistle blowers there would be, and how large a "paper" trail is necessarily involved in mass-scale data collection, making it extremely easy to investigate and prove)

Very few voters will support a bill that will result in them having to pay for things like email, facebook, youtube, etc...

Internet service used to include basic services like email and newsgroups. Still "paid", but effectively bundled, and a tiny part of the total cost.

They do so nowadays, too. At least around where i am. Inconvenient when you change ISPs.

This may be true but it doesn’t justify the monetization of user data.

If this data is useful to cross reference, let the user opt in and use it. Give the user control and insight into the data collection.

The data can be useful without tricking users and making money off their private use activities.

> This may be true but it doesn’t justify the monetization of user data.

I don't understand your point. If it can technically be done and it is valuable in any way, it WILL be done. No matter the justification.

Not if it were illegal.

How can you make monitoring logs illegal? Because that is pretty much enough to start tracking users.

You don't need to make IP logging illegal to make collecting user info that's not absolutely necessary to a transaction illegal, and to make selling or using any necessarily-collected data for anything other than e.g. auditing or further service to the transaction (returns, say) also illegal. I don't know how this became about Apache logs or whatever.

[EDIT] my point is there's a ton of info being collected that goes way beyond web server logging, so I don't know how this became about why all this is impossible because server logs are a thing.

> absolutely necessary to a transaction illegal,

"absolutely necessary" does not mean anything. For example, tracking in banking systems has very good justifications such as fraud detection. That alone means banks have a blank check to connect tons of features about their users, and not for nefarious purposes.

[EDIT] to your EDIT point: even with server logs you could start building user tracking and if your net is large enough you can derive a massive amount of data just from that. Pattern analysis, sites/services users connect to, geolocation, etc... even without the most sophisticated tracking systems this is already good enough to build business value.

Cool. Can't sell it, can't leverage it against users (e.g. use it to select which products to try to sell them). If you're doing that on any significant scale it's gonna leave a hell of a trail and enough people will be involved that it'll be found out.

"waaaah but we need to share it with 'partners'" hahaha OK whatever, but bet you don't though. Illegal. Figure it out. Bet you can.

You forgot another vector of how companies monetize user data: using it to train ML models.

You don't need to keep the data long-term (though it would be more profitable if you could). You can still get a lot of value using the data to train an ML model, then use that model to build valuable decision-making systems, which few other companies could produce.

Oh, yeah, definitely that should also be illegal. If you want to train an ML model you should have to pay directly for that data, not in connection with any other service or product. The current system means every successful monopolist is also a de facto nigh-unassailable leader in ML, which clearly sucks. "Create or buy a massive spying service" shouldn't be a necessary step 1 to realistically competing in consumer- and human-focused ML.

I disagree, many times the very reason I gave the company my data was to leverage their ML capabilities. For example, the only reason I gave LinkedIn my data was so they could find me better jobs. No one would have bothered if it were just a glossier version of Craigslist.

Plus, banks training models for fraud detection has an obvious benefit to everyone.

My point is that if something is being monetized, what makes it monetizable is the agreement between the user and the service provider.

All sorts of data is collected every day that is not monetized, but could be.

Consumers are allowing their data to be monetized by agreeing to sign up for "free" services which take an asset from the user which they do not know how to monetize themselves.

In a way the dynamic is similar to the early 20th century BP oil fields in Iran; the Persians had oil under their feet for centuries but outsiders came in and started to pump it out of the ground, making themselves rich but the general public of Iran - not so much. They didn't even know what to do with oil at first.

Once the Iranian people saw what was going on and realized that they were being exploited, they elected a leader who sought to nationalize the oil fields, since they finally began to understand what asset they had and how and why they could monetize it themselves.

The internet needs its own Mohammad Mosaddegh, so to speak. Not to commit property crimes and break contracts like Mosaddegh did - but to show the masses what is going on in a way that encourages them to change their behaviors in a fundamental way.

> If it can technically be done and it is valuable in any way, it WILL be done.

Until society determines that the practice is unacceptable and outlaws it. Outlawing it won't completely eliminate the practice, of course, but it would dramatically curtail it, and provide people with an actual means of rectifying the situation when someone is breaking the law.

> If it can technically be done and it is valuable in any way

Insider trading is illegal

Monetization of data seems like a great tradeoff to me, really. The users get free content for nothing essentially. I don't see why anyone cares. It's like we've struck gold mines of new utility for society and everyone is up in arms over it.

The collection of so much personal data makes possible all sorts of abuses that are otherwise infeasible. The difference between corporations collecting & keeping massive amounts of data on the population of a state, and the same state's government doing exactly the same, is minor, when the government can buy access to much of that data or compel production of any of it by court order. It'd bother me if the government were running this kind of dragnet surveillance, so it bothers me that companies are, for this if for no other reason.

> Monetization of data seems like a great tradeoff to me, really.

That's a fair opinion. But why should those of us who do not share that opinion be forced to be subjected to spying?

I am not trying to be antagonistic, but how is anyone (particularly the assumed tech-savvy users of HN) forced into the ‘spying.’ When you use these services the cost is the monetization of your data. FAANG isn’t even attempting to hide it anymore, and again, you are posting on HN and clearly know how these companies operate. If you use their service you are engaging in a transaction with them. No one is forced to use Google, use DDG. No one is forced to use Facebook, talk to people in person. I understand the effect of numbers on the practicality of avoiding these companies, it is limiting in many ways, but if you feel that strongly about it just avoid using the services.

> When you use these services the cost is the monetization of your data.

True. And if not using the services meant that those companies wouldn't spy on me, then I would have no complaint -- I already don't use their services. But it doesn't.

I’m genuinely uncertain as to how your data is being collected if you are not using these services, and again I’m not trying to argue or disagree with the underlying thesis that tracking/spying is a net negative, but I do want to understand the assertion that your personal data is being collected by companies you have no interaction with.

See [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21926111 please.

Just for example, Facebook tracks you even if you don't have a Facebook account.[0]

More generally, I think we need to approach discussions about data collection from the perspective that data being about a person doesn't mean that the person owns that data. Here's what I mean: The sort of data we're talking about is personal (read: "individual") merely in the sense that it is about persons. However, it's social (rather than personal) in its origin. For example, the list of my commercial transactions isn't originally (fundamentally?) data about my person. Rather, it's data about a social fabric of which I happen to be a part. So, personal data is not originally personal.

What's the significance of personal data being fundamentally social (by way of its origin)? Well, I would contend that it means personal/individual means of managing personal privacy are ultimately insufficient; your data (while it is about you) doesn't naturally belong to you. Therefore, my takeaway is this: If we want to make personal data (i.e. data about persons) practically personal (i.e. give persons control over their own data), then we need social mechanisms to protect it. My aforementioned point, about the insufficiency of personally-undertaken measures, is corollary to this.

For better or worse, it seems like most people these days equate "social mechanisms" with "regulation". However, there are in principle other social bodies (both formal (e.g. unions or guilds), or informal (e.g. various social movements)) that could be sufficient to make personal data truly personal. However, I'm unfortunately skeptical of the efficacy any non-governmental body could be when dealing with this problem. But that's beside the point.

[0] https://www.vox.com/2018/4/20/17254312/facebook-shadow-profi...

That is too simplistic. Ever heard of

[1} https://duckduckgo.com/?q=shadow+profiles

Except of hiding in some deep hole there is no real escaping them. Maybe in Amish County, or somewhere far off-grid. But otherwise not really.

If some guy sat outside with binoculars and wrote down things about people in public in a notepad, I'm not sure it'd be in anyone's reasonable rights to make him stop.

Why do you think the information is valuable? It's clearly more valuable to companies like google than the cost of providing services like search and youtube.

It's like saying that TV adverts give something for nothing, where the truth is they are a massive drain on society.

>It's very unlikely tracking can even be banned [...]

How so? It's just politics - no more, no less. I don't even consider it highly unlikely that it will, letalone can, be banned, at least in the EU.

Because whatever flows in networks is a fundamental properties of the networks and it's natural for it to be available for anyone/any entity running centralized or decentralized services. Tracking is a natural consequence of operating networks.

What Facebook and Google and Twitter and Amazon and American Express and so on collect and do with their data is not remotely necessary to operating their services and businesses, except to the extent that they make money by spying on people per se.

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