Why do I care the open web is dying? | Hacker News Reader

Why do I care the open web is dying?

insightbrowser.com

390 pointsarchajain339 comments

There’s a lot of talk in the HN comment section recently about the death of general computing and the open web. I’m not convinced. There’s definitely closed platforms both hard and soft but the web still exists and general purpose computers are still available.

When I see these complaints I see people talking about how they want other people to use the Internet and computers. That smells like authoritarianism.

If you want to contribute to an open web then do it. It’s not your job to get our metaphorical racist uncles on mastodon or something. Why would you even want that?

The romanticized “old web” was just a product of massive selection bias that still exists. If you want that experience it is still out there. Just stop worrying about what other people are doing.

> they want other people to use the Internet and computers.'

they want other people's content to be available on the open web (not just their own content).

> they want other people's content to be available on the open web (not just their own content).

It’s precisely because of that the biggest corps of the current day came into existence. Is it even possible for Google, Amazon, Facebook to become this big without the free software that was available on the web?

Could free software exist without closed hardware and software? Was anything created in an ideologically pure vacuum?

Originally all software was free, it just wasn't called that because there was no closed software. It was shared like cooking recipes.

Facebooks success wasn't certain, but it did happen. You can start a better social network now, but success is far less likely than that of Facebook was previously.

But the content is not unique.

And its much more apparent when 4 billion chimps have been brought into one zoo, are watching each other 24*7, copying each other at the speed of light based on some weird ass reward system that props up the most over energetic over confident characters in the world.

The Newton's and Van Gogh's of such a world are never going to surface.

The greatest insult you can speak on HN is to tell someone their post sounds like it belongs on Reddit.

There is no Internet with 4 billion hypothetical 1990s Internet users.

We are living the Eternal September. To some extent closed platforms are the tourist districts of the Internet. They keep the unwashed masses away from the valuables.

Even completely closed systems can host open systems, as long as contracts don't forbid it. It's really all about the money. AOL, ISPs, POPs, Microsoft, etc were never either stupid or philanthropic. They saw money in the distance and they built platforms to collect it.

The best way to "save the open web" is to make money off it.

This idea means whatever exists on the open web is trying to exploit whatever people use it for money. Not thanks. Another possibility is a strong enough social movement to demand the de-commercialization of significant parts of the internet. For example, nationalize facebook, make it more difficult to spend money on the internet, ban or severely limit advertising, and other ideas if one were to be so bold as to suggest them

Nothing you suggested is ever going to happen. Nor, imo, should it ever happen. So let's be practical here.

Well, the first step to making something happen is advocating a position that would actually achieve your goals.

You think the US gov should just nationalize a private corporation? That would have much more disastrous implications than you think.

All of the things you suggest take freedom of choice away from individuals. This is the authoritarianism I spoke of.

The choice to run businesses in particular ways, not political freedoms or freedoms accessible to most working people.

economic rights and civil rights are one and the same. Moreover, a lot of "working" people run businesses.

The commercial web would look far worse without open source. I don't expect any thanks, just that a new generation gets to the ability to tinker themselves instead of using throw away products.

In essence, I'll worry about the death of the open web when people can no longer make mcbroken.com

> When I see these complaints I see people talking about how they want other people to use the Internet and computers. That smells like authoritarianism.

It's authoritarianism to politely suggest that people do things differently?

No one is proposing that we outlaw the corporate web… we're just trying to make the web a little less corporate.

> It's authoritarianism to politely suggest that people do things differently?

There are frequent demands in the comment section of HN to break up Google, Facebook and Amazon.

There is a comment in this very thread suggesting nationalizing Facebook and banning advertising.

So no, your straw man does not stand.

There is already an open web. You are free to host whatever you want. The authoritarianism I speak of is when you tell other people what they can and cannot do, politely or not.

The people who want to break up tech monopolies aren't doing it because they want to tell people what to do. They want to break them up because they are strangling competiton and leaving consumers with less choice.

You are acting like people using these apps is a sign that they like things better this way. Consider that, once the network effects are large enough, the end user doesn't really have a choice. So you can't claim people prefer things the way they are. This thread is proof that there are many people who want the web to be more open, but feel stuck with more centralized options.

I agree there is an argument to me made that competition has been stifled, in fact I agree that it has. But that is separate from the romanticized "old" or "open" internet I am speaking of.

You have again invoked users. I'm making the argument that the romanticized "old" or "open" Internet is actually an exclusive clique populated by the Intelligentsia and it still exists. The people who use Facebook didn't leave this old internet, they were just never on it. And beyond that, if they did join it they would just ruin it anyway.

I would say the straw man here is the claim that breaking up (arguable) monopolies or writing consumer protection laws is tantamount to authoritarianism. Those are both fairly innocuous actions within a regulated market.

Rights often exist along a zero-sum spectrum; e.g., Google's right to surveil me on every site that uses Google Analytics impedes on my right to use the web privately. Telling people what they can and cannot do is not a hypothetical. It just comes down to where you draw the line.

The straw man in this case is your mischaracterization of my allusion to authoritarianism with regard to users as a polite suggestion to moderate corporate change.

It's fair to say that I initially characterized your use of the term as regarding pleas to change personal behavior rather than legislation. But you clarified your meaning with examples fairly mild iterations from the status quo. That's either a straw man or an extremely liberal definition of the word "authoritarian".

To be clear are you suggesting that nationalizing Facebook and banning advertising on the Internet are mild iterations on the status quo?

Who is saying this?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25262354

I stand corrected. This rando comment on a niche bbs is clearly indicative of a mass political movement that is unstoppable. I will dutifully report to the reëducation center.

Yes? The former has plenty of precedent — utilities, Amtrak, Fannie Mae, etc. As far as the latter goes (I'm admittedly reading into it a bit here), it's not revolutionary to say that Internet companies should have to live with the same non-targeted advertising used for every other medium.

> There is already an open web. You are free to host whatever you want. The authoritarianism I speak of is when you tell other people what they can and cannot do, politely or not

And what's the point if nobody will follow? It's just so much fun shouting into the void with a couple of likeminded friends...

Shouting will never give you a diverse perspective. You can only get that by listening.

Shouting into the void is metaphor for publishing to a medium that nobody reads.

Yes and listening is a metaphor for reading.

Unless that's a pointed jab at me not having read the article or comments (which I have) I'm not sure what you're getting at.

The article mentions plenty of places where web viewership is effectively gone. So what is the point in trying then?

My repetition of reading and listening is a response to your suggestion that shouting into the void creates echo chambers and what I interpreted as your fixation on being heard rather than listening.

Instead of shouting into the void you could cross it to the places mentioned in the article and provide them viewership while diversifying your perspective.

The web is horrible now because of the tooling and the functions.

The tooling is bloated, very heavy codebase and the million ways to do the same thing even gave a way for Google AMP and despite developers hating it AS A USER I always tap on the search result with the lightning icon because it means that it will load fast and give me the text I am looking for right away.

Also, the functionality or business model usually needs to recognise you. So the first time you visit a website you have to go through the install process.

To use a website, the first thing is, you need to decide how much you should be tracked so you have to deal with the tracking settings(BTW, no EU doesn't make anyone to put tracking consent popups, it's just that somehow the Web people decided that they must track and this is the way to do it).

The next step of the website installation process is, creating an account. If the website provides periodical content it will slap you the "subscribe to our mailing list" pop-up. For some reason the close buttons usually work slow for me, takes multiple taps on the (X) to close this. It will have this annoying fade-in, fade-out effect with the content barely visible beneath it.

Then comes the monetisation part of the install process. I will be presented with %80 suggestions to do something else instead of using the website that I just installed(in other word, ads) and there would be %20 content and most of the times that content would disappoint me because it is yet another low quality thing that was made to take me there and show me the %80 of the page and collect my information.

Do you know why the old web was great, in my opinion? Because we were freeloading the great pre-web content and the tooling was just advanced enough to show it to us but not advanced enough to make money from us.

The interactivity made the fun even greater but what we were doing was freeload the old content, create some new content and do all this on some investors dime. Now these investors own the thing and want their money back back and they are not sponsoring the "open web", so anyone trying to do anything on the web must pay from the pocket or make the experience horrible so can monetize it.

The web is dying because no one wants to pay for it. The people who used to pay for it (the investors) no longer pay, the remaining good quality web is just a sidekick for their actual business.

> AS A USER I always tap on the search result with the lightning icon because it means that it will load fast and give me the text I am looking for right away.

Nothing wrong with that but that is a choice. I installed that extension that loads AMP pages as HTML so that I never use AMP. I don't need to save that 1s and I am not ignorant enough to be tricked into using it.

What do you get AS A USER from not using AMP? How the USER is tricked into using fast loading web pages? What the "tricked" USER is missing here?

ps: notice the USER. It implies the person who is not bound to profit from the economics of the web but to consume content.

I fucking hate AMP pages AS A USER (not sure why we're yelling)

A lot of them a broken mappings of the actual page, so the layout is broken, or an important image will be missing...

Then there's the whole annoying behavior when you want to visit the actual page, remember when they disabled the quick copy when you hit info so you had to manually copy the URL and paste it into your browser?

And I'd tend to do that a lot, especially on my phone where selecting text is a pain in the ass because AMP pages fail to load in the most aggravating way on my phone!

Instead of actually failing to load, it's like AMP just pretends that the page is still loading? So I'll be on a weak mobile connection for example, and the page will just get stuck in some broken state. It's given up and instead of the browser saying "Page Load failed" it shows me that stupid AMP header and a broken page until I question if it's still loading on my slow connection or stuck.

Then there's the fact that some (really many) pages use AMP to show you the least useful version of the content, so literally the first thing you have to do is go to the actual page! Like Reddit, it won't even show comments 2 comments deep, and it's like half the post types are broken, so you need to go back and load the actual page 5 seconds later anyways!

So instead of just getting to go to Reddit, I get to go to that stupid AMP page, then start the wait for the "slow terrible main site".

Which leads to my next point... AMP's edge caching nonsense is not why the pages are "fast", it's because the AMP page is barren. The websites that do AMP the best tend to already have great websites! I have literally never clicked to go to the "real" site from an actual useful AMP page and had it load appreciably slower than the AMP page did.

Probably because the websites that have bloated crappy sites riddled by ads usually have half-assed AMP versions that are meant to funnel you into the real site anyways while taking advantage of the SEO bonus of an AMP page! So it's literally the worst of both worlds where you're waiting for AMP, then realizing the content is fucked, then waiting for their crap website!

AMP fucking SUCKS as a user, I fucking hate it.

When you say AMP sucks people act like you're opposed for monopolistic reasons or something, I don't give a damn about that! Google owns search; the ship has sailed. But that stupid AMP bullshit? It's not monopolistic, it's just garbage.

>So instead of just getting to go to Reddit, I get to go to that stupid AMP page, then start the wait for the "slow terrible main site"

At that point I usually switch to the App or don't bother. Apps usually have tremendous quality edge over the web counterparts of the same service.

On the more techie communities there's this glorification of web apps but I am yet to see high quality one.

O.K. maybe the desktop versions of Discord/Slack/Twitch/WhatsApp/Youtube/Twitter are fine. Hmm, when you have the screen real estate and the performance to run the bloated web apps all the time, they are actually fine. I guess that's why we have good web bad app on desktop and bad web and good app on mobile.

This is just dumb. I dont want another app on my phone. I am fine with reddit bookmark on my phone.

You know how pages have dark mode and light mode you can set? Does not work with amp.

Amp version of page is typically missing features.

> The web is dying because no one wants to pay for it. The people who used to pay for it (the investors) no longer pay, the remaining good quality web is just a sidekick for their actual business.

This is such a baffling take, and undermines your entire post. There's more money changing hands than ever on the web, and plenty of people lining up to do so. And moreover, the "open" web was never paid for by investors, it was almost always paid for by volunteers and people taking donations. And there are tons of truly open projects being created and maintained this way - I can think of a dozen off the top of my head, and the success of patreon speaks for itself.

>There's more money changing hands than ever on the web, and plenty of people lining up to do so

I want to know more about this great business going on on the open web that I am unaware of. I hope you are not talking about Craigslist or another established platform having even larger userbase, thus larger amount of money changing hands.

>there are tons of truly open projects being created and maintained this way, I can think of a dozen off the top of my head

Please spell these, I am unaware of any. Yeah O.k. the homebrew developers managed to get enough donations to by Mac mini with M1. Which is sad because it's one of the most popular projects out there, considering the value they provide they should have been able to buy a large boat, not a Mac mini. There are a very few, established projects that can barely sustain part-time donations and there are a couple of platforms that are worth billions who facilitate this. It may work fine when you actually sell the premium closed source stuff(support services for proprietary software development based on the free stuff or personalised nudes in addition to the free nudes).

Also, the free content now comes as a side venture of political campaigns. You are expected to feel the emotions today and go vote tomorrow so that the content creators can recoup their investments once in power.

Agreed in part (and upvoted), however, I understand the frustration as an open web advocate when interacting with walled gardens like Instagram and Facebook.

Rather than competing on the product/network alone, Instagram employs dark patterns like allowing only a single link ("link in bio") to the wider web. Links in comments don't work, nor do older links-in-bio persist with their original post.

Facebook Groups is cannibalizing a dearly beloved two-decade-old backcountry ski forum ( turns-all-year.com ) because the user-onboarding is effortless, familiar, and integrates with other familiar walled-garden features. With the FB interface, the discussions are shorter-lived and the archiving of trip-reporting information is no longer effectively searchable. I don't know how an open-web forum with limited resources can compete against FB effectively -- suggestions are very welcome.

Strategies like these are designed to gently carve users away from the open web and gather them within the garden. While not impossible to combat, they are a stout challenge for sites in the modern era.

Deeply missing the ability to search past year trip reports with the shifts in TAY. I think the challenge is once the door is opened to moving a community partly to FB it’s a slippery slope to the lowest common denominator (FB).

Seeing the same unfortunate pattern with some other small camping and car forums.

At least individual users can push back against the slide on TAY by posting trip-reports. If enough of us continue to post, then as GP suggests, the open web (and TAY) will survive just fine :).

One must also balance the utility of the TR with the now-outsized impact of TRs. It was a different world in ~2006, where everyone knew everyone else and a TR meant that at most a few friends and a friendly internet stranger might follow your tracks tomorrow. It is a delicate balance.

I don’t think instagram’s link policy has anything to do with dark patterns. Rather it is a distinct design choice for a social network to avoid spam. Another key decision instagram made was preventing shares/retweets, with the intended effect of promoting original content. These two consequential decisions (both made very early on in Instagram history, likely even before the fb acquisition) made original photos the focus. It’s an opinionated app and has succeeded because of it — I don’t believe either decision should be called a dark pattern.

> Rather it is a distinct design choice for a social network to avoid spam

It's not clear to me how blocking read access prevents spam.

Don’t forget that Instagram was originally just an app with no website. The fact that you got a website to see some posts technically is a step towards openness. =]]

I have similar feelings about the move away from native apps that others have about the move away from the “open web”: I like being able to control the update cycle of the applications I use and not accept new features I don’t like.

I was referring to the fact that they don’t make urls clickable, to disincentivize spammers sharing urls (at least make it a less effective spam tactic)

I never thought of the blocking of links as spam prevention but it makes complete sense.

Now that they’ve progressed a lot they have swipe up links for various accounts that integrate with ads and other publishers so they are loosening the grip.

At first i hated not having links and being able to click but now i rather appreciate it because anecdotally it definitely reduced spam.

How the hell does it prevent spam? Spammers just bake bit.ly links into the image which I doubt have a much lower hit rate than usual spam.

Meanwhile, every time I find a new account I like and want to see what they're all about, I have to use a search engine because all of their posts just say "link in bio" for the context and additional content, but their bio link has long since changed. This is a clear dark pattern to keep people in their walled garden and I really can't see any other explanation.

(they do allow links for ads though, which are usually just spam anyways, so that reinforces this even further)

I think making urls non-clickable absolutely reduces the effectiveness of spamming urls. How the hell wouldn’t it?

I figure that people who are gullible enough to believe spam like "Triple your investment at our new exchange: cryptomatron.xyz" wouldn't be stopped by having to type the URL in manually.

Instagram made a lot of changes recently while their success came much earlier. I wouldn't say they succeeded because of those later decisions.

The degree to which Instagram or Pinterest bleed into the "old web" is hurting the surfing experience of those who want to stay outside of those walled gardens.

There are millions of entry points into those walled gardens, which stop me right at the gate. I can't see a timelapse of a solar flare, because the photographer [1] has been lured into using Instagram as his publishing platform in return for a better interaction with "followers". From a technical viewpoint, there is no reason for this restriction. This is breaking the old internet.

[1] https://www.instagram.com/cosmic_background/

"Log in to view posts from cosmic_background"

I love the modern web :)

This is why we have to fight against it at a much lower level. HTTPS is a prime example of this. It effectively "locks" the data channel or pipe from the source (FB/Instagram/Google servers) to your viewing device (screen, and in a lot of cases, locked-down web-browser) making it effectively a dumb terminal. If MITM-type techologies were allowed to exist safely and controlled by the user, we could be seeing a proliferation of an ecosystem geared around breaking and integrating-with the walled-gardens. I'd go out on a limb and say that HTTPS is one of the biggest hurdles we face when it comes to keeping the web open. With it firmly in-place, we are forced to beg for "scraps" in terms of these walled-gardens giving us API/Integration points.

Edit. Grammar.

This argument is silly in the presence of open-source web browsers that can accept extensions.

> proliferation of an ecosystem geared around breaking and integrating-with the walled-gardens

Youtube-dl works just fine. What kind of things did you have in mind that people might want but are unachievable because of https?

> This argument is silly in the presence of open-source web browsers that can accept extensions.

The only browser like that with any meaningful adoption is slowly dying, as its parent organization is spinning like a headless chicken.

I'm sure many would happily put an end to Youtube-dl (and other such tooling), and for some the copyright infringement argument is just a cover for their issue with youtube-dl basically punching a hole in their garden's wall.

As a side note, imo the state of the copyright laws also does no good to the openness of the web.

Agreed about the dying online communities. Part of all online communities are network effects: a forum is only as good as the users on it; and if all the users are on Reddit and Facebook, it makes it far, far harder to find interesting independent communities to join

Anyone can start their own subreddit and attract users. And you get high quality UI for free. Or I could spend weeks setting up my own forum software. Why would I do that?

Facebook et al won because they made things easy. I don’t like FB’s approach to privacy or dark patterns, but those aren’t why they won. Running your own website is a demanding hobby for tech nerds. Running your own FB group, anyone can do. This is because FB makes money from making it easy. “The web” doesn’t make money from making it easy, so it isn’t.

In addition, the open web is open to spammers. That’s why Google’s search results are degrading. Walled gardens cut down on these negative externalities.

I get it, but besides making it easy, FB made online communities worse. They have absurd limitations that you only realize once you're in too deep. For whatever reason, for example, nudity is banned even in private groups on FB, so several photography groups I know are trying to go back to forums and blogs, but can't migrate their content, nor get most people to cooperate, so many of them are juggling multiple FB accounts because they keep getting temp-banned (and I'm not talking porn here - these are actual photographers that are regularly featured in big galleries).

There was also a game dev group that died out because FB kept flagging their users for spam. Turns out posting executables makes it think you're spamming viruses, even though it's just a gane prototype you want feedback on.

Finally, the quality of discussion is worse no matter what the content is, as FB forces the post>comments relationship, with comments being way less visible and usable than a top-level post.

And this isn't just one grumpy programmer screaming into the void - I only know about that because friends and relatives (from young to quite old) keep complaining to me and asking me for workaround to these limitations. Of course, the answer "just use something other than FB" is rarely accepted.

I wonder if a modern discussion platform with Facebook as the login provider (and some deeper integration of content, perhaps?) would help bridge this gap?

> Anyone can start their own subreddit and attract users. And you get high quality UI

Wait, what?

Any old php forum has a much better UI (faster, easier to read) than reddit's.

Do you actually use reddit? It's an extremely cancerous experience on mobile, they actively work on making the ui as inconvenient as possible. Every iteration of reddits ui is even slower than the last one, which I consider quite an achievement considering how slow it was months ago already.

Reddit also has the "gold" thing going which is probably not what you'd want for your own forum, where some users are more equal than others because they paid money to an entity you have a questionable relationship with.

Unrelated: Google's results decline in quality because google values engagement more than quality. It's been like this for years. When you are the monopoly, you can easily trade quality for more money without negative consequences.

I spend a lot of time there, but the day "old.reddit.com" stops working is the day I walk away. The newer interface is unusable in comparison to the original and I will not be forced to take such a massive step backwards.

Perhaps some of the recent developments in technology are too effective in moving people towards where others want them. Look at how many of us are actively trying to disengage from smartphones. Not having a smartphone is now unusual to a lot of people, but their use could be affecting us in ways that we don't yet understand on a scale of decades.

Cynicism reminds me of Brave New World, but even for walled gardens like Pinterest that I would rather not put up with, thousands of people outside the tech sphere have taken them up and used them for purposes which are materially advantageous to them. Imagine all of the Facebook-exclusive events that went on to connect people to marriages a decade later, or ideas for wedding registries sealed away in Pinterest. "If it weren't for Facebook/Pinterest/etc., then my life wouldn't have turned out like this." These platforms are becoming melded with millions of people's lives in inextricable ways. We have seen what is possible with enough ingenuity and progress, and we probably won't unsee it. People are happy to use these things, and imposing your will on them to change is usually what people would deem poor social etiquette.

Unless civilization collapses, I doubt it will be any time soon that technology regresses to before this point or a significant movement to move off these platforms emerges.

I gotta say, it always makes me furious whenever I see "Facebook and Instagram". Not because of the person writing the comment (you in this case) but because of the basic feeling I have that they SHOULD NOT BE ALLOWED to buy up all their competition. Zuck's "innovation yay, rock on" is a bunch of empty platitudes and he's actively criminal

> If you want that experience it is still out there. Just stop worrying about what other people are doing.

You’re right that the old web is still there if you look for it. But there’s a difference between searching for needles in a needle-box and a haystack

Then build a needle box? Do your needles exist in a world without hay?

> but the web still exists and general purpose computers are still available

For how long?

Computers are simply too powerful and subversive. The powerful and wealthy don't think people should have unrestricted computers. Corporations locking down computers for the sake of copyright is nothing compared to governments cracking down on truly subversive technology such as encryption and anonymization tools.

It's only a matter of time before truly free computers become a thing of the past.

Dan would eventually find out about the free kernels, even entire free operating systems, that had existed around the turn of the century. But not only were they illegal, like debuggers—you could not install one if you had one, without knowing your computer's root password.

> The powerful and wealthy don’t think people should have unrestricted computers.

Citation needed on that one, big time. All of the locking down by computer vendors we’ve seen to date is pretty well explained by more boring but strong commercial benefits (e.g. app stores) and catering to users who couldn’t care less about whether their phones are “general purpose computers” and just don’t want to have to think too hard before they download an app or click a link. It’s also unclear to me how computers being able to run arbitrary code is the part these puppet masters would care about. As long as these devices have browsers (and they pretty much all do, even game consoles now) pretty much all the practical ability to be subversive is still there.

I’ll worry when they outlaw/restrict at least one of: unrestricted browsers, wordpress, wordpress hosting. As long as those are around (and right now they’re highly commercially desired, so good luck to the puppet masters) you can get your thoughts out on the internet for chump change. If fixing the current state of discourse on Facebook is the last great hope for maintaining heterodox thought, we’re totally screwed even if we nationalize it or whatever.

> All of the locking down by computer vendors we’ve seen to date is pretty well explained by more boring but strong commercial benefits (e.g. app stores)

Yes. See also the copyright and advertising industries. Free unrestricted computing is directly opposed to the business interests of these multi-billion dollar industries. Simply because it gives me the power to block their stupid ads and tracking or copy their data without paying for it. They obviously don't want anyone to have this power and the only way to achieve that outcome is by destroying computing freedom. In order for me to not have this power, they must necessarily make it so that my computer does not obey me.

I have no doubt there are more examples out there that I don't know about. Hopefully others will post about them as well.

Like I said, these commercial interests are nothing compared to the big picture surrounding government control of computers. This is already a reality in certain niches such as radio: government agencies already try to control how radio equipment works and I have no doubt they will require trusted computing if they don't already. There have been several attempts to regulate encryption in the US. In the other Five Eyes, particularly Australia, these attempts have been more or less successful.

> I’ll worry when they outlaw/restrict at least one of: unrestricted browsers, wordpress, wordpress hosting.

What makes you think they won't be restricted? This is already a reality in certain parts of the world and the west is becoming ever more friendly to these ideas.

>When I see these complaints I see people talking about how they want other people to use the Internet and computers. That smells like authoritarianism.

>If you want to contribute to an open web then do it. It’s not your job to get our metaphorical racist uncles on mastodon or something. Why would you even want that?

Because you boycotting things won't change anything, only you plus a likeminded demographic.

If you want that demographic to work with you, you have to communicate - you have to evangelize.

> There’s definitely closed platforms both hard and soft but the web still exists and general purpose computers are still available... The romanticized “old web” was just a product of massive selection bias that still exists. If you want that experience it is still out there.

Honestly, I think this is somewhat of a misnomer. You're correct that you can decide to host your own Mastodon instance if you like. But on what?

If the open web really depends on general purpose computers, then it's somewhat disingenuous to suggest that people should just spin up instances on some cloud provider, because that locks people into that cloud provider. The old web didn't have that property - if you used a colocation provider and wanted to switch, you drove down, picked up your hard drives, and left.

The real reason why the internet centralized was because decentralization was never truly feasible. ISPs almost never granted static IP addresses to residential customers. Today, even residential fiber connections often don't offer symmetrical speeds. And why not? Because regulators never required it of residential ISPs. You can't sell a networked appliance that preserves user ownership and control on a remote-access featureset if your market doesn't have access to ISPs that will permit that! Is it any wonder that most "smart home" appliances and gadgets connect out to a central remote service to offer access outside the home?

The old web may have seemed decentralized, but it was never democratic. It had many "centers" that were non-corporate (and so, never aspired to reach the size of Facebook etc.), and with a strong selection bias for people willing to deal with colo-providers and shared hosting. Forget the decentralized web - we will never have a democratic web until people have been empowered to treat service hosting the way we think about our other rights secured under the Fourth Amendment - our persons (i.e. biohacking), houses (i.e. home appliances), papers (i.e. our personal data), and effects (i.e. wearables, automobiles).

> If the open web really depends on general purpose computers, then it's somewhat disingenuous to suggest that people should just spin up instances on some cloud provider, because that locks people into that cloud provider. The old web didn't have that property - if you used a colocation provider and wanted to switch, you drove down, picked up your hard drives, and left.

Same now, easier in fact. If I want to migrate from linode to digital ocean I simply restore my backup image. Indeed I do this automatically -- I have a site running on an AWS lightsail instance, which is backed up nightly to a linode server, and that backup is restored automatically onto linode with a minor script that changes the URLs from my production site to my test site.

It's far more accessible than running my own server in a colocation.

Right, it's not that it's technically impossible, you just pay for data egress. And data egress is expensive precisely to lock you in. I used the colo example because removing hard drives from the colo premises doesn't involve data egress charges.

I don't know how much data you have on your websites, but my daily backup tar is under 3GB, or under 100GB a month. My $5/month lightsail server comes with 2TB a month, and linode 1TB.

So probably the number one home usecase would be to manage social media, emphasis on media. Not just your photos and videos, at very high quality (4k+) at that, but also saving any photos or videos of others that are shared with you and that you wish to save (or share further).

This is not to mention that, if you really own your data, and you control it in your house, then really you should be able to store Big Data at home. Everything from the telemetry of the things you own, to your medical data (a link to which, in standard format, you can discreetly share with a doctor you authorize) and your home security controls (which serve you and aren't dependent on some cloud provider). CCTV isn't cheap to store on the cloud.

A couple of terabytes wouldn't be nearly enough.

> The real reason why the internet centralized was because decentralization was never truly feasible.

…in the U.S.

> ISPs almost never granted static IP addresses to residential customers.

…in the U.S.

> Today, even residential fiber connections often don't offer symmetrical speeds.

…in the U.S.

Well, as the U.S. goes, so does much of the rest of the world. If a home networking appliance doesn't make sense for the American market, it's much less likely to be built in the first place for a smaller, non-American market.

Residential customers get static IP addresses here.

Where are you? Also, are they IPv6 or IPv4 addresses?

Eastern Europe. IPv4.

> That smells like authoritarianism.

It might surprise you that the entire world is not the US, with a huge "muh freedom" fetish that somehow transcends good sense in every conversation. Just because you don't like it when people judge others for ethically reprehensible practices does not mean that suddenly they're "authoritarian". Even if it did, that wouldn't be a bad thing. Keeping society ethical is hard work and sometimes that means calling people out on their bullshit.

Not from the US but it isn't that hard to imagine where removing "ethically reprehensible" content will lead to, especially with a global perspective.

I take the freedom, thank you very much. You think there is a consensus about that and there is mostly on the worst stuff out there, but that is where this common sense ends.

> Not from the US but it isn't that hard to imagine where removing "ethically reprehensible" content will lead to, especially with a global perspective.

Well, in the US you don't use "ethical" reasons to remove things, but use copyright.

The issue however is the same: Globally the understanding of what is "inappropriate" is different and there are overreaching attempts to take things down and different rules globally make this really hard.

However "anything goes" can't be the answer either. I guess most could agree on child abuse to be unacceptable. Beyond that it becomes complicated.

If all you can see is "nazis everywhere" and "literally nothing allowed", yes it's going to be a disaster. The point is that there are things to discuss and agree about internationally. That's what it means to be an adult and have international politics. Black and white thinking is for primary school, when brains are still too underdeveloped to understand nuance.

It's not about romanticism. It's about the fact that almost all value is extracted by Google and Facebook, that the web doesn't inspire a younger generation, that reviews are gamed, that even politicians, authorities, and public broadcasters post on proprietary message boards to feed polarized masses, that there's an industry employing extortionate practices (blackout shops and restaurants not willing to pay from public presence through network effects), aggregators taking undue money for payment services, musicians having to go to "platforms" where they get screwed, citizens and pupils needing to kiss the ring of an ad company to access information, monopolies taking over web and IP infrastructure and standardization to create enormous craptastic media formats to make it impossible to create browsers from scratch, ever again. Hell, even F/OSS developers have been brainwashed to bring all their traffic to github and create fscking webapps.

The web was supposed to work like http://person/thing but turned into http://thing/person. We didn't need that; that was exactly what we had before.

When was the last time you went to a new website? Listen to new music?

The web isn't dying; it's dead already. The only question is if we can eventually come up with a truly recommendable way to author and distribute text and other media digitally that'll serve us as well as books.

What’s a blackout shop? I googled it but didn’t find much (this has become more common. Google’s search seems to get less useful for finding new info daily)

For me it just represents Linux generation coming to grips with reality, most of it they have to blame themselves by shitting on the GPL, and pushing everyone to adopt Chrome.

For me, growing up with closed platforms, shareware, and tools that people actually paid for, it is business as usual.

What do you mean about shitting on GPL and adopting Chrome?

Most Google fanboys I know have come around and accepted that it is now a publicly traded company and not the small underdogs where good engineering and design came first.

It is quite visible here every time someone posts a GPL based library/application, or the recurring mentions of using Electron, Chromebooks or Chrome developer tools.

> When I see these complaints I see people talking about how they want other people to use the Internet and computers. That smells like authoritarianism.

That's not authoritarianism, it's a reaction to authoritarianism. Internet is mass market now, and mass market is distributed authoritarianism. Individuals have no meaningful say over how computing looks for them.

General-purpose computers are still available, but it's not a given there will be for much longer. There are many market incentives working against them. Music and movie industries wants to get rid of general-purpose computers to a) eliminate problem of piracy, and b) exploit customers more. Web industry side-stepped general-purpose computing entirely, by providing software as a service, hosted on company-owned infrastructure. Corporations want to control the machines people work on for reasons like espionage prevention and liability (the true meaning of "security"). This creates strong business incentives for things like Trusted Computing. Most end-users don't even understand what "general-purpose computing" means, much less care. Those who do care, are too small a group to form a market-significant niche.

If talk about open web and general-purpose computing seem authoritarian, it's because it's either that or nothing. As a developer, I can spend my time optimizing my little subspace of computing for sanity and ergonomics, but I still have to interface with increasingly closed world to do anything. Despite web technologies technically being somewhat open, I still have to deal with shitty garbage websites of my bank, of stores and restaurants I order from, etc. - because I have only so much spare time to up-fix things myself. The only way we get less shitty computing is if the market is forced to deliver it.

One problem with the coexistence argument is state regulation.

Because so much of the web is a corporate-operated SAAS, regulation is being made that assumes that everything on the internet is a corporate-operated SAAS. The people who make the laws don't understand (or really care about) the potential of networked general purpose computers who can send arbitrary messages and perform arbitrary computations. What they know is platforms and services: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Signal, ...

The problem is that things that don't fit this mold will 'accidentally' become illegal by virtue of compliance being impossible for the authors of such software.

Look at the upcoming EU regulation about encryption, terrorism related content, copyright enforcement. Everything is aimed at the platform companies but in effect regulates all software as though it were a platform. There always has to be an employee who can process takedown requests, or provide access to cops.

In the eyes of "serious people" making laws, this problem does not exist, because everything that lives on the internet is a platform, backed by a corporation. There is no attempt to suppress alternatives, they are just not acknowledged to exist and matter, and thus become banned by collateral damage. If they did exist and had tons of users, those laws could never pass.

The internet used to be a series of tubes, now it's a series of platforms.

We as citizens have a duty to keep politicians accountable - and that includes campaigning against those unwilling to educate themselves and getting rid of them.

You're assuming the "other side" politicians would not act very similarly. Unfortunately, that assumption is usually wrong, so merely campaigning against such candidates is really not enough.

Currently that’s most politicians, and effectively all politicians that are in the majority parties worldwide.

Thank you for pointing this out:

"n the eyes of "serious people" making laws, this problem does not exist, because everything that lives on the internet is a platform, backed by a corporation"

You've shined the spotlight on exactly what is wrong with the way the internet is being regulated.

I haven't familiarized myself with the legislation you mention, but from your characterization, that sounds like more of an EU problem than an Internet problem.

You seem to be ignoring that the US and Australia are trying similar things with encryption. China is already even worse. That would cover almost all the internet.

Australia has been trying to do this for a decade at least. In fact they technically already have — they can demand that I, as an Australian citizen, build in a Backdoor for the federal police and intelligence services into any system I work on, and gag me from speaking about it.

>When I see these complaints I see people talking about how they want other people to use the Internet and computers. That smells like authoritarianism.

Your comment smells like libertarianism. Exercising some influence over how others behave is not authoritarianism. You have to consider that (1) most users are ignorant of how the web works and are vulnerable to being exploited by those who are; and (2) that exploitation has a chilling effect on the rest of the open web.

Technology workers have an ethical obligation to be good stewards of the technology experienced by the techno-illiterate.

I think they have the obligation to give the "techno-illiterate" the possibility for growth beyond the diagnosed illiteracy and little else, basically the exact same tools the previous generation had until it got the understanding.

Don't buy an iPad for your kid. It will just get dusty because it already has a phone, which can do the exact same things. Some people think computers are too complicated for kids. I think they themselves could use an outline instead.

I don't think it is this. It is about monopolies. The FTC and SEC have failed us. Monopolies tend to have some positive aspects because of economies of scale but it destroys innovation and competition. Just because an unusable piece of tech exists, doesn't make it open web. Just look at the rise of Slack: IRC has been around forever but never used en masse. There should be forced interoperability given the amount of government money spent on research that created the internet and its tools.

I think as long as there is a profit to be made it will be healthy and happy both the open web and hardware. I'm more concerned about governments removing protections like Section 230 and principles such as net neutrality. It's also why I would like to see huge companies like Facebook and Google busted up into 3 or 4 pieces. You can get "too big". I'm afraid the capitalism fails at such ludicrously large legal entities and history has shown us this.

I don't think it's so much about promoting Mastodon than worrying Google Chrome may become next Flash.

"When I see these complaints I see people talking about how they want other people to use the Internet and computers. That smells like authoritarianism."

Complaining about social, political, or economic trends is not authoritarianism.

This article starts by citing problems which could be solved using a more "open web." But then the author proposes their own centralized discovery service, Insight, as an aggregated platform for comparison. It seems pretty obvious that the endgame of this product would be just another Amazon. Why would it turn out any differently for the "curators" on the Insight "platform"?

Beyond that the author's specific arguments don't feel very convincing to me:

> Think about the last time you did some research, e.g. choosing a phone plan. You asked your friends, compared on forums, looked at the official sites, scribbled some notes and made a decision. Even if this journey was quick, you likely traversed a dozen services and products to do this.

The only site I went to is reddit. reddit is where I go to get on the ground crowdsourced recommendations (e.g. I buy coffee equipment by researching on r/coffee). In fact I avoid searching for this kind of thing widely, because I get a bunch of random blogs and content marketing sites of questionable provenance and accuracy.

> Over the years you keep shopping there, until you've forgotten that

- free 2 day shipping is now near universal - amazon isn't often the cheapest place

Well no, free 2 day shipping is not "near universal." I still find most sites which aren't themselves backed by giant corporations (and even so which are!) don't even have multiple shipping speed options, let alone free 2 day shipping. I also have a degree of trust in Prime shipping and I've never personally had a painful experience returning anything to Amazon.

Wait until reddit is fully captured by the groups that do that sort of content marketing.

Yeah, that might happen. I'd have to find an alternative in that case. Whatever I replace it with would probably still be another highly centralized source though.

I know a couple of people who go through these types of Reddit threads and embed referral links into their answers.

Quora is already filled with growth hacker answers.

We are more captured than we think.

Doesn't reddit automatically strip referral links and put in their own? I thought they started doing that a few years ago as a monetization strategy but I could be wrong.

The content marketers have had a work around for that for years.

Just answer the asked question relatively narrowly, then link to a detailed write up on their affiliate site. Note that the article may have already been there (not that uncommon), but sometimes the article was custom-written for that specific reddit post.

It is really tough for reddit to capture money from these posts or prevent links to the affiliate site because the content marketer is providing (perhaps minimal) value to the community, and a link to their more detailed response is usually not a link that will get reported or deleted because it prevents "walls of text"/detailed answers that some redditors seem to despise.

Does anybody click on such articles? I'd think any subreddit I used for product recommendation would immediately delete such comment and ban the author. I'd also think content marketers would be smarter than to do that.

Yes.

It really depends on if it looks scammy or not.

Some criteria:

1. The question asked on Reddit needs to be answered completely on Reddit — that is, without a need to click on a link.

2. The linked article need to be relevant and informative to the asked question, while also providing more relevant information than was originally asked for but might actually be desired. If all of these links to articles were instantly deleted, then it would be a disservice to the community.

3. Some subreddits are absolutely sticklers about affiliate sites, and I imagine affiliate marketers avoid them. Moderation is not easy, but it does require a balance between meeting the needs of the passive users and the content creators.

Growth hackers, lol

How about "spammers"?

There are many similarities. The growth hackers usually do a better quality job though.

Reddit, along with Wikipedia, seems to have already slowly been claimed by groups pushing you to buy, only they're seeking something besides (direct) transfer of stuff for cash: buy-in and validation of which political positions are even valid to consider holding, let alone actually adopting. I'm on the left myself (although I think in terms of being liberal first over being "a part of the left"), and as Jon Stewart said during simpler times, "Reality has a liberal bias!", so I don't see it as much a direct threat to my existence as say a center-right conservative would, but oh geez. It's been getting really intense over the last year or two. Over the summer I was listening to a podcast where someone was discussing the remarks of a non-partisan entity (can't remember who, but the podcast itself was The Fifth Column), and the hosts referred to the undertones of those remarks as having an "implied 'we'".

Because the fervor doesn't match what I see in real life, I really do wonder how much of what's happening reflects actual public sentiment, and how much of it is the result of more subtle, nefarious things at play.

I recently found a Wikipedia article where some media organization had published an interview with a public entertainer, only rather than linking to this interview, the Wikipedia article in an attempt to cite a reference for the entertainer's quote linked instead to a Vox article that was, in consideration of prosaic matters alone, much worse than the original source. Of course it was really heavy-handed, too, and overstuffed with "implied 'we'". How did that happen, that piece getting linked in place of the original? Was it the result of laziness, ignorance, or something more intentional? I didn't dive into it (too much of a quagmire to try to wade in and correct it, either), but I wouldn't doubt if there was some monetary cause related to the big business of politics. It's certainly happening in other places.

It's probably related to their policy of preferring secondary sources[1]. (Without a link to the article in question though I can only guess.) You could argue this is a bad policy, but it's certainly not a new one.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_original_research...

Not at all. If a journalist interviews someone and then goes to print, and a Wikipedia article is trying to cite a source for something the interviewee said, you don't need another organization to quote the part of the article where the interviewee's words appear in order for a secondary source to come into existence. The article where the quote was first printed is a valid secondary source.

> Because the fervor doesn't match what I see in real life, I really do wonder how much of what's happening reflects actual public sentiment, and how much of it is the result of more subtle, nefarious things at play.

Even though it's one of the biggest online platforms, it's still a niche demographic. It's pockmarked by enough differing opinions that you can feel like it's a good representation, but the US has 320 million people in it, and it's hard to find concrete stats but it seems there are around 30-45 million US reddit users. Only some of them would comment on any particular topic, so what you're reading is a curated voice of a particular demographic self selecting their participation in various topics.

As a microcosm of this, checkout the Motorcycle subreddit. You'd be fooled into thinking everyone rides with full leathers and helmets on, and that the entire motorcycle community feels really strongly about it, and that it's a rare sight to see someone without gear on. But it's extremely common to see people riding without full gear in the real world.

That's why all these big political shakeups take that bubble by surprise. Reddit didn't think Brexit could happen, they didn't think Trump 2016 would happen, and it doesn't matter what your political flavours are, my conclusion is that Reddit as a hive mind doesn't really have that good of a grasp of reality.

I'd argue that is already is. Wasn't there some big controversy about a SuperMod that was paid by companies to manage Reddit for them all day?

The only place left for good recommendations is the same place that was good for it all those years ago - closed small niche forums (discord servers fill that gap nowdays) and personal recommendations by people you know in real life

When I want to search "the best something", the query is always preceded by "site:reddit.com". It's really hard to get an honest review otherwise.

But considering how easy it is to game reddit I'm not so sure I can trust it anymore.

All r/hailcorporate I guess...

Hi, blog post OP here. While Reddit has its own challenges, it proven quite resilient to this particular form of content quality drop.

We found that this is such a common workflow with our first few users that we've built it in as a default search engine suggestion and also I wrote this extension for it that we use.

http://share.insightbrowser.com/4

Yeah I seen if you post a specific corporation name, your topic will be bombarded by some companies astroturfing.

You bet every fortune 500 company has a reputation management company willing to "guide the conversation" with a few positive comments and a barrage of upvotes/downvoted.

> I also shop at Amazon because I have a degree of trust in Prime items and I've never personally had a painful experience returning something.

My degree of trust in prime is rapidly eroding and returning things is painful in general (because it's a physical item, not because it's amazon)

I ordered a small food scale to replace one I thought I had lost in a move.

Of course the day the replacement arrived, my wife pulled the old one out of the closet she had stashed it in.

I went to return the one I just bought and Amazon simply said to keep it and they would refund me because it wasn't worth shipping back to them.

Obviously won't work for everything and I imagine if I do that very often they won't let me anymore, but it's the best return experience I've ever had.

I accidentally ordered $200 worth of items through prime pantry, 95% non-perishables (including 24pk Monster, Solo cups, paper plates/bowls) to my home in the MidWest instead of where I was at on the West Coast.

2 minute phonecall, said keep everything and instantly refunded the entire order as a credit (my choice)

Luckily had somebody to bring everything inside back home too, haha.

I use the "return at Kohl's" option for amazon items, and it has been super easy. Don't even have to box the item up.

Anecdotally I got some great recommendations to gym equipment on Twitter.

I tweeted what was best for small space living and got great responses immediately.

> reddit is where I go to get on the ground crowdsourced recommendations

I would be careful about this on reddit. Subreddit communities are heavily influenced by fotm, everyone repeating the same thing(there's a word for this and i cant think of it...) Dissenting opinions to what ever is main stream gets downvoted. Reddit communities are also heavy on beginners. Those beginners often don't realize how much depth of knowledge they are missing.

It might be a place to bounce ideas off, but I would only go there after doing some of my own research. It should only be one tool of many.

In areas I consider myself knowledgeable, I see terrible advice given out. Often parroted by beginners. Like people in the headphone subreddit can give recommendations without listening to them. cscareerquestions is the blind leading the blind more often then not. There's no way to differentiate experience with someone fishing for upvotes or think they're being helpful by repeating someone else's advice.

I also think there's some astroturfing going on sometimes

> everyone repeating the same thing

Maybe "hive mind" is what you were thinking of (at least, I see it a lot in reference to Reddit)?

I think it's called "echo chamber".

yes there it is, though the other is accurate too

> I also think there's some astroturfing going on sometimes

Marketing companies figured this out a long time ago. Even HN had a headline recently that was something like "use subreddits to drive app adoption".

I mean, you can predict somewhat how headphones will sound based on a FR graph.

Careful, yes. It's not a good idea to just pop up on Reddit and buy whatever the first thing you see them recommend is. You need to do some minimum amount of critical thinking. You need to spend some time browsing a given subreddit.

The idea behind using Reddit for product recommendation is the observation that an active community of enthusiast of some niche is hard to game by marketers - such community will try to moderate away spam, as it interferes with their regular discussion, and expert community members will be able to call astroturfers on their bullshit. It's orders of magnitude more reliable a source than in-store reviews and most review sites, as they're all thoroughly gamed and/or owned by marketers. But you do need a little bit of critical thinking to evaluate what you read there.

Another point is that reddit easily to have one side opinion. It is hard to take a look at top downvote replies in popular threads. Are there any reasons to make downvote unsearchable/un-sortable? It feels like an upvotes' justice censoring tool to control the trend. Who gains the upvotes who leads the crowd.

> I've never personally had a painful experience returning anything to Amazon.

This is the number one reason I buy from Amazon. 90% of the time, it doesn't make a difference for me whether my purchase arrives in 2 days or 4 days. What matters is that if I do not like it, it is super simple and convenient for me to return it. I don't even have to put it in a box of print a label these days. I can just take the items to UPS or Kohl's, show them my phone code, and give it to them.

No other online retailer comes close to this level of convenience for returns.

Hi, and thanks for the feedback! I'm the original author of that post.

> Insight, as an aggregated platform for comparison. It seems pretty obvious that the endgame of this product would be just another Amazon. Why would it turn out any differently for the "curators" on the Insight "platform"?

Perhaps some of the writing was unclear, but I just wanted to clarify that Insight the is not a centralized service. It's an extensible mobile browser where you can choose as the user what the alternative services will be.

We suggest a few out of the box because we think that's important to making extensions lower friction and easier to discover, but ultimately you can override them with your own choice.

I think this is important to give the user that power in client app, and our schema for extensions is expressible in JSON for interoperability.

Thanks for the comment and for pointing this out!

The open web isn't dying. It's just that everyone isn't using it daily.

Think about this: back in the good old days that you harken back to when you say "open web", could you send your grandma a meme? No? So then what's wrong with the fact that the current open web is, although not all encompassing of internet users, many times larger than it was back then?

Why do we say the real internet is dying just because the 5 most used websites aren't open? The open web is very, very open. But your mom doesn't use it to watch videos. You've got Gemini, ActivityPub, Tor, bittorrent, i2p, IPFS, OpenNIC, and hundreds of other cool things that nobody can stop or control. Many of these things are less than 10 years old.

There's an open web, it is growing, it is rich with information, creativity and diversity (including diversity of thought for the monoculture members out there), and all you have to do to use it is to take an interest. If you don't like the closed web. Stop using it.

> back in the good old days that you harken back to when you say "open web", could you send your grandma a meme? No?

Yes. You'd put it in email.

Hell, I remember as a kid in the 1990s, my dad would sometimes bring us memes... on paper. He worked in a bank, and back in those days, an e-mail chain full of jokes was common in an office environment. He'd occasionally print one out and show it to us.

Office life was so much better back then. Now it is basically a fortress only a few chosen can flee from. I would like to give that back to the less fortunate, but there are other dynamics that make this very difficult.

One think is certain though: It certainly didn't increase productivity.

Okay so I just signed up for the beta of their web browser, why not give it a shot, right?

It turns out that its just a reskin of mobile Firefox, with an extremely, and I mean extremely, limited if-then "extensions" feature. Doing a great job at "showcasing the web's infinite extensibility and customizability".

They also tout the (Firefox's) adblocker, even going as far as to say it will "Block every ad..." on their marketing page (technically impossible).

Just because a company has an orange Y on their homepage doesn't mean their product is good. I'm not saying that it won't be good in the future, but steer clear for now.

Money got us into the mess we are in[1], it is up to the real[2] community to get us out.

[1] Standardized DRM, the impossibility of building a browser engine, etc

[2] By "real" I don't mean corporations that symbolically showcase their "<3 of open source", while profiting off of it

Thanks for the feedback! As the site mentions, we're still in beta, so feedback is super helpful.

1. Yes, it's forked from Firefox, this is a fairly common starting codebase and compatible license for making a browser, Brave does the same thing. Also, I used to work at Mozilla so I trust their codebase a lot as a starting point.

There's a lot more that Insight can do that Firefox doesn't but that isn't apparent, then I think the onus is on us for communicating that to new users better.

2. The AdBlocking ruleset is actually a superset of Firefox, but it is still limited by Safari's 50k rule limit — https://www.zdnet.com/article/apple-neutered-ad-blockers-in-... The main thing we can do to get in addition to this is the ability to inject JS (this is a class of extension) to block anything else you see fit.

3. Apple enforces OS and API level restrictions on a browser, (e.g. must use WKWebView). There's some things you just can't do that you could if you say forked Chromium or Firefox on desktop.

In general, we're trying to make a browser within the UI and technical constraints of iOS that is

1. very easy to build extensions for (usually no code) 2. has an easy to use interface without the complexity of desktop extensions

In order to achieve that, we did have to simplify compared to WebExtensions. Even though the basic interface is IF-THEN (we adopted this so the easiest level of making extensions can be no-code), you should be able to do a lot with it via JS.

Let me know if there's important use cases you have that you have for a mobile browser that you feel is impossible within our framework — that'd be really helpful feedback as well.

Thanks for trying it out!

> Money got us into the mess we are in[1], it is up to the real[2] community to get us out.

I would state this as - enabling businesses to be as extractive as they currently are got us into a difficult place. People I know hold views on what can get us out on the full range from:

a)the solutions having to be structurally decentralized to b) only heavy centralization can wield enough distribution power to mount a strong opposition.

The position we're taking as a startup with this product is that we have to walk the walk of making the web actually more user-centric than the app alternatives because there's really no reason to adopt us unless we deliver on these promises.

What I personally don't understand is why there are literally tons of Firefox forks out there, each on their own claiming to be open without an accessible codebase. And not only that, but also limiting users sometimes even in what they can do with it when they don't pay up.

I understand that money is necessary to survive, but if you claim to be open at least communicate what the money is used for.

Personally I tried to go with foundations and applied to a lot of them, whereas I wasn't accepted anywhere...so now I have to build a company, too, in order to guarantee the project's survival - without accepting foreign money to guarantee its moral baseline, which makes it hard, very hard to bootstrap. [1]

Coming up with a viable working business model for a web browser is harder than someone might think, especially if you need funds to keep your stomach fed.

I'm not saying that it's a good thing what they did, I'm just saying that I understand their problems.

The difference to myself (being seen as a competitor) is that their project will be abandoned once investors get unhappy with their growth, which is a compromise I am never gonna accept if I really care about the "openness" of the web.

[1] https://github.com/tholian-network

I think it is necessary to work to start to actually make a new browser engine from the start, rather than being based on an existing one (except possibly some of the code from NetSurf). I wrote a list of how to make a better web browser (among other things, half of JavaScript DOM APIs are not implemented or are implemented differently, many core features (including some of the definitions of HTML and of the core protocols) are actually included extensions, and extensions would be commonly written in C for efficiency). Some things might not be compatible, but I don't care. I want full control as a user, and I want it for assuming the user has read the documentation and knows how to do it, rather than being stupid and trying to protect the user from themself, better is to allowing you to "have enough ropes to hang yourself and also a few more just in case" like the UNIX philosophy is. (People who don't like that can continue to use the browsers they have.)

I can post the list I have later once I have written a bit more.

Reading people complaining how open web is dying is like listening to my uncle whining about his job as a butcher and miserable life in general. Yet he goes to supermarket every day to buy a cheap meat and salami to make a "good meal" and spends the rest of his day sitting in front of TV drinking beer and vodka. Every day.

Web is still the same. There are walled gardens and there are gardens without walls. And that is a manifestation of openess. Everybody can build anything and hang around anywhere he pleases. What a beautiful and truly open world.

This article is mostly ad to a browser. That's another manifestation how open web is. You. can. make. own. browsers.

>You. can. make. own. browsers

With the growing marketshare of chromium-only based browsers, I'm concerned that this will not be the case for long. It doesen't matter how many browsers there are if they can't implement the monopoly's proprietary standards

What proprietary standards do you mean? Web technologies aren't proprietary.

Great. Go build me a browser capable of streaming 4k video across all major streaming providers and accessing Windvine DRM (all levels).

Oh, and make it work flawlessly across every site (including the top 10,000 alexa sites) without any issues at all. And try and wade through the mountains of chroumium exclusive bullshit (Google makes the standards).

Go talk to Mozilla about how easy that is (they even have to spoof UA strings to make things work properly).

Good luck.

"complex" isn't equivalent to proprietary. I doubt it's easy to write a Linux fork, either.

All the examples they gave were proprietary or non-standard features , not just "complex".

And none of the examples they gave are necessary for a functioning browser.

Do correct me if I'm wrong, but Google's Widevine and similar DRM technologies seem to be. I have to manually install a blob in order to stream video from sites like Netflix.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Plugins/Flash_to_HT...

You don't have to install anything if you don't want to. You are free to not watch tv shows you don't want to.

Some content creators protect their's content more some less. What has that to do with open web?

Why are these things starting to sound the same, and somehow being framed as "freedom" and "choice"...

If you don't like Facebook/Youtube/Reddit censorship(moderation), you are free not to use them (they are private platform).

If you don't like installing proprietary blobs to watch Netflix, you are free not to use Netflix (they are a private company).

If you don't like paying taxes / agree with government, you are free to not live here and move to Somalia (this is voluntary society and you choose to pay taxes!).

I'm sure there are few other similar ones, just can't recall them at the moment.

Suppose that in order to render stylized web pages, you had to install a non-free binary blob. You're free to not render websites you don't want to, and scroll through what's akin to a minimal HTML tree.

Some content creators protect how their websites look more, some less. Would you still consider CSS a part of the open web?

People like you don't actually understand the problem. It's not about technology or freedom of choice. It's a social problem. Good luck interacting in your free and open forum without anyone to interact with. It's about social manipulation. We are gradually onboarded to these things, and your freedom of choice is suddenly not as easy. If you want to even communicate with your family and friends, you need to join in.

The thing you described seems like your own personal social problem to me. YOU want to communicate with someone who uses different tools which he is happy with. What would you want them to do? Use some different tool you approve? That doesn't sound very open to me.

Openness means they'd be able to communicate with someone who uses different tools, because on an open web, tools would be interoperable.

I should be able to use Messenger, Whatsapp and Slack from a common app of my choosing - or write one if it doesn't exist. But I can't, because I'm prevented by Terms of Service and technological means these services use to enforce a closed environment.

It's scary to see how self-oblivious und frenzied the average American (plus their "society", what's left of it anyway) has become to not see how shitty things have turned out (and I don't mean the technological side)...

Personally I turned my back on most of the web some time ago. It's not the right reaction but it does keep my sanity.

It's high time for a new beginning, but that's complicated :(

>You. can. make. own. browsers

You can't make your own browser anymore. The complexity of HTTP, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and soon QUIC (in place of TCP) has grown to the point where only a handful of large, well-capitalized institutions (and really only Google, if you consider WebKit's ubiquity) can develop and maintain a secure, efficient, modern web browser. Most alternative browsers, even forks of Firefox/Mozilla, have either been abandoned, or fallen so far behind that they have no future.

This is almost certainly deliberate on Google's part. They want to control the browser, because outside of apps, it's through the browser that they deliver ads, and over 80% of their revenue comes from ads, and the more they control the browser, the harder they can make it to block ads. They don't even have to prevent it fully; just make it so difficult that only a small minority of technically-inclined, and sufficiently motivated users will do it.

I should add: I have trouble these days even just using Firefox. Apparently, since its marketshare has dwindled to 3%, many sites either just don't support it, or their fraud detection algorithms view it as suspicious. E.g.: a bank I use has a website that supports Edge, but not FF; I tried to buy something through Amazon with FF a few months ago, and the account immediately got locked for "suspicious activity." Maybe I would have had similar troubles using Chrome on the iPhone, but I doubt it.

Imagine how useless an alternative browser more obscure than FF would be; you wouldn't be able to buy or sell anything, do any banking, and even basic, passive web browsing would result in never-ending CAPTCHAs on many sites.

Yes you can. It is complex, will take plenty of time and effort but you can. And that is what open means.

Now if you complain about complexity that's another thing. Yes it is complex a lot. But it did evolve this way for some reason. Our communities, desires, tools, problems, they are all complex and that's why web is also complex. But if you don't like the complexity you can use only subset of the technologies. You can read only plain HTML blogs on web and don't use any eshops for example. Or not use technology or even web at all.

> really only Google, if you consider WebKit's ubiquity

WebKit is the rendering engine that powers Safari, and is an Apple project.

Did you mean to say Blink?

(Disclosure: I work for Google, speaking only for myself)

> You. can. make. own. browsers.

Even Microsoft failed and had to fork chrome

"You. can. make. own. browsers." *

* Assuming you're an enormous corporation with endless pockets, because apparently even Microsoft couldn't keep up with "the modern web".

(Copied)

The Web itself remains, and so does the freedom to write compatible code.

This wonderful, miraculous platform has remained stable enough over this time for me to be able to plan ahead and not be caught off-guard by something like “we’re deprecating version 2.0, please use new version 3.0 syntax” or “your platform is now obsolete, please switch to the new HTML.NET”. The W3C gang tries, and they fail, because HTML is stronger and bigger than them. The Web is stronger and bigger than all of them combined.

Many have tried to contain it, to own it, to be the main one calling the shots, and HTML laughs in all their collective faces. All thanks to its basic concept of “be strict with yourself, and accepting with others.”

Mosaic was the first browser for which “best viewed with” buttons were used. They failed to own the Web. Then came Netscape, “Mosaic killa”, and they managed to kill Mosaic, but they failed to tame HTML, because HTML will not be owned. Netscape was destroyed by Microsoft-IE, who also wanted to tame and own HTML, and they also failed, because HTML is not ownable.

Then Firefox came and fucked up IE, and things were good for a while, Mozilla was a decent steward. Then Google came and took ownership of Mozilla, and together with Chrome they also tried to tame HTML. They will fail just like the others. HTML cannot be tamed or owned. The Web was built for freedom.

If you want composable, future-proof GUI, open up your notepad.exe and write this:

    <html>
    <head>
    <title>Hello, World!</title>
    </head>
    <body>
    <h1>Hello, World!</h1>
    <p>
    This is demonstration of
    proper composable, 
    future-proof, accessible GUI.
    </p>
    <form action="/">
    <input type=text 
    size=80 name=comment>
    <br>
    <input type=submit value=Go>
    </form>
    </body>
    </html>

This GUI will work as expected and render in 25+ years worth of platform. And it could have been composed by a 10-year-old.

> This GUI will work as expected and render in 25+ years worth of platform

It's not about syntax and language, it's about environment.

Compile 10 lines of hello_world.c into an ARM executable and send it to a friend using a 'walled garden' phone. It'll be useless to them even though it's technically correct.

Likewise the Web is being continually tightened and centralised. That HTML you wrote will soon require an HTTPS server, probably in a VPS because many ISPs block port 443. And the VPS provider has implemented a captcha in front to reduce botting, which links your visitor's data to another huge Internet corporation. Open web?

But not yet, and we can save it.

Yes yet and no we can't (and couldn't) save it.

I'm not sure what www/http/https you're using today but the web is royally fucked.

Source: Use VPN/TOR and try the "open internet", the first GOOGLE Recaptcha will break your will to live.

Then you'll just open Chrome instead. "Open", indeed.

Yup - you now have to "pay" to access certain websites. And you do so by proving you're a human and/or giving them free CV training data.

I agree, I face that all the time, and I consider that the AOL internet, closed to me, and just don't go there.

I don't think I'm missing much.

Dunno. HTTPS is kind of a pain but you can stick the HTML up on github and serve it on your own domain for free with HTTPS in a few minutes. Or a digital ocean or a bunch of other services with letsencrypt. It seems quite easy really.

While I agree that it is backwards compatible, I don't agree it's a GUI. It's a document, and HTML is a document standard. The GUI comes from the browser, whose creator can choose which standard to adhere to, if any. For proof, all you need to do is look at caniuse.com or MDN. Come to think of it, can you say with utmost certainty that today's HTML5 standard will continue to be supported in 25 years' time?

That's part of the problem with developing for the modern web - HTML isn't at all composable, because it has no concept of partial views, unless you count iframes.

While improvements have been made, it still poorly supports an app model, leaving us to add warts through JavaScript. Although even it is improving, it has plenty of its own warts.

In addition to not supporting an app model, the web wasn't built with online payments in mind, has no concept of online identity and no concept of data ownership.

The result: dark patterns like tracking cookies, wild growth of payment providers (good and bad), data siphoning, erosion of privacy and the expectancy thereof, and so on.

Quibble, but...

free 2 day shipping is now near universal

... uh, since when? Maybe for giant companies that can get sweetheart deals from FedEx or just build out their own last mile networks. But for all the small companies actually associated with the open web shipping still costs almost as much as the thing you're trying to buy.

I hope their programmers are better than their lawyers; the terms of service for their website require you to attest that "you are a physician or other healthcare professional". (https://insight.space/terms)

Where is that? I cannot find it.

They deleted it -- but you can still tell it was there. Look at the last paragraph in '1. Access to services'. The list beginning 'You represent and warrant to Company that' is missing an element because they deleted without reindexing.

It looks like they copied the terms of service directly from another one of their products, a browser for doctors: https://www.lumosbrowser.com/terms.pdf

This also explains the broken formatting: they copied from a PDF.

I was kinda surprised that the phrase "long tail" didn't come up in the OP. I think that the author's point can be well summed up as "the open web protects the long tail / diversity".

After all, why diversity is good for the society overall is a tricky question to answer.

>After all, why diversity is good for the society overall is a tricky question to answer.

Indeed. There are plenty of cultures seem to value "homogeneity" over diversity (at least by Western's world standard).

because diversity is an information discovery mechanism. More (or different) eyes see more. Diversity makes it so that your company figures out that the soap dispenser doesn't recognise dark skinned people in development, not when it already lands on the store shelf.

This phrase was definitely in the back of my mind while writing this and something I use in everyday conversation.

I just hesitated to use it because its one of those terms that's very common in search but has mixed usage levels outside search/ml/stats/data people, and I wanted to focus this post primarily on the UX aspect.

I think these walled gardens show how important distribution is.

Everyone complaints about record labels but artists are still signing onto deals.

With some talent and the right amount of luck (discoverability), unheard of people can float to the top.

To me, it's clear that discoverability is the problem with the open web. People are not willing to sink time and effort into creating something unless they have some assurance that they are going to get an audience. From a raw mechanics standpoint, it's relatively straightforward to put some content up on the Internet and give it a URL. But nobody will ever see it.

That is why people put everything they do on some sort of site with discoverability. Streamers stream content on Twitch, because it has that sidebar with people playing the same game and your stream could show up there, and people might click it. People upload videos to YouTube because YouTube will figure out what kind of video it is and recommend it to people interested in that type of video. People post to Facebook and Twitter because their friends can retweet it and spread it around their sphere of influence. People upload their apps to the app store because that's where people go for apps. (This is not new. People that create physical products certainly want to have their product on store shelves, so that people can randomly discover it.)

I think, honestly, Google cancelling Google Reader is what killed the open web. Google Reader made it easy for anyone to become a mini Facebook. If someone liked your writing, you were pretty much assured that they would be back when you wrote your next post. Google Reader gave them an app in which to random discover your next blog post, and there was enough stuff other than you in there to get people into the habit of checking for "something" every day (and that something was occasionally you).

But, it is a little unfair to say that's what killed it. What killed it was a "better way". Social media pretty much guarantees that someone will see and engage with your work, and that's what motivates people to do work. If you can bring that to the open web, you'll kill Facebook and Twitter overnight. Good luck.

(There are other things that contributed. One thing that bugs me in particular is Reddit's unwritten rule of not being allowed to submit your own work. Of course, there is too much spam when people submit their own stuff -- people are too emotionally invested in their creation to notice that it's bad or off-topic -- but it basically forces someone else to be the discoverability method. You have to post it to Twitter and hope that someone picks it up and puts it on Reddit. Or you have to build your audience some other way and make your own subreddit that people opt into. That sort of thing is helping social media and hurting the traditional link aggregator. HN does a much better job, but HN has the benefit of being relatively small, focused, and having professional moderation.)

It might exist, but I couldn't find the URI of any RSS feed for this blog, but a link to their Twitter profile was easy to find, which, all together, given their open web advocacy, is odd.

If I was going write a response to this it would be with the title "The Open Web is dead. Long live the Open Web"

People often look to Tim Berners-Lee for thought leadership on the web, as the pioneer of hypertext and now director of the W3C. But if you read, say, Roy Fielding's REST paper you'd notice things like this https://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertation/rest_arc... (and remember Roy was a co-founder of the Apache HTTP Server and contributor to https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2616.txt)

"Since centralized link servers are an anathema to the immense scale and multi-organizational domain requirements of the Web, REST relies instead on the author choosing a resource identifier that best fits the nature of the concept being identified. Naturally, the quality of an identifier is often proportional to the amount of money spent to retain its validity, which leads to broken links as ephemeral (or poorly supported) information moves or disappears over time."

The two things I take away here were...

- The guys working on the fundamentals of the web at that time couldn't imagine it would be possible to scale centralised services to serve links

- Money was a key consideration to determining "system quality" - they were not building utopian systems here - they knew there would be a relationship between which information would "succeed" and how much money was behind it

That in turn means the key to making a "better open web" is making it more economically viable and able to out-compete existing centralized services. That doesn't necessarily mean "distributed web" is the right answer

I have two personal websites. My main problem is that it is very hard to share them. Half of the subreddits don't accept links thanks to spammers. I don't use other social media... They are not the typical Hacker News link.

Generally speaking, thanks to spammer linking has become impossible outside of social media platforms.

If you care about the Web's openness and accessibility, register your own domain, host it yourself, and write Lynx-compatible HTML.

HTTP access for older browsers is a nice touch. If your site works with Netscape and Mosaic, it shows you mean business.

How do you register a domain? Can I do this without using JS and Google knowing? What's that, I need to do a Captcha and use my real information so that if I post ANYTHING someone doesn't like I can be shot in the head once they find me via WHOIS which every LEA on the planet has access to?

"Open", sure.

DNS and its per-TLD registration procedures/rules and mandatory protocols for transferring your domain to another registrar (depending on the respective TLD) are about as open as it gets. Which is probably why Google et al want to kill it via DNS-over-HTTP and complex amendments to the DNS protocols themselves.

Traffic to and from an HTTP site can be intercepted and spoofed by third parties.

Use HTTPS, always and everywhere.

HTTPS has its own downsides, and I disagree that you should always use it.

When accessibility is paramount, HTTP is still better, because the risk of MITM is overtaken by all the things that can break with HTTPS, such as:

Wrong SSL version

Client date is off

Client doesn't have proper certs installed

Server cert is broken or misconfigured

SSL takes too long to set up over slow connection

No one's going to MITM my blog, while using HTTPS often impairs my own ability to use it.

Also, if you think HTTPS can't be intercepted and spoofed by anyone, you're kidding yourself.

The article states that one strong characteristic of the open web is:

"Ease of publishing: anyone can publish to it freely or at least very cheaply, and is on the same footing with a globally accessible URL"

I'm working on a web-based OS (KaiOS), and let me tell you that many app authors actually see the need to setup hosting as a hurdle. Being able to just upload a package to a store is seen as the ultimate "easy publishing". Yes they lose some control, but they don't feel they need it in the first place.

Distribution of applications is only a subset of publishing. Mobile app developers often willing live in the walled garden because it is easier and more profitable, at least initially.

I don't understand why people keep making the jump that net neutrality means that ISPs and companies can't come to a deal that makes their websites "work faster."

I'm totally onboard that charging more or less for specific websites is a nasty move, but streaming systems wouldn't be nearly as workable if being able to place hardware in network POPs wasn't allowed.

> I'm totally onboard that charging more or less for specific websites is a nasty move, but streaming systems wouldn't be nearly as workable if being able to place hardware in network POPs wasn't allowed.

Well, it isn't allowed. For most of us.

Try it. Ask a major ISP if you can install hardware in their NOC. They'll say no. Unless you are a Netflix, YouTube or Prime and can both pay and have traffic is so large that the ISP will save money allowing it. Now try to compete as a new entrant into the space when your competition has actual hardware embedded at the ISP level.

That article is part of a sales pitch for the "insight browser" - a browser for iOS. People who care about the Open Web should probably want to avoid a device manufactured by/for one of the companies which makes it a point to keep its users in a closed garden.

Just saying.

Well. This article conflates three different complaints as one problem. That their browser supposedly mitigates. There are good articles about the open web vs closed for-profit ecosystems. This is not one of those articles.

You should care because that little trick you used to hop careers into a successful programming career isn’t because Google and Apple built really cool and powerful software and phones.

Maybe I'm an optimist but my guess is that as these companies begin to try harder to please shareholders (like the recent increase of YouTube ads), the walled gardens will become less attractive.

Walled gardens aren't even something new, AOL was a walled garden example from the 90s and people moved on quickly to a more open web.

What we need to ensure is that the open web is still technically feasible. I guess CDNs are not that important if your site isn't bloated, but it is a worrying trend.

Blogs are a thing of the past. Forums dead. News-groups pale compared to what they used to be a decade ago.

Instead we have twitter stories written in images, medium articles where I am asked to login and/or subscribe and Facebook groups open to those who want to participate in their ad machinery. When Googling for my hobbies, all I get are commercial web sites, no mor enews groups, fora, blogs, ... What a desaster.

I don't know how we can get people to write protocols over writing products.

Nowadays it's the natural evolution of thing, write a product from an idea, lock it down, and try to cash in as much as possible.

There is no financially viable paths for writing protocols and open source implementations of an idea. At least there is no clear path and it's far less viable.

Also seriously, who can be F'ed with RFCs.

This is just an ad.

I wrote a blog about this in 2015. In developing economies like India, this trend is more pronounced due to rapid adoption of mobile apps http://pranjan.blogspot.com/2015/04/is-app-only-economy-goin...

What evidence is there the open web is dying? At least here on HN I'd categorize 25 of the top 30 links as open web links.

Evidence is not provided since it's not dying. With the sentiment that the title suggests is really easy to attract attention compared to a happy and optimistic title which says the everything is fine.

> Download the Insight Beta for iOS

I thought the whole article was about how mobile apps are taking away from the open web.

The three listed criteria (ease of publishing, consuming, and remixing) accurately describe TikTok, so ... I'm not convinced this is a particularly useful definition of "the open web".

It was dead long time ago. China shut it off in decades. I guess like history meant western history, philosophy meant western philosophy hence no one noticed it is mostly a way trip - chinese firm can freely roam internet (but not chinese) but western firm cannot roam there. In fact whilst not always if you start from us and uk some chinese firm now block you.

It is like who, un, ... the stronger china meant a broken system as they are not really open up. Free trade if benefit then. No free information if not. After 2 decades and the west still not wake up. Good luck to humanity.

> preach about the open web and breaking the habit of forcing publishers to pay in order to survive

> "solution" is a pro-only subscription model

It's too late to try to revive the open web and what not. Its death was already an obvious trend when Jobs introduced iPhone.

This is a great reminder why I should continue to work on my rss-based "social network" :)

I agree. An RSS-based social network is a network that you fully own. Unfortunately the subscription experience lacks of some aspects, e.g. engagement with other users/author is much harder. We should implement some tools to overcome this. For all the sites that lack of feed support use gap fillers [0], [1] and others.

[0] https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge [1] https://github.com/damoeb/rss-proxy

Well I'm adding extra meta data on top of feeds to add some more "social" aspects. Of course those remain centralized, but every persons' timeline is standard rss so you can read it anywhere

What kind of metadata do you add?

the social features: "likes", comments, reshares (still pondering on all this, not yet implemented)

Very interesting, do you already have a placeholder repo, that I can watch?

not yet and probably not soon... just dev'ing on my machine for now

I never use the Amazon app on my iPhone. I much prefer using the information dense webpage, even though I have to hold it in landscape and zoom around.

I would be offended if Amazon decided to nanny me and change the experience, simply because it detected I was using a mobile screen.

OTOH, the Amazon Prime Video app is great, much better than the desktop website.

>I never use the Amazon app on my iPhone. I much prefer using the information dense webpage, even though I have to hold it in landscape and zoom around.

Yes, but that's a usability choice. What if the app was better and faster, usability wise, than the web page?

Doing interesting things on open web today is about as hard as it was in 2000.

The web is not that bad if you just look at the western side. There is no war in the western front. Just child play cf with the real war.

So decades of cooperation created the most incredible thing humans have created, then a bunch of kids come along and say 'Thanks! Fuck you. I'm just going to crap all over your efforts, profit from it, and there is nothing you can do about it'.

Thanks Zuck. I'd love to see you sit down with some people I know who have spent their entire lives contributing to RFCs and actually building the open internet for everyone. These people aren't rich. They worked hard all their lives and lived with good values. It wasn't all wasted but you've massively devalued their work. I'd love to see you defend yourself to them, one on one. No PR people. Just techie on techie.

On the positive side, the people who are enjoying the walled gardens are probably not the people who would've participated in the open web with much positive outcome anyway.

I'm actually quite happy that certain old-time online communities are available and haven't been swamped by all the people who are online merely to use the walled gardens.

The open web can survive. And the 10% of people who will use it are the same 10% who would've used the open web to cooperative in a positive manner in the first place.

On the positive side, the people who are enjoying the walled gardens are probably not the people who would've participated in the open web with much positive outcome anyway.

That's a false dichotomy. It's not a choice between "open and hard to participate in" versus "closed but user friendly". There's no reason why the web can't be open and cater for users who want to have easy-to-use and enjoyable experiences like Facebook and YouTube. The only thing necessary for that to happen is for companies like Facebook and Google to make it possible to connect with things outside of their sites in meaningful ways.

Shouldn’t the onus be on the open platform to become attractive and provide services that a closed platform can’t or won’t?

You’d think, but alas too often cries of “open web” is just nerds virtue signalling to each other, longing for those Good Old Days when they controlled the world. The vast closed Twitbook silos of today, philosophical awful as they are, are still massively more empowering to the 99% than that old primitivist WWW where you really needed a technical degree just to publish at all.

This is not just me saying this: it’s the 99% saying it too. Because while they may not know how to express it in technical terms, they have already voted with their feet.

So say what you like about the horrors of Twitbook, but at least they managed to unify [their] publishing with [their] consumption, making one as easy and transparent as the other. And they managed to do it even within the crippled confines of the first, botched Web. Meanwhile the geekocracy does little past sit on its ass whining about how terribly unfair it all is. As if life was a game of cricket!

If “open web” geeks really truly want to change the world, they need to start by recognizing where FANG(T) are ahead, and why they got ahead like that, and then figure how to generalize and commoditize what FANG(T) got right, and build that back into the basic building blocks of the Web—blocks which nobody owns, and which nobody can own. 30 years late, admittedly, but still better late than never.

And the first step of that has to be the full and seamless unification of web-read and web-write. Because until the fundamental read and write functionality works right, there isn’t even any point in trying to fix the broken discovery (search) and the broken interop (content negotiation) and all the other brokenness that subsequently evolved on top of that. Because without simple seamless zero-effort read+write in place, no-one except the geeks will be able (or want) to use it. And Web 1.0 already did that, and look where it got us.

So there are really only two things that prevent such a reboot: geeks who cannot imagine a Web that works so fundamentally unlike everything they’ve learned and grown accustomed to, and geeks who cannot imagine a Web over which they have no more control than anyone else. And nobody can fix that problem but the geeks themselves.

> There's no reason why the web can't be open and cater for users who want to have easy-to-use and enjoyable experiences like Facebook and YouTube

Yes, there is. Decentralised systems are resilient. But their decentralisation has a coördination cost. The lack of this cost makes centralised systems more agile. They can also, on account of reduced redundancy, be more efficient.

In a stable environment agility is irrelevant. The efficiency of centralisation pits evenly against the robustness of decentralisation. In reality, we get a mix, e.g. our financial system.

In an unstable environment, however, the agility advantage tips scales in favour of centralisation. The past decades have seen radical computing advances in mobility, prevalence and capability. That gives a natural advantage to centralised players like Apple and Google and Alibaba.

Decentralisation becomes competitive once a landscape stabilises. I thought this occurred with laptops. But Apple Silicon shuffles the deck. (It does appear true for social media.)

And the more agile systems gave us what? Twitter and Facebook? They're cesspools of idiocy and tribalism. Please bring back the walled gardens.

“The only thing necessary for that to happen is for companies like Facebook and Google to make it possible to connect with things outside of their sites in meaningful ways.”

“Dear Facebook and Google, please toss away your trillion-dollar global business empires and do what we tell you. Signed, the Geekocracy.”

Honestly, I’ve met doorknobs with more common sense and understanding of how the real world works. And you all still wonder why nobody listens to you?

I’d shake my head, were it not already shaking so hard it’s damn near flying off.

>certain old-time online communities are available and haven't been swamped

Would you mind sharing some of the links, please?

https://news.ycombinator.com is one example :)

This thread disagrees with you. HN is slowly becoming like Reddit. Down-vote all you like, it doesn't change the facts.

Given that Reddit is, at this point, nothing but a thin, MOSTLY-public-friendly landing page, papering over the world's largest porn portal, it's unsurprising that people who value original thought have left and found other places to discuss things of interest. And when THOSE people leave, the people who like to troll THEM have to find other places to do it, too. Slashdot has also suffered from this diaspora.

Tagfam.org might qualify, though it's a niche subject. Oldest education related forum around, afaik. Though it's a set of email lists, not boards.

https://neocities.org/ is another prominent example.

What, so that thousands of HN readers in search of an authentic open web experience can trample them into dust?

The false premise that your argument relies on is that people aren't transformed by the technologies that they use. Regularly using Facebook transforms you from what you would have been without using Facebook; Using the open web transforms you into something different.

So the problem isn't 'the open web would not have attracted the kinds of people that Facebook has'. The problem is that 'Facebook has produced the kinds of people who have no interest in the open web'. And for the reason that, the open web to hell, this benefit's Facebook's bottom line.

“The false premise that your argument relies on...” is best followed by pointing out a false premise, otherwise it’s a bit obnoxious.

> The problem is that 'Facebook has produced the kinds of people who have no interest in the open web'.

I disagree. Those people have always been there and have always been the majority. America Online back in the 1990s was even more of a walled garden than Facebook is today. Most Facebook users today at least know that there is a "web" other than Facebook, if for no other reason than they see links to it in their feed. AOL users back in the day might never see anything that wasn't hosted by AOL. And there were the 10% or so of us who used the open web back then, just as there are today. For one of us to try to explain to an AOL user what "the open web" was and why it was a good idea back then was even more of a challenge than trying to explain that to a Facebook user today.

>"On the positive side, the people who are enjoying the walled gardens are probably not the people who would've participated in the open web with much positive outcome anyway."

There's a significant number of people who were introduced to the web via the earlier walled gardens of AOL, Compuserve and Prodigy who then went on to both participate and contribute to the open web. Many were even motivated as a reaction against those earlier corporate walled-garden models.

The reason that the web won vs Prodigy, Compuware and AOL is that even in its early form, the internet as a whole was just better. Also, there were no wierd extra charges and your kids couldn't run up a bill for $300 in a night (like I did to my parents).

Ah 10 hours a month limit. Oh how I got yelled at for being online for 2 hours one night.

I find hn filled with comments like this which are apologetic in tone and completely dismiss the essence of the OP. Rather than just state “The open web can survive” please explain WHY you have that opinion. That would make for more constructive discourse.

I don't think Zuck has been a techie for a loooong time

There's a common category error I find grating in discussions about technology and tech companies, in which both engineers and business people are called "tech people", and the label "tech" is extended to cover business of companies that sell technology products and services.

The consequence of that is a worryingly common rhetoric of pointing out various negative impacts of "technology" on society, which in fact are just age-old problems of businesses abusing people - just in this case, the businesses sell technology products and services. But I guess it's more refreshing to say that "technology is ruining society" and unload it on engineers, instead of talking about the real problem - the same usual failure modes of capitalism that have been identified 100+ years ago.

How is this characterization helpful? Zack didn't force anyone to join their platform. They provide stuff for free to users who join by their own choice. If anything, it is the fault of the general population who don't know what's good for them. They don't care about your invisible hero's writing RFCs, not Zack.

Zack didn't force anyone to join their platform. They provide stuff for free to users who join by their own choice.

Every time Facebook buys a social media company that is pretty much what he's doing. People on WhatApp, Insta, ConnectU etc did not join Facebook and yet they still ended up on Facebook.

Since you don't even need a facebook account to use Whatsapp, in what way are Whatsapp users forced to end up on Facebook?

You do need one on Oculus.

WhatsApp shares your phone number, device information, and details of your WhatsApp usage with Facebook. A WhatsApp user isn't "on Facebook" in the sense that they have automatically get a public profile, sure, but they are on Facebook in the sense that lots of information about them end up in Facebook databases.

(See "What information does WhatsApp share with the Facebook Companies?" on https://faq.whatsapp.com/general/security-and-privacy/how-we...)

So? What does that have to do with the free web? Those companies where not forced to acceppt Facebooks deal. Anyone is still free to start a new social network or other web service.

This has nothing to do with the web, and if anything it's a general antitrust case.

> didn't force anyone

This is a bad-faith argument used by ethically dubious people to justify their shady business practices. Perhaps that's you, or perhaps you've spent too long listening to them. In any case, it's not an argument to take seriously and certainly not one that merits in-depth discussion.

If that was really the case, than it's a thing that antitrust laws have to sort out... How does that relate to the web technology wise? Everyone is still free to offer their own services on it.

It's not reasonable to say "I can do bad things until the law says I can't", because that makes you antisocial. Perhaps you are, or you are arguing in bad faith. In any case I don't feel like explaining to you why you need to be a good person. Nobody reading that is going to learn anything new and you won't either.

I just never understand what the solution is. How is the web less free, just because there is one huge social network that people like to use? Yeah we got a classic monopoly there, that just happens to use the internet for it's business... so legally break it up if you don't like it. I can't ethically blame companies for trying to grow wherever they can. And I especially can't see the connection to the internet as a technology.

It's like saying roads are not free, because there are only 2-3 car brands driving on it. If that's a problem, it's not about the roads.

    How is the web less free, just because 
    there is one huge social network that 
    people like to use?

It's not directly because of FB.

We are on the verge of a single company -- Google -- assuming de facto sole control of what used to be the "open web" as its last viable competitor, Mozilla, fades away.

This is possible because, generally speaking, nobody cares about the open web. Even most of us in the tech industry no longer care.

That is where Facebook comes in. We no longer care because companies like Apple and Facebook have successfully shifted us into the "app mindset" in which the open web is irrelevant.

I care deeply about the open web, but I'm a minority.

I would love to understand the downvotes on this comment.

Sure, if Reagan hadn't gutted them back in the 80s.

Yes, they didn't forced you to use facebook, but try to explain to anyone now why you have no presence on social network and people start looking strange at you. Landlord asking four your FB account, your employer asking for your linkedin or border-guard asking to show your latest posts. And yes no one forced you to use FB, but life gets more and more inconvenient if you don't use them. Hell, bought oculus when it was FB free, and try to use it without FB.

In which circles is this the case? I know personally many people who don't have any "posts" in any meaningful way or quantity, and a number of ones that don't have any presence on social networks. Then there are a lot of other people who technically have presense there, but just in a way that they have an account - not in a way of using it or logging into it.

It is also strange to hear that if you have a landlord who is weird by asking for facebook account - that the assumption is that it's Mark Zuckerberg's fault? Shouldn't you blame the landlord for that?

Blaming agents, that are making locally optimal decisions due to the incentives present in the game, for the system being stuck in a suboptimal Nash equilibrium is a very boring critique. Almost, as boring as asking why people get stuck in traffic, when effectively there is only one highway in the region connecting two important points.

In this particular case, the incentives are as follows. Initially, facebook set up the game so that the condition of every agent, as well as the global equilibrium improved if people used facebook. Later on, facebook changed things around, so that the global equilibrium became suboptimal.

> Almost, as boring as asking why people get stuck in traffic, when effectively there is only one highway in the region connecting two important points.

Another thing that's boring is false equvalences. There are tons of other "highways", ie platforms that allow for communication like facebook does. People don't choose them.

Network effects around facebook mean it is far more expensive for people's social lives to use those highways.

If by "expensive" you mean having to make 2 more clicks for some action, or installing 5 apps instead of one - then I argue that it's not that important to people to use those other highways in the first place. That's just not a high price to pay for anyone who cares about not being on facebook. If they are not willing to pay it, it is an indication that they just don't care. It seems that tech people have a hard time to realize this: most people are fine with facebook, knowing all its evils.

And of course the other platforms, they should keep improving and bringing those number of clicks down, and polishing up the UI, etc. But I just mean that they are already up there in terms of usability, at least in the same league.

PS. Heck, people can't even be bothered to spend 5 minutes listening about and 5 clicks installing adblock/ublock... I suppose that's Zuckerberg's fault too. /s

Expensive doesn't mean "two extra clicks". It means convincing all of your friends and family to use a new platform. Facebook's network effects impose very high switching costs.

That's one reason your "free choice" defense of Facebook is inadequate. Yes, people "choose" to use Facebook. Yes, they are techncially free to stop using it. But, when the cost is high, is the choice really free?

If an individual's social and professional life depends on a platform because that's what everyone else uses, they cannot in practice switch to another platform even if that is their preference. You might as well argue that someone from a disfunctional family gets a new family. Or that someone living in a disfunctional state emigrates. They can do these things in theory, but in practice they are not completely free to do them.

This. Lack of interoperability is what keeps people from moving to another platform.

A mandated API for interoperability would go a long way. Just like with e-mails. We expect people with Gmail addresses to be able to get in contact with someone who does not have Gmail.

Post grand kid photos else where. Grandmas will follow.

Turned off my Facebook for awhile. Losing access to photos about caused a family riot.

As someone who once used facebook, maybe a decade ago, but currently does not, I can confidently say I've seen little to no social expense to not using it. My real friends and family keep me abreast of the important things that are happening offline, and I get to skip the rest that happens on Facebook, which is essentially noise, baby pictures, and toxic politics.

I think it's almost entirely FOMO that is keeping people on these horrible "social" platforms. Best decision of my life was to leave.

You say FOMO as if it's a trivial thing, and not a deeply influential aspect of the human psyche.

And that's Zuckerberg's fault too, that people have it? Demonizing much?

It seems like you're attacking a point you made for the person you're replying to instead of anything in their actual comment here.

Nobody's looking for "less clicks" when choosing social media platforms. The product sold by a social media platform is its network of users. There are many alternative services out there that may be functionally equivalent or superior to the most popular platforms, but absent the powerful network externality that Facebook and the like provides, those competitors can't be counted as replacement goods at all.

Facebook did not "set up the game". Everybody is playing the same game. Facebook did not have special powers to change the rules.

They built an especially attractive service (judging by user numbers). Everybody else is free to build services in whatever way they fancy.

    Facebook did not have special powers to change the 
    rules. They built an especially attractive service
    (judging by user numbers)

That is why they initially rose to dominance. They provided a faster and more focused version of what Myspace had become. More attractive, indeed.

They maintain dominance primarily through the power of network effect. You are free to switch away from Facebook, but doing so is useless unless a significant portion of your network switches as well.

FB's end user experience is still good (I'm talking strictly about their engineering and UX here, not their business practices and other board-level decisions) and they have expanded it by adding things like their marketplace. If that experience ever got bad enough I'm sure people would start itching to switch.

But as things are, a competitor would not merely need to be as good or even 50% or 100% better. More like 500% or 1000% better if they wanted to overcome the momentum of FB's network effect.

This is a great quote in that first paragraph! I need to save it.

But the second paragraph looks like you blamed facebook for making locally optimal decisions and making the system stuck in a suboptimal Nash equilibrium :)

Facebook also tracks and profiles non-users [0].

And while I did join WhatsApp by my own choice, I did not chose for Facebook to buy it up to get my data that way.

[0] https://www.theregister.com/2018/04/17/facebook_admits_to_tr...

Frankly if you want the kids to stop profiting from all your efforts without paying back, stop giving away your labour to open source projects that have none discrimination and free redistribution clauses that allow companies like Facebook et. al. to make massive profits from building Skinner boxes and generally increasing the grand sum of human misery. A lot of the "good people" have helped create this situation by pushing an ideology that says devs should give away their labour to increase consumer freedom without acknowledging that the people who benefit most are Zuckerberg, pg and the other hyper capitalists.

The “open web” withered and died the moment Berners-Lee decided he’d cut some corners for convenience and released a web browser that was read-only.

Mosaic took that interpretation and ran with it, and a global information platform that should’ve been as easy for anyone to read and write as opening, editing, and saving a file in MS Word became the plaything of the technocratic elite while the ign’ant plebs looked on none the wiser of how they were robbed.

Can’t blame the Jacks and the Zucks for taking the opportunity that was handed to them on a plate. That’s what happens when you create gatekeepers and single points of failure.

“Just techie on techie.”

Oh bless your heart, child.

Once again, it was the techies who created this mess—and were perfectly happy with it too while they were the ones in charge. So until technies accept and acknowledge that they are the root of the whole problem, they’re not going to do a thing to usefully change it. ’Cos right now they’re one gang of children trying (futilely) to grab back a prized toy from another gang of children, to have all for themselves.

But as long as someone controls the read and write, the conditions that enable these vast walled gardens to take root and thrive will continue to exist. The only way to change that is by restructuring the platform at a fundamental level so that everyone controls their own read and write, and no-one else can just take that from them.

Personally I believe the first step should be reshaping Firefox into a full-blown WYSIWYG document editor, analogous to MS Word except that instead of reading and writing to a local filesystem it reads and writes them via HTTP[S] requests. And then go sort out the stagnant mess that is Apache et al so that they actually speak HTTP right, and provide that client with the “distributed filesystem” it needs to read and write to.

Read-write-publish-share. Simple foundational mechanics, and there’s no reason nor excuse why it shouldn’t all work correctly.

(Plus, Firefox desperately needs to differentiate itself from the Chrome/WebKit hegemony if wants to justify why it should continue to exist. Well, there’s a reason—and opportunity—right there.)

If geeks can make that bit work correctly then they might have a chance at resetting the balance of powr. It’s not a complete solution: there’s still the problems of document search (currently owned by Google) and name ownership (for he who owns your name owns you, and right now all our names are owned by the quasi-libertarian shakedown artists of DNS registrars and squatters), and others. And then there’s the questions of how do you sell it (and Dog knows most geeks couldn’t sell ice cream to Arabs). But it is the first step in the right direction: putting the control into the hands of the Users. All of them, this time.

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

https://digital-archaeology.org/the-nexus-browser/

> Personally I believe the first step should be reshaping Firefox into a full-blown WYSIWYG document editor, analogous to MS Word except that instead of reading and writing to a local filesystem it reads and writes them via HTTP[S] requests.

> Can’t blame the Jacks and the Zucks for taking the opportunity that was handed to them on a plate.

Notice that "WYSIWYGs for web" existed before the advent of Jacks and Zucks. There was Wordpress, with all its glorious WYSIWYGiness that FB and Twitter lacked, which, according to Wikipedia, was first released in 2003. There was LiveJournal that got released even earlier. And yet, it is Jack and Zuck, not Matt (Mullenweg) or Brad (Fitzpatrick), who somehow caught the zeitgeist and attracted the crowds.

This has been done (wysiwyg Mozilla browser). Mozilla used to ship Composer, and then post Firefox there was nvu. Now there is Blue Griffon, which uses Mozilla's rendering engine.

What Facebook provides that has so much value is audience that includes lots of people you know.

Yes, I’m quite aware that Mozilla used to have a crappy HTML editor strapped on as an afterthought. Treating editing as a second-/third-class citizen and not as a first- is exactly what led to this mess in the first place.

Again, see Tim Berners-Lee and the first, second, and third web browsers ever released, and notice what changed along the way.

If you cannot edit and save a web document as easily as you can read it, the system has already failed. If you have to switch mental or environment modes to do so, the system has already failed. If you have to switch to a different tool to complete the write operation (e.g. FTP client), the system has already failed. If you have to fiddle with individual files instead of discrete documents, the system has already failed. If you have to manage local copies vs remote copies of your documents, the system has already failed. And so on.

It doesn’t matter how important something is, if you make it hard (or even just harder) to do, 99% of people will not do it. That’s not on them as the users; it’s on you as the product developers.

Making a read-write web work as a mass end-user product means eliminating ALL the user-facing distinctions between web-browsing for reading and web-browsing for writing. Those distinctions are completely contrived and unnecessary—not to mention ultimately harmful—and the only reason it ever existed in the first place is ’cos Tim Berners-Lee was a lazy ass who couldn’t be bothered to port the authoring part of WorldWideWeb to Windows, and in doing so destroyed the very Open Web that he himself invented.

Talk about Laws of Unintended Consequences.

Like I say, think of MS Word (not an ideal example in terms of ease of use, but it is ubiquitous and an interaction model everyone understands), only instead of reading and writing to file paths reads and writes to URLs. That is the basic UX an open web requires. Anything else is just the geeks playing with themselves (again), which the marketers and money men will make into their own (again).

I mean, it should not be hard to grasp (I am a BoVLB, so if I can see it…), yet so many dyed-in-the-wool geeks utterly fail to grasp it. Maybe that’s because they’re so inured to the current imbalanced system that they cannot imagine it being any other way? Perhaps because they themselves are a deeply integrated part of that system and, on the inside looking out, cannot see what all the fuss is about when that imbalance already works in their favor.

Alas, we do seem to be two cultures separated by a common language here, so help me understand how to explain it in a way y’all can understand.

HTML is pretty easy to edit, even with 1997 era tools (by 97, even WordPerfect could edit a web page). What made it hard for users (and required developers) was when we we started adding dynamic menus (even if they were inserted by a server side script) and dynamic content (inserting records from a database to a document). FrontPage had a little workaround for that used Java applets for dynamic content, and that let people design whole sites with what looked like a dynamic navigatioin.

“HTML is pretty easy to edit”

Congratulations on so utterly missing the point. (Again.) 99% of web users do not want to edit HTML, because they have far better things to do with their lives. I don’t care how easy you find it, because you aren’t representative of any of them.

But since you mention it, HTML is reeking garbage. It has so many freaking rules, and special exceptions, and not-exceptions, and “<>”, and if you don’t get the punctuation just right then your actual content is going to get some degree of screwed up. Which, considering it’s the user content, not the machine markup, that is supposed to be the important part, is a thoroughly FUBARed set of UX priorities (or SOP for the nerdocracy).

But even if HTML was the very model of simplicity and clarity, very few end-users would want to type it themselves. I mean, what’s the fluency in Markdown outside of geek circles?

Oh, and let’s not forget that having broken the user out of her familiar web browser environment and, against all odds, somehow persuaded her to compose a correctly marked up HTML document in a text editor or something, she still has to get that document onto the web somehow, which means screwing with yet another obnoxious app and yet another arcane set of buttons and rules for using that app, all of which is almost entirely unlike their familiar web browser and how they use that.

TL;DR: Computer nerds who arrogantly whine “well it’s easy for meeeee” put my back up like nothing else on Earth. So if you don’t wish to be burned to a crisp then don’t ever talk to me about “open web” when you’re the self-serving jackasses who closed it in the first place.

p.s. I am also very not interested in talking about dynamic menus and stuff, because of the billions of people who post their own content online via Twitbook every day, how much of that content includes custom codes they wrote?

Be happy.

Wordpress is a brilliant example of Inner Platform Effect[1] in all its hideous misbegotten architecture-iness, and symbolic of (and literally) everything wrong with the web we now have today.

A newer example of that same effect is Dropbox, which allows users to read and write files to web-based storage and share with others. Great for Dropbox Inc; piss all use to an open web.

First Rule of Open Web: Shoot all the Middlemen. Because they are the first indicator that you’ve done it wrong.

And if you still can’t see the red flag these “middlewares” represent then shoot yourself too, because you’re part of very the same problem. Nerds love complexity, and they love devising complex solutions to problems they’ve created themselves.

That you so completely missed the point without even trying sadly demonstrates that we have a very very long way to go.

[1] https://thedailywtf.com/articles/The_Inner-Platform_Effect

Where does stuff get saved in this read-write web you imagine? You mention fixing Apache -- does that mean every Apache server must accept edits from every anonymous contributor? You also mention a 'distributed filesystem' provided by Apache servers. Interested in knowing how that could work.

Seems odd to blame the browser if it's really the server side that is what needs to be overhauled, to revive the open web.

“You mention fixing Apache”

I used Apache as an example because 1. it is ancient, and as such rudimentary remains of early write support (e.g. PUT, DELETE) might still be found in its architecture, like leg bones in a whale; and 2. because it is nearly ubiquitous on the web.

That said, Apache is a horrific bloated mess in general UX terms and end-user usability in particular, so wouldn’t be my first choice on which to refound a modern open web. Lessons can be learnt, the whole lot can be done better.

“does that mean every Apache server must accept edits from every anonymous contributor?”

I assume this is a rhetorical flourish and not actually a serious question. Even Apache, awful as its UI is, knows how to mediate read and/or write access for both individuals and groups. Look at how Dropbox manages access permissions and sharing. Now imagine achieving the same without Dropbox as middleman.

“Seems odd to blame the browser if it's really the server side that is what needs to be overhauled, to revive the open web.”

It has to be both. Done together. Because if they don’t talk fluently and seamlessly with each other, ordinary people are not going to use it and then we’re back to an elite technocracy and a mass pool of everyone else; precisely the conditions that gave rise to FANG(T) in the first place.

But perhaps instead of describing an Open Web in terms of its technology, we should try to describe it in terms of its people? Model how its users both want and need to interact with one another, and then describe the technology to fit and facilitate that.

Oh, so Apache will handle user management. Fair enough. I was serious, didn't realise you'd go as far as to move away from the stateless state of HTTP.

What nonsense. Nobody is forced to use Twitter, Facebook or Instagram. Blame the people who keep using them, not the creators of those networks.

As others have pointed out, there are benefits to Facebook et al, both individually and collectively (though some people may ignore the latter) however there's also great harm being done through these platforms, from the creation of echo chambers to data collection (personally, I'm more worried about the former, I don't really care about privacy wrt getting ads sent to me).

So I don't blame Facebook for building a platform people want to use, but I do blame them for the damage it's causing. People that care strongly about the open web (not really me, honestly, as long as it exists I'm content, imo people don't have to use it) likely feel similarly.

I mean let's be honest, there existed echo chambers in the first villages people founded. When I visit my relatives who live in villages, trust me, there is plenty of fascist echo chambers and they don't need internet to participate. The online platforms aren't a cause, they are just facilitating it. I believe it really reframes the problem

I don't think fascism is a real problem on the net and I know some popular places they are around. It got some reactionary traction in the last years, but they were derided and made fun off for years before and they never made significant inroads.

What really helps and has helped them is putting people und general suspicion and restricting user rights. That massively helps fascists. The increased content control is a major success fascists had achieved the last years even while not in power.

QAnon is a fascist movement and has spread like wildfire through websites like Facebook. I know people in other countries who believe it.

How is the servife providers choosing to restrict content furthering fascism? Fascism is explicitly about state control. Twitter banning nazis isn't fascism. I would maybe agree that things like restrictions on repair and copyright restrictions are some kind of corporatist fascism in that they are furthering state control, but I don't think that's what you're talking about.

I think there's an argument for breaking up Facebook for antitrust reasons.

I used to be fine with the "Just don't use Facebook" argument. I quit it myself several years ago.

But recently I've found myself being genuinely inconvenienced by not being on Facebook. My gym for example, uses a Facebook group as its main forum. Several sports clubs and businesses I use now have a Facebook page as their main "web site". Friends tell me that Facebook marketplace is overtaking Gumtree as the best place to buy and sell. I am missing out on participating in all of these groups.

I don't blame any of these organisations for opting to use Facebook. They're all too small to employ anyone to maintain a website. Facebook no doubt gives them a great CMS and makes everything easy.

But it seems completely wrong that I have to submit to Facebook, with its real name policy and abuse of my data, to participate in these groups.

The markets for startups in any of these areas must be hugely stifled by Facebook's monopoly. Who would be brave enough to start a business building a CMS for gyms at this point?

I'm not a lawyer, but I don't see how this is different from Microsoft bundling a browser with an OS. In many ways it's worse.

"Because it inconveniences you" is not a good reason to break up companies, imo.

Maybe those small businesses will learn that Facebook is not the best option. There are other cheap ways to get a web presence. Facebook is not even a web presence, as it is a walled garden.

Also, how would you even break it up? A separate "events platform" would be pretty useless without the Facebook social graph. What would be the point? Just plain disallow Facebook to have useful features, making things more difficult for people?

You do know that creators of the network also created positive feedback loops to get people addicted, right?

It's not addictive like heroine or something like that.

My impression is that when people talk about Zuckerberg, they usually refer to his portrait as a lovable geeky nerd in the movie.

But in reality, you should probably imagine someone with a psychology degree who's a master at pulling strings in the shadows and who just happens to like technology among other things.

I can't find the quote now, but I believe there were several articles about how he was widely disliked at Havard for his FaceMash website. Many people didn't appreciate being part of his psychology experiment ^_^

Also, there was a lot of discussion back in the day because the first Facebook beta looked very similar to a software he was supposed to build as work for hire for a 3rd party. I'd call that a rather opportunistic move.

So I wouldn't be surprised if your thought experiment would end with Zuck just saying "ooh that's sad but I don't care" and not explaining anything.

You found him a lovable, geeky nerd in The Social Network?

Perhaps fxtentacle is actually thinking of Data from ST:TNG.

Yes, I thought the Zuckerberg in the movie seemed more humane and nicer than I imagine the original to be.

For example, the movie presents him starting facemash to find a new girlfriend after he was rejected, which makes him appear to care about others and about relationships.

But some of his actual quotes sound to me more like he sees other people as things and with some contempt. For example, consider this:

ZUCK: yea so if you ever need info about anyone at harvard

ZUCK: just ask

ZUCK: i have over 4000 emails, pictures, addresses, sns

FRIEND: what!? how’d you manage that one?

ZUCK: people just submitted it

ZUCK: i don’t know why

ZUCK: they “trust me”

ZUCK: dumb fucks

but the movie portrayed him as a dick...

The walled gardens are using polished UIs and free hosting to win over open alternatives, and both of these costs money. From users' perspective, it's free and convenient.

To break these, we need technology and infrastructure that enables distributed decentralised hosting, and that decouples UIs from servers. But UI developers still need to be rewarded, and hosting needs to be profitable, otherwise they won't be competitive.

It would involve some form of micropayments system, cryptographic identities, and so on. If these things had been in place 20 years ago, IRC would be what whatsapp is today.

The matrix project sounds promising, but I'm guessing it underestimates what is actually needed to replace walled gardens.

UI should be build in into the browser. Users should be free to choice UI they like, but for that we need a standards that everyone would agree on.

> UI should be build in into the browser. Users should be free to choice UI they like

How would that work? The closest example I can think of is the web before CSS, when there was only html for semantic markup, and the browsers would display it however they wished, with content creators having very little say over what exactly their users would see on the screen.

Can't see us moving back in that direction.

Most people have multiple devices that can act as hosts for content, and if their friends and the people who view it also serve it, that should scale pretty cleanly.

I can't imagine that having good reliability.

It's possible to make it work, you just need a little incentivisation. Private trackers are extremely durable and performant, and their secret sauce is just giving users a reputation to uphold.

Bake a certain amount of seeding into the contract to access the content, then enforce that with a browser plugin I suppose. Doesn't seem like it'd be too hard, aside from convincing users to install a browser plugin to access content. If it were just integrated in to the browser, OTOH...

I agree with your sense, but I don't think this is on Facebook at all. The commercialization is driven by rights holders and advertisers mostly, which might be customers of Facebook.

That some users prefer the fancy is also not a problem because I think there is enough (virtual) space for both groups. I can use the open web as well as before, just have to know that the most viral content is probably not that great.

> I'd love to see you defend yourself to them, one on one.

Why does he need to defend himself? He built what he wanted. Other people built what they wanted. Why's that got to be in conflict? Why does one party have to defend themselves to the other? There's room for both.

This appears to be a battle of philosophies.

May "the best business" win.

Our Dearest Zucky vs Freedom Fighter Stallman.

The enteral struggle continues.

> This appears to be a battle of philosophies. May "the best business" win.

Why do you think it's a battle? Why does anyone have to be fighting? Both groups can build the web they want to build. Both can live side by side. What's the problem?

Complaining that someone else is not building the thing you think they should be building is not a reasonable complaint.

If my local bicycle shop or running club decides they don't need a website because they've got a facebook page, some would see that as a loss to the open web.

I hate this too, but to continue the example, my actual real life bike shop struggled for years with bad websites sold to them by a succession of "developers".

The Facebook page appears to draw as much if not more business, and chap can run entire thing himself with no overheads. It's hardly a surprise some choose just to use Facebook really - as far as they are concerned its often "better" for them than the open web was, even if that is hard to swallow sometimes.

That's only a 'loss to the open web' if the open web somehow had an inherent claim to have that page in the first place.

yeah, "open" implies the freedom to choose to be hosted by a platform like Facebook if you want.

It would be a loss to the open web if, somehow, there were no alternatives but Facebook, but that isn't the case.

It took me a second on Google to find bike shops local to me that have web presences outside of Facebook. They probably have pages on Facebook as well (it would just be good business) but the web isn't a zero-sum game, one doesn't somehow cancel out the other.

One side built their ideals, and released them to the world for free, with the expectation that people would use it the way THEY imagined it would be used. Zuck (as the current victim in this discussion) took those technologies, and used them to personally enrich himself while duplicitously selling out other people's self-interests. In a world in which the original inventors of things like TCP/IP, DNS, HTTP, SSL, Postgres, and PHP never make any real money at it, the implied expectation would be to at least honor their intent. That's the deal that's been abrogated. This argument is so obvious that I am forced to assume that you're just playing devil's advocate here, for the sake of discussion, so I'll play along. And you can say that it's their fault for not monetizing those technologies, or not creating a license to prevent what's been done, and maybe that's true, but that's beside the point.

I'm not playing devil's advocate.

And I think you can see the weakness in your own argument as well! 'implied expectation' doesn't really hold any water, does it?

Part of creating freedom is you have to be prepared to be disappointed that other people use their freedom to choose to do something different to you and to disagree with you. You should embrace that as a success not complain about it, I think, because you really know you created freedom when people can safely disagree with you.

There absolutely was an implied social contract with open source in the old days: that you would NOT just take, but also give back. It’s the entire underlying ethos of the GPL. Saying that the concept doesn’t hold water is to ignore at least 20 years of hacker history.

I didn’t say the implied social contract wasn’t a thing in the mind of the open side of the web.

I’m saying it’s not reasonable to complain about people breaking an implied social contract that they never agreed to.

If I tell you that when I wrote this comment I had in mind an implied social contract that you wouldn’t disagree with me you’d just reply ‘lol no thanks I don’t want to’. I can have as many implied social contracts in my head as I want. What are they worth if you don’t feel the same way? Nothing.

Well we're just dancing around the point now. You agree that there was an implied expectation, I agree that there was no obligation to follow it. That people didn't just makes them -- maybe not bad, per se -- but certainly less-good. But, hey, a lot of businesses are run by literal sociopaths, so what did anyone expect of a person like Zuck. I mean, the "dumb fucks" comment has been out there for at least a decade, and that's really all you need to know about him.

Maybe we should create a fund for these guys.

But isn't this the name of the game? Use things to the best of your advantage?

> I'd love to see you defend yourself to them, one on one. No PR people. Just techie on techie.

That wouldn't end well. He would get his ass physically beat, in most likelihood.

Don't worry, between people who want freedom on one side, and incoming government regulation on the other, walled gardens are about to get squeezed. The people who care just need to be ready with something decentralized to leverage the cracks when they appear.

For starters let's stop using "Walled garden" as the phrasing. "Absolute dictatorship" is more like it.

The users and developers are at the will of our FAANG dictators.

As much as I hate Google for getting rid of services, I love how easy it is to distribute apks without Google.

And if you play ball with Apple, you are encouraging the problem.

The article presents a dichotomy between "web" and "app". This fails for users who consider a web browser itself to be an "app", which is indeed well suited for solving a problem of "browsing web". For as long as this problem remains well solved by a specialized app (browser), I don't need any redundant tools for e.g. reading news, interacting with communities, etc.

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