Comment by neilv | Hacker News Reader

Comment by neilv | Hacker News Reader

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When I was first working on distributed "semantic" Web+HCI+AI stuff, in the late '90s, nobody was concerned with monetizing -- you just did useful or interesting things, and the money will be figured out eventually.

Today, the first thoughts that comes to my mind aren't what my work could do with this information, but more about sustainability, accuracy, and power.

A bunch of huge companies are going to hoover up all the data you've compiled, and use it in such a way that most people using it will never see your Web site.

So won't be prompted to contribute back wiki-style, won't get all the benefit of your quality control, won't see your donation appeals, won't know you exist, won't see the other things that you would like to see, won't give you analytics on your impact, won't fund you with ad impressions, etc.

Which might all be OK for your use case, but over time it could break most of the current useful percentage of the Web.

You've described most of open source software development and yet people still write the code because they need the code and want to share the code with others because others shared with them. This isn't the problem you think it is. The problem is that most of the web's current funding model is broken and user hostile. This isn't a problem with semantic data or software development this is a problem with the capitalist model of post-scarcity information production, distribution, and control. That's what needs to change if we're to benefit in proportion to what we contribute instead of those who appropriate and exploit the most benefiting the most. Let the web, as it exists now, break - it hasn't been ours for a long time.

I'd like to have a better model in place, before the current one breaks.

If necessity is the mother of invention then revolution is the father.

"An Outside Context Problem was the sort of thing most civilisations encountered just once, and which they tended to encounter rather in the same way a sentence encountered a full stop."

— Iain M. Banks, Excession

Despite being fictional, it seems at least as correct as your saying.

Also applies to corporations.

It is and very much does. Fortunately, there is plausibly little that qualifies as a true outside context problem these days. Authors of fiction, and especially of science fiction, are mostly to thank for that.

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