Comment by parasubvert | Hacker News Reader

Comment by parasubvert | Hacker News Reader

I find it fascinating that some comments think this was wrong. Yes it was pretentious and arrogant. But it wasn't wrong.

It was right: too right, and was winner take all for those who figured it out (Amazon, Meta, Apple, Microsoft, Google, many others), before spam invaded and made the conversations much harder.

The web architecture , technology , and protocols are still the decentralized underpinning of the internet, but people have forgotten why they're there. It's almost an archeological dig for the new generation. It's a foundation ready for decentralization but tech folks were frustrated when people CHOOSE to live in large cluster silos, socially (eg. meta, tiktok, Twitter etc) . But in most other domains with network effects, this clustering isn't entirely surprising. Network effects is often a euphemism for "winner take all". Same confusion as to why AOL was so popular for so long. But the web moves on.

Ask yourself: how did TikTok take off? Or how do new sites come about and grow (as is happening with Bluesky, Mastodon and others? How many businesses do I transact eCommerce with directly? If we truly had a big bad hierarchical dystopia , it wouldn't happen.

It requires hard work to get noticed, but the hyperlink (and HTTP/MIME/HTML/JS) is still the foundation of all of our interop. which is why Elon shutting off Twitter unauthenticated hyperlinking this weekend is the biggest signal he wants to tank the site: no more network effects for you!

What's interesting to me is that technical folks never quite "got" the web, the way the mailing list archives from the 90s understood the web. It was built, deliberately. People now assume it's a utility that was always there. They've not experienced true silos (CompuServe Vs AOL Vs GEnie, anyone?). But still, the evolution stalled. RSS Feeds were the closest we got to an evolution , though ActivityPub is finally showing promise 15 years after AtomPub belly flopped. People have to build compelling software to make users want a more decentralized experience, and that's hard to fund when your investors usually want winner take all network effects.

If I'm understanding you correctly there seem to be two main points in here:

1) "It worked much better at first but now spam has invaded and it doesn't work as well"

and also

2) "It's still working enough because new things like TikTok are emerging from things other than some top-down mandate"

My response to the first is pretty short, like: if it didn't still work once big corporations and political actors, etc, noticed it, then it wasn't actually significantly different, just a new venue that was temporarily less crowded. And so the "new guard" is just the innovators in the Clayton Christensen sense who were able to win new markets with fairly traditional methods but without some new profound disintermediated relationship with their customers.

But the second one... to me this is really where it's much more "meet the new boss, same as the old boss" and actually inherently a flawed, naive position.

People were never entirely at either extreme of "sheeple controlled by big corporations" or malcontent sarcastic "haha brands are dum and embarrassing themselves." New things emerged in non-top-down ways pre-internet too. But overall, before-and-after, big corporations that "win" then still usually get stuck in the same patterns that stuff like 66-95 predicts will go away: they have to please their investors, they have to please the media. The hold of the money people hasn't been broken by the internet.

Flawed, Naïve, but mostly right ideas are how the world makes progress.

On the first point: it does still work - all the big corporations and political actors noticed it worked and it profoundly changed the way politics and consumer engagement was conducted. Cluetrain doesn't negate Clayton Christensen but good luck building a scalable consumer business without a strategy to get close with your customers (usually via online/social media). That said, a great counterintuitive old school success here was Apple with opening up its retail stores as the conversation channel for its customers, which makes sense given the nature of its products. Spam etc. gums the online channels up but "markets are conversations" is still the dominant paradigm of how marketing is crafted. It wasn't this way in 1999.

On the second: 66-95 doesn't pretend any of that stuff goes away? Like the manifesto isn't about big companies dying... it's about the game of marketing is changing, and opening up an opportunity for a new generation of what are now enormous companies. The two points on investors are that "if you ignore your customers (ie. us, the market), your investors aren't going to be happy". Ignoring customers was a lot easier in the 90s.

The main naive thing of this section is about workers ability to influence corporate policy, but even there we've seen a lot of movement vs 1999.

I had a third point: the web architecture kind of stopped evolving circa 2010 as the next generation never quite figured out what made it special, as the technical and protocol foundation for all these changes in marketing and communication we've seen in the world. I see HN and tech circles filled with cynics that believe the world is just going to be dominated by the same mega corps for a century, and that the solution is regulation and government utilities taking over certain services. This to me is nonsense. There is huge opportunity for a new generation of titans, in the places people aren't looking.

You hit the nail on the head. For all of our Eternal September jokes, before then it was a morass of networks that didn't talk to one another at all. But now it's time to fix the damage of centralization. We all got lazy, myself included, and today's mess is the result.

I still need to sit down and give one of the fediverse systems a shot. I sat on the sidelines as RedFaceTwitTok ate the world (and have never had an account on any of them). So, for me, the loss of Twitter and nerfing of Reddit are not quite as big a deal as it is for someone who has invested years into a presence there only to get banned or have the site go under.

If I'm going to do $SOCIAL_MEDIA, you better bet I want to be able to jump ship (or, if necessary, self-host).

> winner take all for those who figured it out (Amazon, Meta, Apple, Microsoft, Google, many others)

What's really funny to me is the following quote from "Cluetrain Manifesto" that sticks out in stark opposition to the above:

> We are not seats or eyeballs or end users or consumers, we are human beings. And our reach exceeds your grasp. deal with it.

The manifesto's main flaw (besides its prose / arrogance) is it was talking to the old guard, it didn't consider "what if we are right, and the new guard now rules the medium of the conversations?"

> Yes it was pretentious and arrogant

a lot of things in the VC bubble dotcom 1.0 boom were pretentious and arrogant

a lot of things today still are pretentious and arrogant

nothing has changed

Well, if you narrow enough the scope of the analysis a lot of things can be "right".

My brilliant manifesto talks about cars, with round wheels, on paved streets, taking people places - it will be a wonderful democratization of travel. Come buy a car.

I forgot to manifest that the road is severely inclined and the cars lack breaks.

> The web architecture , technology , and protocols are still the decentralized underpinning of the internet

The web is whatever Chrome and Safari say it is [1].

Its not winner-takes-all on some level playing field. Its a winner-takes ALL, including the playing field.

[1] https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share

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