On the State of the Web | Hacker News Reader

On the State of the Web

manuelmoreale.com

107 pointsheadalgorithm65 comments

Reddit is a glorified bulletin board that does not need ~2000 employees to operate and iterate. The community is their product. They are were never going to be a unicorn and they will die trying. Software eats the world but Silicon Valley manages to find a way to kill off its own creation.

This is the case with most of these. Having big, popular, very profitable website is not enough. They are going to break them all. Good maybe if the VCs get annyoed it will finally allow for healthy ecosystem to emerge.

*not at all profitable

> They are were never going to be a unicorn and they will die trying.

Reddit are valued at ~5bn, which makes them a full-blown unicorn. But in 2023 the gap between a unicorn and an IPO-ready company can be huge.

"valued at" may be the metric, but I think the bigger point here is they're unprofitable and have not much path to either fix that or continue 'growing'. So by monopoly money rules yes they're a valuable unicorn, but realistically it's more like time to pay the piper.

Yes. Whenever I hear that a company (or a person) is "valued at" something, I know that number that follows is not likely to bear any relationship with reality.

Even if, non-liquid worth is like voltage on a battery - it drops fast once load is applied. Except for batteries we're usually talking about maybe 30% drop. In finance, once you try to convert your large "worth" to cash, it's going to be more like 90% drop, simply from the market responding to what you're doing - that's on top of any bullshit involved in calculating the "worth" in the first place.

Unrelated but shouldn’t we adjust the unicorn definition? Everything is increasing thanks to inflation so we should make the unicorn title more expensive.

I’m half joking obviously but the 1B valuation doesn’t seem all that rare anymore.

Maybe 10B?

Wework was valued at 50 billion. Tesla is valued at more than the 10 top automotive firms combined. Surely we don't believe in the infinite wisdom of stock markets or anything of the sort right?

What could these 2,000 people possibly be doing behind the scenes? Reddit essentially never releases new user facing features, so what is everyone up to?

They seem to be constantly redesigning the website. For me, there are two versions of the "new design": one for listing, another for the post itself... one is black and the other blue. Every other week there's something slightly different or a bit broken. The latest change for me was that I can't collapse posts anymore in the new version. Since I don't really use much, I just end up in reddit.com instead of old.reddit.com...

(EDIT: Scratch that, when I actually log in there seems to be a THIRD layout!!!)

There's also the mobile apps that still seem to get weekly (?) releases, all with the same copy-paste changelog (at least in my language). Don't know if something really changed, I don't use it.

The overall quality of course is terrible (at least for the site).

But that's completely expected when the number of developers is that large. Developer headcount doesn't scale linearly to delivered work. At some point you can keep adding people and it will only make things slower. :/

I imagine they're the ones who keep messing up Reddit's design and making it slower and less usable.

> Reddit is a glorified bulletin board

and uber (ride) is an automatic taxi dispatch, it's ok.

> Software eats the world but Silicon Valley manages to find a way to kill off its own creation

I blame capitalism.

digital stuff and capitalism do not mix well. something's gotta give.

but I guess I can also blame digital stuff (the internet); something will give. but which? and what? ....and when???

> and uber (ride) is an automatic taxi dispatch, it's ok

Uber's trick was claiming for years that it wasn't actually taxi dispatch so it didn't have to be regulated as such.

Regulatory avoidance/evasion enabled Uber to break into tightly controlled taxi markets.

> but I guess I can also blame digital stuff (the internet); something will give. but which? and what? ....and when???

The thing that isn't in someone's "value chain" or whatever euphemism for rent seeking is popular this year.

A venture capital news aggregator seems an odd place to vaguely preach your anti-capitalist views.

Nonetheless, what exactly does capitalism do to make "digital stuff" worse?

> You can still set up your tiny quiet corner on the web, do your own things, and connect slowly with other people

This is exactly what I've been after with my side projects. Thanks for the encouragement to continue even when things are slow-going, makes me remember it's a feature not a bug.

The IndieWeb is a nice corner of the web where you can find people with whom to chat about tech, the web, and many other things! https://indieweb.org/discuss

huh I clicked around for a while and I like the vibe but I can't find any directory or feed of pages/projects to explore; it looks like it's all documentation and chat rooms for developers. Is there a way to browse the indie web as a consumer rather than a developer?

Unfortunately, the indie web is very, very dev oriented. That’s because people who care about having personal websites are more often than not developers and they like to talk about development. And as a result of that you get a ton of web related content.

But there’s also something else. As mentioned in another post I maintain a list of weird links you can browse at random if you want to do some browsing https://theforest.link/

I try to include sites that are “different” and I also try to avoid having too much dev oriented content. But I warn you that you might stumble on some weird content.

> As mentioned in another post I maintain a list of weird links you can browse at random if you want to do some browsing https://theforest.link/

Out of 6 random tries, all were dev oriented and none were what I would consider weird. 3 out of the 6 were websitehowto.com and the other 3 were developer blogs. Perhaps it was just poor luck, but I don't see how websitehowto.com, a "5-page guide to start a Wordpress website", really fits.

So there’s some 1800 links in there and it’s possible that some might have been expired and then squatted or redirected to some crappy websites.

I just run the experiment and out of 6 clicks I got:

- a site no longer online - a personal blog on neocities - another blog on blogspot - a dev oriented personal site - another neocities website - a site dedicated to home networks

Again, unfortunately most indie web is also tech web, there’s no way around it.

The slowness and small scale it is definitely a feature and not a bug.

You have time to actually interact with other people, you can engage with them at a more personal level.

I have slow email interactions that have moved from emails to actual mails where messages take weeks to arrive and it’s glorious.

It’s also an extremely kind environment, at least it is for me. It’s the entire opposite of most social media.

I just wish there was some way to have a web site open to the public without having its contents used to train AI models. That threat has basically removed the web as a means for me to share and connect with people over common interests.

Honest question, why does it matter? If we exclude ClosedAI, wouldn't an open source LLM trained on real web data benefit everyone?

It matters a great deal to me because I think that LLMs present an unacceptable societal risk. I want nothing to do with helping to improve them, even a little, because I view that as harming people.

Whether or not it's open source (and whether or not it's OpenAI doing it) doesn't affect the problems I have with it.

How do you square that with regularly commenting on an easily crawlable website?

I would love to hear about your side projects, do you blog about them?

It's tough life out here for developers who're so plugged into the matrix of the actual Web that you can't overlook how condensed and bland it has become. But stating the obvious doesn't really help or do anything. I think if people genuinely feel this way then what is needed are solutions.

There's actually quite a lot of psychology involved in this whole debate/situation, but my gut tells me that people don't even want to listen to that. It's just a weird phase for everyone - there is an overflow of garbage on the web that is designed to manipulate you and talk to you as if we are two different species.

Look what StackOverflow is doing now also - it's literally ruining a great Internet community (intense as it is) because their hand has been forced by people who pay the bills. And because nobody could foresee the future, perhaps things didn't seem like they would end up this bad. But they have.

What's stack overflow doing?

> Moderation Strike: Stack Overflow, Inc. cannot consistently ignore, mistreat, and malign its volunteers

https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/425000/moderation-s...

> Starting the Prompt Design Site: A New Home in our Stack Exchange Neighborhood

https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/390463/starting-the...

Seems like its also slowly loosing its way.

> I think if people genuinely feel this way then what is needed are solutions.

I personally think the solutions, from a technical stand point, are already there. What we need are intentions and solid motivations.

The reason why more people are not running personal sites, blogs, digital gardens or any other sort of truly personal web space is not for lack of technical solutions.

But it’s hard to make non dev people to realize what’s possible out there on the web.

Would it make sense if NPR ran a Mastodon instance?

EDIT: or if public universities ran their own instances? All content submitted by users would be CC licensed.

EDIT EDIT: To keep costs down, just rate limit the number of posts that could be made per user.

I often think about what a "public access" web would look like (similar to "public access" TV that exists in some US cable markets).

This seems to make sense; we have public parks, why can’t we have public spaces online?

I think this makes a great deal of sense, for any organization that wants a feed-type social media presence.

The fly in the ointment is DDOS protection. That might not be a problem in some cases, but once you attract enough attention you become a peachy target.

cries in RSS

You can follow any Mastodon account with RSS:

https://mstdn.social/@feditips/108357998963885456

NPR Mastadon instance: sponsored by Cloudflare

Does NPR want to get into the moderation business at scale of their instance becomes popular?

Or is this just their own instance where nobody else can participate?

A closed to staff only instance for news orgs makes a ton of sense actually, if you see it as a feed and not an interaction platform, which despite everyone claiming Twitter was a way for bi-directional communication I see scant evidence that the average journalist engages with their audience directly in the way one imagines, it’s mostly fire and forget tweets anyway, perfect for Mastodon

I’m wonder how much use such sites are outside a sort of glorified RSS feed.

Not that they can be replaced with RSS, but a lot of use seems nearly just that.

Yes. Mastodon is a feed 2.0.

I think nobody wants to deal with the issue of moderating for the random members of the general public, other than surveillance-capitalism organizations like Google and Reddit.

I could see a university hosting a Mastodon instance for their own students, though. Moderation is probably a little easier if you have the person’s real name.

> And so now we're seeing services turning to aggressive monetization because it turns out that we can't just have an entire world of sites and services all available for free with just a few ads slapped on top of them

It probably doesn't take a huge amount of money to run a basic Reddit-like forum site if you're not trying to become some imagined billion-dollar business.

> You can still set up your tiny quiet corner on the web, do your own things, and connect slowly with other people.

It would be a nice silver lining if the obvious missteps that we're seeing in the commercial web helped to inspire and invigorate the non-commercial web.

We need to get better at connecting with each others. The press revolutionized organizations as it made it possible for few people to organize a large group of people. We now have the Internet where anyone can communicate with anyone else. We no longer need a hierarchical structure with generals and captains telling people what to do. We can solve any problem more effectively by just communicating among each other.

I've been using Cloudhiker lately to replace the good old stumbleupon days and it does capture some of the magic of the old web. (not affiliated)

This is neat, I didn’t know about it. I maintain a site that’s similar in spirit: https://theforest.link/

A lot of weird and quirky websites in there.

That takes me back! I completely forgot about stumbleupon and will check out cloudhiker, thanks!

If you want the web make it easy to monetize and do accounting for small websites. Else you get megasilos

Agree. But also, some things don’t need to be monetized. We can have small forums and small communities online just because we like them. We’re happy to pay for our other hobbies and running a forum with a few hundreds users doesn’t cost all that much.

Then you end up resenting it after some times has passed and you re no longer interested but you re pressured by users to keep the website up. That's unsustainable and ugly

Well in that case you figure out if someone else wants to pick up the torch. And if no one wants to do it then you let things go. And that’s also ok.

I think this is the post that put me over the edge https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7076790...

> Anjali SudAnjali Sud, CEO of Vimeo

> [...] Yes our new tools leverage AI (because duh, we’re in 2023).

Well to be fair he has to do it and has to say that. Otherwise he will be seeming to have missed the boat… but yes this AI stuff getting a bit out of hand now.

I was going to correct you to say she, but I figured I'll double-check, since these days you can't exactly infer someone's pronouns from a profile photo thumbnail - so I clicked the CEO's name, and instead their profile page, I got...

...the most hostile implementation of CAPTCHA I've ever seen, outside of jokes (like "solve this integral to post the comment"). Some kind of manual "do math with some ugly low-resolution icons, and use arrow buttons to find matching image with the ${math result} number of ${ugly low-resolution icon}". And you have to do it 5 times. I gave up after the first, no way I'm wasting couple minutes on going through bullshit like this.

Sorry for this bit of negativity, but I think it's on point in the overall context of this submission.

https://media.licdn.com/dms/image/C4E03AQGThVFQzx3XVw/profil...

> we can't just have an entire world of sites and services all available for free with just a few ads slapped on top of them

Arguably, advertising on the Web is too cheap and too ubiquitous. This may be even the key problem. As a reminder, before this, a select, smaller number of media like newspapers, magazines, even TV, was able to sustain itself by advertising with consumer prices only contributing to a minor part of the overall costs of production and distribution. (The peak in revenues from this actually isn't that long ago: 2008/2009.) The current model of ubiquitous, but also infinitesimal small prices & revenues, plays only to the brokers, while sustaining nothing.

I have positive nostalgia for the early web and web forums.

It takes a key person to keep something good alive, they invest time, effort, themselves into something good and share it.

Please go create a blog and tell me about it.

I use GitHub as my blog host and just update a README.md to post.

A very succint and accurate report, in my opinion. Finally someone named it on an ad-free website.

N.B.

Also reading the other comments, Can HN not become a place where frustrated reddit user come to vent, this is a nice place here...don't ruin it.

Complaining about the state of the web is like complaining that the radio only plays crap songs, that TV only has reality soaps, or that McDonald's food is not nutritious or tasty. At some point you have to realize that this is how it is always going to be in the mainstream, and seek out quality content outside the mainstream. Instead of being mad that the quality content isn't in the mainstream. There's more high quality content online than ever before, if you're willing to lift your pinky finger a millionth of an inch and make some effort to find it - or God forbid pay a little for it.

Two or three generations of a pattern don't make it universal. Manorial servitude dominated European economy for nearly five centuries.

I feel mostly the same about the web (and have kept blogging regardless of audience, discoverability, hype, etc.). I’m not an idealist to the point where I believe we will wind back the clock to before Google Reader was shut down and social networking became a rampant grab for eyeballs, but I like to find places where things are still original, even if few and far between.

How does that make the web special? Humans can por time and love into anything they want.

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