A read through the original WorldWideWeb proposal

The original implementation did support publishing content. The problem is that the Web was prototyped on a NeXTCube, and nobody could run it because nobody else had NeXT machines. Most people's exposure to the Web was through the linemode browser or Mosaic, and neither one implemented the full range of functionality that WorldWideWeb.app did (including content authoring). Andreessen reportedly did want a way to do annotations in the browser but it didn't happen precisely because the only way he could think to do it was by coordinating everything with a centralized service.

As for linking specifically, early versions of HTTP had a LINK method, but it was underspecified and eventually removed in later revisions of the standard. If you operate the server, though, you can make it support whatever methods you want, so there's no reason people couldn't take matters into their own hands and bring it back so long as they're able to figure out how it should actually work.

The web is resistant to this despite not being designed in a secure manner because all graph traverses are one way, the owner controls all outgoing links. I suspect any system where outgoing links are open territory would soon get overrun by spam.

It’s a shame that JavaScript can’t create peer to peer connections, not that most home routers would work with NAT anyway.

This is all by design. The vast majority of the web could be hosted by each user reserving 2GB of space and distributing the published content.

One reason I'm not super surprised they didn't implement publishing is that it seems like there's an inherent complexity to information passing in two-way systems. See as an example the difficulty in a grid with distributed renewables or how long websockets took to come along. Consider even an economy: you bring simply money to the store, not goods that you've created to barter, because of the complexity in figuring out the value of the offered goods, the cost of the negotiation, and potential mismatches in needs.

Maybe, just like with the electrical grid, we can start to get more creative now that the costs of 'the usual way' are more well-known and can start being internalized instead of externalized - this is the case with air pollution and carbon for our electrical grid, for instance, which is helping to drive distributed generation.

The early web just became magazines / flyers online. And in that respect it was far behind some other modalities we had at the time (thinking of social MUDs/authoring-environments like LambdaMOO, etc. in particular which were far more synchronous and interactive). But that wasn't really the intent. It was supposed to be more about knowledge sharing and editing, with a collaborative component.

But in all these things, it really shows the way that era of the Internet was still very much about academia and its methods and concerns.

For example the comments section on any blog or video. Most of it is bland, chunks of it are spam.

Example 2 are the services that explicitly all people to write content. Facebook, Twitter etc. It's a giant mess of mostly-terrible content. In some cases created with the explicit intention to cause harm.

Wikipedia is the opposite, mostly good, but largely because an enormous community spends countless hours undoing the work of bad actors, and effectively censoring most bad behaviour.

That the Web does not live up to some ideal is not the fault of Netscape or Mosaic. It's not the fault of Facebook. It's the fault of the people using the Web. It turns out there are plenty of us, willing to spew out mindless opinions (including this one) all night long.

Prior to the endless September it was possible to "educate" folk to the etiquette of the internet. But that education had a really narrow target market, and didn't scale. Once Joe Public arrived there was no way to "educate", nor was it desirable to do so.

People are people. Don't blame the Web. Blame the people using it.

(And, anecdotally, if early users had had the opportunity to edit my Web pages, that "feature" would have been turned off almost instantly.)

> Had publishing content been as easy as consuming it was from the start, there would've been more tooling built around this concept ..

I have red book "How the Web was Born" by James Gillies, R. Cailliau, and the reason why the original vision didn't fly is bit more complicated.

https://books.google.com/books/about/How_the_Web_was_Born.ht...

The thing is that the editing/publishing part was in fact part of the fist prototype from the beginning (without any way to edit remote resources though)! But to make the system usable early for as many users as possible, this feature was not included in the dumb terminal or vt100 browser, or any other browsers which followed it.

Btw some time ago here on hn, I run into a person who was among the early users of the dumb terminal browser (aka line mode browser), but he didn't know much about the 1st prototype and it's editing feature.

And I would say that it would be very difficult to figure out how to make the original vision or browser/editor fly while at the same time trying to make the early web useful to early users and on top of that driving adoption as fast as possible. The CERN invested money into this proposal expecting some outcome, not a 10 years of vaporware (like some other hypermedia systems ended up, ehm). Moreover if Tim and Robert weren't able to focus on demonstrating that their proposal is practical (remember that while you find their vision familiar and understandable, it was not the case back then), it could have easily failed early on, and we could have ended up with a proprietary closed system(s) from the start.

Btw I wrote a blog post about this very topic some time ago, if you are interested in more details or would like to see additional references from this period, you can have a look:

https://blog.marbu.eu/posts/2023-04-29-the-first-web-browser...

Posts are shared in a reshareabke fashion through email groups, torrents, IPFS, etc.

We have the technology. It's just a centrally hosted aggregator is easier.

Implementing it naively would mean that spam would have been an early initial problem. You would handle it with moderation initially, where some sort of verification would be used. IP black lists would have been a heavy handed early solution. I like to think that if the social aspect of the web was in the hands of infrastructure engineers, that we would have seen clever solutions, like proof of work needed to post content. That may have triggered the rise in ideas like cryptocurrency in the late ‘90s.

The rise of comment spam would have taken pressure off of email providers to manage spam. The focus on them would have been lower. You wouldn’t have seen legislation like the CanSPAM act, which legitimized unsolicited commercial email content.

By integrating social aspects into the web early on, it would have degraded the value proposition of social media sites. You likely would have seen sites like MySpace and Facebook get started, but they would have leveraged built in web technologies to implement the social aspects. A user feed with comments could just have been implemented with RSS and the built in comment feature. Link aggregation sites like Digg or Reddit never would have been created. The value proposition would have exclusively been finding and connecting with friends.

With cryptocurrency taking off in the early 2000s, we may have seen payments get integrated into the web browser at this stage since there already would have been infrastructure for proof of work built into the web browser. This would give content publishers a way to make money off their content besides advertising.

Today there are 1/5 as many journalists as there were 20 years ago. The news industry has been decimated by the web. Had payments been integrated early on, the news industry would not have had to resort to advertising to as high degree as it had, local news would have found more robust funding sources in the digital era, and we would have a more robust media environment today.

With two way communication being the norm, and social media having less prominence, there would have been more healthy discourse on issues. Rise in disinformation campaigns would have been blunted by people with expertise seeing content and being able to say, “that’s bs because … “. That content would not have been in walled gardens, kept away from most of the public to see. We would not have seen a rise in disinformation campaigns. The vaccine movement would have not taken off. This would have changed the course of elections. I don’t think we would be able to predict political outcomes in 2008 and beyond in this future.