We can have a different web

Algorithm, schmalgorithm

Andrew Stephens rang a bell. “Save the Web by Being Nice”

My rant: read it or don’t. The way to have the new web is to be the new web. The web is here to talk to folks. I am one of the ones. So are you. Write it like you mean it. Start a blog, join a forum, add talk. It takes time. Do it. Say nice things on other blogs. Post good reviews. And learn to write well.

Check Hemingway’s 5 hints. Write short sentences. Write short first paragraphs. Use vigorous language. Be positive, not negative. Never have just five rules. (As for the fifth, Omar said, “It is my firm belief that it is a mistake to hold firm beliefs.”)

The point being, forget algorithms. Create! Make the new web. Try small words: let large words earn their keep. Be nice to those for whom you write and make the new web. For grins, I wrote my blog for 16 years; I sent 14 to archive. It’s your turn.

>> And those who cultivate those plots outside of these walls face pressures to conform to the whims of the businesses in hopes that the pathways remain open. Otherwise, they might toil away in silence, rarely seeing visitors like they one day used to.

I feel like this paragraph sums up the root of the issue. IF your main concern is "I want lots of people to like my work, and by extension like me, and by extension validate my existence" then naturally we gravitate (literally a force of gravity) towards single common places.

Since most people most definitely fall into this camp, common platforms win. If no-ones gonna read my post on Google+, why on earth would I share my profound ideas there? If the worth of my product is based on the number of followers and likes then it's logical to go to the place where those metrics are amplified.

The nostalgia for the "good old days" is ultimately rooted in golden memories (sometimes, admittedly, delusional) of when we felt noticed, and valued, and cared for. For many of us that is "before adulthood" for some definition of "adult".

Put another way, there are a LOT more high-school football stars than NFL stars.

Of course the web of our youth -hasn't gone away- . You are as free as ever to build a blog, write your thoughts, as you ever were. In fact it's easier than it ever was. But how will people like it? Friend you? Follow you?

Counter point: We can't have a different Web

Search engines ruined by their SEO spam designed "to pull in money via ads and affiliate links", Social networks and their "constant push to satisfy...an algorithm tuned to keeping eyeballs on the platform", newspapers and their "aggressive paywalls and expensive subscription models", the ads, the trackers, the popups, and the chatbots - the enshittification of the internet in all of its forms can be traced back to single source. The root of all evil. Greed is the problem and we're no better equipped to deal with it online than we are offline.

It seems like everywhere people act selfishly and try to take as much as they can from everyone else while giving back as little as possible things only get worse for everyone, but you can't stop people from falling into that trap. It's like some kind of mental disorder. A person suffering from greed will knowingly poison themselves and their families. It's caused people to pollute the air they need to breathe and the water they need to drink. We'll never convince someone afflicted with Greed to stay away from our websites.

Any new internet protocol we create, any new platform we develop, any new community we build will be slowly corrupted the moment it gets popular enough to be useful. It will probably start even before then. Speculators will try to get an early foothold to gain an edge over their soon-to-be competitors. The playbook has been written, and now it's just a matter of following the steps. Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish.

We have many advantages compared to the people who created the internet. We have better tech. We have better access to that tech. We have the examples they left us to build from. We also have things they never had to deal with. The technology they used was designed to work for them. All of our technology is designed to be used against us by other people.

They were creating the infrastructure to communicate freely. All of our infrastructure is already captured and monitored. It's designed to get in our way if we aren't using it the way others want us to. Simply hosting a website likely violates your ISPs TOS. Using Tor or a VPN means some webpages never load and those that do harass you to solve riddles to improve the AI they'll use against you.

The creators of the internet never had to deal with AI bots pretending to be normal users spreading astroturf and shilling for their masters. Real content takes time and effort but ads can be spammed by bots which never sleep until those ads drown out everything else.

The only way to get back something like the internet before it was infested with greed is to keep most people off of it. Small communities can be controlled and moderated. In a small community the identities of users can be verified to keep bots away. It doesn't solve the problem of carefully planted shills or paid off members, but it keeps the problem a little more contained and manageable. The problem is that what we'd be left with in that case wouldn't really be the internet. Just another walled garden, one to keep the money away. At best we might be able to pull off going back to the time when you could find a really cool BBS, but the old internet was a once in a lifetime thing.

I find a commonality between many articles I read online:

1. An interesting headline that draws me in.

2. A long setup/history which I start reading, then skimming, then just scrolling past

3. And finally, the meat of the article.

But by 3. I've decided that the article doesn't contain any interesting info - otherwise, why would I be scrolling past the first 2/3s of it?

I'm aware this is a subconscious decision, a bad heuristic. But in a world filled with info, I rarely fight against it. I didn't read this article, for instance. My coffee break is over, it's time to get back to work.

Maybe it's time for blogs to start doing something similar to what the better recipe sites do, and provide a link at the top to skip the setup and get to the real article.

Let's stop with the abuse of the word "algorithm". Enough already. Even in a world where it wasn't the wrong word to reach for (i.e. a world that isn't the one we're in), even if it were proper, it is still by this point embarrassingly hackneyed. It's shameless, unrepentant pablum. And that's still ignoring that it's the wrong word to use in >90% of the instances where it seems to show up these days.

I have a pretty simple flowchart for lay people and tech journalists alike. It goes like this:

Are you about to use the word "algorithm" in an article or comment about social media?

No? -> GOOD.

Yes? -> Don't. (And to go one further, since you were already angling that way, maybe you should reconsider whether or not to scrap the whole piece entirely; do you actually have anything new and interesting to say on the topic?)