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Comment by swyx | Hacker News Reader

straight answer: facebook and linkedin. they were so good that they killed the independent, decentralized 1990s web. why bother setting up your own shop and communicating via protocol when you can just make a fb or lnkd page.

theres no dismantling it. every time we offer decentralized vs centralized solutions, the centralized wins because of convenience, funding, faster progress, take your pick (lmao look at bluesky/atproto, bitcoin/coinbase). It's not even primarily because of VC or Silicon Valley ethos. this is just raw human nature at work. you want this to change, propose whatever alternative you have to the normie in middle america and watch their blank stares.

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It's because platforms can deal with feature complexity and UX standardisation in a way that protocols can't.

Multi-protocol clients tend to end up a mess compared to the integrated experience of a platform which can provide a single source of truth for identity, authentication, and so on.

Netscape Communicator ticked many of the boxes of Facebook years earlier, but by kludging together NNTP, HTTP, SMTP, POP3, FTP etc., and that's before you consider the difficulty of moderating an open syndication like Usenet or IRC, or the pain in the ass that email spam had become by the early 00s.

Protocol/standards people like to think they care about UX, but for platform companies, user growth and retention literally pays their bills. It's just a different set of incentives.

And to be clear, I prefer the more open internet, but UX wise, it never stood a chance against normie-optimised, integrated platforms.

Also, around ~2000 or so, most of the "big" movies ran their own websites. There's the infamous Space Jam site [1], but there was even websites made for relatively obscure movies like Pretty Persuasion (whose URL I cannot seem to find but I remember looking at it when it was relevant).

I remember when MySpace came along, I started to see movie studios started creating dedicated MySpace pages for their films instead of dedicated sites.

It makes sense; MySpace was free and had built-in marketing via their "friends" system. You're not messing with hosting, or domain names, or even programmers, and unlike other free hosting systems, it wasn't considered lame to have `Check Us Out On MySpace` (whereas it would have been considered lame to have `geocities.com/myMovie`).

Apply this to most other industries, and you have what we have now.

[1] https://www.spacejam.com/1996/

It isnt so much that they "were so good".

It isnt like the people using the net before facebook etc just stopped what and how they were doing things and moved to facebook.

The large tech firm offering were easier, it allowed people access to the internet in an easy to use way who would not otherwise have done so.

The internet in 2000 was a much much smaller place with far different demographics.

maybe it was the worse discoverability of groups. at some point google became more about commerce than actually listing information high in their result pages. if you search on facebook, communities related to specific topics pop up immediately. even whatsapp now shows "popular groups" around certain themes in the app, even though none of your phone contacts is in any such group.

and by google not showing forums or blogs (especially new ones) as top results any more (mostly because of pre-llm spam websites) they just didnt get any more users.

facebook split up the "advertising" part and the connecting people / groups part, e.g. facebook's search wouldn't show ads.

I personally that this lack of friction really pushed social media sites forward, while the rest of the internet got kneecapped by google more and more like a boiling frog.

> propose whatever alternative you have to the normie in middle america and watch their blank stares.

We also overestimate how important the web in general is to many 'normies'. It was only a little over 10 yrs ago that I had to convince my wife (20-something at the time) that she had a reason to get a smartphone. We're so far apart on the adoption curve that it's very difficult to understand each other. As generations shift, I expect attitudes about lock-in, privacy, dependency etc will as well.

decentralized twitter is just useless. i don’t understand the appeal.

when it comes to things like TOR they make sense and are sticky, or minecraft servers (if that counts). decentralization can be desirable, even something bitcoin like (distributing a ledger) can probably have something to offer if used to solve a problem.

I get what you’re saying, though. I think decentralization will be in vogue again, when it solves real problems.

In theory you could create a decentralized uber, possibly even something cash based, if anonymity ever becomes a concern again. Some services don’t necessarily need to be built by companies, they can be unnecessary middle men. It makes sense for drivers to run nodes themselves, be their own bosses, etc.

Kind of a neat idea now I want to build it.

Something like that may not get users immediately but something will inevitably happen that will get people interested in that kind of idea.

You definitely have a point. I have trouble accepting just how much people will give up for convenience!

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