The web was always about redistribution of power. Let's bring that back | Hacker News Reader

The web was always about redistribution of power. Let's bring that back

werd.io

45 pointsbenwerd14 comments

Yesterday on HN there was a piece about Flash and the explosion of creativity as people started making things and uploading them to a whole bunch of sites. Then there was Geocities and friends. The 90s and 2000s were a time of optimism online; anyone could make a thing and get people to look at it. Eventually Facebook & other similar platforms worked out how to pull everyone into walled gardens and then they pulled up the drawbridges.

To make web publishing happen at scale and keep it decentralized beyond a honeymoon phase, incentives need to be right.

Chiefly it must be just as easy to self host as it is to make an account and produce content for someone else’s platform. It needs to be just as easy to reach an audience on your own platform as someone else’s.

Those challenges are both social AND technical. OP should look around for other spaces where they’ve been solved in the past. See what the patterns are. See where we (collective we, not you HN crowd who are better informed and highly skilled) have not fallen into the centralization trap.

My suspicion is it’ll be offline spaces as they are harder for a platform owner to overtake all at once and monopolize.

But if there are good examples, there may well be a pattern!

One thing that works well is email. There’s a high chance the CAN-SPAM act played a part here - a well designed compromise, requiring unsubscribe buttons - thus preventing marketers from spamming so badly that your email inbox becomes useless and you’re forced onto a commercial alternative. It’s an example of thoughtful, light-touch regulation keeping a thing healthy.

So we could run a thought experiment “what would light-touch regulation of self-publishing on the web look like”. Is there a way?

A law requiring that web providers also provide some minimal webhosting services?

That every broadband connections must come at least with a place where you can put HTML files.

A lot of ISPs used to do that, but it seems pointless when you can get a shared hosting account relatively cheaply.

The problem isn't access to hosting - that's ubiquitous - it's visibility. Most people aren't going to see the point of setting up a website that no one will probably ever visit, and that will probably never even show up in search engines.

Yes and no.

When something is easy and available, and you've already paid for it, then you actually do it. This is why all the advertisement funded services are doing so well, and I think this kind of thing is a good way to match it.

Once people get used it, they might even demand special features, only that they in practice pay for it as a package that also contains an internet connection, rather than paying for it specifically.

>Chiefly it must be just as easy to self host as it is to make an account and produce content for someone else’s platform. It needs to be just as easy to reach an audience on your own platform as someone else’s.

I don't see how that's possible. Self hosting implies knowing how to set up and administrate a server, dealing with SSL certs and your own domain, paying for your own bandwidth, maintaining your own hardware, and everything else on top of building a website from scratch.

It isn't impossible, literal children figured basic html/css/js out back in the 1990s (but mostly on hosted services like Geocities which still took care of all of the backend issues) but doing that will still always be more complex than just publishing to a service.

The thing about centralization is, it isn't a trap, it's a convenience. People don't want to be responsible for infrastructure, they just want to put their content online. And centralized services do serve a legitimate need, both in abstracting away a lot of technical issues most people don't care about, and in making it easy to build communities and audiences.

The closest possible thing I can imagine would be something like a federated network for webpages - which is such an obvious idea that it obviously already exists and my brain just can't think of where and how - a Geocities for the Fediverse.

But even then, self-hosting is a bit of a technical hurdle and most people will just sign up for larger established servers for the sake of convenience.

Perhaps regulation around lock-in: let people take their content with them - and not preventing linking to the outside world.

That seems like good idea. I'd add to that a right to delete all of your content from a service as well.

I sympathize, my entire 13-year-old account was killed one morning, globally shadowbanned, tens of thousands of comments vanished with no sign or explanation. Anything moderators approved was quickly blocked again, with no reason or audit trail.

I used the appeal portal, got an apology saying my appeal was granted, and it stayed dead. Now the appeal page cheerfully declares my account is fixed (it isn't) and blocks me from accessing any kind of support.

I pulled up an old account from 5+ years ago that I used for a throwaway resume review, seeking help, and it too, died exactly the same way.

I still haven't gone back. The injustice rankles, and it's stressful to live in fear of it happening a third time.

Out of curiosity, what site was this?

(I assume not HN since we don't have an "appeal portal" (other than hn@ycombinator.com))

LOL, I'm sorry, I mistakenly replied to the wrong submission, yet somehow the outcome was not entirely off-topic.

Intended destination: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43235046

Ha! amusing indeed!

Completely misrepresenting what the web was trully about in it's birth: a tool to make distributed information more accessible from a central place. Nothing to do redistribution, or power or anything like that.

It's just that people piggy backed on it

Wait, you mean Cerf and Kahn, two DARPA scientists working for the military on nuclear deterrence, had the goal of "redistribution of power from a small number of gatekeepers to a large number of individuals" when they invented TCP/IP?

More and more, I think the open web would have been extinguished in the '90s (at least in the US) if AOL was as brazen as US tech companies are now in bribing government to shut down the competition.

This WWW-hostile vision popped up again with iTunes and the iOS App Store, with Steve Jobs successfully fearmongering about the dangers of downloading apps from 'untrustworthy' websites, eventually turning the walled garden into a billion-dollar business. We've never recovered from that; iOS, Windows Phone, ChromeOS, these were all locked-down systems that had hundreds of millions of users thinking it's the same thing as a computer. Which of course encouraged vendors to start imposing similar limitations in desktop OSes.

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