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Comment by WesolyKubeczek | Hacker News Reader

Isn't "more silos" the desired outcome, more or less? Has the web been anything but many silos? Of course it might have been different when everyone who wanted to have a presence on it was expected to build their own homepage. Now billions are online, courtesy of their phone, and don't even know what a computer is. So they naturally fall into silos where they and their friends are welcome.

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There was a point where "the web" was literally a web, and it was literally "linked" together by...get this: hyperlinks!

I think that what killed that is that hyperlinks work great for browsing & discovery, but as the web matures, a lot of people want to use it for task-oriented things. And all of the Big Tech companies that came afterwards succeeded because they built a task-oriented interface that co-opted the links that were there before and turned them into ways to accomplish the task. Google took hyperlinks, used them to compute PageRank, and then used that to create a better way to solve the task of finding specific information. Facebook took user activity, aggregated it, presented it in a feed, and used it to improve the task of killing time. Amazon took product pages and direct links and used them as lead-gen to increase the ease with which you can buy things. Stripe took embedded Javascript and used it to make paying for things easier; Uber and Lyft took mobile phones and used it to make transportation easier; AirBnB took these large Internet markets and used it to make vacation rentals easier.

Where all these decentralization efforts fall down is that they tend to focus on content, the technical details of how they're going to spread bytes around, and nobody focuses on the task. It'd be interesting to recast the problem in terms of "Here's a common task of everyday life; how do you accomplish it in an adversarial environment where the government or major corporations are trying to shut off the Internet?"

> Where all these decentralization efforts fall down is that they tend to focus on content, the technical details of how they're going to spread bytes around, and nobody focuses on the task. It'd be interesting to recast the problem in terms of "Here's a common task of everyday life; how do you accomplish it in an adversarial environment where the government or major corporations are trying to shut off the Internet?”

Nice observation and can speak to why anyone intent on selling you content writes a “user story” to outline the tasks that lead to a purchase or engagement.

I've become a bit cynic, and I think it will take time until it becomes better. Eventually though, there will be large protests that turn into law that change the dynamics of the now very centralized web.

London was known for having so thick fog from burning coal, and in 1952 it was such a bad event that 4k people died and 100k got badly affected from it. It is was started the Clean Air Act of 1956, that eventually led to clean (cleaner?) air in London.

Another one is Amsterdam. It was a car-centric city up until the 70s, where they started to rebuild it to be a walkable and cyclable city. This started because people protested the dangerous roads, which culminated with the "Stop de Kindermoord" protest.

Maybe if we live long enough, we get to experience a decentralized web again. Next time will come when it's supported by laws, that in turn stand atop a large understanding in the population of why those laws are good and needed.

The cult of marketing ruined it. They're still fantasizing about personalisation, which in marketing speak means optimizing a mattress sale opportunity for Ted Waciznski of 932 West Moreland Ave in Walla Walla, Washington next Tuesday at 3:54pm as he reads CNN.com as he has every morning between 11:19am and 11:26am from a mobile device in the same spot every weekday for the past seven years, rather than, you know, "here's a cool thing you asked us to show you." The only links that matter are to an adtech/martech firm, and presumably the company that wants you to buy something.

Yes, I think so. I agree with you actually. But it doesn’t always seem like that’s the desired outcome for some people when they mention “decentralization”.

I have a particular interest group in mind here, who lament the current state of the Web to an extent unique to our time. It seems like they’re upset with their loss of agency/authority online. When a free, ad-less *.blogspot.com or LiveJournal presence could net you some clout you’d be precluded from otherwise in the real world.

Take for example any evidence of disapproval you may find from the proponents of ActivityPub toward the development of the AT Protocol in parallel. Also notice how moderation features on these federated platforms essentially centralize them and their respective enclaves. The desire for interoperability between social media platforms conflicts with the imminent re-siloing being examined. Or is it just the same ends with new wiry means attached?

“Decentralization” in this context seems more like separating from the whole with the hopes of replacing it. And I’m not confident that these many new “wholes” can resist jockeying one after the other for political influence.

A big chunk of my favorite websites to this day are hosted by motivated individuals in their spare time. And that hasn't changed.

Maybe I am an exception as I find social media nearly worthless by this point, but hey: Just because you don't see it doesn't mean it is not there.

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