Our Regressive Web | Hacker News Reader

Our Regressive Web

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133 pointslukedeering77 comments

The most interesting part of the article (which is well-written and thought-provoking) isn't the mildly alarmist "regressive web" assertion, but the insight that Reader may have been killed because it was strategically opposed to Google's mission as it enters the mass-market phase of its growth.

Which mirrors the developmentally mass-market phase of the growth of the internet itself.

That doesn't necessarily mean that niche tools won't continue to be available to interested specialists. Ham radio kits are still around, right?

I'm not sure that the macro view of the web is as bleak as it seems. We're seeing mass-market effects take hold in our playground, which is a bummer, but we're also seeing mass-market adoption of tools which help keep information democratized and flowing freely in multiple directions, which is an improvement on the past 2000 years.

"Ham radio kits are still around, right?"

Amateur radio may be the last bastion of free, decentralized communication. 70 years ago (when the Internet did not exist) Hams could send and receive signals all over the world, and they still do today. They don't need an Internet, a cellular phone infrastructure, etc. And should the Internet become controlled to the point of being useless (by governments and greedy corporations), RF may be the only thing left standing.

The airwaves have long since been controlled by "governments and greedy corporations." Governments require operators to have licenses and a government that felt threatened by activities on the amateur airwaves would have no qualms about stamping them out, I'm sure.

Ham radio is free-as-in-freedom precisely because no one's figured out a way to make billions by destroying it. Yet.

Unfortunately, hams don't seem to actually use radio for much except complaining about their ailments and/or Windows 95 PCs.

I say this as someone who went through the trouble of acquiring a license, getting VHF and HF rigs, and then discovering that it's a wasteland of "So what kinda radio you got there?". The government's forbidding of encrypted traffic also helps ensure no-one will use it for anything more important than complaining about "kids these days and their computers".

> The government's forbidding of encrypted traffic also helps ensure no-one will use it for anything more important than complaining about "kids these days and their computers".

Isn't that pretty much the use case of steganography?

Yeah, if you don't have the codebook HAM discussion will be very bland.

Darn kids = Federal government

Computers = Intelligence agencies

arthritis = surveilance

getting old = getting ready to commence with the plan

mortgage = jail term

"Yeah, Dan. I hear you about them darn kids and their computers... I hear Bob's just about got his mortgage paid off finally, but I'm getting old and my arthritis is acting up, so I'm going to sign off for tonight."

Ham radio could be shut down by FCC fiat tomorrow and hams everywhere in the country would go silent. They're incapable of operating without broadcasting their positions. That is government control.

Ham radio is many things, but an anarchistic wonderland free of external pressure to conform to regulations is not one of them. Or your next rag chewing session is going to be encrypted, maybe?

I do think services like RSS are strategically opposed to the vision of a lot of technology companies. The more ad-driven (or growth/hype driven they are), the more they embrace the noisy, chaotic one off model. Whereas other companies, designed to serve USERS, want to reduce noise and increase quality. Google may be moving towards that model.

The PC revolution is regressing too. We're going back to mainframes and jailed devices.

Good point. Not exactly my area of expertise but I should have used that as an example.

Pardon my naivete (and disregard for proper accent usage), but I wonder how much Google would accept for their reader service.

We saw this with Delicious though. Some rich guys bought it...and made it unusable.

We never left the mainframe. The bubble did but not the rest of the world. Most fortune 1000 companies still have active mainframe installations running. And so do most governments.

What has happen is computer power has become much more accessible. No more time sharing. No more Comdisco. No more running down the hall to pick up your printed materials. And no more 1m+ price tag (unless you need it).

The mainframe is no longer the front and back ends (which is was). Now it's just the back end - running huge data stores. In other words, it's perfect for the cloud (which by the way, is also nothing new).

The computer industry isn't regressive; it's circular. So is fashion, by the way. Oh and Hollywood and - well you get my point.

The demise of USENET was the first great regression for me. I still haven't found a forum quite as convenient as a news client.

Part of the reason USENET got abandoned is the same reason that MySpace and Facebook are being abandoned: as newer services came about, the cutting edge flocked to them, which left a high ratio of malcontents, trolls, bullies, assorted dickheads, etc.

I don't agree. In fact, the flood of new Usenet users corresponded to an overall flood of new people from all walks of life learning to use the Internet; it wasn't all bad. Also, the structure of Usenet is like that of very-modern Reddit, while the "Eternal September" hypothesis of its demise is premised on an early-Reddit model. I'm sure alt.drugs suffered, but "comp.security.unix" did OK.

The fatal injury from Usenet came from piracy. I ran a competitive† server for the ISP I helped run in Chicago††. The amount of effort it took to host binaries feeds was unbelievable and only got worse as time went on. Usenet is just about the dumbest imaginable way to distribute binaries†††. Unsurprisingly, fewer and fewer ISPs offered full-feed Usenet. When an ISP opted (sanely) to go with no-binaries Usenet, their Usenet consumers bolted. Usenet centralized and became less and less available. Usenet software because less and less lucrative to build. Then blogging hit.

This is a little off topic, I know, but I'm bitter about what happened to Usenet, because I really loved it.

† (we hit the top tier of the Freenix list several times; I believe we were one of the first 3 providers to come up with the INN history cache)

†† (EnterAct)

††† (imagine an Akamai that had no control over whose content was hosted, but instead had to mirror every bit of porn and warez from every server everywhere to every ISP in the world)

Google Groups didn't help, since the interface went from decent to degraded to useless to now-I-can't-find-it over the past decade.

There are still active newsgroups with regular postings, it's just nearly impossible to find them from the web. (And the spam is still a problem.)

By the time Google bought Deja, Usenet was already dead.

I disagree--Usenet was mostly dead. As I said, though it's not like the old days, there are still newsgroups that I follow, and topics that still have active discussion via Usenet. The bulk of my Usenet reading took place post-Google, so active discussions continued long past that point.

Actually, checking it just now, Google's updated the interface yet again, and this time seems to be an improvement, at least on the spam-fighting front.

What newsgroups are still alive? Just knowing where to start would be a huge help.

I can't really speak to general interest. As I said, discoverability is terrible, so I only know of stuff that either I've been following since the '90s or I've seen mentioned by others. So this is a very eclectic list. But they all have recent discussions going on.

  rec.arts.sf.written
  rec.arts.int-fiction
  rec.games.int-fiction
  rec.games.roguelike.development
  rec.games.roguelike.nethack

And a few more active ones I found while searching:

  rec.games.pinball
  rec.games.bridge
  rec.arts.books.tolkien
  rec.arts.comics.strips
  rec.arts.drwho
  rec.arts.drwho.moderated

If you know the usenet hierarchy, you can enter the start of a set of groups (e.g. "rec.games") and the current Google Groups search interface will pop up a list of Usenet subgroups after a sec...but only if you're not already within a group. But the results look to be roughly sorted by recent activity, so that's at least helpful in revealing which of the groups are pretty much dead. (Undead spam threads are pretty common too, unfortunately.)

Note that Usenet quality has always varied (it's the place that more-or-less introduced trolls, viruses, spam, and flame wars). I really can't tell if the quality of the posting has gone up or down. I definitely can't guarantee what you'll find.

Usenet also didn't have a good way to deal with spam, at least not one that I knew about. It steadily became harder to find the signal in the noise.

It still had the best reader experience. I don't know why modern email clients, for example, don't look more like trn.

Usenet had a strict definition for spam, which meant a bunch of stuff got through.

It was also under active attack from Hipcrime and similar.

And no matter how good the killfiles were there were people who wouldn't use them.

I agree about the clients - I really liked slrn.

> Usenet also didn't have a good way to deal with spam

Nobody really does. The only way you can keep a channel spam-free is to have humans spend time monitoring it to keep the spam out, which is a huge cost asymmetry in favor of the spammers. Anything algorithmic gets gamed and, eventually, broken entirely.

> imagine an Akamai that had no control over whose content was hosted, but instead had to mirror every bit of porn and warez from every server everywhere to every ISP in the world

You mean CloudFlare? (They really do have problems with people using them as a large-media/warez CDN.)

I'm curious, what is Facebook being abandoned for? I'm not aware of any social networks that draws users from Facebook. Google + isn't as capable as Facebook, and totally flopped their launch marketing (Standard Google launch -.-), so basically not used by anyone (atleast here in Denmark, and europe afaik).

"Facebook are being abandoned..."

Not that I'm a FB fan, but you have data to back up that claim?

http://wtop.com/52/3270431/Teens-shying-away-from-Facebook

Ok.. so people are "cutting back" their use. That doesn't mean people are abandoning FB.

Of course the time is about right for a new kid on the block. Cause, frankly, there has to be a better way. And don't say Google +. Cause that ain't it either.

Raising the cash is the easy part. The hard part is coming up with a better idea. :)

I still think that Usenet just needs a decent reboot.

Those services are regressing because the general population of users is no longer dominatated by people who like to read. As mainstream consumers flooded onto the internet over the past decade, the demographic changed. Services that give you a lot of stuff to read, no matter how nicely delivered, are not the the services the mainsteam consumers want.

Yep. This means you probably can't get Facebook-level users into your service. But the old group of readers is still out there, looking for a good product. And if it was big enough audience to launch products in 2006, why wouldn't it be now?

I think you are right.

The demographics have changed percentage-wise but population-wise I don't think the number of people who "like to read" has decreased at all.

I don't think we are regressing because the AOL of olden days was an indicator of why the Flipboards of today is successful and why Google Reader is dead. We were never progressing to begin with because the mass was not interested in curating their own, rather, they are happy with the apps buttons, the beautiful looking magazines and what not.

Google Reader isn't dead, it was killed with tens of millions of users. Three million people have already migrated to Feedly, and that's just the more savvy users.

I'm not a big MG Siegler fan but I think he's right http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/24/bees/

My sense is that MOST of the users won't come back. And that's a shame, because they were very important. Delicious is still around--I haven't logged in in a year. I love Google Reader, but I might just use this as an excuse to read a lot fewer sites...or more books.

The point is that RSS is dependent upon user's self-creation needs, versus that of a thing created for them by someone else. TV by its very nature a medium which is created for you and Internet was supposed to be the opposite of it. I agree with the gist of the argument presented in the OP's article but my point is that we were never progressing on the Internet for the better although it surely looked like that we are and we will. The lack of adoption of RSS by the mass, is just one evidence of how we use Internet like it is a TV.

IMO the lack of adoption of RSS is more due to technical reasons and the complex nature of it than a lack of motive. You use TV as an example, but today YouTube has much more viewers than tv, choosing their own content. Picturing people as a homogenous, brainless mass is very short-sighted.

What is technical and complex about self-curation? The whole idea of self-curation is non-technical and anything but complex. One can blame the engineering of RSS and all, and one can even conjure up the conspiracy theories of big media, advertising and such, but the basic fact remains .... people at large are not into curating, finding, searching information on their own. They'd rather other feed information on the plate. There is nothing brainless about such a need. It is just how people wish to evolve.

What does the success of Pinterest say about that?

Pinterest is a stroefront where people are either selling, or they're window-shopping. How do you arrive at assuming Pinterest as a curation tool?

Look at the earlier version of Delicious. It was a curation tool. Look at it now. Do you see a difference between what Delicious now shows versus what you see see at Pinterest? Throw in clipboard.com. They've at it before Pinterest showed up.

When it comes to accessing information, there is a difference between "saving" information and "acquiring" it. Sites like Facebook, Google+ etc are all into serving you means to "save" and not acquire. If you wish to acquire information, they'd rather you acquire first through their Ads infested window-front store. By the time you get to the meat of any substantive information, you have lost the real opportunity.

The RSS protocol was the real substantive engine of a means to acquire information, an ultimate self-curation tool which empowers one with information and not distraction. Again, you must have noticed, the biggest complaints on the demise of Google Reader came from the typical journalist community and the tech savvy people. The know the value of pipes which was serving them information. The mass never cared and still don't because they'd rather be served. Pinterest and window-shopping sites like these are only creating illusion of curation.

One other form of regression: people navigating the web through custom apps on their phone, like "Hail a Cab" or "Shop at Target." The whole idea of the web was to create a neutral platform so that custom software wasn't needed. In addition, this is raising a generation who are illiterate of general computer principles, but have lots of brain-space for specific apps. "I'm really good with Hail a Cab!"

This isn't regression: it's progress. Alerts and Reader didn't fly - not because it didn't work - but because it wasn't worth doing.

There is an implicit assumption, perhaps borne out of the relatively 'youth' of the information sector that the only criteria for a successful idea is that it's "good". There are plenty of examples of inventions, ideas or concepts that seem destined to succeed and yet, in the long run, prove unsustainable or unsuitable to break through to a wider market.

Reader and Alerts would appear to be classic examples. Highly marginal services (srsly), filling a specialised but unloved niche (sry), for a set of low value customers (orly). And before anyone starts that up again, talk of "alienating the influencers" is highly exaggerated. Google's influencers are low-fi, not the tech-l33t, as much as it might pain HN.

Were they really not worth doing? Or just not worth Google doing? The latter has a much higher bar given the rate at which other parts of Google print money.

I could certainly see a minority of Reader customers paying enough for the service to make a small team very comfortable. It would have been nice for Google to spin it out for this reason, though I suspect there were significant technical barriers.

I agree. Correct me if I'm wrong, but using Google Reader seems to cut down on the number of ads a user sees. And seeing as Google is at its heart an advertising company, why would they put effort into maintaining a tool that reduces the number of delivered ads?

Ding ding!

Of course, that doesn't mean this isn't unfortunate, bad for us and bad for the web in the long term.

I think you're right, but I think it also shows that the service will always be niche. That's fine, but it's not "regression".

You've hit the nail squarely on the head...

So, "good" isn't enough, sure. But how do you define what is enough? What's "good" for someone else - the ones who matter, I guess?

The problem is that we've gotten used to the idea that on the internet, the good of someone else doesn't have to interfere with our own good. Two tools, or two thousand, can live in, if not harmony, than in safely compartmentalized areas where their unloved niche can live in peace.

That used be what we called progress - that was using the strength of the net to create a productively pluralistic online world.

I think your definitions of progress and good are not accurate, or concrete. But I could be misunderstanding you.

Alerts and Reader didn't fly - not because it didn't work - but because it wasn't worth doing.

If you reduce everything down to commercial viability, then art isn't worth doing, music isn't worth doing, healing the impoverished isn't worth doing and frankly your comment wasn't worth typing, if you come right down to it, was it?

Art isn't created on a commercial scale by big corporate entities for exactly that reason unless it drives some other corporate interest (i.e. advertising, graphic design etc.). There is a subset of people who would continue to write code for themselves given no financial compensation, because they enjoy writing code. Similarly, there are people who create art purely for the joy of making art. Much as Google abandoned Reader and Alerts, don't expect Exxon to make an entry to the Turner prize.

Music has a large corporate aspect, but then a lot of music is done as art for the love of creation or the love of playing.

Healing the impoverished, for many people, is part of ones responsibilities as a human being. Everyone has the right to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness", right? A lot of people consider health to fall under life and therefore much like the maintainance of civil liberties (wouldn't it be so much more profitable if you could own your staff?) it shouldn't be left to the whims of the market.[1]

[1] I'm a) british and b) practically a communist so your mileage may vary on that one.

Ah, so Alerts and Reader is like healing the impoverished. Clearly, I'm against all those things too!

Nice strawman there.

Google is a company, and if you read the post, it was specifically about "how quickly would VC firms throw MILLIONS at it to scale it up".

I have no idea what you're against. I don't care what you're against.

If you decide that anything a company isn't doing or stops doing must therefore be "not worth doing," you're going to wind up concluding a lot of things aren't "worth doing." Is this not clear?

...if you read the post, it was specifically about "how quickly would VC firms throw MILLIONS at it to scale it up".

It is not.

One of the reasons Google gave for not opening up the source of reader was that it was too closely tied to their web indexing infrastructure. In other words, Google - and Google alone - was uniquely positioned to make the most efficient, highest-performance RSS reader in the world.

In other words, the replacements for Reader will assuredly be inferior. But that's "progress," you say.

If everything that happens is "progress" then we're living in the best of all possible worlds, right?

First you say:

> If you decide that anything a company isn't doing or stops doing must therefore be "not worth doing," you're going to wind up concluding a lot of things aren't "worth doing."

And then:

> Google - and Google alone - was uniquely positioned to make the most efficient, highest-performance RSS reader in the world.

In other words: the company that was uniquely positioned to make the best RSS reader, found that it wasn't worth doing. So, yeah, I'm going to call it. The idea, which seems good, is fundamentally flawed.

Progress is not "just keeping doing what we've been doing for a while because some people feel pretty strongly that we should keep doing it". Progress is recognizing the failures, culling off the dead flesh and seeing what grows in it's place.

Time for the next thing.

In other words: the company that was uniquely positioned to make the best RSS reader, found that it wasn't worth doing.

They decided it wasn't profitable, which you insist makes it "not worth doing." I find that equation offensive, and you have responded to that criticism with mockery and no substance.

Progress is recognizing the failures, culling off the dead flesh and seeing what grows in it's place.

Creative destruction happens when something marvelous and new replaces something old, but simply destroying the old thing is never progress. Too many in the tech field seem to think that all destruction is "creative destruction," that all change is necessarily "progress."

You're looking for slights when there are none.

At the end of the day a product needs to be sustainable. That's just reality, and it applies to music and art as much as it applies to an online service. Sorry, but being offended about it doesn't mean anything.

"Worth doing" in a strictly commercial sense, perhaps, but part of what traditionally made the internet awesome was that it wasn't all about commerce.

That's why I liked Siegler's analogy to bees.

This reminds me of a Dilbert comic. To paraphrase:

Boss: "We need to decentralize to remove bottlenecks."

[later]

Boss: "We need to centralize to improve efficiency."

Am I the only one who feels like the web is making a transition from being more like a library to being more like television?

The more content is sliced up into little digestible chunks and spread across multiple pages the less useful it is. There will always be great content online, it just seems like it might get harder and harder to find on sites whose layout is driven by pageviews.

Pageviews which are counted and monetized by Google's other services. There was another HN submission recently (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5476812) that had a great quote:

"I find that Google and SEO and tracking have soiled the web in unbelievable ways. Google has imposed a constraint on content through its ad business that I can't get away from, because content is trying to adapt to Google so it can be found, but especially because content becomes monetized in doing so-- to the detriment of us all."

This post ignores one fact: VCs did, in fact, throw millions at Reader-like services and competitors a few years ago, when the RSS scene was hot. Most of them went nowhere, the luckiest got acquired.

A few lifestyle businesses will forever chug along on a few million hardcore fans like me; nevertheless, the overall technology in its current incarnation is an evolutionary dead-end: it's heavy on resources (all that bandwidth!), fundamentally uni-directional and too user-unfriendly to break into the mainstream.

We need to ditch RSS and the current breed of pub/sub tools, rebuild them from scratch with monetization and aggregation in mind (while maintaining a fundamentally decentralised approach), and only then we'll be able to build an ecosystem of easy-to-use apps that can self-sustain in the long run.

Everything goes in cycles of human attention span. Technologies become tired and "crufty" because maintainers get bored with them and want the new hotness. This is nothing new and the up-and-down cycle will continue happening over and over. Witness desktop Linux, which has been around for a few decades and yet to this day is constantly being torn down and rebuilt anew because the maintainers (and users!) become too familiar with the problems the technology solves and want a new thing to play with.

The article is very true. But this happens everywhere, when a short term commercial interest is more important than user experience and solution of users problems. Take this hardware example. My moms favourite iron is a heavy chunk of metal with no self adjustments, regulations and it does not switch itself off. It is 55 yrs old. It just works. My wife changes modern irons every 2-3 years. It pushes economy forward.

It's really all about curation. Early on, it was yahoo's attempt to put all web content in a big hierarchy. dmoz after that. Then RSS let people curate their own content. Now people subscribe to friends that post interesting things. I don't think the appetite for curation has decreased - it's just that the best method of curation subtly changes as content generation styles change.

What about new sites like Instapaper and Newsblur?

And Digg (OK, OK), Reddit, Hacker News?

We're losing some things and gaining others. The web isn't regressing, it's evolving.

>The web isn't regressing, it's evolving.

If you understood evolution fully, you would know that "the web is regressing" and "the web is evolving", in addition to not being mutually exclusive statements, regression necessarily implies evolution.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_evolution

If Reddit is evolution for humanity, I support global thermonuclear war.

I think Instapaper is definitely an advancement and I'm a big fan. How many users does it really have though?

RSS specifically is being replaced by reddit and well.. HN. The leading edge of people who adopted and used it, people like us have moved to HN and subreddits, I'm not sure outside our demographic rss ever caught on to any great extent. Whereas reddit especially is becoming popular with a much wider range of people.

There is, nonetheless, a HUGE difference between you pulling content (subscribing) and other people recommending or aggregating content for you. One is subject to the One Off Problem, the other is not. One creates incentives to sensationalize/exaggerate/selectively omit and the other does not.

I don't think you're wrong. But I see here a fantastic example of what's been going on since the Reader shutdown fiasco, which is people comparing RSS to services like Facebook and Reddit, when RSS itself, is actually just an interchange standard, and what you mean is surely RSS aggregators.

I only bring it up because I worry that people might think they should stop providing RSS on their blogs. I hope that isn't people's takeaway because RSS solves a legitimate problem with decentralized publishing in a machine-friendly way.

With regards to Google Alerts, wouldn't it be pretty easy to set up a scheduled task using any decent scripting language (or even just standard unix utilities) to just read a text file of search-terms, scrape the results on Google, and email you the results?

HN Challenge: Do the above, in any language, in the smallest number of lines. I have a feeling it can be achieved in one, so we may need to judge by number of characters :-)

And sorry, I don't see discontinuing Google Reader as the death of RSS, no matter what the author may feel. It's really just the death of a nice RSS reader. I do however feel that the author is correct in saying that RSS is not really compatible with Google's advertising business.

I wonder if you could create a service which uses RSS, serves ads and gives back royalties to the services subscribed. Think Spotify for RSS. The biggest obstacle would be creating an RSS tool usable enough so that people are willing to consume ads (or pay a (monthly?) fee) in exchange for a truly usable RSS reader.

Great article by Ryan! Had to post it. We actually interviewed him last year and some of his advice will be appearing in our book Accelerate that is currently 88% funded on KickStarter. http://kck.st/ZIgBXE.

Ironically it's published on a site that doesn't have an RSS feed (or atom, remember that debate) published. which is a shame really as the content on medium is usually pretty good but I'll hardly ever remember to go back on a regular basis.

It is not just things disappearing with no alternative, it is new "innovations" that are less capable than their predecessors.

-We don't have Flash or Silverlight anymore, we just have HTML5/JS/CSS.

~Well HTML5 is brand new and must be superior to those others right?

-No Both can do all that HTML5 can do and a lot more. Flash could do everything 8 years ago that HTML5 can do today.

~Well can I create my own Markup Language and alternative to HTML5/JS/CSS?

-You can, but most people will spit on you - leave the "innovation" up to the committee. Standard are all that matter to anyone. Just go along with the crowd and be a code monkey, Stick your ambition and innovations into a bottle.

~Is there really no way I can create my own Browser client technology?

-Well, there is one way. Just create your innovative/bleeding edge concept - then make it compile down to JavaScript. That is the only way.

~Wow, that sounds like a workaround/hack just to try bringing new and better ideas to web development. It still gets around the limitations, but sounds very daunting and a like a huge pain in the ass.

-Yeah - I think that this is the idea. Rather than creating a standard for HTML5 AND some sort of VM/API that others can use to create innovative and better technologies. The standards guys' strategy is to remain in a position of power (though it stifles innovation).

~So if I made a suggestion to the consortium to create something like you suggested, do you think that they might listen to me? I really am brimming with GREAT ideas.

-HAHAHA...

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