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Comment by adamesque | Hacker News Reader

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.

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"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.

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