The contrast in comments between the 2017 version vs. this 2020 post is fascinating so my thanks :)
For what it's worth I strongly agreed with the author at the time and feel doubly-so in 2020.
> But most of the time we spend on the web today is no longer on the open Internet - it's on private services like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.
Ultimately there are three good reasons for this, which the author doesn't address at all.
The first is spam and abuse. The problem with a purely "open web" is that there's no solution to those, because of bad actors. The only solution we've found so far are centralized organizations which can run sophisticated machine learning and hire thousands of moderators.
The second is aggregation and discoverability. What good is it to publish if nobody finds you? Matching what people want to read, with the content they'll like (and not turning it into a firehose) is a really hard problem which, again, open standards basically do nothing for.
And then of course the third is monetization. There's a lot of amazing content on, e.g. YouTube, that wouldn't have been created if it weren't for monetization, because it takes content creators time that they'd otherwise have to spend at a job.
Now if we can create open standards that work as well as centralized solutions for all three of these... then we're talking.
The pre-giant-conglomerate solution to those things was the (lack of) scale.
Aggregation and discovery was low-volume stuff like web rings and humble links.
Abuse had a much lower payoff due to the lower scale. Communities were mostly small, and abusers were small. Bigger communities were bigger targets, but could afford to pay people.
If ten thousand people wanted to attack one of them, they could, for sure - but people having public discussions on FB or Twitter aren't immune to a group that size either. Scale and centralization hasn't had much benefit there.
Monetization is certainly the difference. But is it worth it in its current form? If you want to reach a huge audience, these mega-platforms make it much easier to do so. You don't even have to persuade that many people, if the algorithm picks you up and starts dropping you in people's feed!
I'd argue that the blind algorithm-driven promotion is the single biggest problem in the big social media and search platforms (Google, FB, Twitter, even Amazon 3rd party sellers).
--
But I think the interesting thing people usually miss is that the old smaller internet is still there, for people looking for niche discussions and communities outside of the huge platforms.
> The first is spam and abuse. The problem with a purely "open web" is that there's no solution to those, because of bad actors. The only solution we've found so far are centralized organizations which can run sophisticated machine learning and hire thousands of moderators.
Not true. It's the only solution when your focus is growth, and so you permit open signups from anywhere needing only something like an email address. This enables brigading, bots and abuse with fake and anonymous accounts.
If a web of trust were involved, you have an introduction chain for every user, and a bad actor revealing themselves casts suspicion on the whole chain. You can revoke the whole chain in one go which is far more effective than picking bad actors and bots off one by one. The investment needed to sneak in is also considerably higher.
So the status quo is not the only solution, it's the lazy solution focused on growing as fast as possible with no regard for the challenges that raises.
> The first is spam and abuse. The problem with a purely "open web" is that there's no solution to those, because of bad actors. The only solution we've found so far are centralized organizations which can run sophisticated machine learning and hire thousands of moderators.
False: there are plenty of old-school forums that still work just fine, with a handful of very hands-off moderators.
There's a trend toward censorship in the big players, because it's more profitable to get thin-skinned users on their platform, but this is not at all the only way to create a healthy community.
> The second is aggregation and discoverability. What good is it to publish if nobody finds you? Matching what people want to read, with the content they'll like (and not turning it into a firehose) is a really hard problem which, again, open standards basically do nothing for.
I generally find things through a few bloggers who have a high signal-noise ratio in what they post.
The idea that Facebook/Twitter/etc. do a better job than my bloggers is laughable. I left these platforms for a reason.
> And then of course the third is monetization. There's a lot of amazing content on, e.g. YouTube, that wouldn't have been created if it weren't for monetization, because it takes content creators time that they'd otherwise have to spend at a job.
On the contrary, I think the best content is almost always made because the person making it cares about what they are saying. "Hey guys make sure you like and subscribe! And by the way I've been playing Clash Of The Clans!" That's not content, that's advertising, and it's the poisonous result of monetization. Paul Harrell makes little-to-no money on his channel, Erowid survives on donations, Wikipedia authors are unpaid, Mother Jones and ProPublica are purely donation-based... and these are far better sources in most cases than any other sources of information on the subject. There is no case where ad-supported content does better than non-ad-supported content that I know of.
> The only solution we've found so far are centralized organizations which can run sophisticated machine learning and hire thousands of moderators.
I’m pretty sure HN, the site were literally posting on, does not have either of these, or at least not at that scale and yet it’s miles better than anything on fb or twitter so I’m not sure I buy this argument.
Opt in systems solve these in open social media platforms, but introduce their own vulnerabilities such as information/reality bubbles and difficulty in growing networks.
> The second is aggregation and discoverability
Advertising takes many forms, including word of mouth.
> monetization
This is true enough, but most content on the internet isn't monetized by the creator via the platform, and there are many examples of creators who monetize independent of the platform. It also depends on how low you want to go w/ what you call the platform. Some pay for a platform in order to monetize. I don't have stats on this, so maybe it's experiential bias.
The only correct solution to spam and abuse is to empower governments to charge people with offences when they commit them. This means national isolation, since the US can't extradite a fraudster in Russia and vice versa.
Aggregation and discoverability is easy. Talk to people. Don't think about publishing, think about being part of a community.
Monetisation can be solved by doing it the old-fashioned way. Standards aren't necessary; just make it possible to do small anonymous transactions. Don't ask them to log in and sign up before you'll take their money. Just take their money. Internet busking.
>>The first is spam and abuse. The problem with a purely "open web" is that there's no solution to those, because of bad actors. The only solution we've found so far are centralized organizations which can run sophisticated machine learning and hire thousands of moderators.
This is completely false on 2 fronts. The idea that these major services have solved spam and abuse is simply provably wrong.
Further there are a number of ways stop spam and abuse on decentralized systems, in some ways these are better than on the centralized platforms.
>The second is aggregation and discoverability. What good is it to publish if nobody finds you? Matching what people want to read, with the content they'll like, is a really hard problem which, again, open standards basically do nothing for.
Here is a valid point, but there are some cool tech coming out that solves this, things like Lbry for example
>And then of course the third is monetization. There's a lot of amazing content on, e.g. YouTube, that wouldn't have been created if it weren't for monetization, because it takes content creators time that they'd otherwise have to spend at a job.
This is amusing, given the massive levels of demonetization on YouTube i think you are overstating the value of YT ad revenue in the modern area. Most YouTubers today seem to make the bulk of their money from outside sources like Sponsored Videos', Merch Sales, Direct Donations, etc.
The author talks about the web as "one of humanity's greatest inventions." which is now in crisis:
> And now, we the architects of the modern web — web designers, UX designers, developers, creative directors, social media managers, data scientists, product managers, start-up people, strategists — are destroying it.
The interests of tech companies, investors and web professionals have not always aligned with the best interests of end-users and so there has been a gradual erosion of the freedoms embedded in the foundations of the web itself.
My favourite StarTrek moment is Captain Pike's statement "We are always in a fight for the future". Given the current state of the web, this feels truer than ever. Unlike the author, however, I don't think the answer is better web pages. Any chance of us winning the fight for user freedoms must be bigger and bolder than that.
There has been an entire generation of entrepreneurs and investors who have thought and planned strategically how to shape the web to work in their best interests. A meaningful counter has to be equally intentional and coordinated to stand a chance at shaping the course technology takes. We are in a fight for the future and we need to think bigger to stand a chance of winning that fight.
In my opinion, this erosion of freedoms is closely related to marketing departments that are now established practice in every IT company. Technological interest becomes an interest in profit, or at least these two become entwined, and in an environment driven by competition, the marketing strategies become very aggressive.
For example, review sites are frequently manipulated by fake posts, and new products that are introduced into the market find it inevitable to do the same because otherwise, they won't get the required visibility to back-up the investment.
And there's an elaborate online tracking mechanism established to follow the user online to obtain his/her purchase history, interests and desires, to push ads to the face, and this is done (although not always) without users consent, limiting online freedom.
I think there are lots of lessons to learn from Cambridge Analytica scandal, or from the practices of ClearView AI that are cooperating with law enforcement providing them facial recognition technologies.
Not going to happen unless we get property rights to software. As long as software is "licensed", we no longer own our machines.
Battle.net DRM, Steam, EPIC, uplay, origin, are all bids to lock down software.
Without property rights to own software you can't prevent mass privacy invasion that's going on in windows 10. You need to beat back DRM completely and that mean's we need ownership rights and DRM systems need to be destroyed, they only came about because big media companies lobbied away the basic rights and freedoms to own our PC's and the software on it.
Without software property rights for the public, the madness will continue.
I watched for the last 23 years as the game industry client-servered every PC game and got away with it because "software is licensed", not owned, so they can technically sell you incomplete software where pieces of your game live on a remote server and die if it ever shuts off.
Shit is fraud plain and simple, that's why dedicated servers and level editors went away in the AAA space and how we got "software as a service (scam)".
I don't see anything good given the vast majority of people are too stupid politically to even approach the problem of property rights to software for end users.
Did the web sort of start out a super walled garden for millions of people?
My embarrassing story was starting out with an AOL disk in the mail. I thought the "web" was great fun and apparently I wasn't alone. Often I couldn't even log in because the web was all busy signals. It was the AOL fail wail.
In those early explorations, I found a button with the label "www." I didn't know what it was, but I did know that it sucked! I don't think I bothered with the www again until after I moved away from AOL.
All the things we complain about on the web today should have its place. We just don't need to go there. It's not actually that hard to avoid tracking, etc. The majority of HN could probably work out some sort of Stallman type of setup over a weekend or two.
If we can't avoid, then maybe we could create "personas" instead. Like in an MMORPG, create an avatar. Maybe we can create noise machines to throw people off. Do the opposite of the Brave browser. Run bots and clicking operations in the background (IMO clicking ads served to me with no intent to buy is only bad when I intend to profit or help someone I know to profit from it. If I have a process to do things randomly to obscure my tracks, then I'm fine?)
I think if we're really going to make a dent, we need to work to create an ecosystem elsewhere. Look at the dark web for example. It's crap, but you can buy drugs there! Open source developers maybe need to jump on the tooling. Writers need to add the content. Then of course we'll just start the cycle over again. But maybe distributed next time.
Did the web sort of start out a super walled garden for millions of people?
If you define "web" as web sites on the internet, then no. But if you define "web" as people communicating en masse via computer, then yes.
I remember when even something as basic as e-mail would only work within a single e-mail service. Eventually gateways were built between networks, but not every network connected to every other network, so in order to send an e-mail message from User A to User B, you'd have to send it through Gateway X, Gateway Y, and Gateway Z.
For content, we were all in the walled gardens of CompuServe, The Source, The WELL, HAL-PC, and dozens other commercial services, plus tens of thousands of private mini-gardens in the form of BBSes.
> Did the web sort of start out a super walled garden for millions of people?
> I think if we're really going to make a dent, we need to work to create an ecosystem elsewhere.
There is an attempt being made to build what you're describing - and it's called Ceptr (http://ceptr.org) by it's creators. The underlying pattern that has emerged in their work is a 'holograhic' chain (Holochain) that allows users to create small modular distributed apps that come together in a coherent way to form apps and online meeting places that aren't mediated by the corporate structure. In some places it is called Protocol Cooperavitism. The idea is that Protocol Cooperavitism will slowly start replacing/evolve into Platform Capitalism.
So yeah, Holochian is a protocol development framework, like Ruby on Rails but for serverless protocols instead of centralized servers.
Holochain is a framework for writing fully distributed peer-to-peer applications. It is not based on blockchain technology. Nor is Holochain a single platform like Ethereum. It is rather like a decentralized Ruby on Rails, a toolkit that produces stand-alone programs but for serverless high-profile applications.
If you want a better web, we need to figure out two things, none of which appear in the author's article:
1. How to pay for stuff in the web in the same way you can pay with cash in the real world.
2. How to regulate the new-age, digital-good, information-aggregation monopolies. I suspect this will have to be done by either a state-forced, or a highly-useful interoperability protocol for building new tech.
> 1. How to pay for stuff in the web in the same way you can pay with cash in the real world.
This is precisely the problem that Bitcoin was created to solve. You can argue that Bitcoin specifically has failed to fill that role; but, I still earnestly believe that a cryptocurrency system will be a key aspect of the "better web", that the crypto infrastructure is in its infancy now and will bloom as development continues.
1 is pretty easy. Just do it. You go to a store, pay, and leave. You go to a website, pay, and leave. No signup or anything necessary. Most countries support real-time payments, and there's credit/debit cards for those who don't.
2 certainly requires state involvement. it is impossible to use technical means to solve a social problem, since bad actors will just find the loopholes which can only be closed after the fact. In a criminal court, there aren't so many loopholes and they can be challenged in real time.
Thinking more about this, one of the only tangible currencies on the real web is hosting/processing capabilities: you can measure it from the web itself.
I think that's what Bitcoin tried to achieve, although it does so without providing real value to anyone. Instead, imagine the following: you provide a slice of your computer time to Google, some local storage to blackblaze, some bandwidth to Netflix.
All of these are commodities you pay for in the real world. They are valuable on the Internet. Lend some storage and bandwidth to youtube, they could credit your account, and you could use that virtual currency to spend on youtube creators. Youtube would directly pay them with $$$ instead of paying you.
However, my answer only mentioned huge-scale companies, I am not sure it would make a lot of sense at a smaller scale, unfortunately. However, that basic idea of service exchange is something I've been thinking for a while as a path forward to a new kind of currency, which I should put into a prototype as soon as I have the time to do so :)
>1. How to pay for stuff in the web in the same way you can pay with cash in the real world.
This one is a bit easier. Prepaid credit cards are frequently accepted online and can be purchased with cash. The fees are a bit high as is but there's no reason merchants can't create more of these and likely even lower the prices.
Alternatively your CC provider could potentially act as a privacy guard by providing randomized rotating onetime transaction numbers as well, I know some pay services like Samsung pay do this to some degree already by creating virtual cards that require a third party to authenticate without giving your actual account, though I believe those virtual cards remain fairly static. With more potential entropy (large GUID), it seems reasonable you could rotate those on the fly.
> in the same way you can pay with cash in the real world.
but stuff on the web is not at all like stuff in the real world!
this is a hugely understanted problem. digital artifacts have zero reproduction cost (beyond a few volts and a couple of amperes, which are provided by whomever copies)
therefore, IMO, the market mechanism we have in place, which evolved to optimize material goods, is woefully inadequate to deal with digital "goods"
finally, this is not a technological problem, but a sociopolitical problem.
The author highlights tracking, profiling & targeting. Just yesterday, I Asked HN but none responded: can't we just flood the trackers with random data instead of fight so hard to block them? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23324946
This really hits home for me. Somehow the centralized web became better, maybe its a user experience thing. One can't help but wonder if these are solvable in a decentralized or even federated approach?
I've been thinking about writing a new webbrowser with very limited functionality which could be used on secure networks, such as Tor. It would only support a limited subset of HTTP and HTML / CSS and HTML Video. No Javascript / frames or anything else that could impart the safety.
I've been meaning to pitch it to the Tor Project, but haven't gotten around to it yet.
I think browser vendors need to provide more advanced controls for people who want it. Give us a whitelist mode where every feature besides base HTML is turned off, unless we explicitly add the site to our whitelist. I want checkboxes that say only these websites allow: cookies, javascript, images, css, etc.
No need to reinvent the wheel, the browsers are fine, but they open the floodgates by default. I think content providers have abused this to the point of breaking the web. Similar to the ad networks... abused it the point of absurdity, so now you are all permanently blocked, because you couldn't have any common decency. Block it all by default, whitelist what you want.
Moving to Min from Chrome is certainly moving in the right direction, though. After all, Electron is just a stripped-down version of Chromium, and thus quite a bit more minimal by default.
I really like it when people try to give practical advice after describing problems. Agree with most of what's written in the post. But I'd like to discuss one part of it:
> [...] the major websites of today's web are not built for the visitor, but as means of using her.
To me, here lies a key point that both the writer and many commenters here in HN seemed to miss in 2017. What's written here is just a consequence, and the post goes on to develop it through all its length... but why did the dynamics change in that way? What's the underlying reason for the shift?
Some comments here in HN mentioned it: internet becoming a marketplace. With both its good and bad side-effects. It's an extremely complex issue, but money does completely shape dynamics of current society, and therefore internet too, and it leaves us without spaces that aren't conditioned by it. At small scale it doesn't seem a big problem, or we rationalize it because everyone needs money to survive... But it really shapes the world, and we can't simply ignore the ugly sides of it and pretend we can solve it without ever involving the discussion about money and the dynamics it generates.
The "magic" the post talks about only needs three ingredients: human curiosity, time (to develop that curiosity), and spaces (to host those humans and their time). Human curiosity and creativity will always exist as long as we don't go extinct. About time... well, we can satisfy our basic needs more efficiently than ever... and yet, ironically, we are using the newly freed time to create "more competitive" products that focus on enslaving the potential of our fellow human beings through infinite-scroll addiction, fear of missing out, instant gratification, attention grabbing and other kinds of biases and "bugs" in the human system. And finally spaces. Well, nothing left. If the only accessible spaces require money or work-to-generate-money, you close the circle and can't scape the landscape and conditioning I was describing. Even if there are some spaces left, they tend to fell into oblivion against the competition. Too hard to escape, too easy to rationalize.
And honestly, I don't think there's any game-changer discussion about morality standards here. Morals must play a very important part in getting us to start a change (and by us I mean the kind of people that's most directly involved in tech, like this HN crowd), but as long as we don't try to really disrupt at least some of the dynamics generated by money-profit-survival-motivations, I'm somewhat skeptical we will be able to move the needle, because efforts will be eaten by the competition even if we never wanted to play under those rules. Let's hope I'm mistaken and it's easier to solve.
That's well put. I'd challenge the assumption that money completely shapes the internet. After all, Wikipedia did happen relatively recently, and I presume it's what you mean by "necessary space". Having that example in mind, what do you feel is the next step (in ethical norms?...) that would lead to something even more gratuitous?
I'm non-native and I searched for a while for a better word than "gratuitous" here. The vocabulary looks a bit narrow. I mean for example "non-profit", firstly, contains a negation and, secondly, implies that profit can only be measured financially. "Free" on the other hand is too broad, too imprecise.
I (as an armchair philosopher, and not a very good one at that), argue that the problem is not the web, nor technology, but Complexity Vs. Convenience.
In order to create the modern world, in order to create its conveniences, systems, sometimes very complex systems, must be implemented underneath, as infrastructure, to support all of that convenience.
Sometimes they are "systems of systems", that is, infrastructures heaped on top of other infrastructures, etc.
They provide conveniences; that's true, but they conversely create a series of corner-cases, a series of circumstances where the complexity creates additional problems, where the complexity serves to be the problem.
Consider a future sci-fi scenario of robot war...
What happened? What went wrong? Here's what went wrong:
Robots were created to serve humanity, but over many centuries, many generations, the knowledge of how they were created (and what it took to control them) was lost, as mankind became lazier and lazier, and deferred all work to the robots.
The complexity of the robots (and their AI) increased, whereas the knowledge humanity possessed about them decreased.
At a certain time, at a certain critical juncture, because of the increasing knowledge asymmetry, creator (humanity) and creation switched roles, and now the creation caused great problems for the creator, who had basically lost the knowledge, ("lost the manual for" <g>), how to control the creation.
We see this pattern repeat in a variety of formats, in a variety of historic and present-day contexts; it includes (but is not limited to!): Technology, Religion, Law, Governments, Social Systems, etc.
Basically, all of those things were created to serve man, to serve mankind...
And (depending upon where you are in history, or what your knowledge (or lack of knowledge) of them is, in the present day), some of them either will, or at least have the apparency of, the loss of control by their creator -- mankind.
Frankenstein, by Mary Shelly, is an allegory of this theme, that is, of a creator that creates something for beneficial purposes, only that with enough time (and/or loss of knowledge), the creation turns on the creator...
Understood properly, here's the reason why all societies eventually fail, and why far in mankind's past, there may have been a high-tecnology society (Atlantis?) which was destroyed, because with all of the solutions it brought, it also brought additional problems, such that those could not be controlled, and eventually it was destroyed, or was the cause of its own destruction...
The Greek myth of Sisyphus -- is also an allegory for this
phenomena... If the stone which he has to roll up a hill (only to watch it roll back down again! "There goes the neighborhood!" <g>) represents society, then he is fated to roll it up the hill to its pinacle -- only to watch it roll back down again... over and over and over, for eternity...
So, Complexity Vs. Convenience. With every new convenience, you require more complexity, and you generate a new set of problems...
Brilliant. Love it. Of course we see this everything, in automation in aviation for example, or in cars, or even reliance on urban solutions like food delivery and such.
In each of these cases, things become more convenient/less complex, but a new set of problems crop up.
All electronic networks, from the original arpanet to tor, have suffered from the same problem: someone needs to pay for them yet each individual transaction is too small to matter.
Surveillance capitalism is the one model that scaled better than 'let the army and universities pay for it' and it's the one we're stuck with until Xanadu becomes something more than vaporware.
Uh... How you figure? Only the infrastructure needs to be paid for. The "switching fabric" if you will. And of course the power you use to run the computer.
It costs nothing else to put a packet out there on the Net sans doing so through a draconian metered connection, and surveillance capitalism had nothing to do with that. In fact, if anything, the fact the Net was free did more to boost surveillance capitalism than anything else.
If companies actually had to pay to collect, hold, operate on, and be privy to information about people; In Short, if there were acknowledged data privacy rights in play with regard to people's meta-information, and it was not just handed to corporations as a blank check money making asset, surveillance capitalism couldn't have gotten off the ground.
In the time since the article was published (2017), the GDPR has come into effect. I wonder how it affected third-party traffic, if at all. Especially for European websites such as lemonde.fr (used as an example by the author).
[+] [-] headalgorithm|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Pick-A-Hill2019|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] divbzero|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] crazygringo|5 years ago|reply
Ultimately there are three good reasons for this, which the author doesn't address at all.
The first is spam and abuse. The problem with a purely "open web" is that there's no solution to those, because of bad actors. The only solution we've found so far are centralized organizations which can run sophisticated machine learning and hire thousands of moderators.
The second is aggregation and discoverability. What good is it to publish if nobody finds you? Matching what people want to read, with the content they'll like (and not turning it into a firehose) is a really hard problem which, again, open standards basically do nothing for.
And then of course the third is monetization. There's a lot of amazing content on, e.g. YouTube, that wouldn't have been created if it weren't for monetization, because it takes content creators time that they'd otherwise have to spend at a job.
Now if we can create open standards that work as well as centralized solutions for all three of these... then we're talking.
[+] [-] majormajor|5 years ago|reply
Aggregation and discovery was low-volume stuff like web rings and humble links.
Abuse had a much lower payoff due to the lower scale. Communities were mostly small, and abusers were small. Bigger communities were bigger targets, but could afford to pay people.
If ten thousand people wanted to attack one of them, they could, for sure - but people having public discussions on FB or Twitter aren't immune to a group that size either. Scale and centralization hasn't had much benefit there.
Monetization is certainly the difference. But is it worth it in its current form? If you want to reach a huge audience, these mega-platforms make it much easier to do so. You don't even have to persuade that many people, if the algorithm picks you up and starts dropping you in people's feed!
I'd argue that the blind algorithm-driven promotion is the single biggest problem in the big social media and search platforms (Google, FB, Twitter, even Amazon 3rd party sellers).
--
But I think the interesting thing people usually miss is that the old smaller internet is still there, for people looking for niche discussions and communities outside of the huge platforms.
[+] [-] naasking|5 years ago|reply
Not true. It's the only solution when your focus is growth, and so you permit open signups from anywhere needing only something like an email address. This enables brigading, bots and abuse with fake and anonymous accounts.
If a web of trust were involved, you have an introduction chain for every user, and a bad actor revealing themselves casts suspicion on the whole chain. You can revoke the whole chain in one go which is far more effective than picking bad actors and bots off one by one. The investment needed to sneak in is also considerably higher.
So the status quo is not the only solution, it's the lazy solution focused on growing as fast as possible with no regard for the challenges that raises.
[+] [-] kerkeslager|5 years ago|reply
False: there are plenty of old-school forums that still work just fine, with a handful of very hands-off moderators.
There's a trend toward censorship in the big players, because it's more profitable to get thin-skinned users on their platform, but this is not at all the only way to create a healthy community.
> The second is aggregation and discoverability. What good is it to publish if nobody finds you? Matching what people want to read, with the content they'll like (and not turning it into a firehose) is a really hard problem which, again, open standards basically do nothing for.
I generally find things through a few bloggers who have a high signal-noise ratio in what they post.
The idea that Facebook/Twitter/etc. do a better job than my bloggers is laughable. I left these platforms for a reason.
> And then of course the third is monetization. There's a lot of amazing content on, e.g. YouTube, that wouldn't have been created if it weren't for monetization, because it takes content creators time that they'd otherwise have to spend at a job.
On the contrary, I think the best content is almost always made because the person making it cares about what they are saying. "Hey guys make sure you like and subscribe! And by the way I've been playing Clash Of The Clans!" That's not content, that's advertising, and it's the poisonous result of monetization. Paul Harrell makes little-to-no money on his channel, Erowid survives on donations, Wikipedia authors are unpaid, Mother Jones and ProPublica are purely donation-based... and these are far better sources in most cases than any other sources of information on the subject. There is no case where ad-supported content does better than non-ad-supported content that I know of.
[+] [-] ordinaryradical|5 years ago|reply
I’m pretty sure HN, the site were literally posting on, does not have either of these, or at least not at that scale and yet it’s miles better than anything on fb or twitter so I’m not sure I buy this argument.
[+] [-] chisleu|5 years ago|reply
Opt in systems solve these in open social media platforms, but introduce their own vulnerabilities such as information/reality bubbles and difficulty in growing networks.
> The second is aggregation and discoverability Advertising takes many forms, including word of mouth.
> monetization This is true enough, but most content on the internet isn't monetized by the creator via the platform, and there are many examples of creators who monetize independent of the platform. It also depends on how low you want to go w/ what you call the platform. Some pay for a platform in order to monetize. I don't have stats on this, so maybe it's experiential bias.
[+] [-] kiddlethorp|5 years ago|reply
Aggregation and discoverability is easy. Talk to people. Don't think about publishing, think about being part of a community.
Monetisation can be solved by doing it the old-fashioned way. Standards aren't necessary; just make it possible to do small anonymous transactions. Don't ask them to log in and sign up before you'll take their money. Just take their money. Internet busking.
[+] [-] syshum|5 years ago|reply
This is completely false on 2 fronts. The idea that these major services have solved spam and abuse is simply provably wrong.
Further there are a number of ways stop spam and abuse on decentralized systems, in some ways these are better than on the centralized platforms.
>The second is aggregation and discoverability. What good is it to publish if nobody finds you? Matching what people want to read, with the content they'll like, is a really hard problem which, again, open standards basically do nothing for.
Here is a valid point, but there are some cool tech coming out that solves this, things like Lbry for example
>And then of course the third is monetization. There's a lot of amazing content on, e.g. YouTube, that wouldn't have been created if it weren't for monetization, because it takes content creators time that they'd otherwise have to spend at a job.
This is amusing, given the massive levels of demonetization on YouTube i think you are overstating the value of YT ad revenue in the modern area. Most YouTubers today seem to make the bulk of their money from outside sources like Sponsored Videos', Merch Sales, Direct Donations, etc.
[+] [-] benjaminjosephw|5 years ago|reply
> And now, we the architects of the modern web — web designers, UX designers, developers, creative directors, social media managers, data scientists, product managers, start-up people, strategists — are destroying it.
The interests of tech companies, investors and web professionals have not always aligned with the best interests of end-users and so there has been a gradual erosion of the freedoms embedded in the foundations of the web itself.
My favourite StarTrek moment is Captain Pike's statement "We are always in a fight for the future". Given the current state of the web, this feels truer than ever. Unlike the author, however, I don't think the answer is better web pages. Any chance of us winning the fight for user freedoms must be bigger and bolder than that.
There has been an entire generation of entrepreneurs and investors who have thought and planned strategically how to shape the web to work in their best interests. A meaningful counter has to be equally intentional and coordinated to stand a chance at shaping the course technology takes. We are in a fight for the future and we need to think bigger to stand a chance of winning that fight.
[+] [-] TenebrisNoctis|5 years ago|reply
For example, review sites are frequently manipulated by fake posts, and new products that are introduced into the market find it inevitable to do the same because otherwise, they won't get the required visibility to back-up the investment.
And there's an elaborate online tracking mechanism established to follow the user online to obtain his/her purchase history, interests and desires, to push ads to the face, and this is done (although not always) without users consent, limiting online freedom.
I think there are lots of lessons to learn from Cambridge Analytica scandal, or from the practices of ClearView AI that are cooperating with law enforcement providing them facial recognition technologies.
[+] [-] som33|5 years ago|reply
Battle.net DRM, Steam, EPIC, uplay, origin, are all bids to lock down software.
Without property rights to own software you can't prevent mass privacy invasion that's going on in windows 10. You need to beat back DRM completely and that mean's we need ownership rights and DRM systems need to be destroyed, they only came about because big media companies lobbied away the basic rights and freedoms to own our PC's and the software on it.
Without software property rights for the public, the madness will continue.
I watched for the last 23 years as the game industry client-servered every PC game and got away with it because "software is licensed", not owned, so they can technically sell you incomplete software where pieces of your game live on a remote server and die if it ever shuts off.
Shit is fraud plain and simple, that's why dedicated servers and level editors went away in the AAA space and how we got "software as a service (scam)".
I don't see anything good given the vast majority of people are too stupid politically to even approach the problem of property rights to software for end users.
[+] [-] x3blah|5 years ago|reply
Absolute favourite episode hands down, The Cage. According to Shatner's autobiography, NBC called the pilot "too cerebral" and "too intellectual".
[+] [-] throwaway_pdp09|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 0xdeadbeefbabe|5 years ago|reply
A new TCP protocol which provides value (really great value) and discourages the kinds of futures you want to avoid could go a long way.
[+] [-] modzu|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gexla|5 years ago|reply
My embarrassing story was starting out with an AOL disk in the mail. I thought the "web" was great fun and apparently I wasn't alone. Often I couldn't even log in because the web was all busy signals. It was the AOL fail wail.
In those early explorations, I found a button with the label "www." I didn't know what it was, but I did know that it sucked! I don't think I bothered with the www again until after I moved away from AOL.
All the things we complain about on the web today should have its place. We just don't need to go there. It's not actually that hard to avoid tracking, etc. The majority of HN could probably work out some sort of Stallman type of setup over a weekend or two.
If we can't avoid, then maybe we could create "personas" instead. Like in an MMORPG, create an avatar. Maybe we can create noise machines to throw people off. Do the opposite of the Brave browser. Run bots and clicking operations in the background (IMO clicking ads served to me with no intent to buy is only bad when I intend to profit or help someone I know to profit from it. If I have a process to do things randomly to obscure my tracks, then I'm fine?)
I think if we're really going to make a dent, we need to work to create an ecosystem elsewhere. Look at the dark web for example. It's crap, but you can buy drugs there! Open source developers maybe need to jump on the tooling. Writers need to add the content. Then of course we'll just start the cycle over again. But maybe distributed next time.
[+] [-] reaperducer|5 years ago|reply
If you define "web" as web sites on the internet, then no. But if you define "web" as people communicating en masse via computer, then yes.
I remember when even something as basic as e-mail would only work within a single e-mail service. Eventually gateways were built between networks, but not every network connected to every other network, so in order to send an e-mail message from User A to User B, you'd have to send it through Gateway X, Gateway Y, and Gateway Z.
For content, we were all in the walled gardens of CompuServe, The Source, The WELL, HAL-PC, and dozens other commercial services, plus tens of thousands of private mini-gardens in the form of BBSes.
[+] [-] bergstromm466|5 years ago|reply
> I think if we're really going to make a dent, we need to work to create an ecosystem elsewhere.
There is an attempt being made to build what you're describing - and it's called Ceptr (http://ceptr.org) by it's creators. The underlying pattern that has emerged in their work is a 'holograhic' chain (Holochain) that allows users to create small modular distributed apps that come together in a coherent way to form apps and online meeting places that aren't mediated by the corporate structure. In some places it is called Protocol Cooperavitism. The idea is that Protocol Cooperavitism will slowly start replacing/evolve into Platform Capitalism.
So yeah, Holochian is a protocol development framework, like Ruby on Rails but for serverless protocols instead of centralized servers.
Holochain is a framework for writing fully distributed peer-to-peer applications. It is not based on blockchain technology. Nor is Holochain a single platform like Ethereum. It is rather like a decentralized Ruby on Rails, a toolkit that produces stand-alone programs but for serverless high-profile applications.
Source: https://medium.com/holochain/holochain-reinventing-applicati...
[+] [-] x32n23nr|5 years ago|reply
1. How to pay for stuff in the web in the same way you can pay with cash in the real world.
2. How to regulate the new-age, digital-good, information-aggregation monopolies. I suspect this will have to be done by either a state-forced, or a highly-useful interoperability protocol for building new tech.
[+] [-] flyingfences|5 years ago|reply
This is precisely the problem that Bitcoin was created to solve. You can argue that Bitcoin specifically has failed to fill that role; but, I still earnestly believe that a cryptocurrency system will be a key aspect of the "better web", that the crypto infrastructure is in its infancy now and will bloom as development continues.
[+] [-] kiddlethorp|5 years ago|reply
2 certainly requires state involvement. it is impossible to use technical means to solve a social problem, since bad actors will just find the loopholes which can only be closed after the fact. In a criminal court, there aren't so many loopholes and they can be challenged in real time.
[+] [-] MayeulC|5 years ago|reply
What is valuable on the web?
Thinking more about this, one of the only tangible currencies on the real web is hosting/processing capabilities: you can measure it from the web itself.
I think that's what Bitcoin tried to achieve, although it does so without providing real value to anyone. Instead, imagine the following: you provide a slice of your computer time to Google, some local storage to blackblaze, some bandwidth to Netflix.
All of these are commodities you pay for in the real world. They are valuable on the Internet. Lend some storage and bandwidth to youtube, they could credit your account, and you could use that virtual currency to spend on youtube creators. Youtube would directly pay them with $$$ instead of paying you.
However, my answer only mentioned huge-scale companies, I am not sure it would make a lot of sense at a smaller scale, unfortunately. However, that basic idea of service exchange is something I've been thinking for a while as a path forward to a new kind of currency, which I should put into a prototype as soon as I have the time to do so :)
[+] [-] Frost1x|5 years ago|reply
This one is a bit easier. Prepaid credit cards are frequently accepted online and can be purchased with cash. The fees are a bit high as is but there's no reason merchants can't create more of these and likely even lower the prices.
Alternatively your CC provider could potentially act as a privacy guard by providing randomized rotating onetime transaction numbers as well, I know some pay services like Samsung pay do this to some degree already by creating virtual cards that require a third party to authenticate without giving your actual account, though I believe those virtual cards remain fairly static. With more potential entropy (large GUID), it seems reasonable you could rotate those on the fly.
[+] [-] naringas|5 years ago|reply
but stuff on the web is not at all like stuff in the real world!
this is a hugely understanted problem. digital artifacts have zero reproduction cost (beyond a few volts and a couple of amperes, which are provided by whomever copies)
therefore, IMO, the market mechanism we have in place, which evolved to optimize material goods, is woefully inadequate to deal with digital "goods"
finally, this is not a technological problem, but a sociopolitical problem.
[+] [-] f055|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] onebot|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thePunisher|5 years ago|reply
I've been meaning to pitch it to the Tor Project, but haven't gotten around to it yet.
[+] [-] caribousoup|5 years ago|reply
No need to reinvent the wheel, the browsers are fine, but they open the floodgates by default. I think content providers have abused this to the point of breaking the web. Similar to the ad networks... abused it the point of absurdity, so now you are all permanently blocked, because you couldn't have any common decency. Block it all by default, whitelist what you want.
[+] [-] 1bc29b36f623ba8|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] marci|5 years ago|reply
- HTML 4.01 and CSS 2.1
- PNG, GIF, JPEG, SVG, and BMP
- HTTPS
Latest release earlier this week
http://www.netsurf-browser.org/
[+] [-] amedvednikov|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gonehome|5 years ago|reply
It’s also interesting that he links to a Cambridge Analytica talk to make his point in 2017 (before the scandal broke).
It’s even more accurate three years later.
[+] [-] mr_custard|5 years ago|reply
Oh! Exciting!
I dutifully went to check out the Min browser web page. "Oh shit, it's another Electron app". Noped it out of there.
[+] [-] cosmojg|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] michaelyoshika|5 years ago|reply
There is no way to fix it other than inventing a new niche thing.
[+] [-] jonnypotty|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] slx26|5 years ago|reply
> [...] the major websites of today's web are not built for the visitor, but as means of using her.
To me, here lies a key point that both the writer and many commenters here in HN seemed to miss in 2017. What's written here is just a consequence, and the post goes on to develop it through all its length... but why did the dynamics change in that way? What's the underlying reason for the shift?
Some comments here in HN mentioned it: internet becoming a marketplace. With both its good and bad side-effects. It's an extremely complex issue, but money does completely shape dynamics of current society, and therefore internet too, and it leaves us without spaces that aren't conditioned by it. At small scale it doesn't seem a big problem, or we rationalize it because everyone needs money to survive... But it really shapes the world, and we can't simply ignore the ugly sides of it and pretend we can solve it without ever involving the discussion about money and the dynamics it generates.
The "magic" the post talks about only needs three ingredients: human curiosity, time (to develop that curiosity), and spaces (to host those humans and their time). Human curiosity and creativity will always exist as long as we don't go extinct. About time... well, we can satisfy our basic needs more efficiently than ever... and yet, ironically, we are using the newly freed time to create "more competitive" products that focus on enslaving the potential of our fellow human beings through infinite-scroll addiction, fear of missing out, instant gratification, attention grabbing and other kinds of biases and "bugs" in the human system. And finally spaces. Well, nothing left. If the only accessible spaces require money or work-to-generate-money, you close the circle and can't scape the landscape and conditioning I was describing. Even if there are some spaces left, they tend to fell into oblivion against the competition. Too hard to escape, too easy to rationalize.
And honestly, I don't think there's any game-changer discussion about morality standards here. Morals must play a very important part in getting us to start a change (and by us I mean the kind of people that's most directly involved in tech, like this HN crowd), but as long as we don't try to really disrupt at least some of the dynamics generated by money-profit-survival-motivations, I'm somewhat skeptical we will be able to move the needle, because efforts will be eaten by the competition even if we never wanted to play under those rules. Let's hope I'm mistaken and it's easier to solve.
[+] [-] kubanczyk|5 years ago|reply
I'm non-native and I searched for a while for a better word than "gratuitous" here. The vocabulary looks a bit narrow. I mean for example "non-profit", firstly, contains a negation and, secondly, implies that profit can only be measured financially. "Free" on the other hand is too broad, too imprecise.
[+] [-] stakkur|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] peter_d_sherman|5 years ago|reply
In order to create the modern world, in order to create its conveniences, systems, sometimes very complex systems, must be implemented underneath, as infrastructure, to support all of that convenience.
Sometimes they are "systems of systems", that is, infrastructures heaped on top of other infrastructures, etc.
They provide conveniences; that's true, but they conversely create a series of corner-cases, a series of circumstances where the complexity creates additional problems, where the complexity serves to be the problem.
Consider a future sci-fi scenario of robot war...
What happened? What went wrong? Here's what went wrong:
Robots were created to serve humanity, but over many centuries, many generations, the knowledge of how they were created (and what it took to control them) was lost, as mankind became lazier and lazier, and deferred all work to the robots.
The complexity of the robots (and their AI) increased, whereas the knowledge humanity possessed about them decreased.
At a certain time, at a certain critical juncture, because of the increasing knowledge asymmetry, creator (humanity) and creation switched roles, and now the creation caused great problems for the creator, who had basically lost the knowledge, ("lost the manual for" <g>), how to control the creation.
We see this pattern repeat in a variety of formats, in a variety of historic and present-day contexts; it includes (but is not limited to!): Technology, Religion, Law, Governments, Social Systems, etc.
Basically, all of those things were created to serve man, to serve mankind...
And (depending upon where you are in history, or what your knowledge (or lack of knowledge) of them is, in the present day), some of them either will, or at least have the apparency of, the loss of control by their creator -- mankind.
Frankenstein, by Mary Shelly, is an allegory of this theme, that is, of a creator that creates something for beneficial purposes, only that with enough time (and/or loss of knowledge), the creation turns on the creator...
Understood properly, here's the reason why all societies eventually fail, and why far in mankind's past, there may have been a high-tecnology society (Atlantis?) which was destroyed, because with all of the solutions it brought, it also brought additional problems, such that those could not be controlled, and eventually it was destroyed, or was the cause of its own destruction...
The Greek myth of Sisyphus -- is also an allegory for this phenomena... If the stone which he has to roll up a hill (only to watch it roll back down again! "There goes the neighborhood!" <g>) represents society, then he is fated to roll it up the hill to its pinacle -- only to watch it roll back down again... over and over and over, for eternity...
So, Complexity Vs. Convenience. With every new convenience, you require more complexity, and you generate a new set of problems...
[+] [-] livatlantis|5 years ago|reply
In each of these cases, things become more convenient/less complex, but a new set of problems crop up.
Thank you for your armchain philosophising.
[+] [-] lanevorockz|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] buzzkillington|5 years ago|reply
All electronic networks, from the original arpanet to tor, have suffered from the same problem: someone needs to pay for them yet each individual transaction is too small to matter.
Surveillance capitalism is the one model that scaled better than 'let the army and universities pay for it' and it's the one we're stuck with until Xanadu becomes something more than vaporware.
[+] [-] salawat|5 years ago|reply
It costs nothing else to put a packet out there on the Net sans doing so through a draconian metered connection, and surveillance capitalism had nothing to do with that. In fact, if anything, the fact the Net was free did more to boost surveillance capitalism than anything else.
If companies actually had to pay to collect, hold, operate on, and be privy to information about people; In Short, if there were acknowledged data privacy rights in play with regard to people's meta-information, and it was not just handed to corporations as a blank check money making asset, surveillance capitalism couldn't have gotten off the ground.
[+] [-] jefreybulla|5 years ago|reply
https://jefreybulla.github.io/beprivate/
[+] [-] isolli|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nicbou|5 years ago|reply