
Society Needs an Alternative Web - deathwarmedover
https://www.forbes.com/sites/cognitiveworld/2019/03/15/society-desperately-needs-an-alternative-web/
======
cromwellian
Any decentralized system that is more efficient if centralized, eventually
gets centralized by efficiencies of scale.

Email is federated, but everyone running and managing their own email servers
is too costly, so for consumers, it migrated to large sites. Web sites were
federated, but everyone being web master for their homepage was too difficult,
so we get GeoCities, and Yahoo Clubs, and later, Squarespace and Wix, etc.
Then blogs were decentralized, but everyone self hosting and authoring blogs
was too much, so then we get Wordpress.com and Tumblr, and Twitter, and FB,
etc. (even USENET eventually developed super-large hubs like uunet)

For a federated, decentralized system to work and resist centralization, it
has to be the case that running a node is dead simple, cheap, and out-of-
sight/out-of-mind. It also can't be the case that hosting on a more powerful
cluster, colocated with other nodes, gives you large benefits or cost
advantages, otherwise, it'll just get centralized again.

Even cryptocurrencies fail this. They have terrible efficiency, but at least
they were supposed to be relatively flat, instead of centralized and
hierarchical, but instead, a majority of the hashing power is owned by a few
large entities, so in effect, back to large financial players controlling much
of the power.

I think one day we'll discover some ways to decentralize things in ways that
resist re-centralization, but in the mean time, beliefs that you'll achieve
cyber/crypto-anarchy by clever protocol design and the federales won't be able
to rubber-hose-cryptanalyze you, is a dangerous belief that diverts us away
from demanding the government and society agree to the goals of freedom. If
everyone wants unfreedom, underground internet usage is a slim consolation.

~~~
QualityReboot
> Email is federated, but everyone running and managing their own email
> servers is too costly, so for consumers, it migrated to large sites.

I think this is what federation looks like when it works. Yeah, everyone uses
Gmail, but it's also ok to use another service. It still works and delivers a
pretty similar experience. Your messages make it out of the Gmail garden.

> Web sites were federated, but everyone being web master for their homepage
> was too difficult, so we get GeoCities, and Yahoo Clubs, and later,
> Squarespace and Wix, etc. Then blogs were decentralized, but everyone self
> hosting and authoring blogs was too much, so then we get Wordpress.com and
> Tumblr, and Twitter, and FB, etc. (even USENET eventually developed super-
> large hubs like uunet)

Geocities was one of many roughly equivalent services. It was sort of a social
network, but it was mostly just free hosting. Anyone could still link to
anywhere and being on geocities wasn't a requirement for being on the web.

Squarespace is a pretty good product and not what I would consider harmul
centralization, because it's still interoperable with other websites and they
don't prevent people from hosting elsewhere. The web is still federated.

Something different has happened with social media. Different social media
services aren't interoperable. I can't message you on Twitter from Facebook,
or tweet at you on LinkedIn. You must stay in their walled garden to interact
with their users. They're at such a critical mass that almost everyone is in
their garden.

It seems like federation is a happy middle ground between decentralization and
centralized walled gardens.

Maybe something like Mastodon will some day become so popular that Twitter is
forced to become part of the federation and compete on features and marketing
instead of vendor lock-in.

With a federated version of any type of social media clone, eventually new
entrants will prefer to join the federation instead of trying to make a new
walled garden. It wasn't really an option for Hotmail to only let you interact
with other Hotmail users, because the federation was already established.

There was tremendous demand for social media services, but no federation to
provide those services when the demand hit and explosive growth happened, so
now we have a centralization problem.

~~~
beagle3
It’s becoming less OK to use a small service. Gmail and office365 will often
classify mail from small provider as spam, with no feedback to the sender.

I was using s small British provider, and almost by accident discovered at
some point in time that emails I sent to gmail addresses in the prior 2 months
had been marked as spam, unless they were a reply something sent to me (so it
wasn’t true that everything got lost - only stuff I originated).

I gave up and moved to FastMail because I don’t have the time to deal with
this (and solving it once is no guarantee it won’t happen again)

So, email is federated but effectively not decentralized - unless you use one
of the central services, you are at risk from being obliviously blackholed at
any second (that happens to large providers too, but there’s safety in numbers
- it will be discovered sooner by someone)

~~~
panarky
I thought this too while using a small provider, as my messages were
frequently not delivered to Gmail or Office365.

Then I discovered my provider didn't set up SPF and DKIM correctly so emails
were failing authentication.

There are many factors affecting email delivery beyond SPF and DKIM, and it
can be difficult for a small provider to get everything right.

So if you're having delivery issues I'd start with that, not by assuming
without evidence that the big guys are intentionally classifying spam just
because it's from a small provider.

~~~
tmaly
Even if you setup SPF and DKIM, you still run into issues when your domain
does not resolve to the same IP as your mailserver with Gmail.

~~~
panarky
That's what SPF does.

It allows the owner of a domain to specify which mail servers are authorized
to send mail from the domain.

------
Mirioron
I agree with the title - we do need an alternative web, but not the kind the
author wants. We need an alternative web that has less censorship and
regulation. The current internet is turning more and more into TV.

~~~
iliketosleep
The author refers to a decentralized web, which cannot be controlled by any
individual, state, or corporation. I think this implies less censorship and
regulation.

~~~
asutekku
I’d love to be as idealistic, but when “free and uncensored” service has ever
been ended up being something else than a cesspool for alt-right?

~~~
iliketosleep
A decade or two ago it was the left which was vying for free and uncensored.
Political fortunes have changed and now it's the right. Censorship is not free
of political bias, and those on the wrong side of the current trend will flood
platforms where the censorship does not exist. Those who are in favour of
censorship must consider that political trends change over time, and one day
they might be the ones being censored.

------
jasonvorhe
Nerds need a new web because "their space" was taken over and they feel left
out. That's basically the gist of all this talk about decentralization.

Even the difficulty of getting rid of certain videos like the mosque shooting
shows that censorship isn't as easy as it's being portrayed.

Big decentralized networks would be /b/ and /thedonald, 8chan, Alex Jones and
other shitholes of the internet, but on steroids, without anyone being able to
at least make it more difficult for these people to get an audience.

~~~
raxxorrax
Correct, it isn't easy to censor because the web is decentralized. So it seems
to me that "nerds" had more sophisticated views on the subject at hand.

You don't have to consume uncensored sources, but in most (all) parts of the
world, that is a serious blessing.

If there are some people that cannot stomach the existence of Alex Jones, that
is their problem. I think he exploits his audience, but that problem isn't to
be solved with China tactics.

------
mhd
One of the worst mistakes that the original web made was getting rid of the
editing component in the early stages, probably once corporate entities and
their cut-up picture sites got big (yet note that the reference web
implementation "Amaya" was also an editor).

And in a similar note, a distributed web needs ubiquitous editing _and_
publishing. Right now I think that both are better served by something really
lightweight. A distributed web publisher should be able to run on an ESP32.
The editing and display component should run on old laptops or mobile phones.
That probably means good riddance to JS everywhere...

Distributed WAP?

~~~
nostrademons
The editing component died out well before that. The original WWW browser was
bi-directional: it was as easy to publish or edit sites as it was to view them
(much like Wikis are today, but with a WYSIWYG editor). Even up through about
1998 Netscape shipped with Composer, which made it relatively easy to generate
& publish HTML without knowing much about technology.

I think the problem was just development effort and the pace of development in
the early web (and particularly during the browser wars). Shipping an editor
with the browser meant that every new feature available to websites needed
both an easy implementation (in the browser) and a difficult implementation
(in the editor). The editor implementation would often require a lot of
uncertain design work as people hashed out what the editor UI should even look
like. It forbade the browser vendors from shelling this hard task out to
external programs. If you wanted to embed a photograph on a webpage, Photoshop
had already spent decades solving that problem; was the browser vendor
supposed to duplicate all that work? If you wanted to embed a Java applet, Sun
and Borland and IBM had invested thousands of man-years on development tools;
would you ship an IDE in the browser? Some content types are just now getting
decent editing software, 20 years later.

When you have 150M users browsing and maybe 1.5M users creating content, the
economics are pretty clear. There's no sense putting 80% of your development
effort into tools that 1% of the population uses.

Interestingly, even after user-generated content became a huge thing and easy
WYSIWYG editors became just a JS embed away, the 1:10:100:1000 ratio still
roughly holds: for every person creating content _daily_ , 10 people create
content *occasionally, 100 register for the site, and 1000 people might view
it as lurkers. That indicates that the problem might not be in the tools, and
that creating content is just more difficult than consuming it.

~~~
lazyjones
> The editor implementation would often require a lot of uncertain design work
> as people hashed out what the editor UI should even look like.

Isn't this just a dodgy way to circumscribe the complete failure of the W3C to
keep their specifications sane enough for them to provide a reference
implementation, even for a simple browser? That's how we arrived at the mess
we have today, where you need a 9 figure budget just to maintain a modern
browser implementation.

------
jdworrells
I see this come up time and time again in technical circles and I just do not
understand the issue. My first exposure to the Internet was in 1993, when it
was dominated by usenet and hobby websites. It was a happy place, full of
independent thoughts, discussion, and cooperation. As time went on, people
started to establish businesses and make profit on the Internet. That was the
turning point.

Do you want an Alternative Web? We have it. The infrastructure is there. Go
back to the good old days. Run your own webserver, your own email server. Turn
it back into a hobby, like it used to be. Establish "web rings" with your
buddies. The Internet is a boundless eternity, with many opportunities for
techies to establish communities of their own.

Leave the terrible modern Internet to the masses. We have endless frontiers to
homestead. All this hand-wringing about the loss of innocence and the ravaging
hordes of anti-vaxxers and far-right extremists is just silly.

Edit: The way I see it, once the Internet becomes your job, you have lost.
When the web was a hobby, it was a great place. Profit motive drove the loss
of innocence and was the beginning of the end of the hobby web.

~~~
Mediterraneo10
People who hobby blog and don't expect to make money, nevertheless want to
have some audience. They might be creating content for the benefit of a
community.

However, discoverability has plunged because of changes in the way Google
works, as I have found with blogs based on some of my special interests. Even
when one searches for the exact words that appear in posts, Google might not
show them at all! (DDG is often not much better.)

So, when people create detailed, useful content and find they are getting no
visits at all, this is discouraging.

~~~
hessiejones
I remember this in the early day of blogging -- we were always leveraging
community to drive organic reach. I was told by a FB person once that we need
to stop chasing organic reach -- it ain't happening. The monetization to the
forced FB feed meant everyone had to pay. For bloggers this is how they make
money. It's become a staple for the industry.

------
m0nty
> Tim Berners Lee had this Pollyannaish view once upon a time that went like
> this: What if we could develop a web that was free to use for everyone and
> that would fuel creativity, connection, knowledge and optimism across the
> globe?

It's wrong to describe that as "polyannaish", since much of it has come to
pass. Despite its shortcomings and abuses, could anyone say the web has not
fuelled "creativity, connection, knowledge and optimism"?

Berners-Lee is an optimist, but he is not blind to the downside of his
creation. What happens next is another question.

~~~
aestetix
I stopped reading when I got to this point, because it is clearly an opinion
piece masked as news. Regardless of whether I agree with the opinion, because
it is classed improperly I can't take anything else in it seriously.

~~~
icebraining
There's no masking, this is simply an op-ed. It's fairly clear even from the
title (news are usually titled as "this happened" rather than "this _should_
happen").

------
dpq
As much as I like to consider myself a pro-freedom, anti-censorship type of
person, articles such as this one rarely fail to amuse me. As long as the
system of payoffs stays unchanged, the end result is inevitably going to be
the same, and if the decentralized web does change the system of payoffs,
there might be no incentives to motivate development and adoption of such a
d-web beyond a small number of technically adept people. How many times have
there been calls and widespread memes to abandon Facebook [remember
Diaspora?], and yet it's still there.

It's all not doom and gloom, but what society desperately needs is to stop
producing/consuming pointless articles such as this one or idiocy like "We
should break up Google and Amazon" [Oh yeah? Go ahead and break them up them,
I'll watch. Will you be selling tickets?], and to start performing _real_
economic and game-theoretic analysis of possible alternatives.

~~~
SlowRobotAhead
Get ready for more of it. All twenty Democrat presidential hopefuls just
watched Warren talk about splitting tech companies and are currently looking
for someone to hold their beer. It’s going to be a long electional cycle :/

I don’t know about an alternative web, but something will happen with Twitter,
Google, Facebook upping their censorship game more and more.

~~~
rchaud
Politicians promise all kinds of things in stump speeches that they know they
cannot realistically deliver. Remember Bush I's "no new taxes?" Obama's public
option healthcare plan? Trump's wall?

All gone by the wayside. What you say doesn't matter if you can't guarantee
the right number of votes in the legislature.

------
Spearchucker
Can't be hard. I run my own personal web site and don't use Facebook or
Google. Not because I'm trying to go all distributed or something, but because
I think the products just aren't as good as the ones I happen to use.

I realize my profession and skillset put me into a minority that can even do
this. And I realize this last statement is in contradiction to the first
sentence of my post.

Oh and if there was a site that did a version of Facebook like it was in 2007,
I'd sign up to that for sure.

------
jaabe
I’ve done some proof of concepts with IoT in the Danish public sector, and to
do it, we’ve had to build our own wireless internet because the current ISP
controlled one is just terrible, and it’s mobile/wireless version is frankly
too unreliable.

So now we operate a miniplacity wide internet. Setting it up was fairly easy,
because we own a lot of network infrastructure and a lot of locations that are
spread out over our entire county (might be the wrong word, sorry if it is),
and it just works.

Unfortunately we have laws protecting ISPs in Denmark, so we can’t exceed
certain speeds without violating these. It’s made me wonder though, and this
is my personal opinion, if we shouldn’t rethink the way we do internet
infrastructure to be much more democratic and citizen owned.

~~~
anderspitman
This sounds like a really cool project. Do you have any more information
somewhere by chance?

------
marknadal
A key quote from the article:

> Adoption of a decentralized web cannot play by the old rules. New
> experiences and interactions that are outside of current norms needs to
> appeal to individual values, that enable trust and ease of adoption. Pulling
> users away from convention is not an easy task.

They seem to suggest Decentralization is at odds with "conventional" consumer
experiences.

It doesn't have to be that way.

For instance:

\- D.Tube (decentralized YouTube)

\- notabug.io (P2P Reddit)

Both look, feel, and act very much like their "conventional" versions. Yet
both of these are fully decentralized using GUN (my project:
[https://github.com/amark/gun](https://github.com/amark/gun) ). Most users
would not even know there is a difference.

So it is certainly possible to both appeal to the masses/convention, while
being private/secure and free/open-source and decentralized.

Although I do think we do need NEW and DIFFERENT experiences, things that are
"fresh" and fun. Facebook basically looks corporate now. We need to build new
UI/UX experiences that define a new "era" of the web, in the same way people
look back and remember the 80s or 90s. This doesn't have to be something we
look back to, it is something we can engineer from the start. :)

~~~
gitgud
I wouldn't really say _fully decentralised_ they require DNS and a webserver
to point to for the website. Although the content may be decentralised, is
inaccurate to claim its _fully decentralised_.

Decentralising domain names is not an easy task, as IPFS is discovering...

~~~
marknadal
We've successfully done local multicast, Bluetooth, discovery. DNS is not
necessary, IPv4 works, and with IPv6 there are even people hosting P2P reddit
from their desktop - so no, servers not needed either.

And we have Identifi/Iris for naming, by Satoshi's 1st contributor to Bitcoin.
The future is here, yesterday!

------
anderber
This is why I really like what Beaker Browser is doing. It feels like when I
first discovered the Internet in the 90's. I highly recommend you check it
out, if you're into decentralized and easy to use web:
[https://beakerbrowser.com/](https://beakerbrowser.com/)

------
Causality1
Lot of orphan statistics in that article. For example, there's been an 11
percent increase in cyber bullying between 2006 and 2016,but what was the
percentage increase in how much time an average teen spends online? Bet it's
bigger than 11 percent. Every other statistic is similarly without companion
data.

There's also no concrete support for the central premise that big tech
companies are to blame. One could just as easily make a case that the massive
increase in time parents spend online instead of with their kids is entirely
to blame.

------
buboard
IIRC this current web technologies are already decentralized, we dont need an
alternative. We need more nodes, so it can live up to its potentials. Perhaps
start by buying a fixed computer, something that can be up 24/7 and then add
services on top of it. But when 80% of the chatter even among developers is
about how to use the latest centralizing cloud service, this is not going to
happen.

~~~
anderspitman
Once you factor in ISPs blocking port 80, the need to configure port
forwarding, and server maintenance, it's a hard sell for the average Joe. I
think we need something like sandstorm.io if we're ever going to take self-
hosted to the masses.

------
mschuster91
While I agree with FAANG being way too powerful (and that they are all US-
controlled with no viable European competitor in sight!), there is one
elephant in the room that no one has been able to solve at all: the potential
of abuse for non-centralized sites that cannot afford (or technically
support!) any kind of moderation.

The TOR network is a prime example - markets dealing in anything from cannabis
to war-grade weapons, huge child porn dumps, malware coordination servers. Or
the same stuff in the "clearnet", where as an addition there are huge problems
with absolutely vile Nazi propaganda (e.g. Stormfront), Russian propaganda
disrupting Western elections, "anti vaxxers" that literally kill people and
other conspiracy bullshit.

Society doesn't just need an "alternative web", society needs an alternative
society that doesn't make anything devolve into dumpster fires.

~~~
rchaud
Agreed. It's less about the possibility that the system can be exploited it
always can), and more about the fact there are people out there actively
wanting to exploit the system to serve their own ends.

~~~
hessiejones
So what I'm hearing is that opportunism will always exist regardless of
structure

------
nnq
It would be great if more research would be made into un-centralizable systems
and technologies instead of just "distributed systems".

If we could build technology out of building blocks for which _dis_
-economies-of-scale ("the larger the more expensive", or "the more you own,
the more expensive it's to buy more") would apply, and for which any kind of
centralization would _increase_ cost the world would be a much more
interesting place, and I mean in general, not juts IT, but food production and
architecture too... I guess we'll have it when we'll have self-replicable
autonomous drones too but that will be the dusk of humanity so there won't be
much time for us dinosaurs to enjoy its benefits :(

------
axilmar
A decentralized web would not mean a safer web. Those two concepts are
irrelevant to each other.

In fact, a decentralized web would be more dangerous than the centralized web,
from the perspective of bringing closer together people with the same ideas
and reenforcing them through the echo chamber effect.

A decentralized web would mean that there would physically be no opportunity
to come in contact with the opposite view, which will enhance the problems
that we now have with the spreading of false ideas.

The dichotomies that would be created would be so enormous that the opposing
view would loet any humanity status. The opponents would be aliens, and
exterminating aliens would not sound as bad as exterminating other people.

------
gioscarab
I have worked 10 years in this direction, see PJON
[https://github.com/gioblu/PJON](https://github.com/gioblu/PJON)

------
miki123211
IMO the only way to decentralize the web is to rovide tech that has better uX
than centralized solutions and that's hard. Centralization didn't arise
because companies are evil, it did because decentralization is inherently
complex. Preventing decentralization is another story, though. IMO technology
is not enough here, we need the law too. I don't mean regulation, god forbid,
that will only make it worse. I mean something like inter-server agreements
saying that a server may not lock users in etc. with the appropriate legalese.
Those could be enforced i.e. by only federating with servers that send an
"agrees-to: <list of sha xxx license hashes>" header. Getting people to adopt
it is another story, though.

------
stagas
"I see a society that is crumbling" \- texts that begin with a conclusion, are
propaganda, because they are designed to intimidate and that shapes the
reader's view before even laying out the problem. Of course you can expect a
politically biased solution after every scare. The pattern in a loop is:
SCARE->OFFER SOLUTION. Every sentence in that article is designed, not to let
you think, not to offer some insight, but to tell you _how_ to think instead.
Maybe there is a case to be made but it does not seem to be the author's
intention to search for the truth in the matter, but rather to influence an
already established position.

------
auslander
> Business needs to change its mindset

We are past this. Business today is a faceless online giant, nothing human, no
mindset at all. Only goal is share price. I think major driver for this is
financial markets, a.k.a legalized gambling.

------
ohiovr
I am curious what widespread 5G adoption could mean if it was used generally
as the last mile solution. Why wouldn't the high speed of the network allow
for people to do significant self publishing? 1000 megabit internet could
support 200 live hd streams even from the same server. Getting that many live
viewers is pretty tough. So for most people, it could make self hosting at
home more meaningful. People could even form collectives of synced nginx
backends if they had really large audiences.

~~~
thomasahle
Sending the same message 200 times seems like a waste. Can't you just use udp
broadcasting?

~~~
ohiovr
Well certainly I'm no expert on internet broadcasting. I have experimented a
little with nginx's rtmp server for hosting a live stream. Does nginx have the
udp broadcasting ability? How many clients could it support? Pretty exciting
if the 200 figure can be breached.

------
hessiejones
Hi everyone, this is Hessie Jones. I wrote the piece on Forbes. I'll go
through your comments today! Love that this is sparking discussion. Cheers!

~~~
gfody
love the analogy to pollution - if you see someone dropping litter you would
call them out, but people litter the web with poorly researched or otherwise
ill-formed opinions constantly, not to mention giant corporations doing the
equivalent of pumping high volumes of toxic waste into the air we breathe in
the form of manipulative advertising. we need internet environmentalism

~~~
hessiejones
I like the term internet envirionmentalism -- what's good for me is good for
the internet. But like climate change, unless it impacts the individual
directly, few are likely to buy in. I met an environmental activist last week
and she told me that people in Japan is a culture of cleanliness -- it's
instilled in the child from a young age. And it perpetuates into society. For
Singapore, that has translated into stricter laws. In North America, people
have to care otherwise it's likely no real strong regulation will ever happen.

------
grumpy-cowboy
100% decentralization is an utopia. But with the Fediverse, we have the best
of the both worlds: most people will register to a "centralized" instance like
mastodon.social and people who want will be able to run their own
instances/nodes with their rules, their policies, ... and federate it. Pretty
much like any email server.

------
cerealbad
A basic internet where people are taught and then tested on logic and bias.
Take nations as an example. Nations survive economic hardships by inducing in
the population a sense of insular self-defense and struggle for existence (of
the nation). When a nation is economically prosperous suddenly it's borders
are not so well defined and people naturally develop a cosmopolitan outward
and international view based around common union and empire with weaker
nations which become absorbed or vassals.

Nationalism is neither bad or good, it's a system wide response to mostly
economic signals in a given population or subgroup. If the average internet
user understood this, public discourse would be more civil and solutions
oriented. Since the issue is not clearly addressed because the political and
intellectual class have been purchased by the business elite which engage in
transnational profit, the entire concept of the nation state is being
undermined from first principles in order to prop up new exploitative economic
zones. This will lead to popular uprising and revolutionary war, as it has in
the past.

You can of course replace the nation with something better for the individual.
America did this in the 1960s by replacing the nation as a people (race) with
the nation as an idea (free markets, individualism, equality), this influenced
many other nations and won the cold war. And we are probably in a similar
replacement phase now, as an Anglo -American -European identity emerges in
order to face the challenges of central and east Asia, Africa and South
America. The intellectual framework for this new union is not there yet since
it is unclear why nations and world zones are in constant competition- far
left is offering freedom far right is offering tradition both are struggling
to sell the middle who simply want stability.

------
austincheney
Is the web (all its corresponding data) public or private?

Answering that question determines how data flows and thus what's currently
wrong. Answering that question also predicts why an alternative web would
equally fail to achieve separate merits.

------
hessiejones
Thanks everyone for your comments. My name is Hessie Jones and I have written
this article on Forbes. I will weigh in on these thoughtful comments as I go
through them. Thank you again!

------
lazyjones
Pipe dreams of a generation that would happily live in free apartments with
hidden cameras and microphones in every room. They even put their Alexas
everwhere for just a little convenience now.

Free (as in beer) trumps convenience trumps any sort of rational idealism.
It's a materialistic world. Incidentally, it also provides all the tools to
"opt out" at a low price. But if you want everyone to opt out (which is what
the author seems to want), you'll have to pay for them too.

------
burtonator
We're never going to have a decentralized and alternative web until we figure
out the economic model behind it.

~~~
hessiejones
Agree it has to make money. Tech giants stifle innovation and competition by
buying companies they see as threatening. We need a consortium. And we need a
model that can't be easily penetrated by big tech. Money is a true motivator
-- and doing the right thing doesn't fall on the same plane when people are
enticed with this kind of incentive.

------
pjmlp
Yep it should have stayed straight HTML + CSS, leaving all the rest for
Internet protocols, but here we are.

------
ashleyn
My view on this:

1) Technology makes bad people as efficient as good people. Let's define "good
people" as honest, productive workers who value universal virtues like
freedom, well-accepted scientific findings, and necessary progress. Now let's
define "bad people" as selfish, dysfunctional news-site commenters who think
Hillary Clinton is producing vaccines in a pizza shop on the moon, and demand
that you equate their ignorance with your well-reasoned opinions.

2) Perhaps my most controversial assumption, the "everyman" that deranged
populism appeals to tends to be more of the "bad person" than the "good
person".

3) From 1991 to present, the proportion of "everymen" to "professionals" using
the Web has steadily increased, empowering more "bad people" than "good
people".

So is it any surprise then, that we're at where we're at? The problem isn't
the Internet, Tim Berners-Lee, the problem is that we don't seem to have the
courage to admit that the vast majority of people we hoped would use it
constructively have chosen to misuse it, empowering them even more to demand
ignorance and fear be elevated back to the position of a movement demanding
political power.

The problem is our so-called neighbours, and their jubilant disregard for
everything that free society once stood for.

------
martindale
Cool: [https://web.fabric.pub](https://web.fabric.pub)

~~~
nosuchthing
Cooler, and free: [https://www.datprotocol.com/](https://www.datprotocol.com/)

------
al_form2000
Tl;dr: The world and the web suck; Tim Berner-Lee was a clueless Pollyanna;
We're gonna solve everything with DECENTRALISATION that will come to pass by
(makes vague hand gestures, draws ballon shaped objects).

What a bunch of useless drivel.

~~~
hessiejones
It's only Pollyanna if you do nothing about it. Decentralization is more than
an idea. There are many technologies developing privacy as an integrated
feature on their platform. There is enough of an appetite to support it more
widely than it has been.

