
Ask HN: What's broken about the internet? - resume384
I&#x27;ve been interacting with a group of interesting people through the Mozilla Builders &#x2F; Fix-The-Internet project.  A lot of great project ideas going on there.  There&#x27;s talk of making Web 3.0.  Interesting stuff.. but, I&#x27;m curious,  what&#x27;s broken about the internet, the web and tech?  If we&#x27;re going to fix something it seems good to have a list of what we&#x27;re trying to fix.  So what do you see as being broken?  Let&#x27;s build a list I can take back to the group looking to fix things!<p>https:&#x2F;&#x2F;builders.mozilla.community&#x2F;
https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mozillabuilders.slack.com&#x2F;
======
kaffeeringe
These days you need an internet-device and an anti-internet-device like a Pi-
Hole plus half a dozen browser plugins. Every driver of every part of your
computer is trying to sneak out some of you data. Every website is full of
trackers. You are not only fighting off criminals but also some of the most
powerful corporations and every government. A hand full of companies run large
parts of the infrastructre - you couldn't live without Google, Facebook,
Microsoft, Apple and Amazon if you wanted. The central social networks are
hate and manipulation machines. Everything wants to sell you something. And
when you pay to buy it, it tries to steal your data anyways.

~~~
Shared404
This is what makes me the saddest. The internet has so much potential for
good, but it doesn't appear to be heading that direction.

Every couple months I get an urge to give up on tech and start subsistence
farming in the middle of nowhere.

------
dfex
In no particular order: \- The WWW - from a delightfully whimsical follow the
rabbit-hole experience in the early 90s where discovery was hard, but content
was king; to a centralised, AI-ranked, viral echo-chamber in the 00s and 10s
where the discovery engines now control the whole experience and the content
you see is presented based on who pays. The key problem here being the
monetisation of discovery. We need solve search and discovery, but deliver it
as an open Internet standard like DNS or HTTP.

\- Smart devices - buying an appliance with a closed-source, embedded device
that relies on Internet connectivity and the solvency of it's manufacturer in
order to operate it, patch it, secure it, and maintain it is the antithesis of
what this planet needs right now. When the CA Root certificate(s) installed in
your no-name smart TV expires and the OEM doesn't exist/doesn't care to
provide you a firmware update, these devices will become less than worthless
and most likely landfill. We need industry to adopt an open framework for
smart devices that helps prolong their lifespan eg: a public Linux repo for
updates to the underlying OS - the OEMs can deploy their own user interface,
but end-users should be able to pick and choose if they wish (and most wont').

\- Trust - in particular X.509 certificates. A lot of progress has been made
in making trust via digital certificates the default rather than a paranoid
exception, with a large portion of the web being delivered over HTTPS, RPKI
for BGP currently being deployed in large operators and DNSSEC showing some
(admittedly slow) signs of adoption. What is still a major problem in this
area is the complexity of certificate management and renewal. The work
LetsEncrypt and the EFF (certbot) have done in automating this process is
fantastic, but these are still a long way from mainstream usage.

------
zzo38computer
Well, the biggest problems with the internet seems to be the World Wide Web.
NNTP has improved (some of these improvements at my suggestions, such as
support for 63-bit article numbers), and Gopher has also improved since the
original specification (now there are "i" type lines in menus, which are
useful), but WWW has just gotten worse (and that includes Hacker News to some
degree too, but not as much as Google and Facebook and so on). I have set up
not only HTTP but also NNTP, Gopher, QOTD, SMTP, etc, and may later also set
up IRC, Telnet, Viewdata, etc. Additionally, many things I serve on the HTTP
are just direct downloads anyways; no need to deal with 100 megabyte files
just to access a text file or other file that you wanted to download. And, you
can do it too, if you want to do, I suppose.

------
sixhobbits
Content mills -

Someone wise said that tools that make writing easier turn bad writers into
worse writers.

Goodhart's law means that nearly all content is broken. It is judged by its
view count and Google rank, so all it is good for is getting clicks and
ranking well.

So much effort, so much money, ploughed into creating really really awful
content which hides away the 10% that isn't crap (Sturgeon?).

~~~
sixhobbits
Also targeted advertising

------
musicale
Business model seems to be broken. I pay a giant internet bill each month,
basically insane margins based on what it should actually cost to deliver much
faster connectivity than what I get, yet none of that extra money funds the
things that I actually use the internet for. (Why does it cost that much? Part
of the reason may be that our local cable company is a government-enforced
monopoly, that it's next to impossible to get right of way for new fiber, and
that wireless is currently uncompetitive. Perhaps 5G may change things, but
I'm not holding my breath.)

Moreover, the internet makes distribution nearly free and allows a nearly
unlimited number of people to access information and digital media from all
over the world, but lengthy (70 years or more) copyright terms make it illegal
to do so in many cases. Instead, thousands or millions of person-hours are
spent on the impossible task of trying to make bits behave like physical
objects in order to satisfy legal and business requirements. When an
organization such as the internet archive tries to make a digital library
whose collection isn't bound by the constraints of physical libraries, they
are sued by publishers for copyright infringement and potentially liable for
$150k in statutory damages per occurrence.

~~~
wmeredith
This is a regulatory capture problem, not a tech problem.

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Shared404
IANAE, but it seems like the "The web is for transfer of information" and "The
web is for applications" ideas should be split into two separate domains. I
shouldn't need an OS in order to read HN or browse a text based site.

~~~
resume384
Yeah, I'm thinking more and more the same, I'm beginning to think we need a
dual function web.

Static web, and run as an app web.

I kinda have this by running with javascript off (this solves all sorts of
other issues, though much of the web doesn't work that could work.) When I
need to 'run as app' I allow js for that one visit.

~~~
Shared404
That's what I do on most machines I use, but it just feels kinda wrong to not
only have to use a bloated app, but also install add-ons to said app, when I
just want to read some text

This is probably just me being picky though.

~~~
bill_rr
Smart comments. I don't think you're being picky. I'm kinda shocked that this
is the only thread about reading because that's what I think is wrong with the
web: It's not good for reading. I'm 4 years into co-founding a startup that's
solving this problem.

~~~
resume384
Making the internet more useful in the area of concise to the point
information without sidetracks would be a big improvement. How is your startup
approaching the reading problem on the web?

------
ricardo81
Privacy and removal of insidious tracking would be a good start.

I feel the web is too centralised, with half a dozen or so platforms
essentially being gatekeepers of content on the web.

People link out on their sites much less tha in the past, in the belief that
it raises the chance of penalising them on Google and hurt their rankings.
Last I looked search engine are typically responsible for delivering around
50% of visitors to a site, and Google has a near monopoly in many countries.

Wikipedia while great provides a less than obvious set of rules and
regulations before adding data into it. It typically tends to rank first on
all major search engines for any query.

Social media have become moral compasses in what is OK and what is not OK to
talk about.

A more diversified web moving away from these 'decision makers' IMO would make
it a healthier place.

------
tibbydudeza
Make it more decentralized ... why should stupid laws made in the US impact my
experience ???.

------
RandomBacon
The lack of privacy and security. Throwing an ad-blocker on a browser is just
a band-aid; the festering wound is still there getting worse.

------
6510
My world view (or more like a cosmic view) is this: Space and matter are
fascinating phenomenon but the truly fascinating things happen between the
two. Empty space and time are quite boring until you put matter in it.

The "Let the output of your program be the input of mine." philosophy was
really good. Web applications do the exact opposite. All of the interesting
shit is missing.

Keeping parts of a thing in separate places can be necessary at times but it
usually is not. There is the layout of an article website and there are
article in it. The articles with their videos and images are separate things
as much as browsers are separate things from web pages (perhaps even more so).

The article can be a separate file. Like an iframe but as inline text. No
<head>, no <script>, no <style> but if it has any of those they are ignored.

The other perspective also works. The data for a physical object could be a
single file. One or more images, videos, docs, the meta data. Say a product,
its price and description can be put inside the image file and be made
accessible as a js object/json. Standards can be created, adopted and
popularized. If the picture has one or more cars the meta data can have all
the usual properties of a car with standardized key names. This seems chaotic
and undesirable for large shopping platforms but if an object has a
description, contact information and a price it can be sold. Setting up a
small store could be as simple as dropping images into a page. One would want
to parse out some of the meta data of course but there can be much more data
available.

It makes reasoning about the website much more like we reason about the real
world.

------
type0
Trolls, spam and ads. IoT - Internet of turds. GAFAM taking away control of
our devices in pursuit of surveillance economy. But generally technical
illiteracy of average consumer is getting worse. Certain web browser owned by
the largest advertising company is playing with the idea of deprecating URLs.
Maybe Mozilla Builders can find a way to deprecate TCP/IP so that we can start
from scratch until eternal september mark ii hits us.

------
gavribirnbaum
Server farms are weird concept to me. I feel the infrastructure the internet
is build upon is a bit archaic and could use a more rewrite. not sure how
though

------
anaxag0ras
Search. Google results are now full of SEO optimized low quality affiliate
garbage.

~~~
dyingkneepad
I recently tried switching my default search engine to duckduckgo for like the
4th time in my life (I've been trying it about once a year), and this time I'm
sticking with it. It's good enough now that I don't need to use google for
every search. Maybe you could try again.

~~~
6510
A search engine can be much better than google. All shopping websites of any
significance have better features. (Is google treating links as competing
technology?)

Denying the search provider a page view might work. Have them return xml. Use
the OS, browser or custom theme. Build a search extension platform on top of
it, sit back and watch what people come up with. (I would filter out websites
that need more than x requests besides images and video, have more than y kb
js, z kb css, make big news websites into a check box in the side menu, I can
think of 30 extensions right now)

I made a search bar for Opera one time (widget) that had a row of submit
buttons (icons) with different targets. It sat on top so one could just click
the next button. It is hard to explain but it can be quite surprising to re-
send your query some place else.

MyIE use to be able to open X search results in background tabs. A mouse
gesture would close one and move to the next.

------
dangoljames
Search is shit because of advertising influence on algorythm design and
tuning.

~~~
musicale
Having observed that major search engines often seem to hide what I'm actually
looking for - web search results - "below the fold" (assuming it's there at
all) I can't help but wonder if there is an opportunity for building niche
"web search" engines that search the web (rather than the adverWeb, the
seoWeb, or the goog/twit/faceWeb.)

As I've mentioned before, my favorite flavor of Google is Google Scholar. I'd
also like to be able to slice/subset search results to get scientific, non-
commercial, public interest, etc..

------
buboard
discovery . basically discovery through google is bimodal: either the same 5
top sites, or horrible SEO trash. Gimme answers from forums when i m looking
for them, please

Mobile-everything craze. No we don't need to turn everything to information-
sparse, inflexible mobile replicas. Give us more density, there's still a
zoom-in function

kill the cloud. re-decentralize

------
rckoepke
UI toolkits - Seems that all the highest quality UI toolkits (Ant, Material,
Fabric/Fluent, etc) have way too much whitespace. It works for things that
work well in "cards" but the low information-density is killing me personally.
I think more developers would choose high-density UI toolkits if one was
released by a major dev team and could be relied on to be maintained. Maybe
Photon/Protocol could eventually fill this gap, I like them a lot more overall
but they don't seem nearly as well-packaged for easy use, or at least don't
seem to have a complete kit available at
[https://www.adobe.com/products/xd/resources.html](https://www.adobe.com/products/xd/resources.html)
or anywhere else really.

Walled gardens - not being able to build things that integrate multiple
services. Instagram live videos, combining amazon and walmart listings, google
places "here now", or unified client for iOS/SMS/Discord/Slack/Teams are all
off limits to ambitious developers.

Centralization - Seems like home email servers are increasingly being ban-
hammered by the major providers like Gmail, ProofPoint, etc so you have to
have your mail sent by a hosted server. CloudFlare is also seemingly becoming
a single point of denial/failure. Chromium can now effectively dictate W3C
standards because whatever they implement instantly becomes the ground truth
for web dev.

DNS/BGP - Sorely in need of a major update.

IoT - It's shockingly difficult to find IoT devices which can compute
locally/privately/on-the-edge. Everything sends all the data back home and
stores/processes it there.

Tracking - If websites insist on having an OAuth or email verified signup, I'd
like my browser to quickly and quietly create a new profile for every domain,
or even every visit to that domain. And otherwise keep all
tracking/fingerprinting down to effectively zero. I'm really tired of being
tracked everywhere all the time.

------
throwawayab17
Search because web spam.

I've been trying to get a blackhat webspam site down (it has child porn and
piracy on it, besides spam links). But no luck so far, they effectively fool
Googlebot and ruin search rankings.

------
quickthrower2
Talking about the www specifically: too many trackers, dark patterns, hard to
use sites, cookie notifications are just an annoyance and often come with dark
patterns and no opt outs, ridiculous asset bundle sizes, auto play videos, pop
ups, ridiculously large attack surface called the web api, working group
standards == Chrome is the standard, Chinese firewall, browser complexity
makes it hard to compete, JS security challenges ...

------
CalmStorm
The social media walled garden - quite a few people I know rarely use a
browser or don't even know how to use it. They get their news mostly from
their social media apps, and they have a hard time spotting fake news. It is
much easier to censor content in a social network than the open internet.
People live in their bubble and are not exposed to different opinions and
ideas.

------
tester756
I believe that Web 2.0 / whole user generated content thing was kinda mistake,
or maybe "we" (or actually you, oldas) weren't prepared for its consequences.

Not in the first years of its existence, but in last like 10 years.

Yes, I'm aware that HN's like that, but if the price for fixing that whole
mess is this small, then go ahead.

------
mat_couthon
I’d say that the ad-revenue model.

I’ve written about this here: [https://medium.com/anti-content/the-shape-of-
the-internet-34...](https://medium.com/anti-content/the-shape-of-the-
internet-343fdcbfcbc8)

------
d0m
Mobile web app should feel native; now they're slow, clunky, don't have access
to important OS features

~~~
6510
A union?

------
techsin101
Two things discovery (search) and dns (centralized). Not sure if they are both
the same problem.

------
runawaybottle
We sort of don’t have an Internet Bill of Rights.

We have a patient bill of rights for example.

------
rawgabbit
Phishing emails that take users to fake sites where they are asked to login
resulting in stolen passwords. This insecurity makes users less likely to try
new sites for fear of malicious JavaScript etc.

~~~
Jtsummers
Email assumes that I want to see everything addressed to me. I don't so I have
a spam/junk folder. But a lot of resources are wasted sending content that
people don't care about.

Email should become a pull system, where you get a notification that a message
is waiting for you on server X. Server X is trusted? Then I'll take a look,
oh, it's fakegoogle@serverx, I'll block them specifically. I never see that
content again, period. No one else can put a message into fakegoogle@serverx's
outbox so I can be confident that I'm not accidentally blocking valid content
(no address spoofing). If I trust someone, like rawgabbit@rawgabbit.com, then
I can automatically retrieve the content until you prove untrustworthy (either
by your deliberate actions, or by having weak security that grants others
access to your system).

This also handles not just spam, but promotional content. If someone wants to
send out promotional content to 1 million customers, I can optionally retrieve
it or just "unsubscribe" by never retrieving it. It's on them to continue
hosting content that's never retrieved so at some point they'll detect that
Jtsummers has stopped getting their content and just stop sending it to me.

~~~
resume384
Pull might also be a nice way to address the 'right now!' problem. Some,
likely most information can wait till you're ready and doesn't need be
available till then.

------
fadedaperture
There trying to make end to end encryption illegal

------
pretzel_boss
I think the consolidation of the internet has made it a lot less fun. I really
miss personal websites being a popular thing.

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t312227
the "modern" internet - web x.0 - has a focus on ads, (personal) data-
collection and commercialization.

this is a social not a technical problem -> imho. its broken beyond repair.

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dkdk8283
Ads and laws

------
dave_sid
Social media

