
The Web We Have to Save - e12e
https://medium.com/matter/the-web-we-have-to-save-2eb1fe15a426
======
sergiosgc
I really hope the current centralization of the web is an evolutionary step.
At first, the web was decentralized with newsgroups as open as NNTP provided.
Then, the lack of controlling features killed the decentralized protocols and
medium: namely the inability to control spam and the inability to have
participants pay for the cost of the medium.

Blogs suffered from the inability to provide a good _reading_ platform, which
is why the death of Google Reader was so mourned. GReader, not G+, was
Google's best weapon against Facebook (with proper development, not stagnant
as it was).

It is easier to add features to centralized architectures, but it does not
mean the death of distributed protocols. I do believe a distributed publishing
platform will be born sometime in the future. It is unthinkable that Facebook
will still be the top destination, say, 20 years from now.

~~~
roymurdock
Centralization is a law of nature. It allows for more efficiency through
economies of scale.

It's not unthinkable that Facebook will be the top destination 20 years from
now if they are (1) successful with internet.org and (2) first-to-market with
a viable virtual reality product.

~~~
lectrick
> if they are (1) successful with internet.org

no self-respecting third-world intellectual is going to be satisfied by a
catered whitelist of websites they can access. to me this seems like an
attempt to repeat what we did with confusing "the web" with "the internet" by
having third world people confuse "facebook" with "the web"

~~~
roymurdock
_Indonesians surveyed by Galpaya told her that they didn’t use the internet.
But in focus groups, they would talk enthusiastically about how much time they
spent on Facebook. Galpaya, a researcher (and now CEO) with LIRNEasia, a think
tank, called Rohan Samarajiva, her boss at the time, to tell him what she had
discovered. “It seemed that in their minds, the Internet did not exist; only
Facebook,” he concluded._ [1]

It doesn't matter what intellectuals are satisfied with, the internet (like TV
and Radio) will be driven by what the mass-market consumer wants. If they can
get all they need from Facebook for free (running a business & talking to
friends and family), then why pay more to develop a network that they don't
want?

[1] [http://qz.com/333313/milliions-of-facebook-users-have-no-
ide...](http://qz.com/333313/milliions-of-facebook-users-have-no-idea-theyre-
using-the-internet/)

~~~
dreamfactory2
This is even true with SE Asian web developers - if there isn't an active
Facebook community, a technology can't get traction there

------
paganel
Really interesting and spot-on article, I really liked this insight, though:

> But the Stream, mobile applications, and moving images: They all show a
> departure from a books-internet toward a television-internet. (...) When I
> log on to Facebook, my personal television starts. All I need to do is to
> scroll: New profile pictures by friends, short bits of opinion on current
> affairs, links to new stories with short captions, advertising, and of
> course self-playing videos.

Never had thought about it that way.

~~~
pjc50
I think the sheer volume of content plays a part too. In the early days of
blogging (2000 to, say, 2005) there weren't many bloggers, and while they
didn't quite all know each other they crosslinked from sidebar to sidebar into
communities. There wasn't much content, it was all generally high quality, the
discovery process worked well as a result, and few people were monetising it.

Now we have to ask an awkward question: do people actually _want_ quality, as
we define it? Does the undiscriminating mass consumer result in a low quality
market, or is it the other way round? To what extent is media there to support
identity/belonging needs rather than informational ones?

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
There's no such thing as people. There are demographics, and they all have
different interests.

I think it's clear there's a huge demographic with no interest in anything
beyond celebrity trivia.

There's also a HN demographic, and there may even be some overlap (probably
not much...) between both.

The useful question is whether or not there's a demographic willing to support
the content _you_ want to create, and if so, how do you find it/them?

There's always been a subculture of niche print/book publishing which squeaks
by on a subscription model, and the web hasn't killed that. I keep finding
sites that work in that way. So I don't think the web is killing that model.

Obviously Buzzfeed does a lot better, and it's adorable. [tm]

As for monetisation - a lot of personal blogs are there to support a
professional portfolio, especially in tech. I'm just fine with that.

But there are also new opportunities. I was talking to someone last week about
their teenager, who runs a mini-business on Instagram. She has 300k followers,
and people pay her to promote their work.

She's fifteen. The site is an art site. It's not quite super-abstract
conceptual gallery art, but it's not low quality cheese either.

All kinds of things are possible now that weren't possible before.

~~~
nekopa
>There's no such thing as people. There are demographics, and they all have
different interests.

Ouch! Your comment literally hurt me. I upvoted you anyway, as I think the
rest of your comment is excellent.

But I want to address that first line. I know where you're coming from and it
is the reality we find ourselves in nowadays. But.

In my opinion, we are at the cusp of having the technology to break that
mindset. Demographics are an antiquated way of dealing with the "there are too
many people to deal with!" problem, so we put them into buckets. But here's
the rub: privacy.

To break the idea of demographics we would have to be even more intrusive on
how we track and profile individual users. Or maybe not...

Going back to the original article, maybe it is centralisation that sucks. If
I want one place to give me want it thinks I need, or even what I really need,
then yes, privacy suffers. But how about if I just have the tools to find what
I like, and not have them all under the same umbrella? The way it was a long
time ago, where I could be involved in various different communities, and
there was no link between them except for my own list of links.

/rant

------
zwieback
Good points and well written, however it all depends on perspective. Most of
us don't have the same investment as someone imprisoned for speaking out.

The author bemoans the demise of blogging and the rise of decentralization, I
remember bemoaning the rise of blogging bringing about the end of Usenet. It's
always sad when you see your favorite niche of the internet disappear but it
also smacks of elitism when you complain endlessly about what the masses want.

My kids think of YouTube as the empowering platform and free streaming music
as their birthright. If I tried to get them excited about Usenet or gopher
they would call me out as the old fart I am.

~~~
romaniv
Nostalgia is one thing, but sometimes things just get worse. (Look at
television as an example.) You can't just write it off every time when someone
notices the decline.

Also, centralization is objectively there. Google, Twitter, Facebook. It was
obvious where this was going years ago, but instead of warning us,
technologist sung odes to Web 2.0. Great. Now, Web 3.0 is shitty phone apps.

 _it also smacks of elitism when you complain endlessly about what the masses
want_

When you don't complain about things simply because masses want them it's
groupthink.

~~~
coldtea
> _Nostalgia is one thing, but sometimes things just get worse. (Look at
> television as an example.) You can 't just write it off every time when
> someone notices the decline._

People point to old time complaints about decline as if they prove that
decline was never real ("People also complained about the advent of books or
the radio, so surely anyone complaining today is wrong").

The forget that there are other, also logically consistent, explanations:

1) Decline is a constant: e.g. people who complained about the radio bring
some kind of decline were as correct as people complaining about Twitter now.

2) Decline is always present but not absolute: there's always something missed
in sophistication, freedom, etc from previous technologies (e.g. the use of
the imagination in radio-theatricals as opposed to being fed images in TV, or
the freedom to be the fuck alone for a while as opposed to constantly
obligated to be available with mobile phones), but there is also positive
change, and what's the total balance depends on what you value.

3) Decline is sometimes true (a thing is totally worse than another it
replaces), and othertimes not, and some people in the past were right about
claiming decline in some transition, where others were wrong.

~~~
romaniv
All of what you wrote is true. Sometimes decline in mass media is relative. We
loose some radio to get some TV. But I think it is sometimes fair to say that
we trade something of value for something superficial.

Right now, we have unparalleled levels of global surveillance and media
centralization plays a key role in it.

In the past TV channels and publishers competed with one another. Right now
every large website is an unchallenged emperor of its niche. The emperor dies
and we get a new one, but it's hardly a free market system.

Finally, there are phenomena like Twitter/Reddit hate mobs. The principle is
not entirely new, but the scale, pettiness and randomness are unparalleled.

------
jacquesm
This article makes lots of good points.

The wikipedia page about him has a lot of back-story about his arrest:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hossein_Derakhshan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hossein_Derakhshan)

And serves as a good reminder that if you speak truthfully and candidly about
the leaders of certain nations you would do well to avoid going there in
person.

The internet is super powerful and a lot of global leaders realize that it is
probably the most concrete challenge to their authority, anything that has the
power to stir up the masses is something to be properly feared when you're
some insecure dictator.

~~~
sillygeese
His article was kind of skirting around where you're going now.

> _The internet is super powerful and a lot of global leaders realize that it
> is probably the most concrete challenge to their authority, anything that
> has the power to stir up the masses is something to be properly feared when
> you 're some insecure dictator._

It's not just when you're "some insecure dictator".

The free exchange of ideas and information is a threat to _any ruler_
anywhere, because the longer and more widely it goes on, the more likely a
random person gets exposed to ideas like: _" heyyy if we had a choice, we
probably wouldn't fund wars or fight in them! -what's in it for us?!"_ or _"
how is taxation different from extortion, besides that we're threatened with
imprisonment instead of violence?"_.

That's why they're stamping down on free speech everywhere, and that's why
they monitor everything they possibly can. They want to establish a modern,
_lasting_ , technology-based police state before it's too late because too
many people have woken up and become authority-atheists.

Think it can't happen where ever you live? Think again:
[https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150705/18174231556/spain...](https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150705/18174231556/spain-
government-goes-full-police-state-enacts-law-forbidding-dissent-unauthorized-
photography-law-enforcement.shtml)

( I wonder if I'm shadow-banned already )

~~~
jacquesm
Plenty of people believe that taxes are a necessary evil. Also, you're not
shadowbanned so 'they' apparently aren't all that powerful yet.

As for the funding of wars, plenty of people are prepared to fund them as long
as they and their relatives don't end up fighting in them. And with drones
getting better every day all-out robotic warfare is a matter of time.

~~~
sillygeese
Of course they believe that. If they saw taxation for the extortion it is,
they wouldn't be happy with having rulers either.

They have shadowbanned me several times already, with different accounts.

Plenty of people don't care about funding wars or other harmful stuff, because
it simply never occurs to them what's going on. That doesn't mean everything
is alright, nor that people would accept how their taxes are used if they ever
really _thought_ about it.

Drone warfare? The much more worrying threat is drone-enforced tyranny. That's
where they're going, of course. Think Kim Jong Un might like to have his own
robot army? -So would any other ruler.

~~~
jacquesm
Taxation is used for things that I agree with and plenty of things that I
disagree with. It's not extortion because I have the ability to (1) leave the
country for one where the taxes are more to my liking and (2) I can lower and
raise them as much as I want to by working more or less.

> Plenty of people don't care about funding wars or other harmful stuff,
> because it simply never occurs to them what's going on.

It may be true but I suspect that more people are aware of what is going on
that you give them credit for.

As for individual rulers setting their drone army against their own people,
that's definitely a possibility but to date we have not seen that so it should
not cloud your judgment about the present day situation.

~~~
sillygeese
> _It 's not extortion because I have the ability to (1) leave the country for
> one where the taxes are more to my liking_

So I guess a mafia's extortion is not actually extortion either, because you
can leave one mafia and go get extorted by another whose extortion is more to
your liking?

> _(2) I can lower and raise them as much as I want to by working more or
> less._

I don't even need to tell you that this is disingenuous.

> _that 's definitely a possibility but to date we have not seen that so it
> should not cloud your judgment about the present day situation_

How exactly is the possibility clouding my judgment?

~~~
throwaway507212
>>>>> _how is taxation different from extortion, besides that we 're
threatened with imprisonment instead of violence?_

If the mafia takes away 20% of your income (and also the people around you),
and then comes back to you 2 years later to report what they did with the
money: " _Your money and the one from your friends helped me buy this new
house on the lake, and this private jet. I had to use some to pay the workers
because I 'm not enslaving people_"

If a country takes the same amount of money and comes back to you 2 years
later: " _Your money was used to build this new road to improve the local
economy, also we were able to save 3 persons from a fire thanks to this new
fire truck, and treat 2 people at the hospital. Feel free to use that new
road, and don 't worry if your house gets on fire, the firetruck will be there
in a few minutes_"

Do you see the difference? The taxes were here trying to help you and the
citizens of the country you live in. They also spent that money buying 2
fighter jets and tanks? That's unfortunate, that would be useful if there was
some way to make your voice heard. That new house and jet the mafia built, you
will never have any benefits from it.

So: how is taxation different from extortion, besides that we're threatened
with imprisonment instead of violence?

A: One of them, in essence, is _trying_ to help you, the other one does not
care about you.

~~~
sillygeese
Come on.

It's more like: _" I took some of your money for myself, gave some to my
cronies so that I'll get their bribes in the future too, and a part of it was
used to run all kinds of pointless bureauracy. Oh, and we provided you with
shitty health-care services you still didn't need"_.

If a McDonald's starts forcefully taking a cut of your income every month, but
delivers you a few Big Macs "in return", is that alright? You're getting
"services" so it's all good?

> _A: One of them, in essence, is trying to help you, the other one does not
> care about you._

No. Actually, they take your money _by force_ exactly because they're _not_
trying to help you. Otherwise you'd just be paying for the goods and services
_you_ want to pay for.

------
Htsthbjig
So this man talks about saving the "old Web", and then he forces everybody to
Sign in with facebook, twitter or Google just for writing comments.

You should walk the talk. If you want to promote decentralization, you should
decentralize yourself, not channel everything you do through social media.

About less and less text on the web, that is a normal thing to happen. Just
look at the presidents of the US. First ones were great at writing because
dominant mass media was newspapers, then came great orators because of radio,
then Kennedy with images and television(staged images and footage), ending
with Obama(public speaking live on video).

As technology improves, communication becomes more human, and this is great.
Of course, you could feel bad if past technology limitations made you special,
like silent film actors did when they lost their stardom.

~~~
Mikushi
>As technology improves, communication becomes more human, and this is great.

I actually would say the opposite, there is nothing human about internet or
videos or social networks or most technologies. They give us an impression of
social contact without any of the actual benefits, it's creating a society of
lonely people who are connected to thousands of others but are more isolated
than ever.

We have health professionals warning us about this, that loneliness and
associated feeling are a major health concern[1] and we should remedy to it as
technology isolates us more and more from our peers and social circles which
are essential to the survival of our specie.

[1][http://time.com/3747784/loneliness-
mortality/](http://time.com/3747784/loneliness-mortality/)

~~~
parasubvert
It's very much in the eye of the beholder, I personally feel way more
connected with friends and family and much less lonely with social media than
when the technology was more primitive.

This whole "technology alienates us from each other" narrative seems to me
like a misguided reaction to social change, nostalgia for a time that never
existed - where people were never lonely because they were always face to face
or on the phone. (Oh except the geeks interested in boring things like math or
science fiction, fuck them.)

Perhaps this depends on whether you've lived in many places or travel a lot,
and have friends spread throughout the world. Or if you have peculiar
interests and meet friends through those shared interests - hard to do if
you're in a small town, easy to do online.

------
DanielBMarkham
I'm at a tech conference this week and I was talking to some coders last night
about how the internet has changed. Remember back when people would live-
stream their entire lives? Not necessarily to be a eyeball-grabber, but just
because they wanted to live in the open. That lasted for a little while, but
then people realized that by inviting ten thousand people into their lives, it
wasn't just sharing -- it was something else entirely. People started making
demands.

This is not the internet we were promised.

Back in the day, the internet had a Utopian feel to it. We would hook up our
computers to each other, open up the pipes, and the free exchange of honest
information would result in Good Things Happening (tm). We never were really
told what all these good things would be. I suppose it meant more free people
in the world, or rapid advancement of the sciences, or more folks becoming
friends.

Instead it's countries building great firewalls, science publishers holding on
to their data and using the legal system to enforce it -- and more little
niches where like-minded people talk to each other in an echo room.

Web pages, which were just one way of many to go see printed content that
somebody had stored, have turned into some weird kind of real-estate. Long
gone from most toolkits are Gopher, Telnet, FTP, and the rest. Instead,
everything is a web page. Long gone are people owning their own computers,
which amazes me to no end. Instead, somehow in many cases we're ending up
licensing our own stuff. Walled garden providers "help" us by deciding who can
speak to whom. Everybody wants to "help" us now -- and it's all with trade-
offs that most consumers fail to fully fathom.

I miss the old internet.

~~~
userbinator
_Back in the day, the internet had a Utopian feel to it._

I think the peak of this was when P2P filesharing took off, and everyone
started sharing almost _everything_. Books, music, video, software, anything
that could be digitised was uploaded and shared. It really felt like a
massively distributed global library that anyone could access, for only the
price of an Internet connection. Too bad most of it was killed off by
antipiracy interests...

~~~
SSLy
It's still there, just not as easily accessible.

bib, wcd, ptp and so on…

------
josephb
Lovely piece. I liked this bit:

> the diversity of themes and opinions is less online today than it was in the
> past. New, different, and challenging ideas get suppressed by today’s social
> networks

In a crowd environment or mob mentality (which is driven by social media)
people can often refrain from airing an opinion that might be divergent.

From observing friends, less and less are interested in reading beyond "140
characters" or whatever is considered byte size.

But even more concerning is people are too quick to "like" or "me too"
something without considering source or veracity, or taking due consideration.

Personal investigation or research into an issue, before dishing out invective
is becoming rare.

~~~
InclinedPlane
HN is a perfect example. It tries very hard, and in some ways it succeeds. And
yet the attention half-life for a given conversation is measured in _hours_
and long replies often simply aren't read, let alone upvoted. While a
sufficient number of people who downvote for disapproval results in stilted,
shallow, uninteresting conversations more often than not.

And HN is ahead of the game compared to, say, reddit or, guh, facebook.

------
InclinedPlane
This deserves a much longer reply than this, but it'll have to do for now.
There's very much a different tone and structure to content on the internet
today than when it was younger. Much of that has been a transition toward more
commercial content and more "bite-sized" content, a lot of which has been
encouraged by the tools we've come to use to interact with the internet.
Social networks, mobile devices, etc. Each of which reward or encourage a
shallower level of interaction on shorter timescales. I remember using usenet
and forums where a conversation would typically last for days and sometimes
for weeks or months. And where it wasn't unusual for a single reply to be
several paragraphs of text and perhaps have involved several hours of work
and/or research on the part of the poster. And on the web there was much that
was similar. Blogs and personal sites full of essays. Blogs having
conversations with one another via essay, and so on.

That sort of thing still exists in pockets here and there but it does seem
much less common. And it doesn't feel as though the younger generations coming
online have a predilection toward that mode of communicating. And too all of
the communications tools we use from day to day tend to discourage such
individualistic content. There's a sharper dichotomy between content producer
and content consumer than there used to be. But you see people chaffing at the
separation. You see people posting 20 part tweets, or posting an essay in
image form to their facebook wall.

I don't fear that individualistic content will disappear from the web, but I
fear that it is becoming less common, and is being actively discouraged by the
tools and platforms we've come to rely on. Part of it comes back to the ad
supported nature of much of the web. Just as in all other ad supported media
to date there's always a pressure towards shallowness and laziness. Shallow
content is cheaper and easier to make, and when you're just counting eyeballs
it's often seemingly just as profitable.

------
muraiki
The story of the persecuted Christians falling asleep in the cave is also
known in Christianity as "The Seven Sleepers of Ephesus" or "The Seven Holy
Youths of Ephesus"[1]. Their feast day in the Orthodox church is tomorrow[2].

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Sleepers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Sleepers)

[2]
[http://www.goarch.org/chapel/saints_view?contentid=152&type=...](http://www.goarch.org/chapel/saints_view?contentid=152&type=saints)

Edit: I found this article extremely insightful, but have nothing insightful
of my own to offer in response except for this bit of trivia. :)

------
phantarch
This article makes me wonder if what the author is calling for is even
possible. The web, to me, seems subject to exactly the same phenomenons of
growth as all other human enterprises. It starts off with auspicious
beginnings where everyone involved knows almost everyone else involved. It
grows slowly and retains that old familiar feeling during the honeymoon of its
existence. Then, when it really catches steam and starts growing, everyone
from the original cohort gets excited about how it's going to change the lives
of all the newcomers in the same way it changed theirs. In actuality, there's
a saturation point that gets reached where there's so many people using this
system that structure inevitably grows out of it/gets applied to it.

It's the difference between the city hall in a town of 200 versus the US
Congress presiding over 300+ million. When things grow, they become systemic.

------
mjackson
> The centralization of information also worries me because it makes it easier
> for things to disappear. After my arrest, my hosting service closed my
> account, because I wasn’t able to pay its monthly fee. But at least I had a
> backup of all my posts in a database on my own web server.

He published this article on Medium? Isn't that a huge contradiction?

~~~
nota_bene
> Isn't that a huge contradiction?

Try counting web devs who are pro-privacy but implement Google Analytics in
their work. You'll get close to 100%.

------
reilly3000
Great article, I share the sentiment. But we have to remember what killed
blogging more than Facebook itself: webspam. The cost of posting a blog post
is a flood of spam comments and trackbacks. Even with Akismet, the time it
would take to review for ham, etc was substantial. When you make a Facebook
post you get nothing but pure self-validation! Their anti-spam team was
effective from the start and besides the scourge of game invites, the
experience is relatively positive all around. Yes it is full of ads, but
generally they are not about penis pills.

Spam has killed off most of the decentralized web. Any future solution to
corporate controlled media needs to have a great answer to spam.

------
cognivore
>> Are we witnessing a decline of reading on the web in favor of watching and
listening? <<

Yes, unavoidably, as the internet gains popularity and prevalence.

Early adopters are by their nature more erudite than those that follow. Early
internet was was filled with people with big ideas promoted on complex
platforms. Their ideas couldn't be expressed in 140 characters or a funny
picture, and often they had to learn HTML and server management to express
them.

But the numbers of users grow, we're going to have a dumbing down of the
majority of the content. Like television, we'll need the "Hee-Haws" and
"America's Funniest Home Videos" as entertainment for the masses. There's
nothing wrong with that, it's just the nature of humanity.

There will always be blogs and good ideas to be found, just like you have PBS
on TV. It's just going to be in it's little corner the world. It's not going
to be popular beyond a select group.

So I don't think you need to save that part of the internet - it will always
exist. But it will lose its power and relevance in a sea of mediocrity.

------
fit2rule
This is one of the reasons I've become, lately, a big supporter of the IPFS -
Internet Permanent File System - [http://ipfs.io/](http://ipfs.io/)

I think its very important for us to engineer ways to perpetuate human culture
as expressed on the web. Having been privileged to witness the birth of the
Internet and the subsequent explosion in human expression as described by the
Web, I'm very concerned that we are losing so much with every new site update,
every change/refactor of existing communities, every death of a blog. I
remember so many wonderful, enriching things happening in the early days of
the Web, which are all gone now .. being replaced with terrible instruments of
cultural devolution. With tech like IPFS, I hope we are able to construct a
less neurotic corpus of human information - that the truly valuable stuff
sticks around longer than the current attention span, and remains available
for years to come. I'm of course, explicitly not referring to cat pics.

~~~
26cf805ae26f
IPFS means "InterPlanetary File System"

source: [http://ipfs.io](http://ipfs.io)

------
michaelvkpdx
Thanks for the posting. The article is dead-on but it misses one important
contributing factor- the rise and mass acceptance of the "disrupt" culture.
It's become acceptable, desirable, even lucrative to use Internet technology
to jump into lives, right into people's faces.

If most people had realized what they were signing up for when they first
slipped in a phone in their pocket- that every greedhead who could figure out
an HTML tag would eventually be able to use that phone to interrupt any part
of their lives- I think most consumers would have thought twice. Now, they're
all addicted to the endorphin buzz of "likes" and are quickly losing the
ability to seek for themselves.

------
pastycrinkles
All and all, it's just another sign that the internet is becoming less a tool
of individual communication or expression, and more an impression of cable TV.
Besides, y'know, all that surveillance and all.

Another free medium bites the dust.

------
signaler
That's why I wrote my Magna Carta For The Web:
[http://blog.higg.so/2015/07/31/a-magna-carta-for-the-
web/](http://blog.higg.so/2015/07/31/a-magna-carta-for-the-web/) There is an
emphasis on Advertising in this article but it overlooks the meta grand
overview of the web which I go into. The topology, and the tendency towards
centralized systems is not talked about here. Also if Advertising works for
now, then I am going to milk it for all it is worth. Unless decent standards
for publishers are put in place like Mozilla's Subscribe2Web, or hosting and
domain renewals become free, then we are stuck with that business model. Also,
we just got a digital Magna Carta voted in:
[http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2015-06/15/magna-
carta-d...](http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2015-06/15/magna-carta-
digital-rights-vote-censorship-freedom-of-speech)

In terms of how the web is progressing, things like Ethereum look very
exciting: [https://www.ethereum.org/](https://www.ethereum.org/) And the IETF
are in full force now with many protocols being redesigned from the ground up
with security and privacy being baked in.

------
khalilravanna
I like this article and the author makes a lot of great points. However I also
disagree with the main thesis that the internet has become worse or dumbed
down.

> I miss when people took time to be exposed to different opinions, and
> bothered to read more than a paragraph or 140 characters. I miss the days
> when I could write something on my own blog, publish on my own domain,
> without taking an equal time to promote it on numerous social networks; when
> nobody cared about likes and reshares.

My disagreement is on two main levels. One, the internet of yore, that the
author describes in this quote, is not gone. It still exists. Trivial proof
lies in the existence of this post and it's ability to shoot to the top of HN.
The internet has only expanded, to include different types of content and
different communities. The "book internet" still exists and yes a "tv
internet", which some might describe as worse, also exists.

And the expansion of the internet to include new forms of content brings me to
the second reason I think the "new internet" is not worse: it is more
accessible. The mainstream has come and joined the whole internet thing. And
yes, while it might be decried by those who enjoyed it the way it was before,
there are a lot more people other than them who are enjoying it now. And I
think that's a good thing.

~~~
frooxie
> The "book internet" still exists

Amanda Palmer recently wrote this about her and Neil Gaiman:

 _neil and i, and many other bloggers, have discussed this with more and more
worry lately. we used to have blogs, on our websites. we 'd link to them.
people read them. LOTS of people read them. this was in the days before
twitter, bookface, instagram, tumblr, etc. it was when you woke up in the
morning and read people's blogs and posted thoughtful comments and it felt
like the internet was ripe with possibility and freedom. it's going away. even
though we both have far larger fanbases than we did ten years ago, our blog
readerships have been halved, quartered, more._

I don't have any reliable statistics, but that would suggest that the "book
internet" may be shrinking.

~~~
harryf
Traffic is certainly shifting from desktop to mobile e.g.
[https://twitter.com/lukew/status/626792657684029440](https://twitter.com/lukew/status/626792657684029440)
\- a mobile only generation is upcoming while millennials find themselves
addicted to Facebook. So we may indeed have a decline in the "book Internet"

------
l33tbro
Previous (albeit shorter) discussion:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9887040](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9887040)

~~~
myth_buster
It's quite interesting that the exact same submission with same title didn't
get much visibility. I can't find the time of posting of the previous thread
but this one seems to have been posted when the east coast woke up. Is that
mere correlation or is it causation.

------
_pmf_
The main problem is that the Web as originally conceived has should has
nothing in common with the Web as application platform.

The convergence was because of necessity, but further development should
really be done in two different branches.

Keeping both aspects together perpetuates the bloating of the "document" web
and abysmal tooling of the "application platform" web (and yes, the tooling is
abysmal; please don't fool yourself).

------
thomasahle
This artwork in this article is amazing. Does anybody know who did it?

~~~
Adirael
Illustrations by Tim McDonagh :)

------
estava
I enjoyed the article. I think the general sentiment here is that one needs to
take the good with the bad.

I also think that the ongoing changes have made for a different web that is
less important on the mobile devices. In watching some videos about mobile we
get that people are excited about new ways of interacting with computers,
perhaps with the camera, perhaps with the microphone, or perhaps with the
GPS... Sometimes the web just does not feature in those trends.

The web has changed a lot since Obama first won the Presidency. His site with
donations, the network effect directing traffic to his campaign site and so
on... Now there are these "Streams" on mobile, I'm not sure how those could be
shared with a community that was sometimes anonymous and decentralized, like
you say...

Now it's like people want to drink bottled water of a certain brand instead of
sharing the water in the lake (web). It doesn't seem to scale. And companies
and governments are just too forceful to avoid competition and so on to allow
for a thousand flowers to bloom like it may have been possible in the past.

------
GrinningFool
I'm not usually a fan of the full-screen art on medium posts - something about
having to scroll a full page before being able to actually read anything - but
that one is really well done. There's actual substance to it, and it doesn't
have the 'pull something pseudo-relevant from stock photos' that most of them
do (even when they're not stock).

------
zkhalique
To decentralize something, you need the right software and protocols.

Email is decentralized. Imagine if you needed to connect to email.com in order
to communicate with the person next door?

That is the reality for people on a cruise ship, in villages around the world,
etc. where the connection is bad. What's the reason the signal has to travel
to Facebook's headquarters and back in order to share photos? Economies of
scale, and the profit motive.

Money was recently decentralized with bitcoin.

But social is still not decentralized effectively. You can see this because
e.g. GitHub is centralized even though the underlying technology, git, is not.
That's because all the profiles, stars, followers/watchers, security, hasn't
been done yet in a way that can automatically reconstruct the social graph and
enforce privacy across many domains.

Well, that's what we're been working on for the last four years. It's now up
to version 0.8:

[http://platform.qbix.com](http://platform.qbix.com)

Feedback welcome!

~~~
nbadg
I don't agree that email is decentralized.[1] It's interoperable and
universal, but that's not the same thing. You can use a single address for
mail from arbitrary sources, and all email addresses, regardless of client or
mailserver, can talk to each other. But once you've chosen a mailserver for
any given address, you've put all of your eggs in that one basket. Now, it's
easier to switch clients, but let's be realistic, when's the last time you did
that? And both the list of popular mailservers
([http://www.mailradar.com/mailstat/](http://www.mailradar.com/mailstat/)) and
clients
([https://emailclientmarketshare.com/](https://emailclientmarketshare.com/))
is quite short.

Honest feedback: as far as I can tell from a quick onceover, qbix is just an
aggregator for existing services. That doesn't really solve the problem, and
arguably, by positioning yourself as a single point of failure for
negotiations between different APIs (facebook, email, sms, etc), you're
actually creating a system that is substantially more centralized, not less.
And you're covered by a patent (or at least an application), so potential
competitors can't interoperate without a licensing agreement. If you're trying
to be a decentralized, universal platform, you've just shot yourself in the
foot.

Disclaimer: I'm working on a similar problem, but I'm doing it as an
abstraction layer between transport (TCP/IP, bluetooth mesh, anything with a
reliable bytestream) and application. That allows you to do some really cool
things, like communicating between people (or services or whatever),
regardless of device or physical network topology.
[https://github.com/Muterra/doc-muse](https://github.com/Muterra/doc-muse)

[1] That isn't necessarily a bad thing, and I think that email is a great
example of a very successful hybrid (both centralized and decentralized)
system -- it allows users to choose between centralized providers with minimal
switching cost. Centralization with zero node lock isn't necessarily bad.

~~~
zkhalique
I'm not sure what you mean by "aggregator for existing services". Qbix is a
social app platform. Let's say New York University wants to install the Qbix
platform for its community. People can sign up and make accounts. Then, let's
say other organizations, such as Columbia University also run a network.
People sign up there as well. You want a system which seamlessly and
transparently handles all the social integrations. If I have an account with
NYU and then sign up on Columbia's social network, I should be able to find my
friends (but only the ones that want to be found) automatically and see their
user names because they are in my contact list. Columbia would host various
"social apps" on this platform, which would all have a common way to deal with
users, data, privacy etc. Let's say one of those apps is Chess, and another is
Presentations. I can invite friends to play chess on the Columbia servers or
edit a presentation hosted there. If we want, any one of us can start our own
network and invite friends. And they wouldn't have to tell each other, "I am
XYZ123 on the Columbia network", it would just all link up. Privacy, contacts,
etc. it would all work across all the domains. That's what I'm talking about.

Where do you see such a system? It took us four years to build this platform.
But it liberates your accounts from the silos since you can create an account
anywhere and choose to tell some people that XYZ123 on Columbia is ABC456 on
NYC -- and not tell others. Everything would be personalized according to who
is logged in where and viewing what. And it would "just work". So app
developers for Chess and Presentations could simply implement the part
responsible for playing chess or editing/viewing presentations, and the rest
would all be standard -- user signup, forgot password, invites, privacy,
history, contacts, social, etc.

THAT IS WHAT I MEAN. Here are some diagrams:

[http://qbix.com/investors/images/streams-diagramm-02-old-
sty...](http://qbix.com/investors/images/streams-diagramm-02-old-style_04.png)

[http://qbix.com/investors/images/streams-
diagramm-02-2015-02...](http://qbix.com/investors/images/streams-
diagramm-02-2015-02.png)

PS: By the way, your project seems really cool, we should link up. Ultimately
we are missing the network layer for our stuff, but what we'd really like to
do is have our platform also power apps on local networks, e.g. cruise ships
or ad hoc mesh networking. We are deferring that to a couple years down the
line, but that's where we want to be.

------
tim333
>The rich, diverse, free web that I loved ... is dying. Why is nobody stopping
it?

I'm not sure it is dying. The total number of blogs for example has gone from
around 78 million when the writer was jailed to something of the order of 250
million now. [0][1]

Fair enough there is competition for eyeballs from blander more controlled
media like Facebook but diverse free stuff continues, it's just some people
would rather watch cat videos. I don't know if you can stop that - it's a free
world, people can watch/read what they like.

[0] [http://www.nielsen.com/us/en/insights/news/2012/buzz-in-
the-...](http://www.nielsen.com/us/en/insights/news/2012/buzz-in-the-
blogosphere-millions-more-bloggers-and-blog-readers.html)

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blog](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blog)

~~~
bobbles
>That’s the web we have to save.

Literally the next words on the page:

>Log in to Medium and “recommend” this story. >Follow Matter on Twitter | Like
us on Facebook

------
paulpauper
_When I log on to Facebook, my personal television starts. All I need to do is
to scroll: New profile pictures by friends, short bits of opinion on current
affairs, links to new stories with short captions, advertising, and of course
self-playing videos. I occasionally click on like or share button, read
peoples’ comments or leave one, or open an article. But I remain inside
Facebook, and it continues to broadcast what I might like. This is not the web
I knew when I went to jail. This is not the future of the web. This future is
television._

Isn't that how AOL was in the 90's or Yahoo.com a decade ago but with much
less community interaction? AOL had a screen with 20 options, I remember. You
go to a homepage that has most of everything you need, which saves time. I
don't really see the problem.

------
pcmaffey
The Stream is modeled after The Inbox, which, despite long-standing calls to
kill email, is a component of the most powerful and effective communication
tool The Internet has given rise to.

The underlying philosophical tenants of this article are spot on. And all in
all, it's an excellent story.

There seems to be, on HN especially, a lament for the web of yore. I imagine
this has more to do with us first (and 2nd?) generation web builders getting
old. Anyone who spends time with geezers knows it's par for the course to
lament the way things have changed, to long for the good old days.

I'd encourage people to trust in the next-generation. Just as they would have
wished their parents (and the establishment) to trust in them when they were
just starting out in the world.

------
pcr0
Ironic that the article ended with a "recommend" heart button.

------
wainstead
I hope he finds out about the Indie Web movement:

[https://indiewebcamp.com/why](https://indiewebcamp.com/why)

Quote:

> Whatever the reason, you're done with sharecropping your content, your
> identity, and your self.

> Our online content and identites are becoming more important and sometimes
> even critical to our lives. Neither are secure in the hands of random
> ephemeral startups or big silos. We should be the holders of our online
> presence.

A good introductory article on the Indie Web movement appeared in Wired:

[http://www.wired.com/2013/08/indie-web/](http://www.wired.com/2013/08/indie-
web/)

People working on this include Ward Cunningham, inventor of the first wiki,
c2.com.

~~~
oneJob
indeed and agreed. the Internet, or that subset of it which you frequent, will
simply reflect the views and actions of those that built it. in the early
days, the majority of the internet was built by folks who valued community,
transparency, openness, diversity, etc. today, it is largely built by
businesses with mandates to generate profit. but, there is also the Indie Web,
et al.

personal opinion: big business is building a consumer/non-techie friendly web.
builders of the Indie Web, we should compete not only on content and
principals, but on this point too. example. i think many would switch away
from gmail, and pay a nominal amount to do so, if there was a one click
solution. why in the world is there no easy to use, secure, resilient,
distributed competitor to skype. that technology is old as bones. please don't
understand that to mean that i'd think it an easy task, it most certainly
would not be easy. i mean, the competition is well funded, well staffed, well
motivated. but, it'd be worth it.

~~~
benwerd
There is a one-click solution:
[https://withknown.com/](https://withknown.com/)

------
anthonybsd
Interesting point, but it's a largely superficial one. It basically is all a
matter of perspective. 6 years ago all of the same tools and consumption
methods have existed. I.e. RSS feed aggregators, Google Reader & content
websites a la Fark, Reddit, Digg, Slashdot, etc. They have simply morphed into
the likes of Twitter/FaceBook/etc and in the process have become much easier
to use by the general public. It sounds to me that the author is lamenting the
fact that it's a lot harder to be a superstar blogger, which it is. There is a
lot more competition for content these days because of streamlined delivery.
Tough, but that's what it is.

------
vkb
Very powerful. I read this article at the same time as this one [1] this
morning, about the powers and limitations of content platforms. Both say the
same thing to me: many people think the web today is inherently broken by
middlemen, like the music industry was up until very recently. But as of yet,
there is no solution to middlemen, because they are where the audience is,
therefore,where the money is.

[1][http://www.theawl.com/2015/07/in-no-
charts](http://www.theawl.com/2015/07/in-no-charts)

~~~
jacquesm
We already had the solution: a decentralized web. But do note that the author
used 'medium' rather than to use his own platform and so effectively adds to
the value of the medium content-silo.

~~~
fixermark
Is there an implementation method for the decentralized web that doesn't
require individuals to become web administrators (with concerns about
security, SEO and "proper standards-compliant page architecture", storage and
bandwidth costs, etc.)?

If not, I'm afraid it's a non-starter. The centralized solutions are winning
precisely because the average user just wants to get their signal out; they
don't want to be forced to become even an amateur web admin to do it. So long
as that's true, you'll find an ecosystem of dedicated individuals and small-
count co-ops outside the centralized web platforms, but they'll never become
large enough to draw consumer eyeballs away from those platforms.

~~~
mbrock
I don't know about "they'll never." If excellent tools are developed and
freely distributed and improved, why couldn't there be a kind of co-op
renaissance? Certainly there are lots of people who aren't interested in
systems administration but who still see the problems with centralized
services, and more importantly are getting bored and exhausted with the ad-
ridden, spying, proprietary networks they're using.

~~~
fixermark
Unfortunately, I want to believe but I strongly doubt (based on personal
observation of how the web ecosystem is evolving) that there are enough people
to form a strong, healthy co-op ecosystem, for a few reasons.

1) Sysadmining is still hard, thankless, and tedious enough (outside the
ecosystem of services that are paying sysadmins to do the heavy-lifting for
the end-user) that you're looking at a very select clientele, even among the
people who have become sufficiently fed up with the status quo to want to dive
into that space. I'm capable of hosting my own blog, but I host it on Blogger
because I don't want to deal with having to security-patch my tool of choice
every week. Any popular toolchain monoculture is a target for security
attacks, and any popular toolchain heteroculture (i.e. "tool that is flexible
enough that no two installations look alike enough to allow for security
attacks") introduces complications that diminish the adoption rate of the
tool. The development of excellent tools freely distributed and improved is
not at all a given; the bar to success is _extremely_ high, even if someone
comes along to foot the bill (which would be necessary, because if we could
expect those tools to spring up for free, the web is old enough that we'd have
already seen it happen).

2) Any small co-op that is successful enough either becomes a Facebook or gets
bought by a Facebook. Blogger used to be independent. So was Tumblr. So was
Livejournal. The monocultures have the money to acquire real competition, and
it's hoping too much to pretend the central human owners of such co-ops (or
even the entire co-op, if it really is structured as a cooperative) won't just
sell the farm for a half-million dollars.

So I don't see independent blogs ever becoming more than a fringe exercise on
the modern web (hell, even the original author's reference to Blogger is a
service fully owned and operated by Google, which can at a whim change what
content is allowed on that network [[https://www.yahoo.com/tech/s/googles-
blogger-drops-plan-bloc...](https://www.yahoo.com/tech/s/googles-blogger-
drops-plan-block-nude-pics-amid-220802499.html\])).

~~~
mbrock
I agree about these difficulties, but remain incurably optimistic. Actually
I've been thinking about piracy as an example of resilient networks run by
volunteers. For example, every little student dorm I lived in had its own DC++
server, run by dorky volunteers. Of course that's different from a blog
platform with mass appeal, but it's something.

------
z3t4
I think he is on to something ... EACEA, PIRLS and PISA (standard tests for
schools) has shown a steady decline in reading comprehension from year 2000.
And it's starting to look a bit alarming, as it currently states: 1/5
teenagers today can't even comprehend the simplest of texts.

We can all contribute to stop this trend though, if you have kids, sit down
and read books with them!

~~~
teraflop
> And it's starting to look a bit alarming, as it currently states: 1/5
> teenagers today can't even comprehend the simplest of texts.

I'd like a citation for this, if you don't mind. I tried and failed to find
anything to corroborate it.

------
golergka
Isn't that blog itself a huge counter-argument to the whole "blogs are dying"
point? And yes, as more and more of "general public" go to internet, their
percentage in internet audience rise, and so does the percentage of PC-like
content. Do blogs really perceive less attention now? Or may be just a less
percentage of overall attention?

------
michaelvkpdx
Idiocracy rules! See
[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/)

And of course Idiots Rule. www.youtube.com/watch?v=nrUUd-30Bzw

------
jshelly
I'm surprised, no mention of Reddit?

~~~
SnowProblem
I'm surprised too. Reddit and HN are much more valuable to me than Google
Reader ever was.

------
randall
Podcasts. They're the indie web that has long been forgotten.

~~~
jacquesm
No, podcasts are also audio/visual media. The web was text only in the
beginning.

~~~
InclinedPlane
I think a/v vs text is the wrong dichotomy. I think it's more about passive
content and "commercial" content vs. active content and individualistic
content. The web used to be about conversations, it used to be about
individual passions. Some of that still exists, but it's being pushed to the
margin as click bait, memes, sharable bite-sized content, and "hands off"
content has risen to the fore.

------
TazeTSchnitzel
I think they may be getting at something, but at least partly it reads as
someone who lost their popularity after several years and is upset about it.

------
beatpanda
The answer to why the web sucks in 2015 was given by DJ Shadow in 1996:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s2VG53RIJ50](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s2VG53RIJ50)

The irony is that before I could listen to that 45 second track I had to watch
an ad, underlining the point.

------
azinman2
I think a large part of it is just a change about who is online. There's still
plenty of blog type things as much as Facebook wants to chip away at it, but
my 13 y/o niece never would have been reading his blogs in the first place.

------
oneJob
is there a "Facebook Boycott"? if not, there should be. if you'd like to
support the Indie Web, do not link to Facebook or other such centralized
walled-gardens, and explain to your users why you've made that decision.

------
oldmanjay
My tweets rarely get favorited. The web is broken!

------
hmans
Posted on Medium.

------
michaelvkpdx
Greedy advertisers + good Javascript libraries used by bad Javascript
developers= end of the Internet we loved

------
hiou
The web is not compatible with the current economic system in place in the US
and growing throughout the world. Strong property rights are in direct
opposition to decentralization. Unless additional policies similar to net
neutrality are implemented the web with end up an afterthought in the near
future.

------
lectrick
> Why is nobody stopping it?

Why does this generation assume someone else is going to fix the problems they
see?

------
eldude
While well articulated, this post is bloated with alarming entitlement and a
lot of misunderstandings. In short, he largely claims to know what's better
for people than the market (i.e., themselves) while lamenting his loss of
power and importance through moral rationalizations and judgment.

Facebook, Reddit and Twitter are vast improvements over a world where bloggers
would seriously claim, "I could empower or embarrass anyone I wanted." Social
media merely democratized and disseminated that power to the masses. No amount
of rationalizations or FUD over a "television-internet" will reverse that
positive trend. The elitist condescension that his links, comments or
conversations are implicitly superior to the likes, shares or up-votes of the
populace is more than a little sad, and I think he's missing the point; social
media thrives because it gives people more of what they want, and who is
anyone to decide that but themselves?

That said, he makes a good few points with invalid conclusions, mostly
regarding centralization. The loss of ownership over our own content has
severe implications for the internet, most specifically in our ability to
control its dissemination and protect it from loss and privacy. Protection
from loss is easy with the rise of web-exposed storage APIs like Dropbox, and
eventually I think we'll see more and more cloud-storage-backed SaSS
platforms, starting first in the enterprise and trickling down into the
consumer market.

Regarding our ability to control our own data and the corresponding loss of
privacy, it will take a lot longer, which is a real problem because the
government treats the "privacy" of SaSS as a public square; You are entitled
to none. We'll probably need a technological or cultural innovation here.
Culturally, people would need to revert, which is unlikely. Technologically,
something like a content-owner controlled database would need to be developed,
and upon maturity, laws passed to require its use. Such a database would
enable the revoking of permissions to cause all reference entries to be
removed, and disallow the denormalization of any personal data. That seems
unlikely to happen anytime soon, so we're consequently headed for some major
cultural conflicts.

Lastly, the author scapegoats and disparages our focus on newness and
popularity. First, humanity's focus on newly discovered information has
existed for some time: gossip, newspapers, magazines, tv, movie theaters, et.
al. Every edition has only ever contained the newest information or opinions
along with the occasional reprint. Second, popularity is but one vector for
relevance, as were hyperlinks. Yes, a poorly implemented Stream that
interprets likes as votes creates a false-feedback-loop, but it's a widely
known flaw, and exists primarily only in the nearly obsolete Facebook.

Once you clear away all the rationalizations he uses to justify why things
were better when he was in power, you realize, it's mostly just whining
intermixed with a decent social commentary on and summary of the evolution of
internet media.

------
paulhauggis
The government is no longer a threat. 1984 is here and...it's us.

Look at all of the people bullied into submission where their personal lives
are disrupted and careers are ruined.

The ex-Mozilla CEO resigned after he was bullied by a community of people that
didn't agree with his politics.

The ex-Reddit CEO resigned after so many people, without even getting all of
the facts, decided she did something wrong.

Even the hunter that killed Cecil the lion. The facts weren't even out yet. I
saw many conflicting stories..which probably all had varying levels of
inaccuracy. But it didn't matter, he needed to be punished because he did
something we didn't like. So his business gets closed, his yelp pages are
destroyed (even though it really has nothing to do with his business).

Everyone seems to be fine with this accepted form of bullying..until it comes
around to someone they don't want to be bullied. Then it's too late and people
like me don't listen anymore.

------
curiousjorge
Imagine if you could host Facebook that runs only on your friends computers
out of reach by motivated parties interested in tracking you for a variety of
self benefit. Imagine if Youtube ran on everybody's computers, DMCA ignored,
every single content imaginable is available.

That is where we are going. Anonymous, fault tolerant, ephemeral nodes hosting
web services that can't be cracked or spied on. Internet for the people by the
people, literally.

Pretty soon we'll have mesh networking that will support this as well. ISP in
bed with the government? Guess you will have to tap in to the pool of devices
running a node for your favorite web service. DMCA notices? Legal threats and
take downs against all million devices scattered throughout the world hosting
your web service? Arrest that public servant for incompetence!

~~~
logfromblammo
o/~ Imagine there's no Facebook. I wonder if you can. No need for Snapchat or
Twitter, A Diaspora of pods. Imagine all the people, Sharing their content...

You may say I'm a dreamer, But I'm not the only one. I hope someday you'll
join us, And the world will peer-to-peer. o/~

It seems like web freedom is nearly within our grasp. The only problem is a
critical mass of adoption.

~~~
curiousjorge
It should feature:

\- Peer-to-peer proxy mesh network, no internet required.

\- Automatically discover nearby nodes and connect directly via wifi,
bluetooth, internet.

\- Nodes run in memory, no writing to disk. Constantly discovering and caching
indexes of common nodes.

\- A way to store data fully distributed across the network. You only get a
'piece' of the data, you need to hit more than a certain threshold of nodes to
get full piecture.

\- A self policing of nodes from a ledger of some sort that is distributed and
shared by everyone. Bad ones are not punished, they are grouped in their own
'neighborhoods'. Spammers end up spamming each other.

\- Fully anonymous and risk free. You never hold more than a encrypted piece
of the puzzle which alone have no meaning. Only with a certain threshold of
nodes can you access that data. The data is constantly shifting across nodes.

\- While a node is online, it's broadcasting it's piece of the puzzle to other
nodes randomly so that if it goes down, the backup is held by another node.

I don't know I'm just writing some random ideas so obviously these will need
additional work.

