
The Web We Lost (2012) - raldu
http://anildash.com/2012/12/13/the_web_we_lost/
======
aphextron
Everyone cheered the demise of MySpace for Facebook, but in retrospect MySpace
was the last dying gasps of the "old internet" (what I refer to as the "real
web"). Sure it was a rough and tumble world that wasn't exactly "pretty". But
from that ugliness sprang levels of self expression and freedom not seen today
anywhere else, because when you give people total freedom amazing things can
happen. Corporations don't like amazing, rare, or incredible things. They like
standardized, predictable mediocrity. Which is precisely what they've molded
the web into over the past 10 years.

~~~
mgummelt
What amazing things happened on Myspace?

~~~
sjm-lbm
I don't know if this was just an experience that I had, but peak MySpace
happened right as I was hitting a point in my life where I really wanted to
seek out new music. I found a lot of interesting/local/terrible/excellent
music from MySpace band pages back then, and I'm not aware of a platform that
I really think recreates the MySpace music experience.

Not sure if that was a very universal experience, but it does give you an
example.

~~~
heurist
What do you think is missing from contemporary platforms?

~~~
mr_spothawk
for my contemporary listening pleasure, if Spotify had chatrooms I would be in
them with my best music sharing buds all day.

likewise, shared/live-playlist making would be very popular among my friends.

------
systematical
More nostalgic sentiment longing to be reactionary without any balls to do so.
Rinse, repeat. Wake me up in 10 years when the neo Luddites are clamoring for
the web of 2018.

~~~
anildash
Nope. We’re building a very forward-looking business around fixing these bugs,
with Glitch. You can go ahead and sleep for 10 years, though. We’ll be making
the web better.

------
timcederman
Needs a 2012 tag, particularly given the relative dates provided in the
article made it quite confusing.

~~~
sctb
Thanks, we've updated the headline.

------
tahw
Its kinda poetic that this page is down right now.

------
fixermark
I can't help but think there's more than a bit of rose-colored glasses
observation in this story. To highlight a few things popping out at me:

"The web was an interesting and different place before links got monetized,
but by 2007 it was clear that Google had changed the web forever, and for the
worse, by corrupting links."

This ignores the backroom deals that were happening between orgs to cross-link
to each other even before concerns about SEO (and the original algorithms
sensitive to link-frequency that were game-able by adding bunches of links to
a page) became significant. There's always been some flavor of pay-to-play and
favor-exchange in links (though there are certainly also people who would link
to things because they believed they were good or useful, but of course, that
is still true today).

"In 2003, if you introduced a single-sign-in service that was run by a
company, even if you documented the protocol and encouraged others to clone
the service, you’d be described as introducing a tracking system worthy of the
PATRIOT act."

We've had thirteen years of experience since then to show us the risks and
failure-modes of every service on the planet trying and failing to get secure
authentication correct. If anything, the modern web still has _too many_ sites
trying to handle username and password when they should be using one of the
SSO options instead.

"In the early days of the social web, there was a broad expectation that
regular people might own their own identities by having their own websites,
instead of being dependent on a few big sites to host their online identity."

First of all, I'm not sure what we mean by 'social web' and 'own identity'
precisely here, but every email address I owned through college and after was
provided by some @corporation.com provider (up until I registered my own
domain backed by Google Apps). But if Anil is referring to the notion of
personal pages: unfortunately, people don't want to maintain their own
infrastructure. I still have my own personal page, but its uptime is not as
reliable as my Facebook profile. Nobody wants their personal page to be
unreachable when a potential employer is trying to check on it. This nice-to-
have runs afoul of the general issue "Not everyone is a sysadmin or web
developer, so _someone_ is probably maintaining your service for you." The
social networks just moved the maintain-for-you question from the service
layer all the way to the application layer.

"Five years ago, if you wanted to show content from one site or app on your
own site or app, you could use a simple, documented format to do so, without
requiring a business-development deal or contractual agreement between the
sites."

I'll have to take Anil's word for this; this is the first time I've ever heard
of oEmbed. That leads me to assume it was never widely adopted, but perhaps I
am wrong. AFAICT, it's not a w3c standard, so I assume Anil's using some
creative license with the "you could use" notion here. I think he may also be
loosely applying the concept of "user experiences weren’t subject to the
vagaries of the political battles between different companies," since nothing
in the spec suggests to me that a content provider couldn't sniff the
requester and respond with "LOL, no", but perhaps I'm missing something in the
details.

"they’ve now narrowed the possibilites of the web for an entire generation of
users who don’t realize how much more innovative and meaningful their
experience could be"

I think Anil may be committing the sin of assuming users are like him, the web
developer. Users aren't. It's entirely possible and extremely likely that what
we're pointing to here as errors in the development of the web were features
that enabled a hundred million new users to come online.

Most of my relatives were not going to configure their own website to host
their profile or skin their own Myspace page. Most of them don't know HTML.
Most of them have a Facebook account because FB doesn't require any of that
from its end users; it just works.

~~~
bartread
I think you pretty much nailed it. Whilst I look back with a certain -
undoubtedly rose-tinted - fondness on the days of chaotic and garish Geocities
sites, and personal homepages with endless "under construction" images, the
fact is that the people who built that sort of thing were very much in the
minority relative to the general population.

Now, a much larger portion of the general population is online and, whaddya
know?, the internet is dominated by a few big players great at exploiting a
large market who have catered their offerings towards that _very large_ non-
technical majority. The web has been ruined only in the sense that everything
is ultimately ruined by over-popularity.

It's certainly a shame, but is it really a surprise?

What I am quite enjoying nowadays is the resurgence of a more creative side to
the web amongst people beginning to react against the dominance of social
media sites. The pendulum always swings the other way eventually.

~~~
lioeters
"resurgence of a more creative side to the web"

So glad to see some hope here. Would you have any good examples of this trend
you describe? I'd like to be more familiar with the space, like Mastodon,
numerous libraries of decentralized, distributed, privacy-conscious, user-
centered, self-hosted approaches..

------
ateesdalejr
I think this page is getting the HN hug of death right now... :(

~~~
eilyra
Noticed the same, here's a link to the google cache:
[https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http:/...](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://anildash.com/2012/12/13/the_web_we_lost/)

Seemed to work well enough there.

~~~
anildash
Whoops! Sorry, was messing around with my blog while apparently everybody was
trying to read it. Should be fixed now.

------
pmlnr
[https://mobile.twitter.com/t/status/768410197853212672](https://mobile.twitter.com/t/status/768410197853212672)

~~~
anildash
Love Tantek's point, and all the indieweb efforts, but the fact that the
existence of these technologies needs to be pointed out, even on HN, kind of
illustrates that they're currently "lost" from the standpoint of mainstream
internet users.

~~~
epeus
Perhaps you could link to the indieweb page above from your post, Anil? Or
implement webmentions to show replies.

