
Tech giants have hijacked the web – Some innovators are developing new platforms - rblion
https://www.wsj.com/articles/tech-giants-have-hijacked-the-web-its-time-for-a-reboot-11572062420?mod=rsswn
======
theboywho
It feels like the author was exposed to the rhetoric of the web having been
ruined by tech giants due to centralisation, and decided to write an article
about that, expecting clicks and views, all without trying to first understand
what the people behind such a rhetoric actually mean. I mean the article
discusses the issue of a centralised web by stating the russian inference in
the US elections. How does that illustrate the centralisation issue of the web
platform, and how can a decentralised solution prevent that?

Also the article is only accessible through a subscription, so I couldn't
finish it, which is ironic because this is exactly what's broken with today's
web.

~~~
cartoonworld
I think the author was arguing that the siloing off of internet users,
combined with hypersaturated markets is what made that election scandal
possible in the first place. To be clear about what I mean by that I am
referring to unregulated political advertising that nobody checks. An example
of the bad advertising would be: Running an ad campaign referring to the wrong
date of the physical vote to a target audience of 9-to-five 18-35 wage workers
with kids and no college education hoping that it tricks some percent of them
into not voting because they requested the wrong day off. Oops!

People (Ad people) simply noticed that the ads were a communication channel in
and of themselves, and using the (for example) facebook tools to lazily target
a particular demographic, they got huge numbers of eyeballs. Stir in some
classic astroturfing and social-media influencers (Derisively known as
shills), likes, comments and you've got a quick minilove _and_ truth. Except
even better because anyone with cash who resides in any country on earth can
buy in.

The author was pointing out the now obvious fact that "tech companies" look
like an information service for connecting friends but are actually ad
generating theme parks. Since the value of the data your users bring is only
very useful if you have a lot of it, the organizations who have replaced both
Nielsen and News Papers have simply followed the incentives and coalesced into
larger and larger gravitational bodies. By having all the content, users,
tracking pixels, sales data, and ads, it increases the value of all of those
things if you can meaningfuly connect them together by engaging with users
through next-generation enterprise-grade disruptive orthogonal innovation at-
scale.

They're saying a centralized web is more valuable to its corporate sponsors,
because when there are fewer places you need to advertise or track/monetize
user data in this world, the corporate value compounds even more. Likewise
abusing these themeparks will be even more effective, because whatever
mechanism sells soda pop will likely also sell antidepresants and anything
else.

Walking into the stables might get you a big sack of oats, but you wont find
anything other than what they hand over the gate.

~~~
theboywho
Thanks for reporting back about what is discussed in the rest of the article.
I still think the author is confused about two different things: popularity
and centralisation. The issue is not that now, a bunch of very few popular
services is where most of online activity happens, the issue is that these
services have access to users’ data and privacy, by design, and most of all,
they are not censorship resistant.

~~~
cartoonworld
>the author is confused about two different things: popularity and
centralisation.

I strongly disagree. the author has noted the connection between popularity
and centralization and points out its impressive drawbacks. The pluses are
disruptive corporate profitability, the minus makes Church and Pike look like
Tuskegee. Or maybe the other way around.

------
netfl0
There are many compelling technology projects in this space. However, there
are many different use cases on the web and when it sounds like you solve all
of them, the value proposition gets obfuscated.

One of my favorite web sites is
[https://www.sheldonbrown.com/](https://www.sheldonbrown.com/)

It captures the promise of the web and accessible boutique information. I hope
there is a rebirth of that early web movement for high quality highly curated
content and knowledge. It starts with people though. The tech is just a tool.

~~~
readingnews
I do not get it. Are you saying it looks 90s? Are you saying the content is
great? "it captures the promise of the web and accessible..." Do you mean to
say he is using alt tabs and accessibility options all over (I did not see
that yet). He has a lot of js scripts... but it sure looks 90s.

~~~
netfl0
The content is great.

The styling is, let’s say utilitarian. :)

Accessible in the dictionary sense of the word. Everyone can access the
content. I am not sure about the handicap accessibility, however it would not
surprise me if it was “accessible“ in that way given Sheldon’s attention to
detail.

Though, the website seems to have been updated by other people since Sheldon
died so I am not sure about its current “state”/quality.

Hopefully this clarifies my post.

------
jseliger
More accurately, users want easy above and beyond anything else. "Tech giants"
are giants because users use them. [https://jakeseliger.com/2018/11/14/is-
there-an-actual-facebo...](https://jakeseliger.com/2018/11/14/is-there-an-
actual-facebook-crisis-or-media-narrative-about-facebook-crisis)

Don't get me wrong: I agree with the rhetoric against tech giants. But in real
life, looking at measurable behavior, no one cares.

~~~
criddell
Facebook is a giant because people use it but also people use it because of
their size (everybody is there!).

------
kickscondor
People always talk about the “network effects” of Facebook or Twitter - but
what about the network effect of the Web itself? How has that failed so
spectacularly? For a while it seemed like we took the route of competing
standards that defined the network (RSS, Atom, WebSub, REST) but there seems
to be no taste for any of the new connecting protocols (Webmentions,
ActivityPub) that could enhance the Web’s connective tissue.

Whereas community on the Web used to be a favorite hobbyist PHPBB forum or
mailing list - it’s now just a business. (Are you on Instagram or TikTok?)

~~~
buboard
The web collectively failed to provide a single authentication token. Unlike
mobile phones, where the phone numbers are not controlled by one entity, in
the web some companies jumped in and grabbed them all. It's still sad to see
that despite multiple protocols, despite open source browser, despite
distributed trustless databases, we need to sign up to each service with our
email or with FB connect.

For anything in that space to catch on though, it will have to provide a
benefit to the webmater. Facebook provided visibility and extensive
distribution, that's why so many media chose to move their content in there

~~~
kickscondor
Interesting points - like the comparison to mobile phone numbers. You’d think
that an open account system could provide even more visibility - because
you’re not just posting on a closed network.

I think if Facebook was just an account system or just a discovery mechanism,
then it could be amazing. It just sucks that every network tries to do it all
- and in a closed way.

~~~
buboard
Firefox should bundle something like metamask in the browser. Not only you
will have a trustless identification mechanism for multiple identities, but
users will also use it for micropayments.

I think a lot of the privacy and mob mentality issues stem from the fact that
current systems don't support multiple disconnected, pseudonymous identities,
which we had ~15 years ago. We should make it easy for laypeople to have that
again.

I don't know if decentralizing the web is worth the effort since it's less
efficient. We need however to steal back identity from those identity barons.

~~~
repolfx
Firefox tried decentralised identity via the Persona protocol. It failed to
gain market traction and Mozilla canned the project.

Email is already the decentralised identity protocol.

~~~
buboard
i think it isn't and that s why i think we need Persona, but without the
email-account requirement. Plus mozilla canned the project too early and
without ever really trying to push for it, as if they didnt want adoption.

I think such a system is needed, we need to teach people that they are in
control of their identity and that it is independent of facebook. Kind of like
how mobile apps do it with numbers.

------
platz
C.f. Jaron Lanier

[https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/09/23/opinion/data-...](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/09/23/opinion/data-
privacy-jaron-lanier.html)

people should get paid whenever their information is used

[https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/delete-your-account-a-
co...](https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/delete-your-account-a-conversation-
with-jaron-lanier/)

~~~
ISL
In a sense, we do -- the abundance of free services and networks on which many
of us rely. Through that lens, what is at issue may be that people feel that
they are not being compensated enough for private information.

~~~
platz
Jaron points out that it is precisely free services and information
intersected with the profit motive that pushes businesses models based on
advertising, tracking, and manipulation to be the most viable.

Also, I don't believe that getting something for free is "getting paid".

~~~
wutbrodo
You don't believe that getting something is getting paid? "Payment in kind" is
a pretty ancient (and still relevant) concept, and it seems very weird to tie
the concept of payment solely to currency. (obviously excluding narrow cases
like income reporting, where the gov't needs you to convert any sort of
payment into USD so they can calculate your taxes)

~~~
platz
there is a huge difference in agency and choice. they are not remotely the
same thing.

------
6gvONxR4sf7o
Silly title and framing aside, the alternatives being reported on are really
exciting. Some sound implausible, but the goal is good. I'm particularly
intrigued by attempts along the lines of Tim Berners-Lee's Solid protocols.
It's not, as WSJ frames it, because the evil monopolies are hacking our
elections or whatever. But it is a path towards open protocols. It's a shame
the journalist butchered such an interesting and important topic in order to
exploit the anti-big-tech zeitgeist.

------
gdiepen
Ironic that they write about hijacking the web on a page that I cannot read
without a subscription......

~~~
acdha
Isn’t there something fundamentally healthier about a web where you directly
pay for what you use? (Not saying they shouldn’t have micropayments, etc. but
at this point I’m ready for the adtech industry to stop sucking the oxygen out
of the room)

~~~
dredmorbius
No.

Information is a public good, in an economic sense. It is not, generally,
something people pay for, and historically hasn't been

The initial age of directly-paid content -- a small number of largely
business-oriented, small-circulation newspapers, of which the WSJ is a
descendant -- existed only from about the mid-18th through mid-19th centuries.
By the 1850s, mass-circulation advertising-supported penny papers had become a
norm, and a problem, as they were driven by oitrage, hoaxes, scandals, and
direct manipulation, the clickbait of the day.

There's a wondrful contemporaneous account of this I cannot recommend highly
enough, Hamilton Holt's _Commercialism and Journalism_ , from a UC Berkeley
lecture delivered in 1909:

[https://archive.org/details/commercialismjou00holt/page/n11](https://archive.org/details/commercialismjou00holt/page/n11)

During the 1930s the new medium of radio saw huge debates on public vs.
private control of the airwaves. Notably, the US adopted a private model, the
UK public, with the BBC, citing the dangers of private and foreign influence.
Robert McChesney has covered this in _Telecommunications, mass media and
democracy: battle for control of US broadcasting, 1928-35_ :

[https://www.worldcat.org/title/telecommunications-mass-
media...](https://www.worldcat.org/title/telecommunications-mass-media-and-
democracy-battle-for-control-of-us-
broadcasting-1928-35/oclc/223089926&referer=brief_results)

Nobel laureate economis Joseph Stiglitz:

"Thomas Jefferson, the third president of the United States, described
knowledge in the following way: “he who receives an idea from me,receives
instruc-tion himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at
mine, receives light without darkening me”. In doing so, Jefferson anticipated
the modern concept of a public good. Today we recognize that knowledge is not
only a public good but also a global or international public good.We have also
come to recognize that knowledge is central to successful development. The
international community,through institutions like the World Bank, has a
collective responsibility for the creation and dissemination of one global
public good—knowledge for development."

Joseph Stiglitz, "Knowledge as a Public Good"

[http://s1.downloadmienphi.net/file/downloadfile6/151/1384343...](http://s1.downloadmienphi.net/file/downloadfile6/151/1384343.pdf)

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Stiglitz](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Stiglitz)

Micropayments fail for the reasons highlighted b Nick Szabo and Andrew Odlyzko
two decades ago:

[http://szabo.best.vwh.net/micropayments.html](http://szabo.best.vwh.net/micropayments.html)

[http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/case.against.micropaymen...](http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/case.against.micropayments.pdf)

A media readers are required to pay for directly is one that's available to
few (especially on a global scale), which is incentivised by that revenue
stream, and which seeks other forms of revenue, notably advertising, with all
the ills that entails, again covered 110 years ago in Hamilton Holt's little
book, an summarised by publisher John Swinton, quoted anonymously in that
work:

 _There is no such thing in America as an independent press. I am paid for
keeping honest opinions out of the paper I am connected with. If I should
allow honest opinions to be printed in one issue of my paper, before twenty-
four hours my occupation, like Othello 's, would be gone. The business of a
New York journalist is to distort the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to
vilify, to fawn at the foot of Mammon, and to sell his country and his race
for his daily bread. We are the tools or vassals of the rich men behind the
scenes. Our time, our talents, our lives, our possibilities, are all the
property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes._

~~~
freediver
>Information is a public good, in an economic sense. It is not, generally,
something people pay for, and historically hasn't been.

Just by being public good does not make something necessarily free. For
example street lightning.

If you seek information on "Does God exist?" you can get different answers
depending whom you ask. Some of these sources made a lot of money in the
process, because their information had certain non-zero value to those
receiving it.

Also certain types of information cost resources to produce. I pay for Youtube
because I want to support certain kind of information creation that I consume
while not having my intelligence insulted with ads. The same for MIT
Technology Review and Nautilus.

IMO there is nothing wrong in information costing money but the two problems I
see are:

\- Absolute pricing models create inequality. $1/week for WSJ is very
different to someone making $5,000/week vs someone $50/week and they both
'deserve' to have access to it.

\- The user experience of walled gardens is terrible, as you have to subscribe
to each independently

~~~
dredmorbius
"Public good" is a specific term of art in the economic sense. It doesn't mean
that the good has no _cost_ , but that its _price_ fails to correspond to
either that and/or the _value_ , where costs of production, price of exchange,
and value of use, are three distinct concepts quite often confused in economic
discussions (a topic for another day, though I've written on this at
[https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/48rd02/cost_va...](https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/48rd02/cost_value_price_money_and_emergy_developing/)
I've also just learnt that Marx anticipates me by a century and a half).

A public good:

 _In economics, a public good is a good that is both non-excludable and non-
rivalrous in that individuals cannot be excluded from use or could be enjoyed
without paying for it, and where use by one individual does not reduce
availability to others or the goods can be effectively consumed simultaneously
by more than one person._

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

The problem then is that _attempting to enforce per-use payments for access_
to public goods is tremendously inefficient.

You cannot effectively _and with low consequences_ restrict access. The cost,
particularly at a global level, will mean that there are many, often
_billions_ , who won't have access.

Your own ability to pay for content means that you've got an influence that
those who don't lack. This ultimately gets us to a Patronage model of content.
That's an option, but what you end up with is _the patron 's interests unduly
represented_. If you lived in 18th century Europe, your preference in large-
ensemble music or visual artworks would best be strongly similar to that of
the Catholic Church. I had the realisation, watching a computer animation
festival in the late 1980s, that the role of the church in modern computer
graphics was largely replaced by tobacco companies, who'd financed a large
share of the entries.

There is also the contrast of information which the _audience_ seeks vs. that
which the _creator_ or _publisher_ wishes to have distributed. The former is
copy or content, the latter is advertising and propaganda. They are not always
clearly distinguished. And the economics of each are dramatically different.

The world I'd like to see is one in which a means-to-pay funding model, some
semblance of a universal or basic income, a _modest_ performance bonus, and
universal access, are strong if not global norms.

Effectively, markets and information play together extraordinarily poorly.

[https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/2vm2da/why_inf...](https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/2vm2da/why_information_goods_and_markets_are_a_poor_match/)

------
neonate
[http://archive.is/2n2IP](http://archive.is/2n2IP)

------
brenden2
My theory is that one way to reclaim the web is to place more emphasis on
individuals and their contributions, and less emphasis on platforms and their
opinions. Additionally, there needs to be sustainable business models where
the end user's incentives are aligned with the platform's. People are willing
to pay for things they want if there's real value for them.

I'd like to see platforms act as utilities, not systems for enforcing opinions
or curating content. I want to be given the tools to decide for myself what
type of content I see, who gets to contact me, and I don't want to be force
fed ads.

~~~
bilbo0s
> _People are willing to pay for things they want if there 's real value for
> them_

Are you suggesting there is a way to make people pay to use these platforms?
If you are, I call BS.

How are you going to get 2 billion people to pay enough for social media use,
that those payments can cover the costs of planet wide network and
infrastructure supporting 2 billion people?

------
mentos
The same way it’s no longer hip to be on Facebook and kids use Instagram I
wonder if we’ll see a day where it’s no longer hip to use the public internet
and a new generation prefers a dark or decentralized web

~~~
aSplash0fDerp
"I wonder if we’ll see a day where it’s no longer hip to use the public
internet"

Replace hip with sane and we can accelerate the transition back to offline
content (one way communication) and come to the conclusion that a two-way
stream (a direct connection) to crazy is not healthy.

~~~
aSplash0fDerp
Somebody needs a hug. It was not off topic...

"Curated by Crazy" may have better explained the current power struggle online
and how low they'll go for your attention (hijack your connection).

How is packaging data in offline formats not more convenient? We have to do
something with the gobs of storage and blazing fast transfer speeds while
reclaiming our privacy (maintaining control of our attention).

Also, being "always on" allows you to be compromised by netizens far and wide.
On-demand has far reaching security benefits.

------
mxuribe
I really wanted to read this, but was a little disappointed by the
exceptionally high level of the reporting...I mean, this would have been a
nice intro several years ago...But now, i assumed this is somewhat common
knowledge. But, perhaps i should not assume this. That being said, i am
inspired by the numerous decentralization efforts - e.g. SOLID,
fediverse/activityPub (pleroma, mastodon, pixelfed, etc.), scuttlebutt,
matrix, and so on, and so on.

~~~
wutbrodo
> I mean, this would have been a nice intro several years ago...But now, i
> assumed this is somewhat common knowledge

It's the WSJ, they're not writing for a technical or particularly tech-savvy
audience

------
marknadal
Here is a non-pay wall article featuring Tim Berners-Lee SOLID and our
technology:

[https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/these-
technologists-t...](https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/these-
technologists-think-internet-broken-so-they-re-building-another-n1030136)

------
_Codemonkeyism
Written on the WSJ site not a blog no less.

------
jasode
Side note fyi... the _"?mod=rsswn"_ appended to the WSJ url to bypass the
paywall stopped working a few weeks ago.

People keep submitting urls with it (and this article's url also has it) so
submitters probably don't realize it doesn't actually work anymore.

Also, disabling Javascript on wsj.com also used to work to bypass the paywall
but that trick was blocked around the same time they blocked _"?mod=rsswn"_.

One of the workarounds is to emulate behavior of googlebot but I don't think
that's easily translatable to a simple modification of the url string:
[https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-
chrome/issues/...](https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-
chrome/issues/361)

~~~
scarface74
For me, the “fullwsj” link that takes you through Facebook still works.

[https://www.fullwsj.com/articles/tech-giants-have-
hijacked-t...](https://www.fullwsj.com/articles/tech-giants-have-hijacked-the-
web-its-time-for-a-reboot-11572062420?mod=rsswn)

------
pnako
Tech giants have hijacked the web – Some guys promoting shitcoins paid us to
write this PR piece

------
atrilumen
Any way to bypass the paywall? I really wanna read this one

~~~
swebs
[http://archive.is/2n2IP](http://archive.is/2n2IP)

~~~
atrilumen
Thanks!

------
emsign
And it's behind a paywall. How ironic. How are the masses supposed to get to
know the new social media platforms if WSJ keeps it a pay-to-know secret?
(Yeah, I know you can read it by cheating.)

------
hhas01
Businesses gonna business. Can’t really blame them for exploiting the
artificial bottlenecks created by the lazy thoughtless corner-cutting geeks
who (ostensibly) designed the thing. To copy-paste myself
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21181707](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21181707)):

\--

HTTP hyperlinks FTF. Vannevar Bush hypothesized much a higher-level “mesh of
associative trails”, with relationships formed directly and largely
automatically. The closest today’s WWW has gotten to this is search engines,
but again these are centralized, controlled, and first and foremost in service
to vendor, not users.

However, I would argue a far greater problem was the early lack of
editability; Berners-Lee originally conceived of his WWW as a network of
editable documents, where every user could read and write with equal ease. His
prototype web browser was, to use a desktop analogy, a “Word for the Web”; a
true web editor, Opening and Saving documents stored online, just as Microsoft
Word directly opens and saves documents stored locally.

But Tim got lazy and impatient, and shipped his first public browser as a cut-
down web viewer. Which Mosaic then copied; and, before anyone knew any
different, the web was recast as a read-only medium of the masses, with web
editing the exclusive domain of technical and corporate elites only.

A single thoughtless corner-cutting mistake, creating an artificial bottleneck
upon which trillion-dollar global empires have now been built. You can still
see the remnants of the original direct interaction model in HTTP’s PUT and
DELETE verbs, like the hindlimbs in a blue whale, rendered just as powerless
from the ignorance and avarice of this new web’s Intelligent Design.

Tony Hoare named NULL his billion-dollar mistake, but that’s a rounding error
on the scale of TBL’s fuckup.

\--

Which isn’t to say that had the web’s architects not completely FUBARed manual
document editing/publishing and automated relationship-building that various
self-interested parties wouldn’t have locked it up in other ways.

But look at SOAP and Dropbox and even Facebook; were the basic building blocks
working as designed, none of those would exist because the key services they
provide are just standard everyday operations that a correctly-functioning web
would already provide to everyone for free. But they don’t, so again and again
we end up with this instead:

[https://thedailywtf.com/articles/The_Inner-
Platform_Effect](https://thedailywtf.com/articles/The_Inner-Platform_Effect)

Honestly, our modern “web” can make a Matryoshka doll blush, it’s so anything
but.

