
Our Regressive Web - lukedeering
https://medium.com/future-tech-future-market/7b1a7ddb6ffe
======
adamesque
The most interesting part of the article (which is well-written and thought-
provoking) isn't the mildly alarmist "regressive web" assertion, but the
insight that Reader may have been killed because it was strategically opposed
to Google's mission as it enters the mass-market phase of its growth.

Which mirrors the developmentally mass-market phase of the growth of the
internet itself.

That doesn't necessarily mean that niche tools won't continue to be available
to interested specialists. Ham radio kits are still around, right?

I'm not sure that the macro view of the web is as bleak as it seems. We're
seeing mass-market effects take hold in our playground, which is a bummer, but
we're also seeing mass-market adoption of tools which help keep information
democratized and flowing freely in multiple directions, which is an
improvement on the past 2000 years.

~~~
16s
___"Ham radio kits are still around, right?"_ __

Amateur radio may be the last bastion of free, decentralized communication. 70
years ago (when the Internet did not exist) Hams could send and receive
signals all over the world, and they still do today. They don't need an
Internet, a cellular phone infrastructure, etc. And should the Internet become
controlled to the point of being useless (by governments and greedy
corporations), RF may be the only thing left standing.

73

~~~
jff
Unfortunately, hams don't seem to actually _use_ radio for much except
complaining about their ailments and/or Windows 95 PCs.

I say this as someone who went through the trouble of acquiring a license,
getting VHF and HF rigs, and then discovering that it's a wasteland of "So
what kinda radio you got there?". The government's forbidding of encrypted
traffic also helps ensure no-one will use it for anything more important than
complaining about "kids these days and their computers".

~~~
tomsthumb
> The government's forbidding of encrypted traffic also helps ensure no-one
> will use it for anything more important than complaining about "kids these
> days and their computers".

Isn't that pretty much the use case of steganography?

~~~
lotyrin
Yeah, if you don't have the codebook HAM discussion will be very bland.

Darn kids = Federal government

Computers = Intelligence agencies

arthritis = surveilance

getting old = getting ready to commence with the plan

mortgage = jail term

"Yeah, Dan. I hear you about them darn kids and their computers... I hear
Bob's just about got his mortgage paid off finally, but I'm getting old and my
arthritis is acting up, so I'm going to sign off for tonight."

------
api
The PC revolution is regressing too. We're going back to mainframes and jailed
devices.

~~~
ryanholiday
Good point. Not exactly my area of expertise but I should have used that as an
example.

~~~
squozzer
Pardon my naivete (and disregard for proper accent usage), but I wonder how
much Google would accept for their reader service.

~~~
ryanholiday
We saw this with Delicious though. Some rich guys bought it...and made it
unusable.

------
spindritf
The demise of USENET was the first great regression for me. I still haven't
found a forum quite as convenient as a news client.

~~~
sodomizer
Part of the reason USENET got abandoned is the same reason that MySpace and
Facebook are being abandoned: as newer services came about, the cutting edge
flocked to them, which left a high ratio of malcontents, trolls, bullies,
assorted dickheads, etc.

~~~
tptacek
I don't agree. In fact, the flood of new Usenet users corresponded to an
overall flood of new people from all walks of life learning to use the
Internet; it wasn't all bad. Also, the structure of Usenet is like that of
very-modern Reddit, while the "Eternal September" hypothesis of its demise is
premised on an early-Reddit model. I'm sure alt.drugs suffered, but
"comp.security.unix" did OK.

The fatal injury from Usenet came from piracy. I ran a competitive† server for
the ISP I helped run in Chicago††. The amount of effort it took to host
binaries feeds was _unbelievable_ and only got worse as time went on. Usenet
is just about the dumbest imaginable way to distribute binaries†††.
Unsurprisingly, fewer and fewer ISPs offered full-feed Usenet. When an ISP
opted (sanely) to go with no-binaries Usenet, their Usenet consumers bolted.
Usenet centralized and became less and less available. Usenet software because
less and less lucrative to build. Then blogging hit.

This is a little off topic, I know, but I'm bitter about what happened to
Usenet, because I really loved it.

† _(we hit the top tier of the Freenix list several times; I believe we were
one of the first 3 providers to come up with the INN history cache)_

†† _(EnterAct)_

††† _(imagine an Akamai that had no control over whose content was hosted, but
instead had to mirror every bit of porn and warez from every server everywhere
to every ISP in the world)_

~~~
oddthink
Usenet also didn't have a good way to deal with spam, at least not one that I
knew about. It steadily became harder to find the signal in the noise.

It still had the best reader experience. I don't know why modern email
clients, for example, don't look more like trn.

~~~
DanBC
Usenet had a strict definition for spam, which meant a bunch of stuff got
through.

It was also under active attack from Hipcrime and similar.

And no matter how good the killfiles were there were people who wouldn't use
them.

I agree about the clients - I really liked slrn.

------
ams6110
Those services are regressing because the general population of users is no
longer dominatated by people who _like to read_. As mainstream consumers
flooded onto the internet over the past decade, the demographic changed.
Services that give you a lot of stuff to read, no matter how nicely delivered,
are not the the services the mainsteam consumers want.

~~~
bergie
Yep. This means you probably can't get Facebook-level users into your service.
But the old group of readers is still out there, looking for a good product.
And if it was big enough audience to launch products in 2006, why wouldn't it
be now?

~~~
PetrolMan
I think you are right.

The demographics have changed percentage-wise but population-wise I don't
think the number of people who "like to read" has decreased at all.

------
webwanderings
I don't think we are regressing because the AOL of olden days was an indicator
of why the Flipboards of today is successful and why Google Reader is dead. We
were never progressing to begin with because the mass was not interested in
curating their own, rather, they are happy with the apps buttons, the
beautiful looking magazines and what not.

~~~
ricardobeat
Google Reader isn't dead, it was killed with _tens of millions_ of users.
Three million people have already migrated to Feedly, and that's just the more
savvy users.

~~~
webwanderings
The point is that RSS is dependent upon user's self-creation needs, versus
that of a thing created for them by someone else. TV by its very nature a
medium which is created for you and Internet was supposed to be the opposite
of it. I agree with the gist of the argument presented in the OP's article but
my point is that we were never progressing on the Internet for the better
although it surely looked like that we are and we will. The lack of adoption
of RSS by the mass, is just one evidence of how we use Internet like it is a
TV.

~~~
ricardobeat
IMO the lack of adoption of RSS is more due to technical reasons and the
complex nature of it than a lack of motive. You use TV as an example, but
today YouTube has much more viewers than tv, choosing their own content.
Picturing people as a homogenous, brainless mass is very short-sighted.

~~~
webwanderings
What is technical and complex about self-curation? The whole idea of self-
curation is non-technical and anything but complex. One can blame the
engineering of RSS and all, and one can even conjure up the conspiracy
theories of big media, advertising and such, but the basic fact remains ....
people at large are not into curating, finding, searching information on their
own. They'd rather other feed information on the plate. There is nothing
brainless about such a need. It is just how people wish to evolve.

~~~
ricardobeat
What does the success of Pinterest say about that?

~~~
webwanderings
Pinterest is a stroefront where people are either selling, or they're window-
shopping. How do you arrive at assuming Pinterest as a curation tool?

Look at the earlier version of Delicious. It was a curation tool. Look at it
now. Do you see a difference between what Delicious now shows versus what you
see see at Pinterest? Throw in clipboard.com. They've at it before Pinterest
showed up.

When it comes to accessing information, there is a difference between "saving"
information and "acquiring" it. Sites like Facebook, Google+ etc are all into
serving you means to "save" and not acquire. If you wish to acquire
information, they'd rather you acquire first through their Ads infested
window-front store. By the time you get to the meat of any substantive
information, you have lost the real opportunity.

The RSS protocol was the real substantive engine of a means to acquire
information, an ultimate self-curation tool which empowers one with
information and not distraction. Again, you must have noticed, the biggest
complaints on the demise of Google Reader came from the typical journalist
community and the tech savvy people. The know the value of pipes which was
serving them information. The mass never cared and still don't because they'd
rather be served. Pinterest and window-shopping sites like these are only
creating illusion of curation.

------
sodomizer
One other form of regression: people navigating the web through custom apps on
their phone, like "Hail a Cab" or "Shop at Target." The whole idea of the web
was to create a neutral platform so that custom software wasn't needed. In
addition, this is raising a generation who are illiterate of general computer
principles, but have lots of brain-space for specific apps. "I'm really good
with Hail a Cab!"

------
polemic
This isn't regression: it's _progress_. Alerts and Reader didn't fly - not
because it didn't work - but because it _wasn't worth doing_.

There is an implicit assumption, perhaps borne out of the relatively 'youth'
of the information sector that the only criteria for a successful idea is that
it's "good". There are plenty of examples of inventions, ideas or concepts
that seem destined to succeed and yet, in the long run, prove unsustainable or
unsuitable to break through to a wider market.

Reader and Alerts would appear to be classic examples. Highly marginal
services (srsly), filling a specialised but unloved niche (sry), for a set of
low value customers (orly). And before anyone starts that up again, talk of
"alienating the influencers" is highly exaggerated. Google's influencers are
low-fi, not the tech-l33t, as much as it might pain HN.

~~~
jsankey
Were they really not worth doing? Or just not worth _Google_ doing? The latter
has a much higher bar given the rate at which other parts of Google print
money.

I could certainly see a minority of Reader customers paying enough for the
service to make a small team very comfortable. It would have been nice for
Google to spin it out for this reason, though I suspect there were significant
technical barriers.

~~~
ebertx
I agree. Correct me if I'm wrong, but using Google Reader seems to cut down on
the number of ads a user sees. And seeing as Google is at its heart an
advertising company, why would they put effort into maintaining a tool that
reduces the number of delivered ads?

~~~
ryanholiday
Ding ding!

Of course, that doesn't mean this isn't unfortunate, bad for us and bad for
the web in the long term.

------
wyqueshocec
This reminds me of a Dilbert comic. To paraphrase:

Boss: "We need to decentralize to remove bottlenecks."

[later]

Boss: "We need to centralize to improve efficiency."

------
ebertx
Am I the only one who feels like the web is making a transition from being
more like a library to being more like television?

The more content is sliced up into little digestible chunks and spread across
multiple pages the less useful it is. There will always be great content
online, it just seems like it might get harder and harder to find on sites
whose layout is driven by pageviews.

~~~
205guy
Pageviews which are counted and monetized by Google's other services. There
was another HN submission recently
(<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5476812>) that had a great quote:

"I find that Google and SEO and tracking have soiled the web in unbelievable
ways. Google has imposed a constraint on content through its ad business that
I can't get away from, because content is trying to adapt to Google so it can
be found, but especially because content becomes monetized in doing so-- to
the detriment of us all."

------
toyg
This post ignores one fact: VCs did, in fact, throw millions at Reader-like
services and competitors a few years ago, when the RSS scene was hot. Most of
them went nowhere, the luckiest got acquired.

A few lifestyle businesses will forever chug along on a few million hardcore
fans like me; nevertheless, the overall technology in its current incarnation
is an evolutionary dead-end: it's heavy on resources (all that bandwidth!),
fundamentally uni-directional and too user-unfriendly to break into the
mainstream.

We need to ditch RSS and the current breed of pub/sub tools, rebuild them from
scratch with monetization and aggregation in mind (while maintaining a
fundamentally decentralised approach), and only then we'll be able to build an
ecosystem of easy-to-use apps that can self-sustain in the long run.

------
acabal
Everything goes in cycles of human attention span. Technologies become tired
and "crufty" because maintainers get bored with them and want the new hotness.
This is nothing new and the up-and-down cycle will continue happening over and
over. Witness desktop Linux, which has been around for a few decades and yet
to this day is constantly being torn down and rebuilt anew because the
maintainers (and users!) become too familiar with the problems the technology
solves and want a new thing to play with.

------
ommunist
The article is very true. But this happens everywhere, when a short term
commercial interest is more important than user experience and solution of
users problems. Take this hardware example. My moms favourite iron is a heavy
chunk of metal with no self adjustments, regulations and it does not switch
itself off. It is 55 yrs old. It just works. My wife changes modern irons
every 2-3 years. It pushes economy forward.

------
tunesmith
It's really all about curation. Early on, it was yahoo's attempt to put all
web content in a big hierarchy. dmoz after that. Then RSS let people curate
their own content. Now people subscribe to friends that post interesting
things. I don't think the appetite for curation has decreased - it's just that
the best method of curation subtly changes as content generation styles
change.

------
davedx
What about new sites like Instapaper and Newsblur?

And Digg (OK, OK), Reddit, Hacker News?

We're losing some things and gaining others. The web isn't regressing, it's
evolving.

~~~
unimpressive
>The web isn't regressing, it's evolving.

If you understood evolution fully, you would know that "the web is regressing"
and "the web is evolving", in addition to not being mutually exclusive
statements, regression necessarily implies evolution.

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_evolution>

------
dageshi
RSS specifically is being replaced by reddit and well.. HN. The leading edge
of people who adopted and used it, people like us have moved to HN and
subreddits, I'm not sure outside our demographic rss ever caught on to any
great extent. Whereas reddit especially is becoming popular with a much wider
range of people.

~~~
ryanholiday
There is, nonetheless, a HUGE difference between you pulling content
(subscribing) and other people recommending or aggregating content for you.
One is subject to the One Off Problem, the other is not. One creates
incentives to sensationalize/exaggerate/selectively omit and the other does
not.

------
Intermernet
With regards to Google Alerts, wouldn't it be pretty easy to set up a
scheduled task using any decent scripting language (or even just standard unix
utilities) to just read a text file of search-terms, scrape the results on
Google, and email you the results?

HN Challenge: Do the above, in any language, in the smallest number of lines.
I have a feeling it can be achieved in one, so we may need to judge by number
of characters :-)

And sorry, I don't see discontinuing Google Reader as the death of RSS, no
matter what the author may feel. It's really just the death of a nice RSS
reader. I do however feel that the author is correct in saying that RSS is not
really compatible with Google's advertising business.

------
kosei
I wonder if you could create a service which uses RSS, serves ads and gives
back royalties to the services subscribed. Think Spotify for RSS. The biggest
obstacle would be creating an RSS tool usable enough so that people are
willing to consume ads (or pay a (monthly?) fee) in exchange for a truly
usable RSS reader.

------
lukedeering
Great article by Ryan! Had to post it. We actually interviewed him last year
and some of his advice will be appearing in our book Accelerate that is
currently 88% funded on KickStarter. <http://kck.st/ZIgBXE>.

------
jnye131
Ironically it's published on a site that doesn't have an RSS feed (or atom,
remember that debate) published. which is a shame really as the content on
medium is usually pretty good but I'll hardly ever remember to go back on a
regular basis.

------
goggles99
It is not just things disappearing with no alternative, it is new
"innovations" that are less capable than their predecessors.

-We don't have Flash or Silverlight anymore, we just have HTML5/JS/CSS.

~Well HTML5 is brand new and must be superior to those others right?

-No Both can do all that HTML5 can do and a lot more. Flash could do everything 8 years ago that HTML5 can do today.

~Well can I create my own Markup Language and alternative to HTML5/JS/CSS?

-You can, but most people will spit on you - leave the "innovation" up to the committee. Standard are all that matter to anyone. Just go along with the crowd and be a code monkey, Stick your ambition and innovations into a bottle.

~Is there really no way I can create my own Browser client technology?

-Well, there is one way. Just create your innovative/bleeding edge concept - then make it compile down to JavaScript. That is the only way.

~Wow, that sounds like a workaround/hack just to try bringing new and better
ideas to web development. It still gets around the limitations, but sounds
very daunting and a like a huge pain in the ass.

-Yeah - I think that this is the idea. Rather than creating a standard for HTML5 AND some sort of VM/API that others can use to create innovative and better technologies. The standards guys' strategy is to remain in a position of power (though it stifles innovation).

~So if I made a suggestion to the consortium to create something like you
suggested, do you think that they might listen to me? I really am brimming
with GREAT ideas.

-HAHAHA...

