
The Web Began Dying in 2014 (2017) - pcr910303
https://staltz.com/the-web-began-dying-in-2014-heres-how.html
======
mojuba
In addition, what's changed between 2017 and now is that back then Google was
still admired by the tech people. "Google is evil" sounded ridiculous only a
few years ago. I've been ridiculed by my colleagues and fellow engineers every
time I said it. But I think it began to change with the introduction of AMP, a
growing list of products discontinued for no apparent reason, failures of some
of the new products often practically at launch, and finally the decline of
quality and coverage of Search (more spam and more older sites dropping out).

Google like no other tech giant always relied on the credibility among the
tech people. Whether it's a new end-user product or a new programming
language, it would go full avalanche with minimal marketing effort.

Losing our support, on top of poor product management and inability to
innovate will be more and more difficult for them to handle. Rolling out
poorly designed and poorly targeted products is already a sign of a disconnect
from reality. They are slowly becoming less and less relevant and most
importantly, less respected by the tech community. In a way it's the Microsoft
of the 2000s when the revenue figures still weren't bad but the signs of the
decline were apparent.

Yet unfortunately there's no competition to Search on the horizon and "google"
is still a commonly used verb that will be very difficult to remove from the
language. Microsoft seems to be happy with Bing's position today, which looks
and feels like Google Search and maybe internally even mimics all the stupid
and "evil" things Google Search does judging from their search results.

I think it is time (if not a bit too late) to try to challenge Google Search
with something new, a new perspective on how the information on the Internet
can be indexed and searched. I bet a lot of people are constantly thinking
about this, but the window of opportunity may be now while Google is putting a
lot of their time and effort on ML/AI. I doubt you can compete with them by
building a ML-based search, so it must be something else both in terms of
technology and possibly even the UI.

I don't know what the bottom line here is. Google is not dying any time soon,
but the time to challenge them could be _now_.

~~~
kgersen75
"back then Google was still admired by the tech people" "Losing our support"

why do you generalize 'tech people' as 'we' ?

I'm in tech and I've been for 30+ years. I still admire Google.

Sure some tech people don't like Google anymore or even never have.

But I wouldn't generalize my case nor should you generalize yours.

And it's not all or nothing: I want to believe most tech people are mature and
educated enough to not treat Google as a single block, hate everything they do
or love everything they do. There are nuances and shades of gray in life, as
we all learn when we grow up.

In the end, what matters is the silent majority not the chatty loud ones that
have a personal grudge against some big corporation.

That "Google is evil" is highly overrated and over hyped. I always question
the agenda of people promoting this.

~~~
roenxi
People who think carefully then call Google 'evil' may as well be the same
people who used to call it 'good'. Corporations aren't good or evil. They are
powerful.

Being good is many things, but a key part of that is restraining the self from
acting improperly. Corporations can't do that, they will sooner or later do
whatever makes money. Or they get replaced sooner or later by a corporation
that will. At best, there are stylistic differences around the edges that are
simultaneously important but minor in the grand scheme of things. Sooner or
later a corporation will be thinking primarily in terms of 'profitable' and
'not profitable'.

Calling Google 'evil' is trying to articulate something else - Google are
powerful and dangerous. Any entity harvesting and directing the flow of
information at that scale is. They have an unprecedented capability to cause
harm; and sooner or later it will get used by someone to do exactly that.

~~~
Kye
How about insidious? It's the banal sort of evil that doesn't realize the harm
it's causing, or doesn't see a way to survive without causing that harm.

~~~
marc_io
Well, maybe, but that's the human condition also. All of our actions — even
the most well intentioned ones — can have unexpected and even disastrous
consequences.

------
FpUser
People used to sit on a couch and watch TV for hours and also spent hours on
the old phones talking about the most exciting shade of nail polish. Shopping
is also fun.

Now all that activities largely moved to Internet. Thanks to omnipresence of
smartphones the hours dedicated to those activities had also increased. Of
course share of general Joe Doe's website got smaller as said website does not
always cater to few most popular people's activities.

That does not mean that the total amount of Joe Doe's websites decreased. It
is growing, just not as fast as the amount of my cat videos.

Sure big companies may try to subvert the Internet but I think that creative
type of the populace will always find ways.

~~~
cft
Except that it's drowning in noise. The SNR is definitely dropping.

~~~
FpUser
Well I would say that web search takes good care of SNR. So far no troubles
finding interesting stuff.

~~~
VvR-Ox
"Finding interesting stuff" maybe. But finding a lot of the things I used to
find some years ago is just not possible anymore.

Somehow searching changed as well as the ecosystem of the web itself. The big
global players dominate nearly every inch of the web and many sites look like
clones of each other.

There is a lot more effort being put into censorship and also more threats to
ordinary users in my opinion.

When I loved to use the web it was like a big playground and it seemed that
the most people there where extremely curious and open-minded.

Today there is so much hate - no real discussion (this community is a rare
anomaly considering this argument) and I think it's not about discussions for
these people who spread hate. Also it's all about the money. In the earlier
days people used to write blogs and create sites just for fun but today
everyone wants to get some money or measurable attention (likes, views,
followers etc.).

Constantly you are being bothered by advertisement which gets more invasive
from time to time, cryptominers and other malicious software that creeps into
your system if you just click on the wrong link. Don't remember that from the
beginnings and I'd love to experience that again some day.

~~~
superkuh
All you have to do is be the change you want to see in the world. There's
plenty of us out there still living the dream of the 90s. Your descriptions
sound like you're still stuck on the big platforms where money rules
everything. Just stop. Start hosting your website from home. Code it by hand.
Don't care if anyone but you likes or sees it. It's the best you can do.

~~~
VvR-Ox
I've been there & have done that, thank you ;)

For my own services it's okay to host them from home but "the web" just
doesn't work like this anymore.

Do something big and you'll want to get things like DDoS protection - talk to
customers about projects and just realize that they won't scale on your mini
server at home while the internet connection is much too slow and unreliable.

I have started like you describe it and I learned some things on the way but
the industry and the web have changed. Of course there is tiny companies who
can still get their static website from a freelancer guy but this guy has a
lot more responsibility and tasks to fulfill nowadays.

In my opinion back in the 90ies you could play around in a naive way without
getting hurt or hurting anyone seriously. Today it's about a lot of cash,
there is more laws, censorship and other malicious entities (go back in time
and tell the people about bitcoin-mining in their browser and DDoS attacks
against centralized services like CDNs that bring down half of the WWW).

Put a server on the web that isn't hardened properly and have a look at the
logs - this is some new level in comparison.

~~~
superkuh
>Put a server on the web that isn't hardened properly

It's easy. Just don't do/enable dynamic things. There's no need for anything
more than a static webserver in 99% of cases with personal websites. And
static webservers ship very secure by default. There's not a lot of remote
exploits in nginx or the like. It's much more risky to use a web browser with
javascript enabled.

------
ropiwqefjnpoa
FTA: "GOOG and FB ceased competing directly, focusing on what they do best
instead."

“People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and
diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in
some contrivance to raise prices” - Adam Smith

Some things never change.

~~~
tialaramex
I think Smith is almost right, a _conspiracy_ is likely in the broadest sense
but he's wrong to suppose it will necessarily be against the public.

So, the CAB is maybe a useful contrasting example. The CA/Browser Forum (CA/B
or CAB for short) was a meeting that happened as a mixture of conference calls
and email lists back in 2011 or so. This is where Extended Validation (the
green bar) comes from, but ultimately CA/B metamorphosed into a standing (in
the sense of ongoing, not you can't sit down) meeting, still going on today,
for the Certificate Authorities and the Browsers (today in practice the
Operating System vendors, but with Mozilla standing in for the Free Unixes) to
get together to figure out what the rules are.

Because of what Smith notes, the CA/B's rules are explicit that discussion
about prices, product offerings and so on is prohibited, if you want to
conspire to raise prices you'll have to do it somewhere else.

But plenty of _good_ things can be agreed this way. Contrast the many years it
took to get rid of MD5 from certificates (which happened before CA/B existed)
despite collisions being known - against SHA-1 where CA/B was able to co-
ordinate industry wide discontinuation of SHA-1 with only a handful of minor
defections before even a single proven collision of the hash was published.

More broadly I'd argue that the IETF, and certainly the thrice annual IETF
physical meetings (the most recent was in Singapore last week) are exactly
"people of the same trade... meet together" and you could characterise plenty
of the work done at many Working Groups (obviously DPRIVE and QUIC but I don't
see any reason you couldn't make this claim for KITTEN for example) as a
conspiracy, just that it's only "against the public" if you think global
surveillance was what "the public" wanted...

------
Havoc
I don't think it's accurate to count stuff like youtube and google cloud as
part of the %. It's gigabyte heavy but attention light. Just raw data about
cat videos.

Compare it with say whatsapp traffic - that has a crazy high amount of
attention crammed into each gigabyte.

Doesn't really change the message/conclusion but the metric used here seem
flawed.

~~~
greggyb
I had the same reaction. Bandwidth is only one metric of interest. I think
time spent is a better proxy to the true metric of interest, which you rightly
called out as attention.

------
PaulDavisThe1st
There's a fundamental error, or at least assumption, in this piece that really
needs to be called out. The author states it this way:

"Any website aspiring for significant traffic depends on Search and Social
traffic."

This is stated in the context of a discussing of what the web was and might
have been.

Let's be clear: when the web was tiny, having "significant traffic" wasn't a
particularly difficult target to met. Get yourself on the netscape "What's
New" list, and that's more or less the end of it. But the web (really, the
internet) is now unimaginably huge compared to the days referred to at the
beginning of the article. Having "significant traffic" now is not a realistic
goal, or even a worthwhile goal, unless you define "significant" in a way that
isn't strongly related to simple numerics.

If you're interested in and/or aspiring to the sort of web that seemed
possible/desirable in 1994, then you're not really interested in building
sites that attract "significant traffic" in the sense of huge numbers.
Attracting the right people is a much more important goal, and that still
relies on the same basics of "how to write a good web page" that existed in
1994.

In short, the dominance of "the trinet" in driving web/internet traffic only
restates what could have been before computers: most of what humans do is
related to commerce and mass entertainment, and attempts to do other stuff may
succeed but will never be as visible or dominant as those two.

------
ALittleLight
>The Web’s diversity has granted space for multiple businesses to innovate and
thrive, independent hobbyist communities to grow, and personal sites to be
hosted on whatever physical servers can host them.

A few months ago I was feeling the same way, especially about personal
websites. I tried to find StumbleUpon as that seemed like a good alternative
to see random unique websites. However, I was saddened to see it had shut down
or transformed itself into a kind of Pinterest like clone.

Given that StumbleUpon was gone, I tried to quickly recreate the core
functionality - click button get random website, at
[https://stumblingon.com](https://stumblingon.com) \- there are still a bunch
of small, personal, interesting websites out there. We just need a good way to
find them.

~~~
solwyvern
First result was a coolie cutter website selling seo services The creative web
is truly dying

~~~
ALittleLight
I don't see anything wrong with trying to sell services. I wouldn't want a
generic, fraudulent, big business, or cookie cutter site in there though.

If you recall what website it was (or check the history after reloading
stumblingon) and let me know the URL I can reconsider whether or not it
belongs.

------
na85
>Internet Service Providers (ISPs) are probably soon going to dictate what
traffic can or cannot arrive at people’s end devices.

This was the money quote for me. FANG may kill the web, but the idea that ISPs
(in my opinion some of the scummiest corporations out there) get to decide
what content they serve me and what they don't has the potential to kill the
Internet as we know it.

~~~
blackflame
Naw, with the coming of 5G it will destroy their monopolies on the
communication lines which should open the door to more local competition.

~~~
superkuh
No. The modulation and time sharing built into 5G only offers 15-20% increase
in bandwidth available, MHz for MHz, when compared to 4G LTE. This is not a
significant increase. It is not at all like the 3-4x increases in bandwidth,
MHz for MHz, that the jump from 3G modulations to 4G LTE did.

Almost all of any potential increase in total speed will have to come from
using new parts of the electromagnetic spectrum. To that end the FCC is
kicking out old users from the 3 GHz range and auctioning it off to the mobile
telcos. This includes both the traditional backend media distribution role and
completely eliminating the amateur radio alloacations (ref:
[https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-360941A1.pdf](https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-360941A1.pdf)).

But even with stealing bandwidth from you, me, and the normal media companies
it won't replace an ISP with wire. Why? Every single wire or fiber has as much
bandwidth to itself as the entire electromagnetic spectrum useable in
freespace. And you don't have to share. Wireless, no matter the modulation,
can never replace wired ISPs simply because there's not enough spectrum for
everyone to use it at once.

Additionally, the 3-4 GHz spectrum really doesn't have that good of
propagation characteristics. And mm-wave, well, that's about as effective as a
light post light in terms of coverage area.

No, 5G will not destroy any monopolies. That's silly.

~~~
namibj
Smaller cells do wonders. A LimeSDR with <200$ of general-purpose CPU/assorted
components to work between the USB3 SDR and Gigabit Ethernet (and some <50$
antenna + GPS-clock) is enough for a small 5G cell, where small primarily
refers to single-channel and limited reach due to ~4mW output power (on each
of the 2 antennas).

The reach can be increased for <50$ to at least a few hundred meters radius.

~~~
Nextgrid
I don't understand, are you advocating for hobbyists to make their own 5G
cells, or carriers?

Why not use Wi-Fi at this point?

~~~
mch82
I assume Namibj is suggesting a switch from our current hub-and-spoke ISP
model to a peer-to-peer mesh networking model.

Radio technologies have strengths and weaknesses. While WiFi works great in a
home, other radio types are better at transmitting data long distance. The
best solutions combine a mix of radios to leverage their strengths.

~~~
superkuh
Unfortuantely it's not the radio technologies that allow the cell network to
work. It's the cell network paying the big bucks for height above terrain on
various towers, buildings, and the like.

This is the problem mesh networks have to solve: height. Everything else is
cheap and easy. But without height above terrain and line of sight it simply
won't work.

------
RupertEisenhart
I've always the held the somewhat cynical position that this sort of stuff
would push [the interesting] people towards other, decentralized Internets.
I'm a big fan of new projects like IPFS and DAT, and GNUnet had a great call
to arms on their about page (which seems to have been moderated a little) [1]
saying very similar things to the article. Maybe the internet of things will
save us after all, by finally providing the vast, dense network of
interconnected wireless devices that is needed to provide a robust structure
to a really distributed net.

[1] [https://gnunet.org/en/about.html](https://gnunet.org/en/about.html)

~~~
buboard
> [the interesting] people

I don't think those people have to leave. We just need to collectively realize
that, just like with old media , there is a 'mainstream', people who mostly
_use_ the internet (the facebook crowd, who are now the bulk of the web
traffic), and the more eclectic crowd who _care about_ the internet (largely,
the pre-FB mass of the internet).

These are two distinct crowds. Considering that the FB crowd contains mostly
people who did not use the internet before, and don't really know its culture,
it's going to take a decade or more until this mass of people is replaced by
younger internet-natives. Until then, the net is living in a transitory phase

~~~
RupertEisenhart
That's interesting, I like the idea that digital natives will have more of a
vested interest in caring about the internet, but I'm not sure if it will play
out, especially if there continues to be such a strong focus on things like
Instagram and tiktok which are largely disconnected from the net at large.

------
mlacks
I am learning Japanese. I am spending an increasing amount of time searching
for things in Japanese, and am starting to notice how often a 'trinet' website
even comes up on the first page. Virtually zero. I wonder if the 'the web is
dying' mentality is only restricted to English? I would be surprised if
English websites made up even half of all internet traffic

------
dang
Discussed at the time:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15584456](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15584456)

------
mirimir
Actually, the web began dying in the late 90s.

~~~
sago
The eternal September was 1993. I remember that change well and the earlier
flavour I remember nostalgically. And it was tied to the rise of the web.
There's a good argument to say the web killed the internet.

But all things change. Every phase has good and bad points. IMHO

~~~
jancsika
I'll take 2000-on to the 1993 web/net any day.

I get:

* an up-to-date encyclopedia

* all the music referred to by said encyclopedia (Napster)

* an impressive number of books referred to by said encyclopedia (Demonoid)

* 2010s bonus-- a lot of the scientific articles cited by said encyclopedia (Scihub)

* 2010s bonus-- a searchable cache of stupid questions to do an end-run around the pain of interacting with the asocial gate-keepers who wish the internet wasn't so full of people (StackOverflow)

* an archive of all the stuff you're nostalgic for (archive.org and Google's copy/paste of usenet junk)

My internet is like O'Brien to your Winston from _1984_ \-- its mind
_includes_ yours.

Edit: clarification

~~~
mirimir
OK. But most of that stuff is noncommercial, and not part of the neo-
AOL/Prodigy thing that the Web has become.

In my alternate history, the Web would have all that. And so much more like
that.

------
Merrill
The next consolidation will be cleaning up the plethora of apps for mobile.
User's interactions can be simplified with a few well-designed multifunctional
apps. WeChat probably points the way in this regard.

------
Cougher
Interesting article that's somewhat ruined by a click-baity title that it
can't support. I first got on the web in 1994. There was far more difference
between 1994 and 2014 than from 2014 to 2017. And that's the crux of it: just
because it's different doesn't mean it's dying.

~~~
mojuba
The difference between 1994 and 2014 seems more quantitative though. Here we
are talking about the ownership of the referral traffic and how those
companies who own it try to benefit from it. Nothing that happened between
1994 and 2014 comes close to it in terms of the impact on how people see the
Internet and by extension how they see the world today.

~~~
Cougher
I agree with most of what you're saying, but disagreeing with this part of it.
The change between 1994 and 2014 is the difference between the internet
growing to global dominance in everything from social connections to . . .
well, is there anything about our lives that hasn't rested somehow on our
usage of the internet since well before 2014? It seems to me that the internet
of MSDOS 3.10based computers and dial-up modems to online shopping and the
creation of billionaires is more different than what's changed from 2014-2017.

~~~
mojuba
It is true that online shopping and online ads alone have created a whole new
industry in a very business sense of the word. The change happened some time
towards the end of the 1990s.

However, imagine you discover a new continent with vast resources and invite
everyone to share the land and start producing and trading. When all land
grabbing is done you begin to notice the rise of some powerful players who buy
out or simply squeeze out smaller land owners. At one point your whole
continent and the traffic within it becomes either directly owned or dependent
on these giants to such an extent that you simply die if you don't play by
their rules. Your continent now more looks like a conglomerate controlled by
only a few powerful corporations rather than a free republic. And we can't
even be sure they didn't make arrangements between them behind the scenes. So
it's the ownership that's different now, which is nothing new really, we all
kind of know about it.

------
tuxt
What is "Web"?

Side note: both FB and Google cannot be accessed from China.

~~~
jacobwilliamroy
Uhh... I think it's http. Or maybe it's just any data that a web-browser can
handle. Definitely a few OSI layers above the internet.

~~~
BlueTemplar
No question about HTTP. However I'd argue that when HTTP is used for weird
purposes that aren't directly related to serving hypertext pages (often to go
around draconian firewall policies), or to run arbitrary code (JavaScript),
then it's not the Web anymore. (Yes, this means that "Webapps" is an
oxymoron.)

------
TheBobinator
Google is interested in building an AI that is designed to turn people into
its products.

What do you do with a product when you're done with it? What do these people
become?

All you need to do is search google for weight loss advice or anything that
could remotely have a commercial interest and what pops up? Pages and pages of
irrelevant clickbait. If you ever wanted to build an encyclopedia of nudges,
persuaders, and other such exploits of the human mind, now would be a good
time.

The entire game is forcing you to take actions, like answering "yes" to a
sales guy over and over to build the habit so you'll agree to the sale. It's
taxing on the mind, and like television, it got to the point you had to see 30
minutes of garbage ad's for 20 minutes of entertainment, that it's no longer
worth it.

The "Trinet" is dieing because it has become useless; something far more
useful will come along to replace it because people are viewing the recent
infestation of marketing people as damage and are routing around it.

------
cryptozeus
Wait but goog fb and amzn have been aggressively trying to capture global
markets. They have been increasing the footprint, does not that count for %
increase from 2014 to 2017 ?? Does not make sense ..point about web is dying
is opinionated. Today I can watch Netflix, order from doordash and connect
with my family through FaceTime. All via web.

~~~
shadowgovt
Yep. Author is romanticizing the "democratic" web of the time before
facilitating companies simplified the process of getting and being online. The
reality I remember is that it wasn't a democracy; it was a technocracy and the
barrier to entry was high. It still is; hosting one's own full-fledged web
server that is secure and reliable has only grown in complexity in the past
decade, improvements like Docker notwithstanding, and it's no wonder average
users have flocked to Facebook, Google, and Amazon for simplicity of access.

To take Facebook as example, people seem to often forget that the primary
feature Facebook offers the average user is simple low-cost blogging of small
thoughts and reliable auto-aggregation of those blogs. No fussing about with
running one's own RSS feed or managing RSS subscriptions.

If the "web is dying," it's dying like a wooly mammoth---ill-suited to a
changing climate. The mentioned companies created an ecosystem where the
fundamentals of communication, location, and commerce can be accomplished
without the technology getting in the way. It's no surprise users flock to
them.

------
chrisweekly
Great analysis; highly-recommended reading.

I want to bring attention to the followup article Staltz wrote about what we
might do about the problems he enumerated in the OP:

[https://staltz.com/a-plan-to-rescue-the-web-from-the-
interne...](https://staltz.com/a-plan-to-rescue-the-web-from-the-
internet.html)

------
Mauricio_
Small pet peeve: why do some people write GOOG, AMZN, etc instead of Google
and Amazon when the context has nothing to do with the stock market?

~~~
stev0lution
I'm guessing to easily refer to the parent company (not sure if these
collections are still called companies, english is not my native language).
Instead of GOOG one could probably use Alphabet but differentiating between
Facebook and FACEBOOK might be a bit confusing and for Amazon that might just
be to be consistent with the rest of the article.

------
Apocryphon
So what's changed in the two years since?

------
jgalt212
Traffic is just so hard to measure if you equating page views or hits, or
packets with relevance, economic value, importance, etc.

------
johnpowell
In 1994 I was junior in high school and took as many years of auto-tech as
possible. In the end we were rebuilding engines and air-conditioning units.
And yeah, our high school had welding, cnc, woodworking, auto-cad, and even
lumber-jacking as electives.

But I took a lot of auto-tech, three years of it. And the funny thing is I
have never gotten my license. I'm nearly 45 years old and have never been able
to legally drive a car.

But I was living with my sister at the time who was 18 and our landlord had a
weird crush on her. Our landlord also owned a ton of properties in Eugene. And
he would have me mow as many lawns as I wanted for 8 bucks a hour. Most of his
rentals were to elderly people. I was making double the minimum wage and had
no shortage of work. But I also had a girlfriend and skateboarding and bowling
league to attend to. I did the minimum to maintain to healthy balance. If I
needed new shoes I would mow a extra lawn. Skateboarding is hard on shoes. I
would go through a pair a month.

But eventually I found myself doing auto stuff for people after mowing their
lawns. I would get scheduled for oil changes, filters, plugs, brakes..
Eventually I was mostly doing auto maintenance for people and I charged
significantly more. I had a lot of cash for a kid in high school with a
Operation Ivy T-shirt.

Enter the internet.

My buddy Billy went to the University and could get me a cheap computer. This
was back when Apple had serious discounts for students. I got a Performa 6214,
Stylewriter 1200, and 14" Multisync monitor for about $900. A significant
discount.

And Bill gave me his dial-up info into his university account. He gave it out
to a lot of people. They didn't check if multiple people were using it. Back
then we mostly looked up stuff about how to make LSD and mortal kombat
fatality codes. It was Amazing. And a lot of very slow loading scans from
porno mags.

But a person that was exploring this new thing that was non-commercial with me
had a forward-thinking father. He was a real-estate agent and thought the
internet was cool. So he wanted to put his listings on the internet that
nobody would ever possibly use for looking at houses. Images were brutal since
dial-up was the norm. And we used tables since css wasn't a thing back then.

But we made a commercial site. A site for a real-estate agent. And we hosted
it on the university's of Oregon's site since we didn't really know how to get
a domain name or find hosting. But it was pure HTML.

He paid us well to update the site with new listings. But then the dot.com
thing happened and I got a job at a movie theater and wouldn't touch the
internet until 2002.

edit :: I forgot to add that I think I might have been responsible for making
the internet worse.

~~~
shadowgovt
Helping someone do legitimate commerce online isn't making the internet worse.
Quite the opposite.

~~~
johnpowell
That misses the point. I wish the internet was never used for financial gain.
Just the sharing of information.

~~~
shadowgovt
> financial gain

> sharing of information

... These features aren't really extricable from each other in any society
where money exists

~~~
BlueTemplar
Wikipedia?

~~~
shadowgovt
I mean in general, not for any specific agent involved in the sharing of the
information. But where information is flowing, _someone_ is turning it into
profit.

I am 100% certain that people have made significant revenue facilitated by
their ability to look things up quickly and efficiently on Wikipedia. I know
it has certainly helped me do my job. The fact that that revenue hasn't flowed
directly to Jimmy Wales's institution is because nothing about commerce
guarantees that everyone involved gets a cut of the money flowing.

Imagine how much money they would make if they started running ads though.

------
Paianni
The web has never been particularly robust.

------
ttldude
Why on earth is he naming them "GOOG", "FB" and "AMZN"?

~~~
mindw0rk
It is ticker symbols of their stocks in the market.

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ttldude
Oh help, you can't be serious that he uses those on purpose.

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hnuser77
It's a neat trick: it emphasizes that they are amoral companies required to do
nothing but make money, and simultaneously that they're _only_ companies like
the thousands of other gyrating tickers on the stock market. This same author
frequently uses the term "Microsoft Github".

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ttldude
Thank you, it's framing. Now that makes sense.

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Jamie452
It makes me sad the web isn't what it used to be.

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8bitsrule
The web 'began dying'? What does that mean, Boomer?

If you were to ask when it began being _corrupted_ that would be more to the
point. How are children corrupted? What is the cure? After PCs came along it
was all fun and games until people noticed there was gold involved. Stir in
some greed and ego. Old forumula.

