
Bringing people back to the open web - ChrisHardie
https://chrishardie.com/2018/04/rebuilding-open-web/
======
superkuh
>If the closed web is a place where hate speech, harassment and bullying
thrives, the open web can be, needs to be an experience where it does not.

I am strongly against this appeal to censorship. Luckily in the real open web,
where you host your own content the incentives and mechanisms for censorship
are few and difficult to achieve. No, my dream of the open web is diverse.
Full of things people hate and full of things people love. Not just some
gentrified, marketable, set of opinions from a narrow slice of the possible.
The overton window has shrunk enough.

That's how the web was and how it can be again. Without extremes there's
nothing exceptional.

~~~
groby_b
The reason we're in the mess that we are is the shit show the open web was.
People were _delighted_ to have a walled garden where they only communicated
with friends, instead of random drive-by trolls in the open.

And frankly, it's understandable. A place that justifies bullying and hate
speech as a good thing, with mumblings of "b.. b.. but free speech", is not a
place where anybody wants to spend their time. (Except people who either like
or don't mind bullying)

And given that we're currently debating if the Overton window should include
actual real-life Nazis - "because free speech" \- I'm OK with it shrinking
some more.

Extremes in thought are indeed necessary. But they need to be followed by a
realization of how far is too far, and an ability to moderate how much of that
extreme thought is publicly shared, respecting other people. Maturity is a
necessary tool of useful debate.

"How the web was" was (and is) mostly kids screaming in the backyard, with
sensible adults carving out spaces that exclude immaturity.

~~~
malvosenior
Sensible adults have long been a proponent of free speech. It’s the call to
censorship for comfort that is new and seemingly coming from younger
generations who don’t have experience with why that may be a bad idea.

The ACLU has long defended _all_ speech: [https://www.aclu.org/blog/free-
speech/why-we-must-defend-fre...](https://www.aclu.org/blog/free-speech/why-
we-must-defend-free-speech)

~~~
prophesi
The saddest part is how the younger generation turned college campuses, the
place where radical & worldview-challenging ideas could thrive, into places
wherein you're protected from any such challenging ideas.

~~~
untog
That's a very common and entirely overblown hypothesis. Sure, there are
student protests about a tiny number of speakers each year. But there have
been student protests about anything ever since there have been students.

> More importantly, though, we can see here why reaching broad conclusions
> from sets of anecdotes is inadvisable. There are around 2,600 four-year
> universities in the United States. Friedersdorf tried to compile all of the
> most outrageous instances from a single year, and found about 10 of them.
> Those 10 were probably roughly evenly distributed according to the political
> affiliation of the students; i.e. there are more shutdown attempts by
> liberal students than conservative students, but students are also more
> liberal. And among those high-profile incidents, a bunch of the speakers
> ended up coming and speaking and the petitions went nowhere.

[https://www.currentaffairs.org/2018/02/why-do-those-
college-...](https://www.currentaffairs.org/2018/02/why-do-those-college-
students-hate-free-speech-so-much)

"college campuses" are quite safe from the "younger generation".

~~~
prophesi
If you want a book that uses national polls conducted over the past 40+ years,
plus a little bit of anecdotal evidence to make the data tangible, I recommend
iGen by Jean M. Twenge[0].

There's a noticeable trend that the kids of this upcoming generation are ill-
prepared for college and expect the authorities to protect them. In
highschool, they're less likely to go out without their parents or work a
part-time job (And on a positive note, less likely to drink or have premarital
sex).

[0] [https://www.amazon.com/iGen-Super-Connected-Rebellious-
Happy...](https://www.amazon.com/iGen-Super-Connected-Rebellious-Happy-
Adulthood/dp/1501151983)

~~~
untog
Yeah, about that:

> For instance, Twenge argues that young people have become increasingly self-
> absorbed since the advent of the Internet. One piece of evidence she uses is
> a search she ran through Google's Ngram (which searches through printed
> books) for the phrase "I love me." She found a sharp spike in the phrase in
> the last few decades. But "I love me" sounds slightly off — surely most
> people say "I love myself." And lo, if you search "I love myself" (as I
> would guess Twenge did first), you find that the phrase fluctuated with much
> less satisfying results, and in fact occurred at a higher frequency in, for
> instance, the 1770s, than in the early 2000s. So, Twenge discovered a
> grammatical shift and disguised it as a cultural one.

> It's a small example, but the book is dizzying with this brand of deceptive
> spin.

[https://www.npr.org/2017/09/17/548664627/move-over-
millennia...](https://www.npr.org/2017/09/17/548664627/move-over-millennials-
here-comes-igen-or-maybe-not')

I'm not arguing that the book is without merit, but I really don't think it
comprehensively and inarguably states that the "younger generation" are as
damaged as the "older generation" might suspect (and "the coming generation
are wrong about all the things!" is a trope as old as time)

~~~
prophesi
Still, I recommend the book. You can't deny the statistical significance of
the polls. There are a few far-fetched pieces of evidence, but that's to be
expected with sociology.

I think the main issue is that we're trying to measure changes over a long
period of time across a wide swathe of people. Those are two very difficult
areas to study.

------
galactus
I don't believe there will be any silver bullet that will make people back to
the open web any soon by sheer technical merit. In the meantime, we should not
abandon efforts to make people understand why huge centralized walled gardens
such as facebook are a problem. It would be like if society had stopped anti-
smoking campaigns in the past, waiting for a miraculous safe cigarette to
solve the problem.

------
ianbicking
Open Source has done a lot for developers, but it's not very present on the
actual surface of the web – the surface that people interact with, and that
defines the Open Web.

If developers are going to build up the open web, then it feels like this is
something of an issue. To live up to one's potential as a developer, you can't
just make your own choices in support of the open web, you have to facilitate
other people. But I sure as hell don't want to run a service hosting people's
content. It's a pain in the ass! And to top it off I have to pay for the
privilege.

Building up a whole company in support of a service is an option, but then I'm
not a developer, certainly not an open source developer, I've instead become
an "entrepreneur". I don't want to be an entrepreneur! Hell, that's even more
of a pain in the ass than giving stuff away.

I think we (open source developers) really need a platform to build on. An
actual hosted platform. One where, as a developer, I can do interesting things
that empower people, things that participate in the web as a whole, things
other people can build on. I'd be willing to compromise SO MUCH if it means I
can give people cool things without any of the incurred debt.

As a strawman, maybe it could start as just a bit of static hosting, with easy
discovery and management from in-browser code. Neocities has an API, for
example ([https://neocities.org/api](https://neocities.org/api)), but you have
to already use Neocities, so I couldn't publish an app that would be easily
used by non-Neocities users.

------
optimuspaul
technology isn't going to solve a culture problem. I also don't think that the
walled gardens are even part of the problem. It's that anonymity gives too
many people the license to treat others poorly. I'm not saying we need to take
anonymity away, we need to change the culture (of the world) that regards
mutual respect as a default even when remaining anonymous.

------
throw7
We did have a way. It was called a kill file.

Unfortunately, we don't have adults anymore. We have children that need to be
protected from hearing anything they don't like to hear and must be giving the
right to shutdown people's speech they disagree with ("heckler's veto").

~~~
ebiester
In a walled garden, like facebook, I have a private/public space. I can send
out a message to a subset of my friends. The open web does not have these
controls.

Further, if one of the people I thought was trustworthy starts abusing that
trust, I can kick them out. Because it's a walled garden. I don't have to
worry about spam. I don't have to worry about hate speech. I don't have to
worry about any of that shit.

Facebook means that I can approve anyone from seeing that content
individually. As of now, we don't have an equivalent way to handle that on the
open web.

Facebook means I don't have to deal with spam to have a conversation with
anyone involved. As of now, the equivalent ways to handle that on the open web
take far too much time to be practical.

Facebook, over the last decade, has solved a legitimately hard problem, and I
don't see "kill file" as a sufficient solution.

The open web is about public space. Facebook is a more private space.

~~~
jononor
How are the ads that FB pushes into your feed not spam? Seems more or less
indistinguishable too me

~~~
amdavidson
Do you consider ads on cable TV to be spam? Likely not.

Like them or don't, but the ads on FB are not spam because they are not
unsolicited and are targeted.

~~~
jononor
Of course I do. It is one of the reasons I do not have a TV.

If there was a plain choice between without ads and with (probably at
different prices), I could accept them as a transaction I have accepted. But
such choices are often not available, they are bundled in with a bunch of
other choices.

~~~
zodPod
Agreed on all counts! It's pretty weird that we pay really good money for TV
and then still have to sit through commercials, isn't it?

------
bertil
I would love this idea to take off and be successful but I have many
reservations on the feasibility of such a project. Two are fairly simple:
innovation and trusted hosting.

Let’s assume that we have a protocol that allows us to have the same
interactions as Facebook/Instagram/Twitter: a multi-media flow of posts,
comments, etc. Let’s assume that we have distinct hosts that let you befriend
and follow people with a different service, just like we have with email. We
can even imagine that those services have internal tweaks (like the
integration of Google Calendar in GMail) that provide some network effect, but
overall there is a push to make such improvements universal (like providing a
compatible .ics file, etc.) and part of the protocol.

I expect that the overall protocol adoption will be slower, so I expect that
things like Gif comments that display (rather than a link; admittedly not the
most loved feature among HN’s crowd) or editable comment (with a version
control system; probably more within HN’s preference) will be slower. I don’t
think that most of those project imagine how to address that issue. It’s
distinct from open source (which admittedly innovates faster than closed code
in the areas that I’m familiar with) and more akin to how no new feature has
been adopted by email since probably the 80s.

I also wonder who people would trust with their personal data: intimate
conversations, dirty secrets… We’ve learned the hard way that security is
hard, and even serious projects like Telegram have had their issue. At the
moment, that information is indeed clustered on few servers with a reasonably
good security team protecting them. I suspect that more hosts with a lesser
team would not really make it safer. You could try extreme dilution, but I
suspect that people would not want to host anything themselves and would frown
upon letting their nerdy cousin hold the keys of that server, over a cold
company who presumably monetise their data but at least is not really expected
to pry and gossip. That leaves large-ish commercial entities.

I see that area concentrating fast, like email did, and the upside of using
internal features winning people over to two or three platforms, like today.
It would be great to have that platform be open and allow you to host your own
server compatible with Facebook, but that kind of openness is what got us the
latest scandal.

------
kuschku
This is a good idea – but impossible.

Google and Facebook have tenthousands of developers. And not just any devs,
some of the best in the industry. Google and Facebook have tons of userdata
for training ML models.

How do you compete with that?

The only way your projects would ever be able to outcompete Google and
Facebook on technology is if you’d somehow get a ton of engineers willing to
work for a good cause.

But that doesn’t happen. There’s not enough engineers that would volunteer
their time for this. In fact, most engineers either don’t care at all about
this stuff, or they drank the kool aid and believe Google and Facebook are
doing good.

As long as there’s so many developers that _want_ to work at Facebook, as long
as Google has more resources than you, you won’t be able to outcompete them on
technology.

~~~
bitwize
A free OS for PCs is a good idea -- but impossible. Microsoft and Apple have
tenthousands of developers. And not just any devs, some of the best in the
industry. Microsoft and Apple have research labs where they can subject their
OS to hundreds of thousands of user-hours of testing for usability,
scalability, and robustness.

How do you compete with that?

~~~
butterfi
Linux?

~~~
lwhsiao
I believe the parent was intentionally mirroring the grandparent comment to
make the argument that Linux is a good counterexample.

~~~
bitwize
Not only that, but I was almost directly quoting the arguments that were
routinely used against Linux back in the 90s.

------
carapace
What if the Internet itself is the problem?

We might be witnessing the Eternal September of the entire network.

    
    
        Humans + networked Turing machines = shit-show
    

Are we doomed? Can we have a fundamentally different relationship with these
machines?

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

~~~
lainga
> networked Turing machines

Brainfuck over UDP...?

