
Please Go Away, Tim Berners-Lee - Fice
https://tinyletter.com/mbutterick/letters/please-go-away-tim-berners-lee
======
marcinzm
This seems a particularly un-constructive piece of writing. All it does is
flame rather than saying what could have, realistically, been done differently
or better. It's easy to tear down, much harder to build up. Likewise it's easy
to talk about idealistic expectations rather than the realities of real life
(ie: what can you really do when a few companies with much larger budgets
control almost all implementation?).

~~~
Normal_gaussian
Your comment has two components; firstly you criticise the idea of criticism
(hmm...), and secondly you put forwards a defeatist attitude towards
situational improvement.

Those concepts go hand in hand. You can't cause change without criticism and
without criticism you don't want change.

This rant is well written, well sourced, and rather on the nose. It has the
potential to inspire change.

~~~
marcinzm
>you criticise the idea of criticism

No, I criticize the idea of un-constructive criticism especially in cases
where the solution is non-obvious (my second point). Constructive criticism
would have been, for example, "here's five things that should have been done
differently and here's why they would have helped." If you cannot inspire
change in an issue with constructive criticism then all you're doing is
throwing dice and hoping the change will be positive since you have no idea
what that change should actually be.

~~~
crazygringo
There's value in criticizing without a solution, because then someone else can
read the criticism and perhaps be inspired to a solution. Or multiple people
can debate the pros and cons of different solutions together.

Societal progress is the work of people working together, each contributing
their part. We need some people to point out problems and other people to fix
them. There's zero reason they need to be the same person.

~~~
marcinzm
Except then you get emotionally driven hatred of people and situations. After
all, that is exactly what this sort of criticism is designed to inspire. That,
in turn, tends to lead to solutions that don't actually fix the problem but
just make people feel satisfied regarding their hatred.

------
Jamwinner
Fair points, but pass the torch to whom? I think Tim is so vocal now because
of the mistakes he made in the past letting the web become more closed. He is,
fairly or not, paid more attention to than many other equal minds. If we have
a clearer voice, will they speak up? Will we raise them up, if we even can
notice and solidify as a community?

We need cohesive and reasoned guidance more than ever. A technology once
hailed for enabling free and open discourse has become the key tool for
suppressing that same speech. Meanwhile, totally unmoderated forums have
become a liability, and practically unhostable, mostly thanks to bad-faith
actors. Does anyone posess a torch, unfiltered by money or idology, no matter
how dim, to lead us out of this without leaving our humanity at the step?

I don't know the answers, but I feel like asking passionate people not to
speak up, is not one of them.

------
paulgb
I really haven't followed W3C politics, but has it really been mismanaged and
captures more than is inevitable when you have power concentrated in a few
companies and interest groups? Are there standard-setting bodies in other
industries (ISO?) that operate with less capture? If anything I've been amazed
at how much cool tech the web has been getting as a platform (WebGL, wasm,
service workers) but I'm not sure how much credit to give W3C for that.

PS Matthew is also the author of the excellent Practical Topography.
[https://practicaltypography.com/](https://practicaltypography.com/)

~~~
somebodythere
Typography is sweet, but I'm still a little disappointed there was no actual
topography in that link.

~~~
welly
Here you go: [https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/spie/practical-topography-
design...](https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/spie/practical-topography-design-for-
alternating-phase-shifting-mask-r6jtDovxUi)

------
crazygringo
Wow. Pretty shocked this was flagged after 110 points in less than half an
hour and disappeared from the front page.

You may disagree but it certainly seems worthy of discussion.

I’m disappointed in whoever called this “flamebait” and who suggested this be
flagged. Stopping discussion on a valid topic is not cool.

~~~
dang
Users flagged it, most likely because the post is a personal attack (a pretty
ugly one actually) which is not in the spirit of this site as expressed in its
guidelines:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).

We try to avoid posts that are personal attacks, not necessarily because we
owe celebrities better, but because this kind of internet denunciation
degrades the community, even if it also makes some good points. I think that's
probably why users flagged it.

Trying to prevent the community from degrading is more important than any
individual post, as it's the container that supports good discussion in the
first place. The container is fragile. It's more fragile than it seems,
because much of the work to prevent it from falling apart isn't visible.

Posts that feature indignation over information are always bad for curious
conversation. When the indignation is directed against an individual, that's a
multiplier of badness, because it brings out worse in others.

~~~
qixxy
Still not sure why "Powerful Person in Tech needs to take accountability and
resign" qualifies as an ugly personal attack or a "denunciation".

In the tech world recently, there have been plenty of calls for, say, Sundar
Pichai or Mark Zuckerberg to resign. And those have been featured on HN.
What's the difference here? If you're a Powerful Person in Tech (or industry
or politics), that's just part of the gig.

"It sucks to have haters, but every founder who now runs a huge company faced
this for a long time."

[https://blog.samaltman.com/dont-read-the-
comments](https://blog.samaltman.com/dont-read-the-comments)

In this case, the author cites facts about Berners-Lee and his performance at
the W3C. Each one is supported by a link to evidence. I don't agree with the
author's conclusion. But if this community is so "fragile" that it needs to
bury fact-based arguments, wowsers.

~~~
dang
Because the article takes the opportunity to vent gratuitous personal bile
alongside its factual claims and links. That brings out the worst in people,
and it brings out the worst in people here. See my point about protecting the
container above.

We don't need the callout/shaming culture on HN. If the facts in the article
are important, someone else will write a factual article that doesn't have a
side channel of putdowns and snark. Then we can have a thread based on that
article instead.

I suppose I should add that I have no opinion about Tim's role in web
governance, only about Hacker News.

------
Angostura
It would be good to be able to downvote this egregious bit of flamebait

~~~
GhettoMaestro
Flamebait? He is pointing out the hypocrisy of Tim presenting himself as the
moral guardian of the web.... as Tim ran W3C for all of these years.

~~~
mk99
There is no hypocrisy. Tim said that DRM is a reality and that it should be
standardized. Some people did not like that. We owe Tim a great debt of
gratitude for inventing the web and bypassing any opportunities available to
him to patent his invention so that the technology would be freely available.
The OP should show him some respect.

~~~
rambojazz
I really don't understand people fascination with idolization. There is no
such thing as "one person alone invented this great technology".

~~~
alecbenzer
Yeah, I don't have any informed opinions on Tim's role in DRM or related
things, but the idolization surrounding him always left a bad taste in my
mouth.

------
golemotron
This is a remarkably bitter take. Sir Berners-Lee deserves thanks. None of us
created the web and I don't think we can say that it was inevitable that
someone would have in its initial open form. It changed the world.

That said, his attempts to reclaim the web to its original frontier state
don't seem possible. There are innumerable reasons why; network effects and
entrenched interests being the least of them.

------
qixxy
It's curious that this was flagged and removed so quickly from the front page.

What's the problem?

I don't agree with the author's take. But Tim Berners-Lee is not above
criticism. These are fair questions to ask about his motivations and track
record.

Moreover Berners-Lee can put his decades of celebrity behind his views, and
get access to megaphones like the New York Times. There is no conceivable
threat posed by this dude and his Tinyletter page.

Sorry HN mods, think you got this one wrong.

~~~
dang
Mods didn't touch the post or even see it. Users flagged it. That's what the
[flagged] annotation indicates. Well, nearly always anyway.

See also
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21651530](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21651530).

------
Dirlewanger
While I agree in principle that he needs to shut up and that people need to
stop listening to him (he made himself irrelevant as soon as he become a paid
Google puppet), I don't see a way out of this, a way to make the W3C great
again as it were. It's just another item on the laundry list of things Google
has its tendrils coiled around and will never let go of.

~~~
ksangeelee
I don't see why working for Google would make someone irrelevant. There's
every reason to think that his choice was a reasoned one.

He gave a talk recently, broadcast by the BBC, which he used to raise the
issues we have with tracking, click-bait, and misinformation. His audience
looked to comprise quite influential people.

The fact is he saw the potential his software had; that the combination of
server, browser, and markup could revolutionise the world, even before anyone
was using it.

It would seem foolish to silence someone like that, and careless to advise
people not to listen. I'm certainly not saying that we accept his opinions
without question, and I'm sure he would agree.

------
djohnston
Reminds me of TETHICS!

~~~
ajeet_dhaliwal
As I was reading it this is exactly what came to mind too.

------
benbojangles
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worshipful_Company_of_Informat...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worshipful_Company_of_Information_Technologists)

------
csours
How do you imagine this could work better in actual reality? It's nice to
imagine the web as a pure location for users and developers, but nothing else
in the world works like that either.

------
kingbirdy
It seems a bit unfair to lay the blame for Embedded Media Extensions at
TBL/W3C's feet, since (as the author mentions) W3C has no enforcement ability,
so either TBL & other W3C members could be part of the decision making process
for EME, or the companies that wanted it would meet somewhere else and still
do it anyway, and possibly have come up with an even worse DRM system. It's
unfortunate that a handful of companies are able to exert such an outsize
influence on the web, but that's a bigger discussion to be had about
capitalism, rather than Tim's fault.

~~~
samastur
How could it be worse? And what was the benefit of sitting at the table?

~~~
kingbirdy
The current implementation allows Firefox to fully sandbox the DRM module, and
optionally uninstall it completely if the user wants. It seems reasonable to
me that if other voices hadn't been involved in the standardization process,
even this small win may not have been possible.

------
arjunbajaj
Honest question: What would be the alternative to DRM?

How would video streaming companies “protect” their content without DRM? Or is
the debate that they shouldn’t be able to?

Having the ability to stream directly in the browser is definitely a good
thing IMHO.

~~~
mk99
There is none. If we are going to have intellectual property, if we are going
to incent developers of IP to produce, they should have some right to monetize
their IP. The people who are against DRM present a certain selfishness and are
never really able to answer the question of how developers, particularly of
very expensive endeavors are supposed to recoup their costs and make a profit.

~~~
samastur
Like with OP you are making a lot of assumptions about consensus. Things that
don't have one: intellectual property is not an oxymoron, we need to incent
people to create content, right to monetize has to include strict technical
limitations. Not being burdened with resolving your problem does not mean one
is necessary selfish; they might just not see it as a problem worth solving.

