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Ask HN: What's broken about the internet?

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Re: Ask HN: What's broken about the internet?

#21

Post by ricardo81 »

Privacy and removal of insidious tracking would be a good start.

I feel the web is too centralised, with half a dozen or so platforms essentially being gatekeepers of content on the web.

People link out on their sites much less tha in the past, in the belief that it raises the chance of penalising them on Google and hurt their rankings. Last I looked search engine are typically responsible for delivering around 50% of visitors to a site, and Google has a near monopoly in many countries.

Wikipedia while great provides a less than obvious set of rules and regulations before adding data into it. It typically tends to rank first on all major search engines for any query.

Social media have become moral compasses in what is OK and what is not OK to talk about.

A more diversified web moving away from these 'decision makers' IMO would make it a healthier place.

Re: Ask HN: What's broken about the internet?

#22

Post by dyingkneepad »

anaxag0ras wrote: post #13

Search. Google results are now full of SEO optimized low quality affiliate garbage.

I recently tried switching my default search engine to duckduckgo for like the 4th time in my life (I've been trying it about once a year), and this time I'm sticking with it. It's good enough now that I don't need to use google for every search. Maybe you could try again.

Re: Ask HN: What's broken about the internet?

#23

Post by zzo38computer »

Well, the biggest problems with the internet seems to be the World Wide Web. NNTP has improved (some of these improvements at my suggestions, such as support for 63-bit article numbers), and Gopher has also improved since the original specification (now there are "i" type lines in menus, which are useful), but WWW has just gotten worse (and that includes Hacker News to some degree too, but not as much as Google and Facebook and so on). I have set up not only HTTP but also NNTP, Gopher, QOTD, SMTP, etc, and may later also set up IRC, Telnet, Viewdata, etc. Additionally, many things I serve on the HTTP are just direct downloads anyways; no need to deal with 100 megabyte files just to access a text file or other file that you wanted to download. And, you can do it too, if you want to do, I suppose.

Re: Ask HN: What's broken about the internet?

#25

Post by type0 »

Trolls, spam and ads. IoT - Internet of turds. GAFAM taking away control of our devices in pursuit of surveillance economy. But generally technical illiteracy of average consumer is getting worse. Certain web browser owned by the largest advertising company is playing with the idea of deprecating URLs. Maybe Mozilla Builders can find a way to deprecate TCP/IP so that we can start from scratch until eternal september mark ii hits us.

Re: Ask HN: What's broken about the internet?

#26

Post by dfex »

In no particular order: - The WWW - from a delightfully whimsical follow the rabbit-hole experience in the early 90s where discovery was hard, but content was king; to a centralised, AI-ranked, viral echo-chamber in the 00s and 10s where the discovery engines now control the whole experience and the content you see is presented based on who pays. The key problem here being the monetisation of discovery. We need solve search and discovery, but deliver it as an open Internet standard like DNS or HTTP.

- Smart devices - buying an appliance with a closed-source, embedded device that relies on Internet connectivity and the solvency of it's manufacturer in order to operate it, patch it, secure it, and maintain it is the antithesis of what this planet needs right now. When the CA Root certificate(s) installed in your no-name smart TV expires and the OEM doesn't exist/doesn't care to provide you a firmware update, these devices will become less than worthless and most likely landfill. We need industry to adopt an open framework for smart devices that helps prolong their lifespan eg: a public Linux repo for updates to the underlying OS - the OEMs can deploy their own user interface, but end-users should be able to pick and choose if they wish (and most wont').

- Trust - in particular X.509 certificates. A lot of progress has been made in making trust via digital certificates the default rather than a paranoid exception, with a large portion of the web being delivered over HTTPS, RPKI for BGP currently being deployed in large operators and DNSSEC showing some (admittedly slow) signs of adoption. What is still a major problem in this area is the complexity of certificate management and renewal. The work LetsEncrypt and the EFF (certbot) have done in automating this process is fantastic, but these are still a long way from mainstream usage.

Re: Ask HN: What's broken about the internet?

#27

Post by tester756 »

I believe that Web 2.0 / whole user generated content thing was kinda mistake, or maybe "we" (or actually you, oldas) weren't prepared for its consequences.

Not in the first years of its existence, but in last like 10 years.

Yes, I'm aware that HN's like that, but if the price for fixing that whole mess is this small, then go ahead.

Re: Ask HN: What's broken about the internet?

#28

Post by CalmStorm »

The social media walled garden - quite a few people I know rarely use a browser or don't even know how to use it. They get their news mostly from their social media apps, and they have a hard time spotting fake news. It is much easier to censor content in a social network than the open internet. People live in their bubble and are not exposed to different opinions and ideas.
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