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The Fathers of the Internet Urge Today’s Software Engineers to Reinvent the Web

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Re: The Fathers of the Internet Urge Today’s Software Engineers to Reinvent the Web

#201

Post by Kadin »

ryanmarsh wrote: post #105
mark_l_watson wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also attended the Decentralized Web Summit (the first 6 hours) and it was great. I hope they have this every year. The Summit was inexpensive, the venue at the Internet Archive building was cool, the speakers and panels were uniformly interesting, and the food was tasty. Good job by the organizers! I sometimes I feel like I am by my self on privacy and freedom issues. Very few of my non-tech friends & family get wh…

> sometimes I feel like I am by my self on privacy and freedom issues. Very few of my non-tech friends & family get why I think government and corporate encroachment on privacy and freedom is an issue Privacy and Freedom are values. The web (along with Facebook et.al.) is a product. I once read that Steve Jobs told Drew Houston that file sync was "a feature not a product". Obvi SJ was wrong but it's an interesting di…

> What I want to know is what is the next revolutionary WWW like Internet product that solves a pain many people feel?

I think that already happened and the answer is/was "smartphones". Most people circa 1999 probably wouldn't have thought that they needed an always-on, always-connected computer in their pocket (they sort of existed, e.g. the Apple Newton, and weren't that popular). The "killer app" for mobile phones at the time was voice, and maybe texting, but primarily voice in the US. "Apps" -- as in the general ecosystem, rather than a particular app -- are the 'killer app' of smartphones; it's the idea of having small task-specific apps rather than big general-purpose application suites.

I'm not sure what the next revolutionary product/application is, but it seems likely that it won't be on the PC. I say that as someone who vastly prefers the PC over mobile or set-top or embedded or basically any other platforms, but the PC has been the focus of 30+ years of concerted effort while some of those other platforms represent near-greenfield opportunities, so it's likely that the as-yet-unmet desires of the general public are going to be there.

Re: The Fathers of the Internet Urge Today’s Software Engineers to Reinvent the Web

#202

Post by gleenn »

sanoli wrote: post #184
mark_l_watson wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also attended the Decentralized Web Summit (the first 6 hours) and it was great. I hope they have this every year. The Summit was inexpensive, the venue at the Internet Archive building was cool, the speakers and panels were uniformly interesting, and the food was tasty. Good job by the organizers! I sometimes I feel like I am by my self on privacy and freedom issues. Very few of my non-tech friends & family get wh…

I have zero tech friends. Zero. Not one of my friends cares about privacy. Never have for as long as they have started using email in the late 90's. Me, I just gave up trying to raise the issue. So much so that I don't care anymore. It's a lost war. I'll take care of my own privacy whenever I care about it, and that's it. The rest of the population will deal with it when it gets too crazy. If it ever gets too crazy,…

Just because people don't seem to care, doesn't mean they aren't listening. Even being "that guy" who makes a point about important issues without obvious agreers can have a positive affect on people. Think of it like advertising: you might not buy that shiny car now, but when you go to make a decision, all those car ads you consciously or subconsciously watched make you aware of their existence. When the time comes and people have to make decisions, many might bias towards your point of view. Don't nag, but quietly continue making the point. Stay positive

Re: The Fathers of the Internet Urge Today’s Software Engineers to Reinvent the Web

#203

Post by dandelion_lover »

sanoli wrote: post #184
mark_l_watson wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also attended the Decentralized Web Summit (the first 6 hours) and it was great. I hope they have this every year. The Summit was inexpensive, the venue at the Internet Archive building was cool, the speakers and panels were uniformly interesting, and the food was tasty. Good job by the organizers! I sometimes I feel like I am by my self on privacy and freedom issues. Very few of my non-tech friends & family get wh…

I have zero tech friends. Zero. Not one of my friends cares about privacy. Never have for as long as they have started using email in the late 90's. Me, I just gave up trying to raise the issue. So much so that I don't care anymore. It's a lost war. I'll take care of my own privacy whenever I care about it, and that's it. The rest of the population will deal with it when it gets too crazy. If it ever gets too crazy,…

Why not just donate to FSF/EFF? My situation is the same, but I do not feel lonely because I know there are huge non-profit organizations fighting for me.

Re: The Fathers of the Internet Urge Today’s Software Engineers to Reinvent the Web

#204

Post by jakub_h »

neilk wrote: post #30
tsunamifury wrote: post #3

Most of these guys are a disconnected from where the global market is going and are proposing preposterous ideas for west coast tech scenes own problems. The web was based on a Western educational reference model that is not the normal mode for 3/4ths of the planet. The new web would need to be pushed based, not pull based. It would need to be need to be instantly authorable and aware of people and devices, Not docum…

I'm surprised that people seem to believe you're trolling. Or perhaps that confirms your point! tsunamifury is absolutely right that the relatively static, document-centric model of the web is an extension of Western academic culture. TBL's project was originally shaped by the need for researchers to share papers. Even in the world of HTTP/2 and all the other horrors of modern adtech, we still have this model. The si…

"tsunamifury is absolutely right that the relatively static, document-centric model of the web is an extension of Western academic culture. TBL's project was originally shaped by the need for researchers to share papers."

Wasn't the original WWW editable? I mean the thing that ran on NeXT boxes.

Anyway, the DynaBook idea is still alive for me. And it's probably close to the thing we actually need.

Re: The Fathers of the Internet Urge Today’s Software Engineers to Reinvent the Web

#205

Post by jakub_h »

josteink wrote: post #6
tsunamifury wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Storing knowledge in written semistatic documents to be referenced is for the most part a higher education model. The vast majority of the planet stores knowledge in people and references it via direct communications.

So basically when someone says the web needs to reinvented, you object and in the same breath conflate the web with the internet as a whole? Or am I missing something?

Perhaps if you reinvented the web well enough, it would become the Internet. Everything would be just some communicating components, only some of them would be graphical, for example.

Re: The Fathers of the Internet Urge Today’s Software Engineers to Reinvent the Web

#206

Post by rsync »

Mon_7i wrote: post #149
brokenmachine wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I sometimes I feel like I am by my self on privacy and freedom issues. In real life, I also often feel like I am alone in caring about privacy and freedom issues. Sometimes I feel like a crackpot when trying to explain to people who don't care why privacy is important. However I am hopeful that us techies who are actually the ones creating the future of the web are aware of and give weight to those issues. It seems f…

I think privacy/freedom issues are symptoms not root causes. The Internet today allows/has allowed for the rapid extraction of information/wealth from the masses into the hands of a few. I am totally opposed to the propping up of Mark Zuckerburgs and Larry Pages. Who then get to decide who and how the worlds information shall be accessed. This should not be the point of the internet. There are too many unintended con…

"Why? Because we know there will be nonrecoverable unintended consequences ... It's time we handled the internet the same way."

You can set down your phone anytime you want to. It just feels like you can't.

The degree to which "Internet" becomes a driving force in your life is the degree to which you diminish your life to allow that to happen. It doesn't have to be this way and it takes very little effort or imagination to keep it from being that way.

Re: The Fathers of the Internet Urge Today’s Software Engineers to Reinvent the Web

#207

Post by rsync »

sanderjd wrote: post #39

> “That utopian leveling of society, the reinvention of the systems of debate and government—what happened to that?” Only speaking personally, what happened for me was that I noticed that these utopian online communities that we reinvented are not really particularly wonderful because a lot of the loudest people in such communities are really nasty people with really nasty things to say. On the other hand, the intern…

"Only speaking personally, what happened for me was that I noticed that these utopian online communities that we reinvented are not really particularly wonderful because a lot of the loudest people in such communities are really nasty people with really nasty things to say."

It's interesting that you say that here, on this forum, which in my mind has defied that stereotype for quite a long time.

The aesthetic barrier to entry of plain text and limited function along with (relatively) little support or help is, I think, a fairly decent recipe and one we see succeeding in places like craigslist, which has shown surprising longevity and utility.

I am optimistic that this recipe will start to influence designers and builders more and more ...

Re: The Fathers of the Internet Urge Today’s Software Engineers to Reinvent the Web

#208

Post by pjmlp »

diyorgasms wrote: post #200
pjmlp wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes it does. "Don't bother" as in like most professionals they see a value in paying for their tools and don't mind having to pay them.

Just FYI that's basically opposite how the phrase "doesn't bother" is idiomatically used in at least American English.

Thanks for the hint. I am not native English speaker.

Re: The Fathers of the Internet Urge Today’s Software Engineers to Reinvent the Web

#209

Post by danjoc »

niftich wrote: post #70
pudo wrote: post #42

The argument to re-decentralise the web wildly confuses economic, technical and political concerns. The reason that Facebook runs a centralised system isn't that it cannot figure out a technical alternative, it does so for economic reasons. To assume that making incremental advances in decentralised technologies will somehow fundamentally alter those economics is wishful thinking. Instead, we need to recognise the fa…

This, but also, they run a centralized system for intellectual property reasons. Facebook Inc. offers a product, called Facebook, where you post content and make connections with other nodes in a large graph. It was built on prior art, but arranging and packaging them together in their particular way was novel. You could wholesale copy Facebook's public APIs and implement your own "Facebook-compatible clone", in the…

>Gmail, another frequent example of decentralization overcome by centralization

How did Gmail do that though? I suspect it largely had something to do with ISPs blocking port 25 for anyone except expensive "business class" users under the auspices of stopping spam. Well, spam never stopped, but about 80% of email in the US runs through 10 domains now. Further "stopping spam" measures meant that those big 10 basically block email from small servers by default and anyone wishing to send email to them has to jump through numerous hoops, further solidifying this centralization.

Centralization starts at the ISP. It starts with asymmetric bandwidth where you get 4x to 10x max download speed vs upload. It starts with port blocking. Centralization is monopoly. As you pointed out, nobody can compete with these large companies because of "intellectual property" laws. If there will be change, it has to start with legislation. You can't code around this unless you have billions of dollars in patents to fight with.

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