Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Time to rebuild the web?

oreilly.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 449 posts

Re: Time to rebuild the web?

#61

Post by realpeopleio »

pjc50 wrote: post #29
realpeopleio wrote: post #13

I agree that having a few walled gardens is a problem, but having more smaller walled gardens probably won't change much. Bad actors can still sign up, post, spam, harass, etc. on several small walled gardens. What we need is a way to better identify and handle bad actors. The internet in the 90s seemed more fun and more open. Perhaps it's because the only people really participating were not interested in abusing si…

> Each person can create a single account on RealPerson.io That web page doesn't explain how they guarantee uniqueness of users or pay for the required ID checking?

It doesn't really guarantee uniqueness. It also doesn't verify identity (that this is really "John Smith"). It essentially verifies that the user has paid for an account on RealPerson.io, which is currently $9/year. This was to strike a balance between having to divulge too much personal info to RealPerson.io (like an identity verification service), but at the same time making it highly unlikely that the user is a bot. RealPerson.io doesn't try to drive the percentage to 0 that the user is a bot, but rather make it cost prohibitive for bots, while at the same time making it cost effective for real people, and still protect privacy.

Also, a user only gets one RealPerson code per website, so a user can't create multiple codes for a website and hence create multiple accounts on that website. And if that website bans the user, that user would need to get a new code for that website, which would mean creating a second account on RealPerson and paying again and face the scrutiny of RealPerson detecting that the user has two accounts on RealPerson.

Re: Time to rebuild the web?

#62

Post by goatlover »

naranha wrote: post #44
goatlover wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You still download and install Office 365 as applications and run them independent of a web browser and can do so without an internet connection. They also have their own updater. Yes, you can run them on the web from the Office 365 portal, but that's the html version. The installed version is still fundamentally a desktop platform. I'm pretty sure it's written C# or C++ and runs on dotnet. An SPA is a web page run i…

> An SPA is a web page run in the browser over http(s). I'd argue that if they are using web technologies (like vscode) they are still profiting from web innovations. Isn't electron just a way to distribute SPA on the desktop (plus some integrations).

Sure, but the way I look at it is if the application runs on the desktop, server or mobile OS, then it's not a web app. A web app is an html page you access via the browser with a bunch of javascript that makes it interactive enough to stay within that single page (if it's strictly an SPA).

Also, the stuff that powers the web such as web servers and browsers would obviously not be SPAs.

Re: Time to rebuild the web?

#63

Post by macspoofing »

martin_drapeau wrote: post #30

When I ask friends and family who use Facebook daily, privacy and security never come up as pain points. Media is blowing everything out of proportion. Replacing Facebook with RSS or Feedly is nonsense. My friends and family have no idea what those are. Facebook makes it easy for people to connect with old friends and family members through active human interactions: like this, follow her, read that. By doing so you…

>When I ask friends and family who use Facebook daily, privacy and security never come up as pain points.

This scandal is so incredibly overblown it's crazy. I've been arguing this since the beginning.

Media blew this up because it's loosley connected to Trump and because there's no better story than when you tear down a high flyer. Facebook was/is an American success story.

Re: Time to rebuild the web?

#64

Post by lmm »

scandox wrote: post #60

I feel like he's worrying but he isn't sure about what. I don't think the problems of the internet are related to how easily people can make their own sites. It's just that the feeling that your content might actually be seen and appreciated is gone. In the 1990s if you published something online it felt good like some people are going to read this and care. Now it feels like "hey another ball tossed into the massive…

Honestly, this is exactly the problem that Facebook (and other social media like HN) solve. I can write a blog post/article and rather than tossing it into the void, I share it on Facebook or a suitable subreddit or here. And while I may get a small number of views, they're likely to be from people I care about (either friends or people in the same hobby community), and those people have a chance to respond and comment.

Re: Time to rebuild the web?

#65

Post by realpeopleio »

jasode wrote: post #51
pjc50 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Each person can create a single account on RealPerson.io That web page doesn't explain how they guarantee uniqueness of users or pay for the required ID checking?

>how they guarantee uniqueness of users I was curious too so I clicked on the sign-up button to see how it worked. It immediately takes you to a page to pay $9.00 by credit-card. I guess it guarantees you're a "real person" because bots† don't pay with credit-cards. †(At the large scale required for profitable fraud)

Right. Bots aren't going to pay. But a user might pay $9/year for all websites. Websites don't have to pay for the service either. The more websites that use the service, the more cost effective it is for users (since they pay once for all sites), and for websites (since the likelihood that the user signing up already has a RealPerson account and doesn't need to pay anymore).

This is the primary way to prevent bots, but there still are secondary means like IP address, credit card, behavior pattern than can be used to detect bots. But with estimated millions of bots operating on Twitter and Facebook and elsewhere, the bot operators are not going to spend millions of dollars on RealPerson accounts.

Re: Time to rebuild the web?

#66

Post by naranha »

jcalabro wrote: post #47
naranha wrote: post #5

SPAs have made almost all desktop applications obsolete. DevTools have deprecated view source. Through progress and innovation the web can do a lot more than 20 years ago. Sure the web is being abused for tracking by Google and Facebook but that was also possible 20 years ago with a single img-tag.

> SPAs have made almost all desktop applications obsolete. Adobe, office for desktop, text editors, video games, my command line, iTunes, yada yada yada. Native applications are a hugely important part of my computer usage and I personally prefer to keep it that way.

Sure they are still important, but isn't everything that CAN be made into a web application made into one? Just because there are so many advantages: The applications travel with you, no need for manual backups, more secure (I try to completly avoid clicking on exe files on Windows), no installation/maintenance required.

And don't young people use YouTube/Amazon Music/Google Play to listen to music these days?

I'm a developer so of course I still use a lot of desktop apps, but for the normal user, the only thing that rivals the convenience of web apps are Android/iPhone apps, but nobody enjoys writing those.. So perhaps they will get replaced by something based on web technologies too one day.

Re: Time to rebuild the web?

#67

Post by icc97 »

jen729w wrote: post #45
martin_drapeau wrote: post #30

When I ask friends and family who use Facebook daily, privacy and security never come up as pain points. Media is blowing everything out of proportion. Replacing Facebook with RSS or Feedly is nonsense. My friends and family have no idea what those are. Facebook makes it easy for people to connect with old friends and family members through active human interactions: like this, follow her, read that. By doing so you…

One of the few times I’ve heard a counter to this was an old fisherman who took us out on a boat here in Melbourne, Australia. Proper bloke, skin like leather from the sun, done nothing but run fishing trips his whole life. He was lamenting the loss of a particular forum with one of the other guys. “All just on Facebook now”, he said, and he said it with sadness. He missed that old forum.

Actually that makes a lot of sense, it's not that we need to have RSS replace Facebook, we need a resurgance of forums to take back from Facebook.

Perhaps if forums could talk to each other you'd have an experience more like mastodon, but in concepts that more people understand.

Something like an open source Stack Exchange network. So you can log-in to one of them but then easily create an account using the credentials of the original forum that you signed in from.

Edit: I know discourse [0] is kind of working along these lines, but I don't think they're designed to have activity between forums.

Perhaps it could just be called 'Friend Forums'.

[0]: https://www.discourse.org/

Re: Time to rebuild the web?

#68

Post by edraferi »

scandox wrote: post #60

I feel like he's worrying but he isn't sure about what. I don't think the problems of the internet are related to how easily people can make their own sites. It's just that the feeling that your content might actually be seen and appreciated is gone. In the 1990s if you published something online it felt good like some people are going to read this and care. Now it feels like "hey another ball tossed into the massive…

You want an “intimate Internet” with its own search capability to restore the feel of the early web? Probably we should make sure it’s easy for less technical people to use. Needs a good story around mobile and rich media.

Oh dear, we’ve reinvented Facebook!

Seriously though, I think this is more about community than technology, and more about channel saturation than centralization.

I think the best shot for what you want is the re-distributed web and niche social networks (subreddits?). The peer-based web stuff will give you that feeling of being ahead of the masses on tech, and subreddits for your favorite hobby will let you connect with people who care about your random thing.

Re: Time to rebuild the web?

#69

Post by zaarn »

The problem usually lies in UX.

Most projects attempting to "fix the web" as admirable as it be, suffer for pretty bad UI. Usually because the UI designer was also the developer.

I'm also guilty of this.

A recent project that got around this was Mastodon and Pleroma, both have pretty decent UI/UX.

Re: Time to rebuild the web?

#70

Post by naranha »

naranha wrote: post #44
goatlover wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You still download and install Office 365 as applications and run them independent of a web browser and can do so without an internet connection. They also have their own updater. Yes, you can run them on the web from the Office 365 portal, but that's the html version. The installed version is still fundamentally a desktop platform. I'm pretty sure it's written C# or C++ and runs on dotnet. An SPA is a web page run i…

> An SPA is a web page run in the browser over http(s). I'd argue that if they are using web technologies (like vscode) they are still profiting from web innovations. Isn't electron just a way to distribute SPA on the desktop (plus some integrations).

> Sure, but the way I look at it is if the application runs on the desktop, server or mobile OS, then it's not a web app.

Yes perhaps your definition is clearer. But the point remains that "web technolgies" have expanded tremendously in scope. And that it does not suffice anymore to look at "View Source" to become a web developer.

Because today the field of web development includes things like electron and you want to bring your application to as many devices as possible, with as little development overhead as possible. And this is what users expect, it's just not possible with the 90-style web.

Post reply on HN