"The web was done by amateurs." - Alan Kay
Time to rebuild the web?
91–100 of 449 posts
Re: Time to rebuild the web?
#92I 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…
As some have pointed out this could be viewed just as a social media network. The issue with all social media and with HN as well and which doesn't fit the paradigm I was trying to articulate is that content is pushed to you in a feed.
Quite apart from centralisation, comments, chat, commerce and ads which I also don't want, I view the Feed as really the bad thing. Instead of my mind controlling what I am interested in and would like to know about, the feed gives me a range of topics and things to take an interest in.
I know there will always be a feed somewhere, but online it becomes compulsive.
Re: Time to rebuild the web?
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
Of course then you get into Gopher only territory. I wouldn't mind some CSS / HTML only sites like HN, your JS is limited to 5KB, jQuery isn't allowed, etc. Minify the web! Literally.
I think people that do care about this stuff already make webpages that are minimal. So there is probably no need to have a completely alternative space. Maybe just a directory/search engine that only indexes such pages.
Yes, and we do this search: https://bubblehunt.com
Right now 1 link - 1 indexed page. And in the future we think to upgrade it - add 100 best resources about design and create best information bubble for this topic.
Re: Time to rebuild the web?
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
50 years ago people who smoked didn't care about the adverse effects mainly because they didn't know the dangers. As people who know the dangers of poor privacy choices we should protect those who have not had the opportunity to consider it yet.
And yet a lot of people smoke.
In the US there has been a steady decline: https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/tables/trends/ci...
Almost three quarters of all smokers in the US want to quit: http://news.gallup.com/poll/163763/smokers-quit-tried-multip...
I think it is pretty clear that the information and social stigma campaigns run by people who care about the health of their fellow citizens have been effective.
Re: Time to rebuild the web?
#95> The web was never supposed to be a few walled gardens of concentrated content owned by Facebook, YouTube [...]
What are the numbers on views of original Youtube content vs. views of clips of material that infringes copyright? My guess is that the latter still makes up a significant portion of clicks.
If someone makes a serious P2P alternative to Youtube, not only will infringing content be there-- such content's existence will be a measure of how successful the platform is.
Either that, or you design something like the unexplained decentralized internet on the show "Silicon Valley" which somehow still has a single company controlling the pipes.
If not that, then "P2P-tube" has to house Silvestri's "Back to Future" theme[1] just as it houses impassioned vlogs of walled-garden escapees. If you don't have both you'll end up with a bunch of walled-garden escapees rationalizing the virtues of housing unpopular, homogenized content.
Anyway-- as passive onlookers its easy to dismiss Youtube's infringing content. But it's a lot more difficult when its a fledgling service that content owners cannot monetize. I think we've been through this before with Bittorrent. What was O'Reilly's opinion then?
[1] The first Youtube link that popped up was obviously put together in a consumer video editor and currently has over 9 million views:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e8TZbze72Bc
Edit: clarification
Re: Time to rebuild the web?
#96Unlike in the past, people don’t build websites for fun anymore. I remember I used to visit topsite ranking sites just to explore what other had built. Nowadays, it’s all templated design hosted in a walled garden.
Re: Time to rebuild the web?
#97It feels like this is already a work in progress using Beaker Browser and Dat. - Beaker lets you browse entire websites (dat archives) and fork them. - It lets you create and serve your own sites directly from the browser and seed it from a server (like a torrent). - It lets other sites create templated sites under your name for user generated content. - Visitors by default temporarily seed your website which may red…
But that only works for static data?
Re: Time to rebuild the web?
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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 a user might pay $9/year for all websites
Nope. Not going to happen. A HN user might, but regular user? No way in hell. Honestly I'd be surprised if you managed to win them over with $1/year or whatever the card minimum TX cost is. Even I was blindsided by it with a "wooah, whats this about" and I'm happy paying up for apps etc just to test them once. I thought I'd accidentally signed up to the website side of it
It's hard enough for Netflix to get customers to pay (account sharing) never mind a site that - from the user's point of view - does nothing
On the thought of the website side - Why would I as a website owner have my users pay your service when I could set up my own paywall and also enjoy the monetary rewards? I really feel like I've missed something here
Side note, there's also no way to delete my account
Re: Time to rebuild the web?
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 credentia…
Sounds like subreddits.
I was reading something the other day about how reddit has killed the community feel of forums. And thinking about it I agree, I can remember pre reddit I used to be reasonably active on a few forums, made friends etc. Reddit interactions feel a lot more ephemeral if that’s the right word.
Re: Time to rebuild the web?
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 sites or people. It was mostly nerds sharing nerdy things. Once money got involved, and free everything was available, it turned into this soup of bots, trolls, AI, fake this and that, big money, swaying public opinion, and gross content. The 90s had fair share of the above…
There were some bad actors in the 90s, but the scale is different now. And the effect is now raised to the level of concern that elections are affected. Some people are even talking about how it is threatening democracy. We don't think an arms race of technology with the bots and bad actors is going to work long-term. We need to change the economics so that bad actors go broke trying to act bad, while real people hav…
> There were some bad actors in the 90s, but the scale is different now.
It depends on what you're measuring. Take trolls for example; is the proportion actually any bigger? Sure there are more trolls but there's also more users on the whole so you'd expect the number of trolls to also grow while the percentage might remain the same.
> And the effect is now raised to the level of concern that elections are affected. Some people are even talking about how it is threatening democracy.
That's not really the same point you were making in your first post. I agreed with you about how worrying those specific cases are but you were originally complaining about a more general problem of rot and giving examples of stuff that also existed in the 90s. But yes, I too am concerned about targetted "marketting" being abused in a way that is new to anything we had seen in the decades previous.
> We need to change the economics so that bad actors go broke trying to act bad, while real people have to pay very little and not have to give up privacy.
I don't disagree with you on principle but it's a lot easier said than done. I mean just look at how hard it has been getting a handle on spam email and as a result it's now harder than ever to host your own mail server.
Ultimately I don't think it is possible to have privacy / anonymity and to prevent spam. I also don't think it's possible to prevent bad actors from automation while allowing the good actors to do the same things on the cheap. The problem is the same controls that are used to make it difficult for bad actors will also make it difficult for the good ones, And equally the same controls that give us privacy also make it easy for malicious sock accounts to be created. It's a double edged sward like that of free speech allowing opinions we don't want to hear amongst those that we do need to here.
I think the best approach is education. There was a time when we were taught not to trust what we read online. Not to trust other people online. But things have since flipped and perhaps it's time to re-educate everyone to be cautious of anything presented online?