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Time to rebuild the web?

oreilly.com

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Re: Time to rebuild the web?

#131

Post by noir-york »

johnsea wrote: post #117

What I miss in the article is tax. Yes, "Much as we may complain about Facebook, selecting relevant content from an ocean of random sites is an important service". Same with google, they do a terrific job with providing YouTube and the Search infrastructure. But YouTube, Facebook, Google destroy (a.o.) the 'normal media' as they oligopolize advertising. They hinder progress/competition as they cross-subside their ven…

I think you're on to something.

A thought which came to mind would be for a country to levy an access charge (think of the BBC license fee) to access social networks based on usage. The money would then be used to clean up the negative externalities caused by the social network in that country.

Re: Time to rebuild the web?

#132

Post by laumars »

realpeopleio wrote: post #104
laumars wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.…

> 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, That's how RealPerson.io is different. It's pay to play so it doesn't try to out-tech the bad actors, and so it doesn't make it harder for the good ac…

I can think of a few ways it makes it harder for the good actors just from an initial scan of the site:

* It's an additional service that people need to discover / learn and sign up for

* It's not free. While the cost might seem cheap for people like ourselves in well paid jobs, not everyone has a disposable income. Anyone in poorly paid jobs / unemployed, expensive bills or family etc wouldn't want to or even might not be able to afford such a service

* It requires people pay with a bank card, which excludes anyone who doesn't have a bank account / credit card (only a small group of people but they do exist). It also excludes anyone who doesn't feel comfortable with entering payment details online (I personally only use PayPal these days on all bar a very small handful of sites)

* I also don't trust handing "identity token" over to that site any more than I trust Facebook. What happens if/when they get hacked? Will they then have my bank card details? Will the be able to use my identity token to access other sites? These points matter to me because I know nothing about the company and they are gearing themselves up for being an obvious target for attackers.

So in summary there is no such thing as a perfect solution. By making it harder for bad actors you're going to make it harder for at least some good actors as well. That is an inescapable truth.

Re: Time to rebuild the web?

#133

Post by jsilence »

zaarn wrote: post #69

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.

zeronet has a pretty decent UI.

Re: Time to rebuild the web?

#134

Post by gregwtmtno »

d--b wrote: post #106

These articles are annoying. They completely miss the point. The web as it was in the early 90s was an alternative to major content delivery platforms (TV, press, mostly). So there was these massive systems that were the press and the TV who would own most of our attention span. And then there was this cute alternative technology with a great community that was yet unpolluted by the big guys. Today, the big content g…

It's a discoverability problem. All that great small community content isn't monetizable and gets de-incentivized over time by algorithmic changes in search engines and link aggregators.

Everyone is being nudged to where there's money to be made.

Re: Time to rebuild the web?

#135

Post by naranha »

jhasse wrote: post #121
naranha wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IDEs -> vscode thunderbird ->Gmail Ms office > gdocs Msn messenger -> Hangouts Etc. At least for most (non professional) users Edit: and often you are better off using webapps because they are sandboxed.

VS Code even includes native code (ripgrep written in Rust), so I'm not sure if it should count. And in my experience Microsoft Office is still used more than Google Docs for non professional users, but YMMV. Hangouts is also way behind natives apps like WhatsApp, iMessage, Telegram in market share.

> so I'm not sure if it should count.

vscode may or may not count as a SPA, that's beside the point. It is certainly based on and would not be possible without web technologies. And illustrates perfectly why today it is not possible anymore to become a web developer just by "viewing the source".

Re: Time to rebuild the web?

#136

Post by emddudley »

kristianc wrote: post #124
d--b wrote: post #106

These articles are annoying. They completely miss the point. The web as it was in the early 90s was an alternative to major content delivery platforms (TV, press, mostly). So there was these massive systems that were the press and the TV who would own most of our attention span. And then there was this cute alternative technology with a great community that was yet unpolluted by the big guys. Today, the big content g…

Which works great, until ISPs start offering subsidized plans for Facebook, Gmail, Spotify, Twitter, and expensive plans for everything else. When that happens, there is very little economic incentive to have smaller websites, smaller e-commerce websites end up being part of Amazon, and Google starts providing more and more of its own content.

I agree that could be an outcome, but could there not also be a reverse "Eternal September" where niche communities thrive? Since people would need to make a conscious, meaningful choice to join them?

Re: Time to rebuild the web?

#137

Post by martin_drapeau »

skummetmaelk wrote: post #71
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…

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.

Smoking will kill you. Liking funny cat videos on Facebook won't. I think you are comparing oranges and apples here.

Re: Time to rebuild the web?

#138

Post by skummetmaelk »

martin_drapeau wrote: post #137
skummetmaelk wrote: post #71

Earlier 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.

Smoking will kill you. Liking funny cat videos on Facebook won't. I think you are comparing oranges and apples here.

Poor privacy choices can severely damage your future career and thereby quality of life. I'd say that is also pretty severe.

Re: Time to rebuild the web?

#139

Post by bhaak »

quantumwoke wrote: post #38
bhaak wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You sound like a buzzword machine. A simple RSS feed can easily be hand written. But of course, you don't do that because there are so many mature tools to create or manipulate an XML feed already. Whereas with jsonfeed there is not much yet because it is so new. If you can hack JSON, you can hack XML as well. Even programmer novices can do this. Edit: Reworded the last sentence that could be interpreted as a persona…

Please be civil :). Avoiding ad hominem attacks is more conducive to discussion. I have already justified my preference for jsonfeed. XML has proved many times to decrease developer productivity. To my knowledge open source projects that have dropped or diminished their use of XML have only become more popular over time. Extrapolating a little bit, switching to JSON can only be a good thing.

I'm the first person to acknowledge unnecessary use of XML.

Historically, XML is infinitely better than the custom formats we had before, where might even have been in binary instead of textual (the horror). Of course they went overboard with XML (oh hello XSLT).

But RSS feeds are a prime example for a good use of XML. Standard, validated, machine-parsable, and easily extendable data structures. For example podcast feeds are just extended RSS feeds.

I don't think that projects got popular because they dropped XML but because they dropped unnecessary baggage.

Re: Time to rebuild the web?

#140

Post by pjmlp »

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.

And here I am selling consulting services doing native apps most of the time, with very occasional web gigs.
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