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Time to rebuild the web?

oreilly.com

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Re: Time to rebuild the web?

#151

Post by oneeyedpigeon »

klokoman wrote: post #113
ElCapitanMarkla wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Because there aren't avatars and signatures. Those are essential to recognize users and also find out what they're about (signatures with links to other sites helped everyone). Also even a little personalization will be an incentive to invest a little more time in the community.

There is 'flair' which is essentially a signature. And people get creative with usernames to replicate avatars.

Re: Time to rebuild the web?

#152

Post by psyc »

kabes wrote: post #122
eddieschod wrote: post #91

"The web was done by amateurs." - Alan Kay

The context of that quote had nothing to do with what this article is about.

I really don't care, because it's important enough to repeat in any discussion about rebuilding the Web. Involve some real systems people. Design a real app platform, with multi-language support, especially compiled languages. Have a cohesive end to end development story.

Re: Time to rebuild the web?

#153

Post by JustSomeNobody »

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.

There's a whole world of software out there besides the web. I know that the context of this discussion was web, but I really think people forget that that's not all there is to software.

Re: Time to rebuild the web?

#154

Post by Hedja »

cdata wrote: post #120
Hedja wrote: post #23

It 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…

It seemed to me that the OP was making a distinctly different suggestion: the real challenge is offering a better UX. Emerging distributed tech won't fix a UX problem just because it happens to be technologically sophisticated (he calls out TOR, but I think he is making a general comment here). Instead, he asks, why not spend some effort giving older tech like RSS a better UX? I'm inclined to agree, but on the other…

I would argue that Beaker is providing a better UX for the web while solving the centralised nature of it. Its API allows websites to provide interfaces for creating and modifying websites tailored for specific audiences, owned by the user.

So you can have your own RSS subscriptions in a Dat, a feed reader in another Dat, click a button on a website to subscribe to it and add it to your Dat. The Feed reader can keep track of what you've read and store it in its own Dat or a different Dat (if you want client/data separation). Your mobile phone can sync to your Dat(s) so you have Desktop/Mobile sync all in a single place.

I've not tried this, but I don't see why it wouldn't work.

Re: Time to rebuild the web?

#155

Post by dec0dedab0de »

dagaci wrote: post #130
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…

There is some irony in painting the major content delivery platforms in the 90s as bad actors when in actuality much of 90s media (like BBC) had much higher standards than so much of what comes via the web today. Today we don't "pay" for quality content. Today content simply has authority if a lot of people who think like "me" read it _else_ -1.

There is some irony in painting the major content delivery platforms in the 90s as bad actors when in actuality much of 90s media (like BBC) had much higher standards than so much of what comes via the web today.

I don't think that really means anything. There is so much junk, that anything that honestly attempts to be good is better than "so much of what comes via the web today."

Re: Time to rebuild the web?

#156

Post by JackFr »

ElCapitanMarkla wrote: post #99
freehunter wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

sigh ...newsgroups...

I remember when I knew everyone on rec.sports.basketball.college and then the damn web came along, and everyone was on the internet.

Re: Time to rebuild the web?

#157

Post by hnal943 »

gregwtmtno wrote: post #134
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.

The pre-google internet also had a discovery problem. Remember webrings? I think OP is right that the decentralized internet is the same as in the "golden era".

Re: Time to rebuild the web?

#158

Post by peterwwillis »

I just came back from China. I could not message my loved ones, check my mail, update my social media, or listen to internet radio. This was not Facebook's fault, it was not even China's fault (though they were the ones blocking me). It was the fault of the way we use existing technology.

So Facebook is banned. Fine. That shouldn't stop me from being able to at least send data somewhere that will end up at Facebook. And I should have been able to send an e-mail that bounced through intermediary relays without connecting to Gmail's servers.

A lot of the web that _could_ be peer to peer isn't. And it's not because it is difficult, but because we simply haven't decided to use it that way. Email is the oldest, most successful distributed decentralized application. It does not require complex consensus. It does not use distributed databases. And it just works. You don't even need to be connected to the end server. There's no reason the web couldn't work like this. It is feasible today.

On top of this, where your web content is stored should be simple: it should be stored on a device in your pocket, and cached and distributed on servers around the world, just like email already is. Again, no complex algorithms are needed for this. A very simple design could accomplish this with existing technology, and perhaps an extension to a protocol's RFC and an update to some core software.

Re: Time to rebuild the web?

#159

Post by wsy »

It is somewhat ironic to see such an article coming from the VP of a large publisher. How can he seriously suggest to use Feedly as tool for finding relevant and high-quality content? Where one of a publisher's main services is to separate the wheat from the chaff, and to guide the reader to content useful for them.

The whole issue I see with these articles is that they view the Web mainly from the content producer side. However, the majority of Web use is consuming content. And also the problem of the few walled gardens is on the consuming side. Everybody can nowadays put content on the Web with ease outside of these gardens. It is just hard to get attention for that content.

So if you really want to make the Web more distributed again, you need to come up with models for distributed relevance assessment, spam filtering, quality checking, etc. Work on a new 'Web infrastructure' totally misses the point.

(context: I have worked in P2P research for a while)

Re: Time to rebuild the web?

#160

Post by JacobJans »

icc97 wrote: post #67
jen729w wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 credentia…

I run a popular forum in a certain niche -- and have played around with discourse as an alternative. It doesn't seem to solve any important issues with growing a community. Additionally, it is rather difficult to customize, making it even harder to solve problems specific to my community. I am not a professional coder, but I can hack pretty much anything I need into my php based forum.

Though, maybe discourse has gotten better since I tried it a couple of years ago.

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