I attribute the issues the web is having today with one simple fact: We never democratized home servers. If routers came out with home-server capabilities that were standardized for data transfers we would not be here today. Simple as that. Is that to say that adoption of home-servers is impossible because users would have never adopted them? That's a non-technical issue I frankly have no idea what the answer is. I'd like to think that if people of all walks are capable of plugging in a wifi router and logging in/signing up to social media websites, they would also be capable of managing their home server (as long as the UI was nice enough.) but I have no way of knowing if that's true or not.
Time to rebuild the web?
161–170 of 449 posts
Re: Time to rebuild the web?
#162When 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…
There is nothing wrong with Facebook. Its a legitimate use of the web. We just need to tweak the advertising model to disable micro targeting by both advertisers and platforms. Google is a far worse offender here. This will kill the incentives for surveillance and stalking at source.
> We just need to tweak the advertising model to disable their entire business model.
FTFY
Re: Time to rebuild the web?
#163These 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.
> until ISPs start offering subsidized plans for Facebook, Gmail, Spotify, Twitter, and expensive plans for everything else.
Is priced content worse than the current situation, where services are monetized exclusively by essentially running malware on the user's machine?
Re: Time to rebuild the web?
#164I 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.…
This was not Facebook's fault, it was not even China's fault
Absolute shite. It's 100% China's fault. Given the widespread, damaging, lingering ramifications of the lack of security on the Internet in general, the absolute last thing we should be doing is promoting the idea that this information and these connections should be less secure.
I am baffled that anybody could even propose this idea.
Re: Time to rebuild the web?
#165I 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.…
SSL isn't some slap-on after the fact that does nothing - it renders traffic unreadable to anyone in the middle, and unalterable. The fact that China deems any content it cannot read as immediately forbidden says way more about China than it does about "our current state of tech".
Re: Time to rebuild the web?
#166These 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.
EU is about to enforce GDPR. Net neutrality seems to be American problem, while rest of the world is moving to the opposite direction.
Which economy has better prospects in the long run? Currently internet is very U.S. centric because most of the big players are located there. That could change if European legislation is more supportive for small agile companies to evolve.
Re: Time to rebuild the web?
#167> You can't become a web developer by viewing Facebook's source; but you might by looking at a new site that isn't weighed down by all that CSS and JavaScript.
I agree that web bloat is a problem, but why is it the responsibility of web developers to teach users of their site how to code? Is there any other area of software development where that's the case? Even major FOSS projects aren't designed to easily enable new developers to "copy the code they want".
Re: Time to rebuild the web?
#168It's weird that the author mentions the 90s and how the web was not meant to be walled gardens, but then decided to omit AOL from the story. AOL was one big ass walled garden back in the 1990s. It was pretty popular back then. The funny thing is, back then, it was popular for 2 groups of people. First were younger kids who wanted to stir up trouble on the network (AOHell, etc.). The second were old people. My uncle i…
That’s a pretty US-centric take on things though. AOL didn’t exist in any great form in the UK certainly, and the walled gardens that did (BBSes, CIX, Compuserve etc) pretty much evaporated by the mid-90s.
I vividly remember how big AOL was in Germany in the 1990s. It was that (the easy option) - or the rather complicated "traditional ISPs" which required no small amount of technical expertise to get to work.
AOL only really died when they decided to block port 25 to make you use their webmailer.
Re: Time to rebuild the web?
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> until ISPs start offering subsidized plans for Facebook, Gmail, Spotify, Twitter, and expensive plans for everything else. Is priced content worse than the current situation, where services are monetized exclusively by essentially running malware on the user's machine?
Those are two separate things. OP is talking about the pipe being monetized. That is an extra charge we will pay just to get to the sites that then monetize via ads or gathering our data.
Re: Time to rebuild the web?
#170These 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.
> Everyone is being nudged to where there's money to be made.
This is an ass-backward way of looking at what actually happens. People (you, me, CEOs of large corporations) are the entire system. You and I want a thing, there is a demand, smart people notice that demand and fill it. Folk flock to the product that satisfies their demands.
I admit there is clever marketing that manipulates our ape brains in very effective ways, perhaps that nudges us toward one thing over another, but there is legitimate demand beyond the marketing.
Then there are communities and marketplaces. These products are largely successful because of a demand for an agreed meeting place to share ideas, sell things, exchange messages. You don't need to be 'nudged' toward these places, they just happen to be objectively very useful places because everyone else agrees they are.
Money being made is a byproduct of the success of these places. I am so tired of people looking at big successful corporations as somehow being existential to an otherwise utopian perfect system. Regular people give power to corporations by patronizing them, it's as simple as that. Most-always no one is forcing anyone to go to one place over another, we almost always have a choice. We need to recognize that as consumers we should take responsibility for the companies we promote to the forefront. If you don't like marketing or large corporations, reject them! Take responsibility for how you spend your money, we have the power.