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Time to rebuild the web?

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Re: Time to rebuild the web?

#201

Post by ryandrake »

randomsearch wrote: post #103
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. Another anecdote: a few days ago my Mum mentioned she was going to cut down on Facebook and move to other social media in light of what's been happening. And she's about as non-technical a user as you get.

> cut down on Facebook and move to other social media

Thanks for sharing, but I wonder if she realizes this isn’t going to help...

Re: Time to rebuild the web?

#202

Post by kingnight »

Hedja wrote: post #154
cdata wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

How does a mobile phone sync dats? The main drawback I see currently with beaker is their is no mobile version (for iPhone)

Re: Time to rebuild the web?

#203

Post by always_good »

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…

That's what https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ezboard was where your username worked across all forums.

https://www.proboards.com/ is still around but doesn't have global accounts as far as I can remember.

I'm not convinced there's much payoff waiting for you if you were to create such a system.

I think that Reddit's format is so popular because you get to just scroll a stream of provocative/vetted headlines. Even the comments are geared in a way where you're scrolling a stream of one-off provocative comments. There is no long form conversation over time. Everything is ephemeral.

By the way, kind of interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ezboard#Technology

Re: Time to rebuild the web?

#204

Post by komali2 »

Mononokay wrote: post #200
vlehto wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

GDPR is a bit heavy handed where it counts, and generally ends up as a net-loss. The US definitely has its problems, but as long as there's still an ISP in the Valley who upholds Net Neutrality, development is still probably going to happen there. Asia will replace it, if anything.

Yo, I live in the Valley, I'm not aware of any actual alternative to Comcast. Sonic isn't available in my neighborhood, I can't do the dish on the roof one because of landlord rules, and fiber options aren't available in my neighborhood.

Re: Time to rebuild the web?

#205

Post by Mononokay »

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.

Just pick smaller subreddits. Of course if you stick to one with half a million users, you're not going to have a good time - the Facebookization of the site has been extremely evident in recent years, but smaller subs are still more or less independent forums.

Pick a few niches and make a new account that only subscribes to small subreddits about them; it really does put a community feel to it all.

Re: Time to rebuild the web?

#206

Post by JBReefer »

randomsearch wrote: post #105

I don't believe the problem lies in any technology. We don't need blockchain, it's not JavaScript minification, it isn't the centralisation of services that are the problem. It's the business model. No amount of tech is going to change that. If you want to change the situation, start social media businesses with a different business model.

Totally agree. It's ads and the attention economy. They thrive on controversy - it's the psychological version of the banner ads in the 90s, but 10,000x more effective.

Re: Time to rebuild the web?

#207

Post by isostatic »

robin_reala wrote: post #41
nickjj wrote: post #9

It'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.

Microsoft got in on the walled gardens with MSN, and that wasn't until 95. I think it's fair to say the first half of the 90s was walled gardens, although by 1995 holes were opening up. A whole generation (or two) wanted to email Terry Wogan and see the webcam, which started in 1996. By the time freeserve launched in 1998 the walls had crumbled -- it was a very fast moving time in the UK - over the course of 5 years we went from a few people on dial-up compuserve to almost the whole country knowing what the internet was, even if they didn't realize it's potential.

I'm not sure the internet is much different now than it was in 2013, or even 2008. I suppose the accessibility (always on phones), and the increase in online media (video/audio streaming as the norm) is the biggest change from 08 to 13, but last 5 years?

Re: Time to rebuild the web?

#208

Post by candu »

kodablah wrote: post #183
vlehto wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> EU is about to enforce GDPR [...] if European legislation is more supportive for small agile companies Surely you see the contradiction there. > Currently internet is very U.S. centric because most of the big players are located there. That could change if [...] That's not just a coincidence and I don't believe it's any kind of first-mover advantage. It's about the environment in which you operate and passing more…

Not necessarily a contradiction - GDPR could have many possible effects; it's too early to claim that these effects will disproportionately harm small companies.

One possibility, of course, is that larger companies will have more resources to tackle GDPR compliance, and thus be better able to respond effectively than small companies. However, it's also possible that, by taking privacy / security seriously from day one and storing the minimal set of user data needed to operate, a smaller company will have a distinct advantage over some BigCo that must now migrate sprawling, inter-tangled distributed systems never designed for GDPR compliance. After all, that small company now has a compelling legal reason to avoid feature / data warehousing bloat and save their limited engineering resources, whereas the larger company most certainly has that bloat baked deeply into their stack due to years and years of "Big Data" hype.

Re: Time to rebuild the web?

#209

Post by _bxg1 »

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 more a question of culture. Theoretically, yes, nothing has been lost since the 90s. All those technologies still exist. But culturally, the norms of the web have shifted. The proposal is to create technologies that encourage/empower regular people (people who don't read hacker news) to make a cultural shift back to the web's original vision.
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