Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Time to rebuild the web?

oreilly.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 449 posts

Re: Time to rebuild the web?

#221

Post by loceng »

_bxg1 wrote: post #209
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.

Culture shifts with awareness, education, and well-designed solutions being available. The next "Facebook" platform that isn't designed to control or have a strategy to collect or hoard data will exist.

The layman doesn't generally know what's good for them in any specialized area, that's quite clear when we saw the level of technical understanding shown during questions to Mark Zuckerberg; it's obvious career politicians will need to eventually evolve over to successful people with strong holistic standing of all systems, with the ability to learn in depth and have strong critical thinking.

We need to do a better job as a society of developing these people, and of capturing society's attention with genuine interest and excitement, and not merely with hype and paid-for reach.

Re: Time to rebuild the web?

#222

Post by typingduck »

vlehto wrote: post #166
kristianc wrote: post #124

Earlier 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.

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.

As a EU citizen after watching all of Zuckerberg talking to Congress I was really amazed. I do not think any country in Europe would have such open discussions. Most articles I've seen have unfortunately picked soundbites to make a point, or claimed the Representatives were not tech-savvy. But for me it was really great democracy in action.

if European legislation is more supportive for small agile companies to evolve

GDPR is great, but it seems to me many of the Congresswomen/men were questioning how would legislation impact the ability of US tech companies to remain agile. I do not think we have such pro-business forces in the EU. That's why we are so far behind US and China in tech. I fear more and more legislation will make us less likely to have small agile companies.

Re: Time to rebuild the web?

#223

Post by stephengillie »

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…

This is something addressed in a side project I'm building. Websites are converted to JSON (or built as JSON), then built in the browser by a small Javascript engine.

Since sites are just JSON, they're highly portable, and sections or whole pages can be simply copied from one file to another, to add content to your site.

The project is in late alpha - I'm just now completing the in-browser editor that uploads to S3. Other than requiring fewer server calls, it uses traditional browsers, servers, networks, etc.

https://www.sparational.com/

Re: Time to rebuild the web?

#224

Post by api »

kingnight wrote: post #202
Hedja wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

Mobile as a whole is an unsolved problem for decentralized systems. The mobile revolution is and has been by far the most powerful driver of centralization in the last 10-15 years.

Mobile devices are slower, have less memory, and must consume less power than desktop, laptop, or server devices. To achieve good battery life they really need to be in an almost-off state most of the time. Add to this the fact that cellular data plans limit bandwidth and cellular networks are a lot slower than most land-line networks and you also have to be very efficient with the use of bandwidth.

This means that decentralized systems that rely on peer to peer participatory propagation of data or distributed compute just don't work well on mobile. Anything with P2P data propagation will use too much data plan and run the radio too much, shortening battery life, while anything with distributed compute will destroy battery life and turn your phone into a pocket hand warmer.

Mobile devices really are thin clients. I call them "dumb terminals for the cloud." Since the cloud is mainframe 2.0, mobile devices are the "glass TTY" (e.g. VT100) 2.0.

The best solution is probably not to fight the nature of mobile devices as thin clients but to tether them to stationary devices. But which stationary devices? Laptops are themselves mobile and are off half the time, and most people (myself included) no longer own desktops. I have a personal server but I'm a geek and a huge minority. Most people just do not own an always-on device.

Farming this out to random always-on devices is a security nightmare or at best is no better than the vertically integrated silo-ed cloud.

I see only three solutions:

(1) Create a niche for a personal always-on server type device and successfully market one to the end user. It would have to be open enough to allow the server side of 'apps' to be installed. Many have tried to do this but nothing has caught on.

(2) Create a mobile device that's designed to be a "real computer." With 5G coming the bandwidth for this might be on the way, but you'd also have to contend with battery life and heat dissipation. One avenue would be to split the CPU in two: a high-power burstable CPU and a low-power slow always-on CPU. Require the always-on parts of decentralized services to run there and as a result to be very optimized. The problem is that a mass-market mobile device is a huge undertaking. Another route might be to sell a snap-on case that carries an extra battery and also includes a mini-server CPU, RAM, storage, etc. This would make your phone a bit bulkier but if there are benefits / killer apps it could catch on.

(3) Solve the security problems inherent in appointing random stationary nodes to serve random mobile devices. This would probably involve a major innovation like fast scalable fully homomorphic encrypted virtual machines or really tough security enclave processors.

Re: Time to rebuild the web?

#225

Post by icebraining »

matthewaveryusa wrote: post #161

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…

Most people I know never plugged in their wifi router, the ISP tech did that for them.

Re: Time to rebuild the web?

#226

Post by nailer »

jacquesm wrote: post #52
nailer wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Now there are many places rather than just a few where style and functionality can be modified. Styling is done in style sheets, functionality is done in JavaScript (with the exceptions already mentioned). Trying to create, say Hotmail in 2018 would result in a much better to understand and debug app than the 1998 version was.

For a seasoned programmer, sure. But a layperson had a much better chance of understanding an early 90's webpage with the exact same content as a modern day one.

I specifically mean for a layperson.

    
      
         Hi John how's things?
    (close all the things)
Is way better than

    
      
         
         Hi John how's things?
    (close all the things)

Re: Time to rebuild the web?

#227

Post by hsribei »

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.

I think the Brave Browser and associated Basic Attention Token (BAT) are a step in the right direction. It's hard to escape ad revenue if you want to avoid paywalls, but Brave at least gives users privacy, control, and revenue share.

Re: Time to rebuild the web?

#228

Post by johnfactorial »

snarf21 wrote: post #119
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.

Agreed 1000%. Everyone wants unlimited high quality content that is also free but no ads and conditional privacy and "true" information and ... and ... and ...

... and Wikipedia and NPR are excellent if imperfect versions of that model.

Re: Time to rebuild the web?

#229

Post by laumars »

realpeopleio wrote: post #65
jasode wrote: post #51

Earlier 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,…

> Bots aren't going to pay.

If your site ever gains traction then would quickly become rife with stolen credit card details as the amount is small enough that most banks wouldn't question it (at first at least - but it's small amounts like these that attackers use to verify the card details are still valid) and those attackers would get the added bonus of growing their database of fake user accounts, thus rendering the point behind your site irrelevant.

Worse still, you'd then need to find some way to differentiate between stolen details and legitimate accounts (you will legally need to do this otherwise you'd quickly get shut down) - which means you're back into the arms race against the bad actors. This is going to cost you money (hopefully not more than you're making but that really depends on how heavily you get targeted) and will mean you'll likely end up adding counter measures that add further hurdles for legitimate customers.

And thus we're all back to square one.

I do wish you luck with your endeavor; but I don't agree with you that this solves any of the problems you're hoping to address (or at least described in this thread - if your problem was merely to earn some extra cash on the side then this might work beautifully for you).

Re: Time to rebuild the web?

#230

Post by WhiteNoiz3 »

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.

I've always felt that we need some kind of ubiquitous and low friction micro transactions for small time websites to succeed and to move away from the ad driven model. A niche blog could be successful with a small audience if each of them donates a penny or two to read new stories. That way people are directly supporting content that they find useful, rather than having to create controversy to drive ads and clicks.
Post reply on HN