Time to rebuild the web?

This works fine for a business that sells direct on the internet, or a company that advertises themselves there (like my BigCo that has a website so people can learn about it, find people to contact, etc.), etc. It doesn't work so well for a company whose product is intangible, most notably news companies. How is NY Times going to stay in business if they don't make a profit on their website? In this age, people don't really want dead-tree newspapers any more. Also, sites that don't really have a product can't survive by selling stuff. Reddit, HN, etc. are good examples here; how is HN making enough money to operate itself? Basically, it isn't, it's run through goodwill by a VC company (though it might also be a form of advertising in and of itself). Smaller, more specialized discussion forum sites are also like this, probably to a greater extent: unless they're being financed by some sponsor (which is then likely going to advertise on it directly), they need a way to pay for themselves, and that usually means ads.

Interesting idea and project. The browser's UI is very different... and lacks some (most) customization options... I spent a long time looking for a way to increase the font-size, for example. (Not all of us are accustomed to squinting at phones.) Preferences to set: I thought that was hiding, but it seems to be missing. Say what?

After an hour toying with the interface: technically it looks to have a lot of possibilities. I have serious concerns about the lack of transparency ... unlike most browsers today ... what's going on in security, ad-blocking, tracking? I found no way to tell.

In sum, cool project. The potential is clear. I can't imagine anyone non-technical not running away on first sight. It's more opaque than Ello, even. More like an oscilloscope than a mobile!

Absolutely nailed it. Although I'd go further, and say this cuts to the core of human nature, and perhaps speaks to how fundamentally bad actors can lead to a general degradation of behaviour and standards across the board. So much behaviour in business is driven by the feeling that you have to do something because everybody else is, especially in industries that are in a downward spiral already (publishing!).

It follows standards that you need to know if you want to be able to easily hack it.

Which means learning standards.

Ruby On Rails is really powerful, but it is not easy to start hacking on without a fair amount of base knowledge. In addition, discourse uses a lot of javascript, which makes it even more difficult to modify. The barrier to entry, in terms of creating a custom template, is quite high. You need to learn quite a few things before getting started.

On the other hand, hacking something like a Wordpress template takes almost zero knowledge. You can just start poking at things.

The lack of a relatively simple templating system is a big drawback in Discourse. Especially if you're not a rails developer, and you're running a community forum as a hobby.

I know how to program because of software such as phpbb and Wordpress, which are pretty much hacked together. Maybe because they're hacks, they have easier entry points.

I do think the Discourse people have different goals than I'm talking about here, however. If their goal was to make software that was easy to modify, hack, and deploy, they would have made different choices.

Feed authentication would allow for a variety of potential services business models.

    - Paywalls: Whether subscribing to a newspaper to supporting a blog through
      Patreon, it lets user directly pay for content provided through RSS.

    - Customized curation services: Whether manually curated by an editor, or
      using algorithms, you could build a business around providing content to
      individual users.

    - Social network integration: Instead of joining one or two massive Social
      networks, I could be involved in dozens of small, focused ones, all
      collected in a single RSS reader.