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The Web Began Dying in 2014 (2017)

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81–90 of 272 posts

Re: The Web Began Dying in 2014 (2017)

#81
post #7

>Internet Service Providers (ISPs) are probably soon going to dictate what traffic can or cannot arrive at people’s end devices. This was the money quote for me. FANG may kill the web, but the idea that ISPs (in my opinion some of the scummiest corporations out there) get to decide what content they serve me and what they don't has the potential to kill the Internet as we know it.

How can they even do it with encryption and CDNs everywhere? It's just not possible. The last trace is unencrypted domain name in TLS handshake and it'll be gone soon.

ISPs/governments and CDNs/clouds could start partnering/synergizing/colluding. Shake some hands and write some APIs to share user data with each other in real-time. Even make it a 3GPP standard.

Re: The Web Began Dying in 2014 (2017)

#82
post #19

People used to sit on a couch and watch TV for hours and also spent hours on the old phones talking about the most exciting shade of nail polish. Shopping is also fun. Now all that activities largely moved to Internet. Thanks to omnipresence of smartphones the hours dedicated to those activities had also increased. Of course share of general Joe Doe's website got smaller as said website does not always cater to few m…

I agree and I also believe that it's important for people that care about these things to be vocal, stand behind and support people and companies that are doing good things. Promote what they're doing to an audience that doesn't know about them, buy their products, share their work... only that way the web may "recover" and a larger percentage of internet users may actually discover and spend their time on the more independent stuff.

Re: The Web Began Dying in 2014 (2017)

#84
post #35
post #33

In addition, what's changed between 2017 and now is that back then Google was still admired by the tech people. "Google is evil" sounded ridiculous only a few years ago. I've been ridiculed by my colleagues and fellow engineers every time I said it. But I think it began to change with the introduction of AMP, a growing list of products discontinued for no apparent reason, failures of some of the new products often pr…

I like your parallel between Microsoft and Google. To me, it also implies Google probably won't ever lose the search crown directly, the same way Microsoft never lost it's OS crown, to Linux or MacOS. However, Windows is dwarfed by the Android install base.

How is Windows OS these days? I haven't used it since the early 2000s. I think the last version I used was... XP? Everyone at my work uses a MacBook.

Some of my children are in their early 20s now and have never used Windows. It has always been OSX/MacOS, iOS, Ubuntu, Android, or ChromeOS. I don't know if my kids are typical or not but if many of the rising generation don't grow up using Windows, will they want to use it when they are adults? Will Windows hold on to its OS crown?

Re: The Web Began Dying in 2014 (2017)

#85

I've always the held the somewhat cynical position that this sort of stuff would push [the interesting] people towards other, decentralized Internets. I'm a big fan of new projects like IPFS and DAT, and GNUnet had a great call to arms on their about page (which seems to have been moderated a little) [1] saying very similar things to the article. Maybe the internet of things will save us after all, by finally providi…

> [the interesting] people

I don't think those people have to leave. We just need to collectively realize that, just like with old media , there is a 'mainstream', people who mostly use the internet (the facebook crowd, who are now the bulk of the web traffic), and the more eclectic crowd who care about the internet (largely, the pre-FB mass of the internet).

These are two distinct crowds. Considering that the FB crowd contains mostly people who did not use the internet before, and don't really know its culture, it's going to take a decade or more until this mass of people is replaced by younger internet-natives. Until then, the net is living in a transitory phase

Re: The Web Began Dying in 2014 (2017)

#86
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oblivious marketing ppl bullying tech guys into doing stupid things. Such a classic. Unfortunately I have a hunch aswell that not adding GA does indeed negatively affects SEO. How would it be possible to prove/disprove this?

Experiment with your own web sites? Create two of them with and without GA, possibly with different content because Google seems to be able to detect duplication, then try to promote both (this is the difficult part of course) and compare.

It's hard to do any kind of objective comparison like this when it comes to SEO. It takes months to see any effect and even then you will have to speculate.

You could try to remove GA from half the pages on an existing site one day and see if those subsequently drop more, if you have enough pages to experiment with.

Re: The Web Began Dying in 2014 (2017)

#87
post #33

In addition, what's changed between 2017 and now is that back then Google was still admired by the tech people. "Google is evil" sounded ridiculous only a few years ago. I've been ridiculed by my colleagues and fellow engineers every time I said it. But I think it began to change with the introduction of AMP, a growing list of products discontinued for no apparent reason, failures of some of the new products often pr…

>> In addition, what's changed between 2017 and now is that back then Google was still admired by the tech people.

That’s not quite right. There are plenty of tech people who stopped admiring google much earlier (shuttering of google reader was probably what keys me into where they were ultimately heading, and I’m sure many others saw things much earlier). On the other front, G$ is neither entirely evil or good. It is a very large company. There is still good, field advancing work and valuable contributions to the open source community coming from them. One the other front, there are absolutely perverse motivations and capabilities to break the open internet coming from them.

It’s a fine line to tread. They are like the Bell labs of our generation, for better or worse. Great tech came out of it, and breaking it up will kill that great tech R&D part. Then we will have to wait for the next disruption. I’m not in a position to say which is better, but this is how I see Google position currently.

Re: The Web Began Dying in 2014 (2017)

#88
post #33

In addition, what's changed between 2017 and now is that back then Google was still admired by the tech people. "Google is evil" sounded ridiculous only a few years ago. I've been ridiculed by my colleagues and fellow engineers every time I said it. But I think it began to change with the introduction of AMP, a growing list of products discontinued for no apparent reason, failures of some of the new products often pr…

unfortunately there's no competition to Search on the horizon”. What about duckduckgo? I’ve been using it roughly for a year and i’m happy with it.

Re: The Web Began Dying in 2014 (2017)

#89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Naw, with the coming of 5G it will destroy their monopolies on the communication lines which should open the door to more local competition.

No. The modulation and time sharing built into 5G only offers 15-20% increase in bandwidth available, MHz for MHz, when compared to 4G LTE. This is not a significant increase. It is not at all like the 3-4x increases in bandwidth, MHz for MHz, that the jump from 3G modulations to 4G LTE did. Almost all of any potential increase in total speed will have to come from using new parts of the electromagnetic spectrum. To…

Smaller cells do wonders. A LimeSDR with The reach can be increased for <50$ to at least a few hundred meters radius.

Re: The Web Began Dying in 2014 (2017)

#90
post #33

In addition, what's changed between 2017 and now is that back then Google was still admired by the tech people. "Google is evil" sounded ridiculous only a few years ago. I've been ridiculed by my colleagues and fellow engineers every time I said it. But I think it began to change with the introduction of AMP, a growing list of products discontinued for no apparent reason, failures of some of the new products often pr…

"back then Google was still admired by the tech people" "Losing our support" why do you generalize 'tech people' as 'we' ? I'm in tech and I've been for 30+ years. I still admire Google. Sure some tech people don't like Google anymore or even never have. But I wouldn't generalize my case nor should you generalize yours. And it's not all or nothing: I want to believe most tech people are mature and educated enough to…

> I want to believe most tech people are mature and educated enough to not treat Google as a single block, hate everything they do or love everything they do.

Unfortunately, as long as it is a single economic entity, it is a single block. All of its parts strengthen and finance the same entity.

If the different parts want to be treated separately, they must become separated.

I consider it basic logic that if you do not want something to be under a control of a single entity, you shouldn't continue fuelling an entity whose growing power will ensure exactly that. Isn't this far less judging and more nuanced than "Google is evil"? The motto is basically just a catchy shorthand for that.

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