The problem is that, IMO, centralization of the internet is simply the natural course. Especially when people seem to care so little. Centralization is cheaper, easier to monetize, easier to control, easier to update and upgrade. That's why people prefer Discord to IRC, that's why people prefer Slack to SMTP or Jabber, that's why for many people these days the distinction between git and GitHub is blurry. I suspect t…
IMO one if the biggest blunders of Moz was not having had the vision to champion the open web by becoming an alternative monitization platform like Patreon. The biggest reason why the open web failed and will continue to fail is not because of aggregators like Google, Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter but rather because there's simply no way for people to vote with their wallets. Moz was uniquely positioned to drive such…
Web by Google (TM)
121–130 of 496 posts
Re: Web by Google (TM)
#122A good idea would be to state fund Mozilla.
Re: Web by Google (TM)
#123Chromium should be taken away from Google and put in the hands of some truly neutral non-profit entity.
Re: Web by Google (TM)
#124> Google’s capture of the Web is a fait accompli. Only legislation will keep the World Wide Web from finally becoming Web by Google (TM). I really hope it's not the case, because then Google will cancel it. /s Search is probably something where there could be creative use of the p2p decentralized technologies. If when performing a search I could ask my contacts to look in their history if they have something matching…
I'm working in an architecture for a semi-decentralized, some-of-the-web crawler and search engine to try to address some of the problems with Google. Basically affinity groups maintain lists of links (sort of like social bookmarking) that are the crawl root urls. Crawling comes from Common Crawl plus updates for recency. Groups can pool resources to run their own indexes and receive a share of the profits from text…
Is there anything that I can follow? I'm very interested in this -- I was considering making something similar myself.
Re: Web by Google (TM)
#125A lot of talk in this article about Google capturing the whole web, all valid points, but I find the Facebook walled garden even more terrifying. I see people now, often in online school parent groups I'm a part of, etc. who cannot even use email anymore, who don't use web pages at all, they get all their information through Facebook groups and Facebook, and only talk through Facebook messenger or sometimes SMS. E-ma…
Couldn't you have said the same thing 20 years ago and used "AOL" instead? There seems to be a large group of users who consistently fit this trend and the company names just get swapped occasionally
Yep that is to be expected when for a large part of the population the built-in browser is the Internet, and for many of those persons, AOL, FB are what Internet means on their universum.
Re: Web by Google (TM)
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
The concept of AMP makes a lot of sense. It does speed up browsing and prevents sites from being terrible. The prloblem is that the implementation isn't great and it's Google driven. But the concept is sound.
If by 'the concept' you mean 'be faster', then yea. But that's not much of an endorsement of AMP.
I don't know if you remember the mobile news web around 2015 or so.
Content would furiously jump around as the page was overcome by advalanches, videos on autoplay would pop up in all the corners, as you scrolled, the page would often break at paragraphs as even more videos would load, secretly sliding in the content like some infestation. If you tried to highlight text to copy, you'd see interstitial popups of yet again more ads and then discover your clipboard was populated with ad after ad.
Then when you copied the URL, it was full of fingerprints and UID hashes from all these providers so it was hundreds of excess bytes, usually leaking personal information. You'd have to chop it off or just give up and share the extra tracking garbage at the end of the url
And this was essentially all of the local news sites. They were indistinguishable from the click here to download virus typosquatting sites. It was horrific. Often loading an article would lock up and crash the browser, it was totally completely unusable. This was the post-flash web that we all desperately wanted, here ya go!
I really don't like amp, but it has fixed that problem so effectively that you have to remind people in detail that it actually once existed.
Re: Web by Google (TM)
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s also not 100% Google fault. Chrome was needed to move the web forward when it was launched. And are they now suppose to make a less good browser to help competitors emerge? I’m not happy with the current situation and would hate to see Mozilla fail, but I can’t fault Google for the current situation.
That's like saying it's OK for someone to invade Poland because they got the trains to run on time.
What... No that is not same. Mozilla failing isn’t Googles fault, the opposite in fact, the’ve kept Mozilla alive for years.
Google misusing their position to dictate web standards, that’s Googles fault. But Google-centric standards didn’t cause Mozillas current problems. Poor management did.
Re: Web by Google (TM)
#128The problem is that, IMO, centralization of the internet is simply the natural course. Especially when people seem to care so little. Centralization is cheaper, easier to monetize, easier to control, easier to update and upgrade. That's why people prefer Discord to IRC, that's why people prefer Slack to SMTP or Jabber, that's why for many people these days the distinction between git and GitHub is blurry. I suspect t…
That’s why we need a regulator. The old AT&T monopoly was dismantled. Based on talking to IBM insiders, IBM actively neutered itself fearing a similar fate in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
But then, with Bush Sr and then Clinton, the rules changed; Microsoft started playing the political game, and essentially avoided a similar fate.
There is no antitrust enforcement anymore. Breaking a company once indeed only buys a little time. But getting regulation workiNg again WILL work, and will likely include breaking them.
If only the US would vote in politicians that cared about competition. I can’t find any amongst either presidential or congressional candidates, though.
Re: Web by Google (TM)
#129A lot of talk in this article about Google capturing the whole web, all valid points, but I find the Facebook walled garden even more terrifying. I see people now, often in online school parent groups I'm a part of, etc. who cannot even use email anymore, who don't use web pages at all, they get all their information through Facebook groups and Facebook, and only talk through Facebook messenger or sometimes SMS. E-ma…
Couldn't you have said the same thing 20 years ago and used "AOL" instead? There seems to be a large group of users who consistently fit this trend and the company names just get swapped occasionally
AOL at least was pretty strictly a US phenomenon. Here in Canada it wasn't a thing, and it wasn't a thing in Europe or Asia. FB's tendril's are international.
What's worse is it's very walled off, it's not really searchable or properly indexed. FB's search facilities are a joke, such as they are, but they are only available to FB users. Information that goes in there is basically available to FB and to nobody else.
Re: Web by Google (TM)
#130A lot of talk in this article about Google capturing the whole web, all valid points, but I find the Facebook walled garden even more terrifying. I see people now, often in online school parent groups I'm a part of, etc. who cannot even use email anymore, who don't use web pages at all, they get all their information through Facebook groups and Facebook, and only talk through Facebook messenger or sometimes SMS. E-ma…
Couldn't you have said the same thing 20 years ago and used "AOL" instead? There seems to be a large group of users who consistently fit this trend and the company names just get swapped occasionally
No, because most uses back then were not integrated in internet. Parents at school did not rely solely on AOL to get news, communicate with each other, etc.