The Web We Lost
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The Web We Lost
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Re: The Web We Lost
#2I don't understand why he thinks the pendulum is swinging back. Is there any particular evidence of that?
Re: The Web We Lost
#3I don't understand why he thinks the pendulum is swinging back. Is there any particular evidence of that?
Um, did you read the article? There's tons of good points in there. Some of them might be a bit exaggerated though .(like the oembed one, was that ever popular?)
Re: The Web We Lost
#4I agree with Anil 110% that the Web he's talking about was, in many, many ways, a Better Web than the one we have today.
The problem is that it's worse than the one we have today in the only way that most people care about: it's harder. To participate, it expected you to know how to do a bunch of things that seem trivial to tech folks but frighteningly complicated to everybody else. You had to buy a domain. You had to choose a Web host. You had to know how to connect the domain to the Web host. You had to choose the right software to do what you wanted to do. You had to install that software, and configure it properly.
The reason hosted services became popular is because they let you skip all that stuff. You fill out a form and you're up and running. Someone else worries about all that other stuff for you. This makes those services accessible in a way that the Web of 2000 was not.
Of course, to get that accessibility, the hosted services make you give up a lot of things. You lose access to your raw data. You lose your privacy. You lose the ability to change vendors if the one you're on turns evil.
But to non-technical people, those losses aren't obvious. They don't understand what they've lost until losing those things turns around and bites them. It's like DRM: people don't understand why DRM-encumbered music downloads are bad until their iPod dies and they want to move their iTunes-bought music to an Android phone. "What do you mean I can't do that?" is what you hear the moment the penny drops. But before then, they don't understand the risk.
This is what will need to be overcome to make tomorrow's Web like yesterday's was: it'll need to be as easy for people to use as today's is, or you'll need to educate the entire world about why they should put up with it not being that easy. Otherwise people will keep on blindly stumbling into the heavily-advertised walled gardens, not realizing that's what they're doing until the day they decide they want to leave, and can't.
Re: The Web We Lost
#5I agree with Anil 110% that the Web he's talking about was, in many, many ways, a Better Web than the one we have today. The problem is that it's worse than the one we have today in the only way that most people care about: it's harder. To participate, it expected you to know how to do a bunch of things that seem trivial to tech folks but frighteningly complicated to everybody else. You had to buy a domain. You had t…
I strongly prefer the web of today to the web of ten years ago because those barriers to entry prevented most people from doing all the cool stuff Anil talks about. So it was possible to have all those better connections, but it didn't happen much.
One way or another, services would've arised that would've tied it all together for the non-technical. I don't think we lost anything more than a potential to have a "better web" that never would've been realized anyway. (And many of those things are still possible, just even less worth the effort now that there are entrenched networks.)
Re: The Web We Lost
#6Funny that he says all this then has a Facebook comments box at the bottom of the page.
Don't get me wrong, there's nothing wrong with that IMO- people are far more likely to have their real names on Facebook, and thus leave sensible comments rather than total drivel. But it makes a point that he doesn't include in the article- sometimes these centralised information stores can be useful.
Re: The Web We Lost
#7I don't understand why he thinks the pendulum is swinging back. Is there any particular evidence of that?
You're right, he doesn't specifically give support for the idea idea we're recovering these values and capabilities.
But I think he's alluding to people, as they gain experience and perspective, becoming aware of the limits of proprietary platforms, and investigating (or rediscovering) other possibilities.
Re: The Web We Lost
#8After all that, I can't comment on the piece with OpenID or any other service I actually use. Facebook, Yahoo, Hotmail, or AOL? Really?
The way out of this mess is for people with loud voices to support efforts like Tent.io, open, decentralized, standardized protocols that don't lock us into corporate silos: https://tent.io/
Re: The Web We Lost
#9Maybe I have changed, or maybe the Internet has changed, but I used to meet people on the internet. I used to make friends online, and some of these friendships gradually mutated into "offline" friendships. There used to be message boards, IRC and web chats where people would talk, form groups, become friends or enemies.
People used to have blogs on livejournal or other services, some were trying to create content, write interesting posts. I met a lot of new people through that medium too.
But now everybody is locked inside the narrow bubble of their own social network. People don't become friends on facebook - they usually "friend" their IRL friends. You can't fit a good meaningful post into a tweet. And you can't have a normal discussion without sane comment threads like on livejournal - and I haven't seen that on any of the popular social sites.
That's also a part of the web we lost.
Re: The Web We Lost
#10Looks like the author is wearing rose-tinted glasses to me.
While much of the observations may be true, the web is still a far richer and more valuable resource than it was five or ten years ago.