101–110 of 449 posts
Unlike in the past, people don’t build websites for fun anymore. I remember I used to visit topsite ranking sites just to explore what other had built. Nowadays, it’s all templated design hosted in a walled garden.
This article is more of a longing for the past than any concrete idea on how the web should be rebuilt. Not only that, but it sounds like the ramblings of someone who isn't merely longing for the past but stuck in it. Is not being able to copy code from Facebook using view source killing the web? Of course not. If you are just starting out there are more resources available now than ever. And I hope to God we never h…
My thoughts exactly. It's constant complaining and referencing old tech.
Right now there are two webs and they're interwoven to the point that it has become hard to see, but there is the 'web of applications' and the 'web of information'. There is no particular reason why the second should be implemented using the tools for the first.
When I ask friends and family who use Facebook daily, privacy and security never come up as pain points. Media is blowing everything out of proportion. Replacing Facebook with RSS or Feedly is nonsense. My friends and family have no idea what those are. Facebook makes it easy for people to connect with old friends and family members through active human interactions: like this, follow her, read that. By doing so you…
Another anecdote: a few days ago my Mum mentioned she was going to cut down on Facebook and move to other social media in light of what's been happening. And she's about as non-technical a user as you get.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There were some bad actors in the 90s, but the scale is different now. And the effect is now raised to the level of concern that elections are affected. Some people are even talking about how it is threatening democracy. We don't think an arms race of technology with the bots and bad actors is going to work long-term. We need to change the economics so that bad actors go broke trying to act bad, while real people hav…
> There were some bad actors in the 90s, but the scale is different now. It depends on what you're measuring. Take trolls for example; is the proportion actually any bigger? Sure there are more trolls but there's also more users on the whole so you'd expect the number of trolls to also grow while the percentage might remain the same. > And the effect is now raised to the level of concern that elections are affected.…
That's how RealPerson.io is different. It's pay to play so it doesn't try to out-tech the bad actors, and so it doesn't make it harder for the good actors.
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.
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 guys colonized the medium, so it no longer feels like the web is "a cacophony of different sites and voices" to quote the article. But in fact, we're in the same situation: big guys with money and loads of content on one side and small guys with communities on the other side.
The web as it is today doesn't prevent you from spreading your ideas to the world on your very own server... And websites like reddit and hacker news are great amplifiers of small voices.
I would probably never have read this article if it had been published in the 90s. Since it's #1 on HN, perhaps 50k people have read it today! The way I use the web feels very much like the 90s: a few aggregation sites, a lot of excellent content written by independent guys, links between them...
Who cares about the centralized internet when the internet that we've loved since the 90s is still there and thriving?
> The web was never supposed to be a few walled gardens of concentrated content owned by Facebook, YouTube [...] What are the numbers on views of original Youtube content vs. views of clips of material that infringes copyright? My guess is that the latter still makes up a significant portion of clicks. If someone makes a serious P2P alternative to Youtube, not only will infringing content be there-- such content's ex…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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,…
> But a user might pay $9/year for all websites Nope. Not going to happen. A HN user might, but regular user? No way in hell. Honestly I'd be surprised if you managed to win them over with $1/year or whatever the card minimum TX cost is. Even I was blindsided by it with a "wooah, whats this about" and I'm happy paying up for apps etc just to test them once. I thought I'd accidentally signed up to the website side of…
Incidentally, this is how RealPeople.io (https://realpeople.io) is able to have no ads because the revenue from RealPerson.io subsidizes it since they're owned by the same company.
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…
Any recommendation on how to make time series data available via Dat or IPFS is highly appreciated.
There will be base data of different systems and experiment data from experiments running in those environments. So far I have no concrete idea on how to segmentize and make available the data in a sensible way.
I agree that having a few walled gardens is a problem, but having more smaller walled gardens probably won't change much. Bad actors can still sign up, post, spam, harass, etc. on several small walled gardens. What we need is a way to better identify and handle bad actors. The internet in the 90s seemed more fun and more open. Perhaps it's because the only people really participating were not interested in abusing si…