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What Is the Small Web?

ar.al

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Re: What Is the Small Web?

#101

Post by kgraves »

kanox wrote: post #99
kgraves wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Come on now, "user" as in "computer user" was a term in use since long before the web. The "computer user" term was true back then, but I am on board with Aral's definition. But now in today's world, those "computer users" are: + Addicted to social media whilst those companies control information and spread fake news. + Continuously pay for products like Netflix, YouTube and Amazon whilst those companies continue t…

> Continuously pay for products like Netflix, YouTube and Amazon whilst those companies continue to 'recommend' you stuff you don't need. > Having companies spying on them and implementing dark UX patterns by A/B testing; all for sake of keeping you 'hooked' onto their products. This applies to all commercial products.

That don't care about your privacy.

Re: What Is the Small Web?

#102

Post by dafoex »

imgabe wrote: post #18

I'm generally on board with the sentiment, but some of this rhetoric is a bit much, even for me. > The Big Web has “users” – a term Silicon Valley has borrowed from drug dealers to describe the people they addict to their services and exploit. Come on now, "user" as in "computer user" was a term in use since long before the web.

Furthermore, "user" doesn't imply addiction. I hung a picture the other day, I used a screwdriver to do it. I'm not addicted to screwdrivers or hanging pictures, I'm just a user of a tool.

Re: What Is the Small Web?

#103

Post by gonehome »

kgraves wrote: post #54
gonehome wrote: post #23

I think this is a good idea and I think making it easy for people to host their own services is valuable. [0] It’s also been tried a few times with little success (sandstorm.io). I think the problem is deeper, modern infrastructure is messy to run, it’s hard to configure, and every thing has to be specifically tweaked to work. Something that works for regular users will require extensive tooling to be useful and will…

Urbit is extremely cryptic but I do like the idea as long as they don't include any 'blockchain' nonsense.

The blockchain is only used for handling the IDs, but the core project functionality does not rely on a blockchain beyond that.

Re: What Is the Small Web?

#104

Post by ISaIF73 »

ForHackernews wrote: post #96
ISaIF73 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Urbit stack is ~30k lines of code, that's low enough to be grasped by a single person. What's hard is learning form scratch completely new platform, but that's deliberate and is not such a problem if it manages to deliver what it promises. Somehow I feel that accusations of being ideological come from people, who themselves are ideologically oposed to Yarvins work and fail to consider Urbits network protocol purely f…

From the last time this came up on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22859156 > the core of the whole system (the Nock language) has "loobeans" instead of booleans in which 1 represents false and 0 represents true at which point I nope'd out pretty hard. >> Being contrarian is not the same as being clever, and this is very much not clever.

Do you think this convention would be that hard to get used to, so that the whole system should be disuqallified?

Re: What Is the Small Web?

#105

Post by gonehome »

ForHackernews wrote: post #96
ISaIF73 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Urbit stack is ~30k lines of code, that's low enough to be grasped by a single person. What's hard is learning form scratch completely new platform, but that's deliberate and is not such a problem if it manages to deliver what it promises. Somehow I feel that accusations of being ideological come from people, who themselves are ideologically oposed to Yarvins work and fail to consider Urbits network protocol purely f…

From the last time this came up on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22859156 > the core of the whole system (the Nock language) has "loobeans" instead of booleans in which 1 represents false and 0 represents true at which point I nope'd out pretty hard. >> Being contrarian is not the same as being clever, and this is very much not clever.

Yeah, no disagreement from me there. That bit is dumb and he admitted it was a mistake to do that.

It doesn’t mean that everything is bad.

I was skeptical initially too, but was curious enough to check it out. I was surprised when I did.

It's a small community and product is still in pre-widespread adoption stage (though far enough along to be useful for people to play with): https://urbit.org/understanding-urbit/roadmap/

My quick overview here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23397725

Re: What Is the Small Web?

#106

Post by gonehome »

ForHackernews wrote: post #27
gonehome wrote: post #23

I think this is a good idea and I think making it easy for people to host their own services is valuable. [0] It’s also been tried a few times with little success (sandstorm.io). I think the problem is deeper, modern infrastructure is messy to run, it’s hard to configure, and every thing has to be specifically tweaked to work. Something that works for regular users will require extensive tooling to be useful and will…

Oh god no. Urbit is not less complex or easier. It's piling on all kinds of extra superfluous nonsense in service of an ideological project, not for technical reasons.

As long as a complex system has the complexity abstracted away it can still be simple for users.

The modern (non-Urbit) tech stack is extremely complex, but a lot of that (though not enough) is hidden from the end user.

In a lot of important ways the Urbit stack is a lot less complex than the existing modern tech stack, but it’s still early on and the abstraction for regular users is still in progress. Being less complex than the modern tech stack (by designing from the feet up by first principles) is one of the main reasons the project exists.

It’s just rarely done anymore in modern computing. It happened more in the 60s-70s when people would experiment.

I understand the skepticism - I think it’s a cool project, but there’s still work to do before it’ll win over average users.

Luckily the project is invested in long-term planning and design (with solid short term execution and feature shipping/iteration) so it’s improving quickly.

Re: What Is the Small Web?

#107

Post by rrrrrrrrrrrryan »

imgabe wrote: post #18

I'm generally on board with the sentiment, but some of this rhetoric is a bit much, even for me. > The Big Web has “users” – a term Silicon Valley has borrowed from drug dealers to describe the people they addict to their services and exploit. Come on now, "user" as in "computer user" was a term in use since long before the web.

The term "user" didn't become ubiquitous until after the people using the software were no longer "customers."

Implying that Silicon Valley borrowed this term from drug dealers is kind of silly, but the tech industry's adoption of this strange term does tie into the author's main point.

Re: What Is the Small Web?

#108

Post by DiggyJohnson »

kanox wrote: post #99
kgraves wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Come on now, "user" as in "computer user" was a term in use since long before the web. The "computer user" term was true back then, but I am on board with Aral's definition. But now in today's world, those "computer users" are: + Addicted to social media whilst those companies control information and spread fake news. + Continuously pay for products like Netflix, YouTube and Amazon whilst those companies continue t…

> Continuously pay for products like Netflix, YouTube and Amazon whilst those companies continue to 'recommend' you stuff you don't need. > Having companies spying on them and implementing dark UX patterns by A/B testing; all for sake of keeping you 'hooked' onto their products. This applies to all commercial products.

I completely disagree.

A vast majority of commercial products don't do anything in the way of recommending additional goods and services to their users. The sale of the original good or service would be the only profit-seeking component.

Re: What Is the Small Web?

#109

Post by gonehome »

aral wrote: post #78

Hey all, Just skimmed the comments (I know, I know, never read the comments) but here are couple of facts in case you care about that sort of thing (but please don’t let these get in the way of a lively discussion) ;) - re: drug dealers/users, see: analogy - Yes, six years ago, we thought we could fix the problem with a phone. Then we started working on the problem and realised we couldn’t possibly raise enough money…

Thanks for the thoughtful response, was HN always this nasty?

I think tooling around this idea makes sense and I hope you succeed.

I wrote a little allegorical story about this which you might like: https://zalberico.com/essay/2020/07/14/the-serfs-of-facebook...

I think it's a hard problem and it's exciting to see multiple projects trying to make this better: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24269016

Re: What Is the Small Web?

#110

Post by [deleted] »

kgraves wrote: post #50

Aral is in this for the long term and I respect his principles. Those accusing him of his past 'failed' endeavours are part of the problem. He is self funding his goals and has been ever since, not taking money from surveillance and vulture capitalists. He was critical on Mozilla taking money from Google, and calls out privacy conferences taking money from Google, Facebook and Palantir. Aral is following in the very…

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