21–30 of 76 posts
Once something becomes about the money, it's going to be about the money.
An error has occurred. This application may no longer respond until reloaded. Reload
The death of the web, indeed.
Not every was around when the web was obscure. It's hard to explain how magical that time was. The pinnacle of the web for me was Audio Galaxy. A website where you could find new music to download and even push music to your friend's computer (using the Audio Galaxy Satellite app) [1]. I spent so much time in IRC rooms and discussion forums. It wasn't doom scrolling. No one was trying to manipulate me for my time or…
Boiling take: Myspace doesn't get enough historical heat for walling the blogosphere while simultaneously Eternal-Septembering it.
Before MySpace web designers and developers could have work all year just working with bands. Band web work basically dried up below a certain band success level over a year or two.
But since MySpace allowed custom CSS and had limited built in design options it created a new market for custom pages. The rates were mostly lower but there were probably 100X the number of bands that needed work.
Not every was around when the web was obscure. It's hard to explain how magical that time was. The pinnacle of the web for me was Audio Galaxy. A website where you could find new music to download and even push music to your friend's computer (using the Audio Galaxy Satellite app) [1]. I spent so much time in IRC rooms and discussion forums. It wasn't doom scrolling. No one was trying to manipulate me for my time or…
I imagine people will have the same nostalgia for doom scrolling one day ;)
Once something becomes about the money, it's going to be about the money.
TANSTAAFL [1] One of my collaborators would say we got seduced by the idea that it wasn't about the money. That is, it was cheap enough that we could go for a while without thinking how to pay for it, then the advertising model looked like an answer. Early on one would make the comparison to advertising on TV, radio, magazines and such. Little did we know that personalized advertising would lead to something much wor…
I feel that early on, we should have had the foresight to press the microtransaction option much harder. There could have been a widely adopted standard where you load your browser or UA with money and then individual sites visited could be given permission to debit some amount per page load, hour consumed, or whatever. I would rather pay a few cents to read an article or watch a video than have surveillance capitalism ruin everything for everyone. It's not about the ads, it's about the ecosystem.
The web is a garbage ecosystem now. The sad thing is that it would take only about twenty of you people, you who came across this post on HN today and are now reading this comment, to build an alternative ecosystem.
They did, it's called gemini: https://geminiprotocol.net/
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They both did, but governments enabled corporations to do it.
How would government realistically preserve a (in hindsight) fragile cultural phenomenon? OTOH a ~difficult mandatory PC/internet operator's license might have done it. Now that reminds of the weird Internetführerschein ("internet driver's license") courses for nontechnical folk in Germany. Though these were entirely optional and so not cool.
The web is a garbage ecosystem now. The sad thing is that it would take only about twenty of you people, you who came across this post on HN today and are now reading this comment, to build an alternative ecosystem.
They did, it's called gemini: https://geminiprotocol.net/
The reason I didn't is to avoid a discussion of how I personally would design tools for an alternate web. I think gemini is a step in the right direction, but not enough to supplant the web for a large enough minority of users. Not that it takes many users - the web was vibrant in 1995 with 100x fewer people on it than today.
I don't know that the specific qualities I personally would want for a web replacement are the right ones for everybody, but I would add to the philosophy of gemini some sort of control - not necessarily centralized - to curb commercial activity and abuse. To attract users, it would also need more cultural cache than Gemini. There wouldn't be much content on it at first - unless its design found a loophole to facilitate piracy - so its early adopters would need to feel like they were part of some exclusive community.