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Time to rebuild the web?

oreilly.com

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Re: Time to rebuild the web?

#211

Post by purple-again »

marsrover wrote: post #7

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…

It’s a bad example too. There are so ducking many ‘let’s clone Facebook to learn x language’ guides that yes anyone of any skill level should be able to build Facebook right now without relying on view source because there are step by step tutorials!

Now if he means you can’t build Facebook the service...we’ll yeah Google didn’t go around telling everyone in the 90’s how it’s algorithms wirked either. But you can clone Googles website super easy!

Re: Time to rebuild the web?

#212

Post by lucideer »

kodablah wrote: post #183
vlehto wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

EU is about to enforce GDPR. Net neutrality seems to be American problem, while rest of the world is moving to the opposite direction. Which economy has better prospects in the long run? Currently internet is very U.S. centric because most of the big players are located there. That could change if European legislation is more supportive for small agile companies to evolve.

> EU is about to enforce GDPR [...] if European legislation is more supportive for small agile companies Surely you see the contradiction there. > Currently internet is very U.S. centric because most of the big players are located there. That could change if [...] That's not just a coincidence and I don't believe it's any kind of first-mover advantage. It's about the environment in which you operate and passing more…

> That's not just a coincidence and I don't believe it's any kind of first-mover advantage. It's about the environment in which you operate and passing more and more laws and rules, regardless of the intentions, is the opposite direction

You're presenting the situation as a failure of the EU, but I think you've missed the point here. The big players are located in the US because the environment there rewards big players and has a general snowball effect. The EU system rewards small-player innovation and limits the creation of very large, dominant, monopolistic big players. This should be a net benefit to the overall system, if it weren't fot big players just coming in from elsewhere. Unfortunately, due to the global nature of the web, this leads to less-regulated US big players dominating the EU players. Solving that is tough, but the fact GDPR applies to US companies is an interesting start.

Re: Time to rebuild the web?

#214

Post by bitL »

psyc wrote: post #152
kabes wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The context of that quote had nothing to do with what this article is about.

I really don't care, because it's important enough to repeat in any discussion about rebuilding the Web. Involve some real systems people. Design a real app platform, with multi-language support, especially compiled languages. Have a cohesive end to end development story.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect

Re: Time to rebuild the web?

#215

Post by always_good »

pvg wrote: post #22
nickjj wrote: post #9

It's weird that the author mentions the 90s and how the web was not meant to be walled gardens, but then decided to omit AOL from the story. AOL was one big ass walled garden back in the 1990s. It was pretty popular back then. The funny thing is, back then, it was popular for 2 groups of people. First were younger kids who wanted to stir up trouble on the network (AOHell, etc.). The second were old people. My uncle i…

AOL and similar services connected to the internet but were separate from it. They predated wide availability of consumer internet service. There's not much of a parallel to what the author is discussing.

Huh? You could access arbitrary websites from AOL. How is that not part of the internet?

Re: Time to rebuild the web?

#217

Post by eksemplar »

I find these articles a little ironic. I absolutely agree with the message, but they are always published in walled gardens themselves. Maybe that’s how you get reader counts and views but there is is really nothing that stops anyone from building their own.

It’s easier to use Wordpress than building your own, even easier to write a blog entry for O’Reilly.com but if your message is a decentralized network of enthusiasts, then maybe you should publish on your own platform, you know, to be the change you want.

Re: Time to rebuild the web?

#218

Post by 3pt14159 »

nicbou wrote: post #80
dkns wrote: post #31

I'm not buying it. Web development complexity grows but so does desktop software, kernel development, etc. You used to be able to have a small program written in BASIC or whatever that would give you a simple popup alert on desktop. Now you need to worry about backwards compatibility, different OSes, etc. But guess what? You can still write simple programs, without all the complex stuff, if you want to. The exact sam…

It's still possible: http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ When I made All About Berlin, it was just HTML and CSS. Nothing complex there. I eventually added Disqus and Google Analytics, but it's still possible to build simple websites.

Fixing the internet is hard. There are so many things wrong with it. Take your website for example:

1. No encryption, meaning any intermediate router could have altered the contents or at the very least surveilled them.

2. Illegible line length without me boosting the font size or browser width.

3. No protection for the reader that this is actually motherfuckingwebsite.com and not some .com with a Cyrillic character instead.

4. No protection for the reader that what is on this site hasn't been fingerprinted somehow (zero-width characters, Cyrillic, etc).

5. Even if the site was encrypted the DNS lookup would have exposed that I was looking at it anyway.

6. It's on the root of the domain which has a number of headaches at scale and roots vs www in general complicate things like understanding certs, CORS, etc.

I agree that we need something simpler and locked down and I've even thought through not just the web portion, but the underlying portion as well, but it requires a massive change to get something that is both secure / trustworthy, not prone to spam, useable by the non-technical, and resilient against well funded mal-actors like warring nation states. And none of the replacement makes the world better for most of the worlds well funded corporations. Silicon Valley and Hollywood would both take a real hit because their business models both rely on insecurity. Hollywood is reliant on surveillance to enforce copyright and SV is reliant on surveillance to supply targeted ads.

Re: Time to rebuild the web?

#219

Post by simonh »

d--b wrote: post #178
kristianc wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which works great, until ISPs start offering subsidized plans for Facebook, Gmail, Spotify, Twitter, and expensive plans for everything else. When that happens, there is very little economic incentive to have smaller websites, smaller e-commerce websites end up being part of Amazon, and Google starts providing more and more of its own content.

Of course net neutrality matters for the small guys to thrive. My point is that net neutrality is the only thing that matters. This is not about HTML or RSS or Facebook feeds. A non-neutral internet would have impacted the 90s internet in the same way.

And in fact almost did. Things like ISPs blocking VOIP services, blocking VPNs, preventing more than one device being able to use a connection, are things that actually happened, though a couple of years too late in some cases to count as 'the 90s'.

Re: Time to rebuild the web?

#220

Post by whamlastxmas »

randomsearch wrote: post #105

I don't believe the problem lies in any technology. We don't need blockchain, it's not JavaScript minification, it isn't the centralisation of services that are the problem. 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.

Ads are only so prolific because they can be tracked. If we eliminate avenues for sites to track us their popularity will drop tremendously.
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