Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Time to rebuild the web?

oreilly.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

271–280 of 449 posts

Re: Time to rebuild the web?

#271

Post by herbst »

return1 wrote: post #56
martin_drapeau wrote: post #30

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…

it's also a fault of the websites themselves. In the off chance that an average facebook user uses google to search and end up in a website outside facebook, they 'll be typically be pestered with signing up to a newsletter and then with a popup to get browser notifications (along with a cookie popup in europe). The User experience will be usually atrocious, with content hidden way behind the ads. At that point the u…

I think both Facebook and poorly used screen space are good indicators for low quality content.

Makes it incredible easy to just move along.

Re: Time to rebuild the web?

#272

Post by mozumder »

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.

Disagree completely.

The business model doesn't need to be profitable. Almost every website is unprofitable in itself, and only exist to serve as a person's or company's marketing interface. Websites ARE the ads, because that's their point. The web is a giant marketing device to sell stuff, like your resume or your local plumber or your open-source software project.

The problem is the tech, and in particular, how a person can create a website from scratch, without going through any other gateway company.

Facebook/Twitter/Instagram makes it super easy to post your content online. Ebay makes it easy to sell. You don't need to write any HTML or any other piece of code, or build a server and find hosting or configure AWS. You just post content from an app, and that's it. Any elderly person can do that now.

There really is a huge technological barrier in making the usable - in particular, the entire UX ecosystem of creating content on the web. This difficult UX problem will be a hard limit to expanding creation of the web by the public, and should be a focus on anyone that wants to make the web open.

I would recommend that groups like W3C or WHATWG or hardware vendors like Apple or Cisco develop standards that not only display content, but also entry, storage, and distribution.

Why isn't there a default app, like SMS/MMS messages, on an iPhone that lets you post your own website? Think of all the infrastructure that had to be built to get SMS/MMS messages working... the web needs the same thing. Can you imagine if sending an MMS, you had to write your own software? Or build your own hardware interface?

This is the level the web is at right now.

Re: Time to rebuild the web?

#273

Post by staticvar »

api wrote: post #224
kingnight wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does a mobile phone sync dats? The main drawback I see currently with beaker is their is no mobile version (for iPhone)

Mobile as a whole is an unsolved problem for decentralized systems. The mobile revolution is and has been by far the most powerful driver of centralization in the last 10-15 years. Mobile devices are slower, have less memory, and must consume less power than desktop, laptop, or server devices. To achieve good battery life they really need to be in an almost-off state most of the time. Add to this the fact that cellul…

We would love for someone to test these theories using Bunsen Browser! Getting some solid metrics would go a long way to starting to solve any problems that might be there. Theoretically it shouldn't be eating up much bandwidth because every device visiting a Dat Archive helps contribute to the network.

Re: Time to rebuild the web?

#274

Post by skummetmaelk »

martin_drapeau wrote: post #145
skummetmaelk wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Poor privacy choices can severely damage your future career and thereby quality of life. I'd say that is also pretty severe.

That is a good point. If any type of legislation should come out of this, it should be about usage of social media data by companies. They should not be able to discriminate people because of things they do in their private lives. In fact, they shouldn't have the right to investigate it unless it relates to the job (i.e. checking that a community manager does in fact use Twitter and Facebook in an efficient way). The…

It's just very hard to make laws against that. There are laws forbidding discrimination based on gender and race, yet we still know that this is commonplace.

I personally think it is better to tackle the issue by making it harder/impossible for companies to obtain this data and allowing users to force companies to delete ANY data they have on them by request.

Re: Time to rebuild the web?

#275

Post by skummetmaelk »

pferde wrote: post #174
skummetmaelk wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the US there has been a steady decline: https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/tables/trends/ci... Almost three quarters of all smokers in the US want to quit: http://news.gallup.com/poll/163763/smokers-quit-tried-multip... I think it is pretty clear that the information and social stigma campaigns run by people who care about the health of their fellow citizens have been effective.

That doesn't mean much. I know several people who have wanted to quit smoking for 20+ years now.

This means that they are addicted. They still want to quit. They know it's bad, but are incapable of quitting because they value the short term fix over long term health.

So why not try to help them do what they know is best for them instead of throwing our hands up in the air and saying "your problem buddy".

Humans are notoriously bad at estimating future vs. current value. I think we should help people make good long term decisions instead of letting biology sabotage us.

Re: Time to rebuild the web?

#276

Post by icebraining »

peterwwillis wrote: post #256
icebraining wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the interesting things ran over email, China would start blocking those too. Who cares where the intermediary server is, if the email headers contain the final destination? Plus, they would probably block any direct access to intermediary servers outside the country.

They can block all intermediary servers outside the country, that's fine. E-mail is an entire system, the way Facebook is a system. They would either need to block individual addresses, or the entire system. The former is the only feasible option with e-mail, otherwise basically you couldn't do business with the outside world, and China likes doing business. With the web, or chat apps, they block the whole target sys…

They would either need to block individual addresses, or the entire system

Well, no, they could (and would) block domains, like "*@facebook.com". Which would leave you exactly where you are now.

If what you want is an a non-encrypted web where China can analyze and choose the specific content it wants to block, then fine, but I don't see what the whole email-like system has to do with it.

Re: Time to rebuild the web?

#277

Post by fragmede »

cdata wrote: post #120
Hedja wrote: post #23

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…

It seemed to me that the OP was making a distinctly different suggestion: the real challenge is offering a better UX. Emerging distributed tech won't fix a UX problem just because it happens to be technologically sophisticated (he calls out TOR, but I think he is making a general comment here). Instead, he asks, why not spend some effort giving older tech like RSS a better UX? I'm inclined to agree, but on the other…

Because there's no money in making a better RSS reader.

I'm sure the internal story of why Google killed off Reader is far more mundane office politics that we'll ever know, but since then, there's not been another that's risen to popularity. As the article mentions there's Feedly who's UI is functional if a bit baroque (why does every feed need to be tagged?) but ultimately it's still like trying to drink from a firehose. There's not been an RSS reader company that has come about since that shows Google was wrong to kill off Reader.

It's easy enough to think up improvements to their UX, but we don't have a marketplace of ideas because there is so much friction (even ignoring the work involved in starting up a company and hiring a team, there's no way to introduce a small tweak to Feedly without recreating their platform - and then you'd still have to convince enough people to migrate to your Feedly-clone first).

What we have a marketplace of VC-funded corporations, and branding is king. There's no stock exchange for listing specific features Feedly could implement in order to promote better RSS reader software.

Re: Time to rebuild the web?

#278

Post by firmgently »

zimpenfish wrote: post #116
arkh wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I like the idea of a text-only browser Lynx is still available.

Bloody useless for ~90% of the current web though.

true of course but the Venn circles of that 90% and "pages I immediately back out of in horror" are becoming increasingly overlappy

[ reply posted from links2 -g ]

Re: Time to rebuild the web?

#279

Post by snug »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #249
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.

It's not just social media, and it's not just ads, about which other people responded to you. The root of the problem - or at least the trunk very close to the root - is Software as a Service. It's the trend of turning software into services. Sure, it's nice for the vendors, and it's nice for corporate clients who can write off responsibility to a third party. But it also makes you no longer in control of your data,…

> If technology is meant to be - or at least is capable of being - empowering to individuals, then turning everything into a service is an exact opposite of that.

What? No. Plenty of new companies are being built off these SaaS providers. Why should a company just starting out build their own infrastructure, host their own CRM, build their own AI models. Companies would move much more slowely if they couldn't rely on these services.

Re: Time to rebuild the web?

#280

Post by pvg »

always_good wrote: post #215
pvg wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

What if I told you that when AOL started, you could not access arbitrary web sites from it because there weren't any.
Post reply on HN