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The Death of the Web (2024)

garry.net

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Re: The Death of the Web (2024)

#41

Post by flir »

imglorp wrote: post #26
PaulHoule wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yes, that's where we went wrong. 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 vide…

Ever heard the expression "bad money drives out good"?

Free content drives out paid-for content. It would only take a tiny percentage of sites going ad-supported. All the users would rush to them, the microtransaction sites would see this, and they would soon change their models.

Re: The Death of the Web (2024)

#42

Post by RGamma »

fragmede wrote: post #28
RGamma wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

archive.org could have been a government funded initiative by the librarians. (not libertarians)

That wouldn't have prevented tech bros from hijacking the cultural momentum or commoditizing attention. Even a maximum fidelity web archive would drown in the noise just the same.

Re: The Death of the Web (2024)

#43

Post by nicbou »

stevage wrote: post #38

I have a theory that part of why you don't see such great niche sites now is that they were the productive of cognitive surplus. People had spare brain power and not that much to do with it, so they built and contributed to fun sites. Now, FB and YouTube and Tiktok etc have gotten very good at consuming all that free time and energy. Just a theory.

They have become good at capturing that surplus. People are still doing amazing things, and these platforms give them the tools to publish videos, an audience, and monetisation opportunities. However the platforms giveth, then taketh away.

Re: The Death of the Web (2024)

#44

Post by fuzztester »

RyanOD wrote: post #35

I often feel this way about a lot of things where I was present during the genesis moment. Then I remind myself that I'm getting older and likely misremembering what it was really like - fun and exciting, but not very useful. Moreover, I feel like this perspective fails to acknowledge everyone globally who benefits massively from simply having access to information I take for granted - even if it is surrounded by ads…

>Lastly, I get that the proliferation of apps for tangible goods is frustrating,

I had the same experience with a mobile service provider that I use, recently.

since the last few days, the USSD code that used to work to find my prepaid recharge expiry date, so that I could recharge again in time, does not work. it doesn't even give a proper error message. it just suddenly exits, and tell me to install an app for that purpose.

mobile self service / IVR features are brain dead, and don't work a lot of the time anyway. I don't know what the reason is, except stupidity.

Re: The Death of the Web (2024)

#45

Post by aklemm »

thomassmith65 wrote: post #14

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.

20 engineers are going to solve misaligned incentives and bot automation?

Re: The Death of the Web (2024)

#46

Post by MarioMan »

The wild thing is that the web has achieved both the aspirations and the failings mentioned here. There's an odd dichotomy of user experiences.

Progress really has accelerated. "Big data" couldn't have been a thing without the Internet. Science through improved communication is advancing more rapidly than ever before. Just look at how quickly things change today vs. 100 years ago in all aspects of life.

Knowledge is everywhere, you just need to know where to dig to work around all of the junk. You no longer need to take up an apprenticeship to understand the basics of a given job, and knowledge as a whole is more accessible than ever before.

We really can communicate with people all over the world. The Internet is always active, because users from across the globe are always online.

The Internet has accelerated globalism. People can readily expose themselves to outside ideas and perspectives, so long as they take the effort to step outside of their algorithm-prescribed interest bubbles every once in a while. You can make friends on the other side of the planet and communicate far easier than you could ever send letters or pay for long-distance phone calls.

People still make their own websites. I'm sure there are more of them then there ever were in the '90s, they're just significantly harder to surface in the deluge of the modern Internet.

Ads, pop-ups, and modals are only experienced by people that don't know about worthwhile ad/nuisance blockers.

Ultimately, the Internet is filled with more content rather than strictly better content than ever before. Though as a consequence of more, it means there's also more great knowledge and more likeminded subcultures available than ever before, but you need a certain kind of discipline to actively work to find it. This is why I feel that information literacy is one of the most important life skills: if you can find the "good stuff", discriminate fact from fiction, and dig deeper than an AI-generated Google summary of search results, then you have the means to learn and develop talents in just about anything.

Re: The Death of the Web (2024)

#47

Post by [deleted] »

giantrobot wrote: post #33
imglorp wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, that's where we went wrong. 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 vide…

That sounds just as bad if not worse than what we have today. You'd have to outright pay for your hardware, electricity, connectivity, and then on top pay for every piece of content. Browsing would suck as there would only be bad mechanisms for previewing content before deciding to access it (and being charged). Enshittification would still happen just like with cable television and video streaming. You'd have to pay…

[deleted]

Re: The Death of the Web (2024)

#48

Post by smb06 »

unethical_ban wrote: post #25
TechDebtDevin wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I imagine people will have the same nostalgia for doom scrolling one day ;)

We'll have the same nostalgia for being able to travel anywhere without our location and emotions catalogued by government databases analyzing us for threats to order.

Or assigning a national security threat score if we like too many Chinese tik tok videos

Re: The Death of the Web (2024)

#49

Post by cobertos »

PaulHoule wrote: post #12
hyperhello wrote: post #5

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'm not sure mandatory payment could have worked when the internet brought down the cost of publishing, which has only continued to drop.

Not to mention the incentives to create a way to distribute (cough pirate) paid content to people who do not want to pay. That would have broken the system from the start. Some software nerd somewhere would've figure that out.

Re: The Death of the Web (2024)

#50

Post by fragmede »

thomassmith65 wrote: post #40
fragmede wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where they're coming from is great but as someone unfamiliar with what it is (needs a name change in the face of Google Gemini) that landing page isn't a moving introduction to the project. (hint: The FAQ page is for follow-up questions after I've been told what the thing is and I have questions, not to tell me what the thing is)

Gemini's inspiration was the "gopher" protocol from the early 1990s. Gopher was a text-only precursor to the web - plain text with highlighted clickable text links. If you've ever used an ancient library computer (green and black display), their UI was essentially the same as gopher.

it's not their fault Google came along and used that name, but they did, so here we are.
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