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Time to rebuild the web?

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Re: Time to rebuild the web?

#411

Post by elihu »

martin_drapeau wrote: post #137
skummetmaelk wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

50 years ago people who smoked didn't care about the adverse effects mainly because they didn't know the dangers. As people who know the dangers of poor privacy choices we should protect those who have not had the opportunity to consider it yet.

Smoking will kill you. Liking funny cat videos on Facebook won't. I think you are comparing oranges and apples here.

Liking the wrong thing might not get you persecuted or killed in your current time and place, but there's no guarantee that those opinions which are safe to hold here and now will continue to be safe.

Social media creates a semi-public record for bad actors to identify targets to persecute for whatever they've decided to retroactively declare to be a crime. That may be a small risk in a stable democracy, but it's still worth considering due to the magnitude of the potential consequences.

Re: Time to rebuild the web?

#412

Post by flavor8 »

kristianc wrote: post #399
TACIXAT wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Monetization is easily possible, we just need a reliable way to transfer small amounts of money electronically at a low fee. Right now the large credit card players have a stranglehold on digital transactions, we just need something new that makes it not awful to pay someone a few cents online.

Consider that the people watching the videos have repeatedly shown in no uncertain terms (even when given the option and it is made really really easy for them), that they don't want to pay.

There's a difference between "$9.99/mo for no ads" and "skip this ad for 2c". I'm not aware of any popular video sites offering the latter.

Re: Time to rebuild the web?

#413

Post by gcb0 »

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.

technically, browsers can break the monetization incentives.

For example, Google found it a wise investment to sponsor an entire browser just to keep referrer header and 3rd party cookie enabled.

If all browsers disabled this (apple already got rid of 3rd party cookies) then the cost to monetize the web as it is being monetized today, would be too high to be effective.

Re: Time to rebuild the web?

#414

Post by confounded »

oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #148
astura wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't this basically Reddit?

I think they were raising the possibility of having multiple reedits, each owned by a separate entity, yet still compatible. Like we have multiple email providers, for example.

What would compatible mean? Why is compatability needed?

Re: Time to rebuild the web?

#415

Post by [deleted] »

kristianc wrote: post #399
TACIXAT wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Monetization is easily possible, we just need a reliable way to transfer small amounts of money electronically at a low fee. Right now the large credit card players have a stranglehold on digital transactions, we just need something new that makes it not awful to pay someone a few cents online.

Consider that the people watching the videos have repeatedly shown in no uncertain terms (even when given the option and it is made really really easy for them), that they don't want to pay.

[deleted]

Re: Time to rebuild the web?

#416

Post by icc97 »

CM30 wrote: post #330
icc97 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually that makes a lot of sense, it's not that we need to have RSS replace Facebook, we need a resurgance of forums to take back from Facebook. Perhaps if forums could talk to each other you'd have an experience more like mastodon, but in concepts that more people understand. Something like an open source Stack Exchange network. So you can log-in to one of them but then easily create an account using the credentia…

This is basically the setup I've been discussing in my articles about a decentralised Reddit alternative. A system where forums are all hosted independently, but can share login data, reputation data, post history, etc. https://artplusmarketing.com/discussing-a-decentralised-redd... It would hopefully avert the issue Reddit like sites have where different groups want to control what others can say on the platform, by…

Excellent post, pretty much exactly what I was thinking of

> Of course, it still raises questions about how it’d be financed or supported. No investor would back a service that couldn’t be controlled at all and could lose most of its userbase overnight.

I think the WordPress/WooCommerce model works for this. So you handle forum set up for businesses, or have paid for plugins. You can also still have a centralised system like basically reddit/wordpress.com , but allow subdomains just to be redirected to someones own domain (all for a minor cost).

Re: Time to rebuild the web?

#417

Post by annabellish »

vbezhenar wrote: post #375
fragmede wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ongoing success of Netflix proves not everybody is a freeloader, and a report from Spotify made the news for their estimate that 2 million people are using ad-block software to get premium without paying for it - the bigger news should really be that they have 150-some million users that aren't cheating the system, and that 70 million people pay money to Spotify. Everybody wants something for free, but there are…

May be that's a consequence of poor society I'm living in, but if I learned any lesson about life, it's that most people won't pay a penny if they can get away with it. You won't make a profitable business believing that some people will recognize the need to pay, because they won't.

This is a compelling thought, but the evidence doesn't seem to back it up. What we actually see in the real world seems to be the opposite - people absolutely _will_ pay for things they could get for free so long as it isn't less convenient than not paying.

Given that the act of making a payment is an inconvenience in and of itself, this does suggest it's _harder_ to get people to pay for a service, but the success of things like netflix and spotify is a clear indicator that people really like the "pay a consistent amount of money and get access to whatever" model.

Re: Time to rebuild the web?

#418

Post by reitanqild »

brandon272 wrote: post #397
reitanqild wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Protocol is the thing that makes sure you can get email from anyone, independent of what client they used to send it and what client you used to receive it. There's technically nothing to prevent sending messages from facebook to twitter etc, those companies just didn't want it to happen so they didn't agree on a way to do it, that is a protocol.

The problem is that it assumes that people in general understand and want to use protocol based services because they are protocol based services. Look at instant messaging as an example of where consumers/users vote routinely to choose features over the foundation of the service. I would love to chat with people on XMPP but I don't know anyone who uses it.

I'm familiar with the idea of voting with the wallet.

But not every transaction is a valid vote.

Re: Time to rebuild the web?

#419

Post by dane-pgp »

reitanqild wrote: post #395
brandon272 wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really understand what the term "protocol" means in this context or how a protocol can provide the foundations of a social network. Can you elaborate?

Protocol is the thing that makes sure you can get email from anyone, independent of what client they used to send it and what client you used to receive it. There's technically nothing to prevent sending messages from facebook to twitter etc, those companies just didn't want it to happen so they didn't agree on a way to do it, that is a protocol.

While Facebook and Twitter may not have collaborated on a protocol for distributed social networking, other interested parties have, and they've come up with standards like this:

https://activitypub.rocks/

Whether Facebook and Twitter end up supporting such a standard may well depend on how expansively the European Court of Justice interprets the right to Data Portability that is being introduced by the GDPR:

https://gdpr-info.eu/art-20-gdpr/

Certainly when read in the light of existing competition law (not to mention the bad reputation Facebook in particular has right now, nor any cynical political protectionist goals that an EU court might have), it is possible that large near-monopolistic American social media companies may end up being forced to allow automated pushing of user's posts to friends on 3rd party competing websites.

Re: Time to rebuild the web?

#420

Post by YSFEJ4SWJUVU6 »

TremendousJudge wrote: post #362
Just_Smith wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't used an ad blockers for Spotify in a long time (because I'm a premium user when I can afford it), but when I was using one, all it did was mute the ads when they came on. Not perfect, but it certainly didn't break the mood as much as a randomly placed ad.

I use Spotify web with uBlock. It doesn't mute audio ads, they just aren't there. Not sure how it works. As a side note, the web app is hidden -- they want you to download the desktop app, from which you can't block ads. The thing is, the desktop app performs even worse than the web app

You can watch uBlock's logger when using the web player to see what it does. AFAIK the blocking rules are imported from EasyList.

However, as far as user experience goes, I don't share your experiences at all – the web player is almost unbelievably bad, with frequently malfunctioning (disabled) player keys, volume slider jumping all over the place and common problems when resuming playback after a while. (Also, the desktop application has more features, including the ability to select multiple tracks to perform an operation on, and naturally the support for media keys.)

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