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The Death of the Web (2024)

garry.net

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Re: The Death of the Web (2024)

#51

Post by monday40 »

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…

Or, since we pay for access to the internet, let's say like $80 per month for home connection, plus $20 per month for phone data, and the internet providers know the websites we visit (in Australia they have to keep this information for 2 years), and can approximate how much time we spend there, they could redistribute part of the $100 (50%?) to the website owners automatically.

Re: The Death of the Web (2024)

#52

Post by krapp »

fragmede wrote: post #50
thomassmith65 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

To be fair, names based on Greek and Roman mythology were overplayed back when NASA was using them. Calling anything "Gemini" is about as uncreative as one can get.

Re: The Death of the Web (2024)

#53

Post by gloomyday »

The death of the Internet was so insidious. I guess I trusted too much that what people built would remain the same. Once a few players took over their respective niches, they opened up a Pandora Box of ways to make money.

I miss finding niche forums where we saw a number of very active members, and we could distinguish them. There was often great care curating their content. These communities have been concentrating on Reddit, and I don't like it.

Re: The Death of the Web (2024)

#54

Post by fuzztester »

does anyone remember MyWay or Neoplanet?

the former was a website / pre-social-media-but-like-it site, with an email service, iirc, and the latter was a web browser.

I used them for a while, I thought they were good for a while. after that I don't remember what happened. they probably shutdown sometime later.

but they were interesting at the time.

Re: The Death of the Web (2024)

#55

Post by thomassmith65 »

aklemm wrote: post #45
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?

20 people would have an impossible time trying to fix the existing web because they would be up against FA*NG companies etc.

But if 20 people design an alternate system (protocol, browser, security features, etc) from scratch, and their incentives are right, yes they could come up with decent protections against users with bad incentives and against bots.

Re: The Death of the Web (2024)

#57

Post by marginalia_nu »

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.

If true, the implications for innovation seem fairly terrifying.

Re: The Death of the Web (2024)

#58

Post by PaulHoule »

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…

Who knows? If we had micropayments we certainly would have had a lot of fraud around them,.

I'm sure, however, that we haven't seen how bad it gets on our current track.

Last summer I watched a lot of Tubi, which is a free advertising streaming service which has the lower tier of content that you might see on broadcast TV or cable plus generous helpings of old movies, subprime anime [1], subtitled Italian crime dramas, etc.

The ads started out really polite, with heavy rotation of ads for P&G brands like Dawn and Tide featuring black people cleaning up [2]. None of the personal injury lawyers, prescription drug ads, ads for legal and illegal medicare frauds, etc. I gave my email addresses and they mixed in a light tranche of retargeted ads from brands I'd engaged with long ago and who were famous for using retargeted ads on the web in the day.

The adtech revolution is half about tech and half about brands that take advantage of the new medium and it's certain Tubi is in the honeymoon phase today because they're still willing to lose money. Investors will expect to take profits someday, and by then cable will be gone, broadcast will suffer from neglect [4] and the ads will get worse, much worse.

I think we'll see more businesses centered around running bad ads everywhere, the only respite might be that some platforms like Amazon and Temu get so big that they trap many businesses into using them as their exclusive channel and starve other channels.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juden_Chan but also some good older stuff like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranma_%C2%BD and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accel_World

[2] their own messes

[3] https://www.avclub.com/tubi-success-hasnt-turned-profit-stre...

[4] even a few years ago the kind of normcore people who used to watch broadcast TV would seem to think I was doing some kind of hacking when I put up an antenna to get OTA television

Re: The Death of the Web (2024)

#59

Post by stevage »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #57
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.

If true, the implications for innovation seem fairly terrifying.

Hard to say. People certainly seem pretty motivated (and better equipped than 10-20 years ago) to create content for money. It just feels like there is less whimsical, fun expenditure of effort.

Re: The Death of the Web (2024)

#60

Post by marginalia_nu »

stevage wrote: post #59
marginalia_nu wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If true, the implications for innovation seem fairly terrifying.

Hard to say. People certainly seem pretty motivated (and better equipped than 10-20 years ago) to create content for money. It just feels like there is less whimsical, fun expenditure of effort.

A lot of what is being created is fairly derivative though, it's often more like a grift than an act of innovation. Actually coming up with something new damn near requires a fair bit of cognitive surplus.
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