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Freeing the Web from the Browser

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Re: Freeing the Web from the Browser

#91

Post by dredmorbius »

Joe: some god thoughts, and ideas I'm seeing from several quartersv and have been thinking about myself.

I'd also like to see a tool that's useful for research, a readers' ans writers' Web, not merely a consumers' funnel.

I've been lookingat the history of the Web and information in general (guilty pleasure: http://www.historyofinformation.com/index.php). Bush, Nelson, TBL. Early browser history, especially Viola, an entire system: http://www.viola.org . Plan 9's 9p and /net: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs#/net .

I'm thinkinking or possibly presenting the Web as a filesystem, or other forms not typical of contemporary browsers:

https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/6bgowu/what_if...

And I've a long list of concerns, largely referenced in the last link above.

Taking a look at your doc.

Re: Freeing the Web from the Browser

#92

Post by hiccuphippo »

machiaweliczny wrote: post #30

I would love a web where you can comment with your forum circle on any URI available on internet. Eg. I open some research paper and I click "comments" in web browsers. And I see comments from /r/machinelearning, hackernews etc. Also real time chat would be awesome to have for each of websites. Nowadays it work for me like this - found something interesting X - type "X site:myforum" in google to learn more about it F…

Sometimes content creators don't want to see comments from the users. See YouTube for example. Some creators prefer to close the comments section even if it's available.

Re: Freeing the Web from the Browser

#93

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

bastawhiz wrote: post #90

We almost got there with Pingbacks being the first step. Then they devolved into meaningless spam. Without a system of manual curation, it's impossible to build something where _everyone_ contributes. Spam scales easily, and moderation and curation does not. A thousand good links buried under a million spam links don't add any value. And we can talk about reputation and proof of stake systems until we're blue in the…

I never understood that; PoW seems like not merely an elegant solution, but a simple one. What am I missing?

Re: Freeing the Web from the Browser

#94

Post by Sir_Cmpwn »

bastawhiz wrote: post #90

We almost got there with Pingbacks being the first step. Then they devolved into meaningless spam. Without a system of manual curation, it's impossible to build something where _everyone_ contributes. Spam scales easily, and moderation and curation does not. A thousand good links buried under a million spam links don't add any value. And we can talk about reputation and proof of stake systems until we're blue in the…

I think web of trust might be suitable here.

Re: Freeing the Web from the Browser

#95

Post by skadamat »

Surprised nobody has mentioned HyperCard - https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2012/05/25-years-of-hypercar...

There was a very compelling vision for the web, by Doug Engelbart and others in the 60's and 70's. Unfortunately, because of the computing culture's attitude of forgetting even the recent history / understanding what foundational work was done (like real scientific fields do!), the web folks didn't have a lot that context.

Alan Kay, in many of his talks, has discussed how the browser should really be more like an operating system kernel. The web is a mess and we can still build interesting things with lots of hacking & engineering, but it's fallen short of the original vision. And now we're locked into the tooling we've built.

Re: Freeing the Web from the Browser

#96

Post by monort »

firasd wrote: post #54
machiaweliczny wrote: post #30

I would love a web where you can comment with your forum circle on any URI available on internet. Eg. I open some research paper and I click "comments" in web browsers. And I see comments from /r/machinelearning, hackernews etc. Also real time chat would be awesome to have for each of websites. Nowadays it work for me like this - found something interesting X - type "X site:myforum" in google to learn more about it F…

I've been building an app that (among other things) can kind of generate this for Twitter--if people are discussing a link, it finds tweets about that link, quote-tweets of tweets about that link, and replies to tweets about that link (in addition to tracking the number of retweets and likes). (The app is pre-release but it's on social media as https://twitter.com/flockpath ) I've been thinking that I should 'break o…

How do you rank tweets? Does Twitter API allows to sort by threads size?

I actually wrote a small extension to collect comments from HN and Reddit using their search API, and it's very useful for me.

https://imgur.com/a/vWy5NaP

Re: Freeing the Web from the Browser

#97

Post by toyg »

superflyguy wrote: post #85
toyg wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Something I never read on any site. I feel sorry for you - the original early-'00 blogosphere was actually very good, with all sorts of people building connections and intelligent debate through comments. After a while, the conversation was so deep that comments ended up being too short, so they had to define Pingbacks so that people could post elsewhere while still connecting with the source material. And then spa…

I remember those blogs. Somewhere between Usenet and Facebook. I found the ping back things annoying. If I remember rightly it was four or five pages of a copy of the first line of the article plus a link to someone else's blog but with no reason given for why I'd want to roll my sleeves up and start clicking on them.

Pingbacks were a 0.1 implementation of a concept that never got a second chance, because then the walled gardens arrived and destroyed the ecosystem. The main problems they had were what you mention: each ping would contain only a few lines (which i think was a limit in the standard, to limit spamming) and the automation mechanism was a bit stupid (every reblogging ended up generating a superfluous ping). People who cared could fix the first issue (with a sort of "above the fold" summary), but the second was enabled by over-eager engines and ended up ruining it for everyone.

Re: Freeing the Web from the Browser

#99

Post by [deleted] »

dredmorbius wrote: post #87
Torwald wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I would love a web where you can comment with your forum circle on any URI available on internet. This would be automatically available if hyperlinks were two way connections. All that would be needed is a culture of linking to what you commented about. Which, I would guess, would have happened in such a web, because it would be a no brainer that any cool tool provides that. Much like the share buttons for SN we ha…

A key element of Nelson's Xanadu.

[deleted]

Re: Freeing the Web from the Browser

#100

Post by dcuthbertson »

This looked interesting, so I started reading the author's dissertation, but I've been sidetracked/put-off by its overbearing copyright statement.

    This copy of the dissertation has been supplied on 
    condition that anyone who consults it is understood to 
    recognise that its copyright rests with its author and 
    that no quotation from the dissertation and no 
    information derived from it may be published without 
    the prior written consent of the author.
At least in the US, the fair use clause under the copyright law allows for limited quotes/excerpts w/o asking permission.
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