The Web’s Creator Looks to Reinvent It
nytimes.com
The Web’s Creator Looks to Reinvent It
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Re: The Web’s Creator Looks to Reinvent It
#2Efforts towards thorough decentralization are easy when dealing with static resources(see ipfs, torrents etc).
Issues creep up when you need to support dynamic resources, which rely on :
a) user input b) stateful server
With b), a will feel more comfortable sharing data when there's trust built up in b). This seems to go directly against legacy-web as centralization was the solution to the trust problem.
With new technologies like bitcoin showing trust can be based in mathematics, and ethereum showing that interactions can be based around mathematical rules, we definitely have the technological raw power to built a scalable, trustable, non-censorable alternative to www.
I do hope these new technologies are not too-hampered by how ubiquitous and entrenched www is.
Re: The Web’s Creator Looks to Reinvent It
#3Efforts towards thorough decentralization are easy when dealing with static resources(see ipfs, torrents etc). Issues creep up when you need to support dynamic resources, which rely on : a) user input b) stateful server With b), a will feel more comfortable sharing data when there's trust built up in b). This seems to go directly against legacy-web as centralization was the solution to the trust problem. With new tec…
They managed a) user input b) stateful server with Diaspora as an alternative to Facebook. The trouble with decentralisation is users aren't bothered with it unless they need it to circumvent laws with things like bittorrent for copyright laws and bitcoin for money laundering, drug dealing, cryptolocker extortion and the like.
Re: The Web’s Creator Looks to Reinvent It
#4Efforts towards thorough decentralization are easy when dealing with static resources(see ipfs, torrents etc). Issues creep up when you need to support dynamic resources, which rely on : a) user input b) stateful server With b), a will feel more comfortable sharing data when there's trust built up in b). This seems to go directly against legacy-web as centralization was the solution to the trust problem. With new tec…
You are right, static resources is much simpler to solve than dynamic data. Everything from regular old Bittorrent, to IPFS (and many many others) can handle resources.
But we need something like a Decentralized Firebase. And that is exactly what we're working on at https://github.com/amark/gun . I met Tim Berners-Lee last year at the Extensible Summit and chatted for a bit, and it is pretty incredible to know that he is rock solid in his principles and values. That takes a pretty level head.
Re: The Web’s Creator Looks to Reinvent It
#5"People assume today's consumer has to make a deal with a marketing machine to get stuff for 'free,' even if they're horrified by what happens with their data. Imagine a world where paying for things was easy on both sides."
I can't see that friction is the problem. It's easy to implement payment on the web nowadays. The issue is getting people to want to actually pay, rather than going and looking elsewhere for the same thing for free.
The challenge with the web is as is noted at the end, not one of technology, but one of society. Making a better web means making how people work with each other through the web, what we expect of it, and how we want it to work better.
Unfortunately, time and time again we've seen people prefer free, lousy web content to even a ludicrously small payment for something really good.
How you fix that (getting people to value what they get from the web and to be willing to pay for it), I don't know. Spotify, Netflix, The FT et al have shown that it's possible to get people to pay, but I can't imagine even the majority of the web going that way for now. Hopefully that changes in the future.
Re: The Web’s Creator Looks to Reinvent It
#6The end of the article said it best. It isn't an infrastructure problem. It's a society problem; people want to use centralized services, ie. Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook, etc etc. Muggles don't give two fucks about privacy - idiots aren't usually political dissidents until their food supply gets low or their Snapchat gets filtered by the Great Firewall.
Re: The Web’s Creator Looks to Reinvent It
#7I think the way the web has been conceived once and then evolved around a relatively small set of core concepts is amazing. I find it hard to imagine though that after 20 years of evolution we could go back to a point where we apply another round of centralized planning how it actually should look like. The existence of centralized services is the result of demand and evolution, not of false planning in the beginning.
20 years is still a very short timespan, and we should probably admit that for huge societal changes like this we simply need more experimentation and more time. The rapid changes in technology sometimes lead people to the misconception that everything else would move similarly fast, but our human world is still slow. I'd rather see more people just try out different options on the web as it is and then have the most successful win rather than putting a bunch of clever people in a room and plan for everybody else.
Re: The Web’s Creator Looks to Reinvent It
#8"People assume today's consumer has to make a deal with a marketing machine to get stuff for 'free,' even if they're horrified by what happens with their data. Imagine a world where paying for things was easy on both sides." I can't see that friction is the problem. It's easy to implement payment on the web nowadays. The issue is getting people to want to actually pay, rather than going and looking elsewhere for the…
I think that the problem isn't paying per se, but rather just the inconvenience. After all people already pay plenty for their web connection. Something like Flattr might be the solution.
Re: The Web’s Creator Looks to Reinvent It
#9"People assume today's consumer has to make a deal with a marketing machine to get stuff for 'free,' even if they're horrified by what happens with their data. Imagine a world where paying for things was easy on both sides." I can't see that friction is the problem. It's easy to implement payment on the web nowadays. The issue is getting people to want to actually pay, rather than going and looking elsewhere for the…
I think that the problem isn't paying per se, but rather just the inconvenience. After all people already pay plenty for their web connection. Something like Flattr might be the solution.
As a flattr user from both sides (site owner and site visitor), I can't say I was entirely happy with it. Although it's well implemented.
I find it difficult that they constrained the concept to payoff = $monthly_amount/$number_of_clicks. From both sides I would prefer to be able to set and see prices, not arbitrary equal results for all the sites I click. That had kept me from clicking in most cases, because I wouldn't want to give the equal amount to go to some 1-paragraph blogpost as to a 1 hour podcast. Even though I would want to contribute for both.
Re: The Web’s Creator Looks to Reinvent It
#10Efforts towards thorough decentralization are easy when dealing with static resources(see ipfs, torrents etc). Issues creep up when you need to support dynamic resources, which rely on : a) user input b) stateful server With b), a will feel more comfortable sharing data when there's trust built up in b). This seems to go directly against legacy-web as centralization was the solution to the trust problem. With new tec…
They managed a) user input b) stateful server with Diaspora as an alternative to Facebook. The trouble with decentralisation is users aren't bothered with it unless they need it to circumvent laws with things like bittorrent for copyright laws and bitcoin for money laundering, drug dealing, cryptolocker extortion and the like.
Users don't bother with Diaspora because while it makes some gestures towards being simple and friction-free, it's essentially still a geek project for geeks, and not a mass user project for mass users who have zero interest in technology and just want to be social.
The distributed network idea has been around for a long time, and ideally it's how the web will go.
But it's much more of a technical and social challenge than today's server-based web.
To win users it has to be significantly better than what's available today - not just another way to do the same things, but with a few extra complications and unreliabilities.