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> (Let the entire existence of the Web, with its myriad flaws, be a lesson to you: your crappiest demo may well become the thing you're known for twenty-five ye

by oskarth 11y ago

> (Let the entire existence of the Web, with its myriad flaws, be a lesson to you: your crappiest demo may well become the thing you're known for twenty-five years later, so make sure your crappiest demo doesn't suck as bad as the Web does.) The web is amazing, and you are using it right now. It has flaws, but so does anything that achieves success at the level the Web has. How many technologies have a direct impact on billions of people's lives? There are subtle reasons why "crappy" technology often wins. One is that worse is often better (http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html) and the second is that people are more prone to complain about popular technologies, which create the illusion that their alternatives would obviously be so much better. EDIT: Note that the web is not just a technological phenomena, it's a social one. If you care about the real world, it doesn't make sense to look at it as a technological innovation in isolation. Anyone can dream up The Perfect Protocol in a research paper, it's an entirely different beast to actually do it and make it work for billions of people.

tikhonj 11y ago
A big (biggest?) reason is that popularity is largely independent of quality. Things get popular for lots of reasons heavily affected by the shape of social networks and early choices by a small number of people involved—often based on what they have and have not heard of more than an analysis of what is better or worse. Quality plays a small role at best. This Nautil.us article[1] does a good job of summarizing the relevant research on the issue and references some supporting studies. > My own research has shown that fame has much less to do with intrinsic quality than we believe it does, and much more to do with the characteristics of the people among whom fame spreads. Put another way: the web has a direct impact on billions of people less because it's any good and more because popularity is inherently a power law and it happened to come out ahead. This doesn't invalidate any criticisms of quality! It's perfectly possible if not likely for something popular to be crappy because most things are crappy and that's not enough to stop them from getting popular. Then they require tons of engineering effort and hacks to scale and improve again not because of quality but because of legacy. The web is what's there already, after all! That's how things are, but that doesn't mean it's inevitable or a good state of affairs. I really wish people wouldn't conflate popularity, quality and success. The first two operate on different axes and the last, if it doesn't, should. [1]: http://nautil.us/issue/5/fame/homo-narrativus-and-the-trouble-with-fame http://nautil.us/issue/5/fame/homo-narrativus-and-the-troubl...
- oskarth 11y ago
  > Quality plays a small role at best. This is simply not true in the long-term. Good technologies survive because they are useful. Of course quality is not enough to ensure success, but it sure as hell matters for long-term survival. Homer, Shakespeare and the wheel survived because they are very good / useful. Are there lost Homers? Of course there are. Will the Web survive 100 years? I have no idea, and neither do you. A decade? Most likely. Be careful with conflating what is with your idea of what something should be. If you think something sucks and work on making it better, that's great! Keep doing it, and maybe someday we will have something that's even better. But don't diss the popular just because it isn't ticking all of the "it-should-be-this" boxes.
  - enkiv2 11y ago
    Quality is definitely a small factor in success, when we're talking about network effects. When we add in capital, with all its perverse incentives, quality matters even less. Technologies become popular primarily based on how easy or cost-effective they are to replicate. The fewer concepts you introduce, the lower the bar is for people to reproduce your intellectual inventions; the cheaper the materials and manufacturing process, the easier it is for knock-offs to be manufactured. Popularity means a plurality of knock-offs. Quality often requires subtlety and attention to detail -- two things that add effort to replication, and thus work against popularity. The web became popular not because it was better than the alternatives but because it was stupider than the alternatives -- it had fewer features, fewer ideas, and fewer nuances. The web is no longer less featureful or nuanced than its competitors, because unplanned organic development grows complexity like a rat with a radium drip grows tumors, so as a result the very simplicity that made the web grow so quickly in the first place would prevent it from growing again, had it not become the focal point of an enormous amount of lock-in and path-dependence. The web is a huge bureaucratic mess right now, just waiting to be disrupted by a superior hypertext system.
- rdancer 11y ago
  How does one take advantage of this situation? There will be technologies which: (1) despite better quality, but won't have enough traction (OS/2 v Windows), (2) thrive just fine, while their crappy cousin continues beating them in popularity year after year (PostgreSQL v MySQL) (3) despite being better on paper, fall short in actual use (Android v iOS) (4) ___________________________ Without fame, how does one evaluate technologies; it's impossible to try them all. How does one proceed?
JulianMorrison 11y ago
HTML/HTTP was an improvement over earlier concepts of bidirectional, centralized, reliable hypertext precisely because the links were one directional, hierarchy-free and unstable, and could be put anywhere. The servers belonging to distinct entities weren't coupled. The pages belonging to one entity weren't coupled. It ripped out a lot of politics and baked-in design decisions and let loose creative anarchy.
- oskarth 11y ago
  Great point. A good example of theory vs practice. I still think Xanadu et al are interesting, but it's instructive to try to understand what the real trade-offs are, the most obvious one being one of shipping speed.
api 11y ago
I think a big reason for worse-is-better is that simple "crappy" solutions very often have better evolvability characteristics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolvability https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolvability "Elegant and beautiful" systems that are polished and perfect are often also brittle and monolithic and complex. Complex means hard to interoperate with, understand, and re-implement, and brittle means they can't change with the times. Complexity also favors single vendors due to the difficulty of interoperability and understanding. Xanadu would likely have ended up as Xanadu, Inc. with no third party implementations.

by oskarth 11y ago

tikhonj 11y ago

A big (biggest?) reason is that popularity is largely independent of quality. Things get popular for lots of reasons heavily affected by the shape of social networks and early choices by a small number of people involved—often based on what they have and have not heard of more than an analysis of what is better or worse. Quality plays a small role at best. This Nautil.us article[1] does a good job of summarizing the relevant research on the issue and references some supporting studies. > My own research has shown that fame has much less to do with intrinsic quality than we believe it does, and much more to do with the characteristics of the people among whom fame spreads. Put another way: the web has a direct impact on billions of people less because it's any good and more because popularity is inherently a power law and it happened to come out ahead. This doesn't invalidate any criticisms of quality! It's perfectly possible if not likely for something popular to be crappy because most things are crappy and that's not enough to stop them from getting popular. Then they require tons of engineering effort and hacks to scale and improve again not because of quality but because of legacy. The web is what's there already, after all! That's how things are, but that doesn't mean it's inevitable or a good state of affairs. I really wish people wouldn't conflate popularity, quality and success. The first two operate on different axes and the last, if it doesn't, should. [1]: http://nautil.us/issue/5/fame/homo-narrativus-and-the-trouble-with-fame http://nautil.us/issue/5/fame/homo-narrativus-and-the-troubl...

oskarth 11y ago
> Quality plays a small role at best. This is simply not true in the long-term. Good technologies survive because they are useful. Of course quality is not enough to ensure success, but it sure as hell matters for long-term survival. Homer, Shakespeare and the wheel survived because they are very good / useful. Are there lost Homers? Of course there are. Will the Web survive 100 years? I have no idea, and neither do you. A decade? Most likely. Be careful with conflating what is with your idea of what something should be. If you think something sucks and work on making it better, that's great! Keep doing it, and maybe someday we will have something that's even better. But don't diss the popular just because it isn't ticking all of the "it-should-be-this" boxes.
- enkiv2 11y ago
  Quality is definitely a small factor in success, when we're talking about network effects. When we add in capital, with all its perverse incentives, quality matters even less. Technologies become popular primarily based on how easy or cost-effective they are to replicate. The fewer concepts you introduce, the lower the bar is for people to reproduce your intellectual inventions; the cheaper the materials and manufacturing process, the easier it is for knock-offs to be manufactured. Popularity means a plurality of knock-offs. Quality often requires subtlety and attention to detail -- two things that add effort to replication, and thus work against popularity. The web became popular not because it was better than the alternatives but because it was stupider than the alternatives -- it had fewer features, fewer ideas, and fewer nuances. The web is no longer less featureful or nuanced than its competitors, because unplanned organic development grows complexity like a rat with a radium drip grows tumors, so as a result the very simplicity that made the web grow so quickly in the first place would prevent it from growing again, had it not become the focal point of an enormous amount of lock-in and path-dependence. The web is a huge bureaucratic mess right now, just waiting to be disrupted by a superior hypertext system.
rdancer 11y ago
How does one take advantage of this situation? There will be technologies which: (1) despite better quality, but won't have enough traction (OS/2 v Windows), (2) thrive just fine, while their crappy cousin continues beating them in popularity year after year (PostgreSQL v MySQL) (3) despite being better on paper, fall short in actual use (Android v iOS) (4) ___________________________ Without fame, how does one evaluate technologies; it's impossible to try them all. How does one proceed?

JulianMorrison 11y ago

HTML/HTTP was an improvement over earlier concepts of bidirectional, centralized, reliable hypertext precisely because the links were one directional, hierarchy-free and unstable, and could be put anywhere. The servers belonging to distinct entities weren't coupled. The pages belonging to one entity weren't coupled. It ripped out a lot of politics and baked-in design decisions and let loose creative anarchy.

oskarth 11y ago
Great point. A good example of theory vs practice. I still think Xanadu et al are interesting, but it's instructive to try to understand what the real trade-offs are, the most obvious one being one of shipping speed.

api 11y ago

I think a big reason for worse-is-better is that simple "crappy" solutions very often have better evolvability characteristics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolvability https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolvability "Elegant and beautiful" systems that are polished and perfect are often also brittle and monolithic and complex. Complex means hard to interoperate with, understand, and re-implement, and brittle means they can't change with the times. Complexity also favors single vendors due to the difficulty of interoperability and understanding. Xanadu would likely have ended up as Xanadu, Inc. with no third party implementations.