16 ms·

Iran's blogfather: Facebook, Instagram and Twitter are killing the web

570 points by plg 11y ago

sehr 11y ago
Is there any way to, or rather, is it even worth fighting centralization? Has anything similar to this happened?
- deleted 11y ago
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aaron-lebo 11y ago
But hyperlinks aren’t just the skeleton of the web: they are its eyes, a path to its soul. And a blind webpage, one without hyperlinks, can’t look or gaze at another webpage – and this has serious consequences for the dynamics of power on the web. More or less all theorists have thought of gaze in relation to power, and mostly in a negative sense: the gazer strips the gazed and turns her into a powerless object, devoid of intelligence or agency. But in the world of webpages, gaze functions differently: it is more empowering. When a powerful website – say Google or Facebook – gazes at, or links to, another webpage, it doesn’t just connect it , it brings it into existence; gives it life. Without this empowering gaze, your web page doesn’t breathe. No matter how many links you have placed in a webpage, unless somebody is looking at it, it is actually both dead and blind, and therefore incapable of transferring power to any outside web page. Apps like Instagram are blind, or almost blind. Their gaze goes inwards, reluctant to transfer any of their vast powers to others, leading them into quiet deaths. The consequence is that web pages outside social media are dying. Best part of the piece, imo.
- personjerry 11y ago
  But there are links both to and from social media sites, aren't there?
  - soheil 11y ago
    As he also mentioned Instagram for instance doesn't allow links in posts.
  - johnchristopher 11y ago
    Try keeping up with newspaper comments that are driven by Facebook. It's a nightmare to follow conversations.
  - amirmansour 11y ago
    Yes, but I also think you have to consider how those links are presented and interacted with. It's not just a link, it's got "like" button. What you see is people posting and even crafting links to optimize for that "number of likes" metric. That's how you end up with the stream of junk on FB: quick bait links with the potential for instant gratification. Also for many people this stream is their one-stop-shop web, which is fine, do whatever you like, but now it has reached the point where social media has to be appeased just to get people to look beyond the stream, which I think goes against the openness philosophy of the internet. As the builders of the web (majority of HN base) we should stay conscious of this philosophy.
    - ethbro 11y ago
      Relevant Eli Pariser: https://www.ted.com/talks/eli_pariser_beware_online_filter_bubbles?language=en https://www.ted.com/talks/eli_pariser_beware_online_filter_b... I thought the "stream as something that only gazes inward" was a nice metaphor. "Aren't there outward links on Facebook?" is a less relevant question to the author's point than "What's the chance I click on a link in Facebook and it takes me to something unexpected?"
  - ngoel36 11y ago
    Yes but the few social media sites get to control how a link to anywhere else appears. For example, try updating your Facebook status with a video. If you upload the raw mp4 directly, the video will autoplay in your friends' news feeds, generating more engagement & likes. If you instead post a YouTube link, your friends will see one screenshot in an ugly embedded player. Facebook, intentionally or not, gets to control part of YouTube's fate and relevance. It has every right to, but that's a bit scary when it's the only way to share a video with my friends.
- pjbrunet 11y ago
  And 90% of that falls on Mark Zuckerberg's shoulders, Facebook owns Instagram. But if Instagram suffocates the Internet, perhaps it's an opportunity for the arts. Renaissance. That's my take. I noticed the same thing happening (I wrote this same rant 10 mins ago on Facebook) and I have already shifted more of my focus to fine art and I have drawings for sale on Instagram as of a few days ago. If I can choose between making a $2000 web app or a $2000 painting, I'm going to do the painting if that's what people want, and then I get to teach painting, podcast about art, coach artists, the whole nine yards ;-)
  - rpgmaker 11y ago
    He is giving people what they want. If it wasn't facebook they would still be using myspace, hi5 or some other crap. There's no one to blame here, just a realization: humanity screws everything up eventually. That being said, the "open web" still is a rich place if you know where to look, but it sure would be better if the vast majority of people on it weren't social media drones.
    - marincounty 11y ago
      What are some of these sites? My favorite sites are gone, or deemed illegial. I go to HN daily. Then--it's trying to avoid social media sites, or anything remotely related to Kardasian's.
      - TranceMan 11y ago
        Think the Internet - built by engineers - destroyed by social engineers.
- open-source-ux 11y ago
  A lot of sites seem terrified that users might (gasp!) leave their site to go elsewhere. The result is ridiculous articles like this: 42 startups that grew to be worth billions in 2015. Not a single link to any of the comapnies mentioned in the article. http://uk.businessinsider.com/new-billion-dollar-startup-unicorns-in-2015-2015-12 http://uk.businessinsider.com/new-billion-dollar-startup-uni... Another horrible trend is to hide links behind Javascript. Simple Hypertext links should never require Javascript to be clickable, on many websites they very often are.
  - ethbro 11y ago
    This. I've tried to stop reading new articles from sites that seemingly only allow inward hyperlinks to be posted with their articles. Informally, through personal observation: if anyone has a list of actual editorial policies that preclude doing that, I'd be happy to look at it! BBC News, afaict, will typically drop an external link next to the article.
  - petepete 11y ago
    Our company blog is like this, I left a comment on the related LinkedIn post (that links to our own website using some URL-shortening service!) saying "this doesn't really make any sense without citations and providing links to the services discussed" and received a request to remove my comment shortly after. The marketing team believe linking to sites other than our own drive people away. Instead they internally link to product/service pages that are often barely relevant and rarely (if ever) what anyone reading the post wants to see. It makes me want to throw the whole thing away and start over.
    - unusximmortalis 11y ago
      Yes yes, let's do that. Let's start over with all the lessons learned. Let's build something that will not be able to be morphed into something close to ... hidious.
  - jacquesm 11y ago
    Pet peeve: pdf links on google. When you want to mail someone a link to a pdf you search for the pdf, then copy-and-paste the link from the results page and boom a whole screen full of garbage and a link that is next to unusable instead of the actual link to the document. Super annoying.
- elorant 11y ago
  As a counterargument, if Instagram allows links there is a very good chance it will become a spammer’s playground with affiliate links all over the place.
  - bashinator 11y ago
    Perhaps that wouldn't be true, if the WWW were more of a federation and less of a republic.
    - jacquesm 11y ago
      That's a good point. Spammers know everything about ROI, if a platform isn't worth it spam won't be found there. The problem with that line of reasoning in relationship with the WWW is that the WWW is the platform and it is vast, federated or republic doesn't matter to the spammers, as long as there are forms and buttons to click spambots will come because the similarities between federated sites are still large enough to take advantage of them.
      - zmmmmm 11y ago
        >Spammers know everything about ROI, if a platform isn't worth it spam won't be found there. The problem is that the 'I' in ROI is tiny. I occasionally put up custom web forms for sending feedback about my software. All custom fields etc. And after a period they will start generating spam, despite the fact they send only to me and some spammer had to go and create a completely bespoke spam bot to fill it out. It is clearly worth it for spammers to hit just about every open web form on the internet, as far as I can tell.
        icebraining 11y ago
        Not sure how custom your form was, but spammers do have "smart" bots that use heuristics to guess what they should fill in the fields.
      - bashinator 11y ago
        If a Federated Internet (see dscr in alt thread) allows for some spam, that's OK by me. I think some spam is the price you pay for having a well trafficed protocol.
- noobermin 11y ago
  It seems like a number of people commenting here don't use instagram other than passively. You aren't allowed to have links on instagram pics, and as others have mentioned that this helps with spam issues, but the idea that instagram "looks inwards" isn't doesn't lead to isolation and the same can be said for twitter. People do connect to each other across ig and twitter using hashtags, so in a way, hashtags help link people together in a way that links didn't. Something I like about hashtags over links is that the content you link to now isn't specific and thus there is no filter. This is how I discover content and content producers (photographers) I wouldn't have discovered otherwise. For example, something I love is #komorebi[0]. I have discovered and followed a number of people from Japan and elsewhere on the basis of that hashtag and I wouldn't have found them if I could only go link by link. Hashtags effectively make a large number of nodes in the graph adjacent to you, while with hyperlinks, you'd have to travel from node to node through one edge at a time, making finding interesting content more difficult. What might differ then with the old web is that people are no longer represented by websites, they are represented by profiles, profiles that are somewhat limited, somewhat forced into a mold, so that it is easier to polish and curate them. That is a discussion in and of itself, but the point I'm trying to make is that there is connection between people going on, and in some ways, better than before. [0] http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/181055/english-equivalent-of-komorebi-%E6%9C%A8%E6%BC%8F%E3%82%8C%E6%97%A5-sunshine-filtering-through-leaves http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/181055/english-eq... Using hashtags gives your content eyes and gives
  - chippy 11y ago
    >but the idea that instagram "looks inwards" isn't Do instagram hashtags only work within Instagram? Do hashtags within Instagram look outwards, or inwards? How about Twitter? Does Twitter hashtags cross over to other "Content Producer" friendly applications?
    - hasenj 11y ago
      Exactly, which emphasizes why instagram only looks inwards. In effect it's an isolated web. A web of images.
- Retric 11y ago
  Google search killed the web. Links went from how you shared content to how you spam page-rank which promoted spammers swarming any popular site not because humans would click links but because dumb algorithms would do so. Further simply linking to interesting things became less useful so simply sharing link collections stopped being a thing.
  - skj 11y ago
    Hah. I think it's only mildly controversial to assert that Google search created the web.
    - andybak 11y ago
      IMHO the golden age of the web was in-between the points where pagerank started having a major impact (leading to the rise of indepenent blogs as easily discoverable sources of writing and thought) and before they got crushed between the scylla and charybdis of spam blogs and over-optimized big content sites. Google started drowning in spam and began to tweak it's algorithms in favour of big content. Simultaneously Twitter/Facebook/Instagram and god knows what else captured the mainstream eyeball. There's still great independent content out there - but somehow it now feels like it's a side-channel rather than a vanguard.
    - astazangasta 11y ago
      It is? Google was created in 1998 and didn't hit it big for a few years thence. There was a vibrant web for several years before that, and other search engines (Lycos, AltaVista) did a perfectly fine job of doing what Google does now. Sites like Slashdot and Geocities existed long before Google came around. Google was a better search engine, but it hardly created the web.
      - contingencies 11y ago
        Agreed. In my memory, the years before were superior. Almost no commercial presence, what felt like more informed and less emotive opinion, small websites run for the love of them, the birth of Wikipedia and the growth of Linux, etc.
- iamcreasy 11y ago
  Also this part, The prominence of the stream today doesn’t just make vast chunks of the internet biased against quality – it also means a deep betrayal to the diversity that the world wide web had originally envisioned. and, The stream, mobile applications, and moving images all show a departure from a books-internet toward a television-internet. We seem to have gone from a non-linear mode of communication – nodes and networks and links – toward one that is linear, passive, programmed and inward-looking. When I log on to Facebook, my personal television starts. All I need to do is to scroll: New profile pictures by friends, short bits of opinion on current affairs, links to new stories with short captions, advertising, and of course self-playing videos. I occasionally click on the like or share button, read peoples’ comments or leave one, or open an article. But I remain inside Facebook, and it continues to broadcast what I might like. This is not the web I knew when I went to jail. This is not the future of the web. This future is television.
  - Jormundir 11y ago
    Beautiful arguments. What's the solution put forward? Being critical is easy, but what's something better we can build with the internet?
    - iamcreasy 11y ago
      From the article, Hossein Derakhshan is currently working on an art project called Link-age to promote hyperlinks and the open web. Link-age : http://newmediasoc.com/projects/link-age/ http://newmediasoc.com/projects/link-age/
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
    - vvpan 11y ago
      Nothing wrong with being critical even when you don't have a solution.
    - coldtea 11y ago
      Well, getting off Facebook and Twitter is a good start.
- mooreds 11y ago
  Just a request for clarification. > Apps like Instagram are blind, or almost blind. Their gaze goes inwards, reluctant to transfer any of their vast powers to others, leading them into quiet deaths. Not clear what "them" refers to here. Is it instagram or "others"? > The consequence is that web pages outside social media are dying. This seems to imply that it is the "others", but I'd love a second opinion.
  - wutbrodo 11y ago
    I read it unambiguously as others fwiw
- lcedp 11y ago
  Indeed Instagram is looking inward. But isn't large portion of both Facebook and Twitter posts is no more than a link to other sites with a brief comment?
onewaystreet 11y ago
Most of this is just a guy complaining becuse he can't adapt to the new world.
- rvense 11y ago
  Which is completely justified when the old world was better.
  - onewaystreet 11y ago
    > old world was better For him.
    - wanda 11y ago
      I would not say that he is alone in his preference for this 'old world' and I would say that he certainly shouldn't be alone in preferring the 'old world'.
- amirmansour 11y ago
  I'm not sure we read the same article. I think you missed the larger point he made. He has no trouble adapting, he explained just how he himself uses Facebook. The point of the article were concerns regarding the implications of the rise stream-style activities of the web.
- Sven7 11y ago
  I agree. Donald Trump is showing us you don't need a donaldtrump.com to get elected. But it doesn't look like you can be (or become) a public figure anywhere in the world anymore without facebook, twitter etc.
  - gkop 11y ago
    He does have the version with his middle initial "J": https://www.donaldjtrump.com https://www.donaldjtrump.com
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
codecamper 11y ago
I wonder if there is really a smaller blog audience now than before. Or is it that a massive number of people have arrived to the Internet knowing only the FB, IG, and WA apps. Those people don't quite get it yet. Some of them are new because of finances. Computers and routing equipment too expensive 10 years ago. The smartphone has brought massive numbers of new arrivals. I think the problem could be app stores. Could be paid search results. But these are short term problems. I think eventually all these new people will discover blogs. And podcasts. Just like people these days are discovering grunge rock, and mullet hair. Or at least they were 8 years ago - last time I had a look.
- pjbrunet 11y ago
  I think it's the majority of people won't ever pay $10/year for a domain name. If domain registrations were free, that might help save the Internet as we know it. But $10/year vs. free Facebook, most people will take the free cookie.
  - kuschku 11y ago
    Well, that’s why some ISPs in Germany give you a free website and a free domain (plus free self-hosted, managed email) with every contract. Mine (TNG) is one of them.
    - pjbrunet 11y ago
      Is the domain registered to you or is it user.company-owns-it.com ?
      - kuschku 11y ago
        It’s an actual, real .de domain registered to you. Do a WHOIS (with DENIC.de) for koschima.de, it’s an example for a domain that you get for free with them. (It’s what my dad got). (Don’t do a ICANN whois, because that only shows you the technical admin, not the domain owner).
enraged_camel 11y ago
He wrote something similar earlier this year that was discussed on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9994653 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9994653 There's definitely more to be said on this topic, though.
amirmansour 11y ago
The author also published a related article on the Matter publication on Medium titled. "The Web We Have to Save": https://medium.com/matter/the-web-we-have-to-save-2eb1fe15a426?mod=e2this#.6gdnjidkp https://medium.com/matter/the-web-we-have-to-save-2eb1fe15a4... His writing can be found on his personal site: http://hoder.ir/en http://hoder.ir/en
- y04nn 11y ago
  Thanks, that's why it was feeling déjà-vu.
- dyadic 11y ago
  And the same article was previously discussed here on HN at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9994653 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9994653
systems 11y ago
i have to strongly disagree i am egyptian, and the revolution that started in egypt in 25th Jan 2011, was more or less organized on facebook on a facebook page that started few years earlier to condemn the torture and killing of a young man "khaled Said" it was even kinda a surprise to the twitter crowd where most of the activists hanged out in the two following years, twitter played a major role in sharing information on whats happening in the streets vs what the controlled media show twitter and facebook did kill the web they revolutionised the world, literally
- trentmb 11y ago
  It's chilling, isn't it? Facebook/Twitter could have severely hampered (if not ended) the Arab Spring if they wanted.
- mavdi 11y ago
  I think your point sort of proves the case that a revolution that's guided by mass submissions of Twitter and sensationalism and populism rather than well thought out ideas will end up in the dust bin of history. Egypt is back exactly where it was pre Arab spring. If not a little worse. Hence the point this blogger makes.
jegoodwin3 11y ago
Finally, a blowhard too young to remember AOL and the Eternal September. I feel old.
- mavdi 11y ago
  Neither of which were experienced by anyone outside US.
  - ableal 11y ago
    There was plenty of Internet outside the U.S. by 1990, mostly in Europe, but also in other continents. The web was invented in 1989 and came out of Geneve in 1993, for instance.
- ZenoArrow 11y ago
  Eternal September was different, in that it was the personalities of the collective that shifted, rather than how information was shared.
arthurcolle 11y ago
I feel like users don't really want to get switched out of apps as they scroll through a feed. I've noticed Facebook has many links that point outside of facebook.com/, but the constant new tab context switch is a pretty big distraction.
- ngoel36 11y ago
  Which is something they're definitely working on! Try clicking on a NYTimes article in your feed (on iOS).
- gengkev 11y ago
  This reminds me of when tabs were introduced to browsers (remember when you had to open a new window for each webpage in IE6?)
jseliger 11y ago
I'm sympathetic to this point of view—I write one blog and contribute to another!—but at the same time, it's not really FB, Instagram, and Twitter that're killing the web—it's us, every day, with every choice we make. Every time we fire up Facebook we choose to enable the proprietary web instead of the open web. It's fun pointing at corporate villains. I've done it. But it's more true and less satisfying to say that we enable the online world that has come to be.
- asddubs 11y ago
  He's the universal soldier, and he really is to blame. His orders come from far away no more, they come from him and you and me, and brothers can't you see, this is not the way we put an end to war
- nitrogen 11y ago
  "We" are extremely susceptible to psychological and emotional manipulation though, so it's still accurate to say that those doing the manipulation are to blame.
  - munchhausen 11y ago
    Huh? No matter how susceptible someone is to something, a decision they make is their own. Trying to absolve the decision maker of responsibility for their decision is a sure way to disaster. If people at large start to feel that they are not to be blamed for their actions and it's considered acceptable to pin the blame on some corporate overlord, things will get out of hand real quick.
    - Sven7 11y ago
      ...and the same logic can be applied to the decisions made by the corporate overlords. It's why we have the law. People in general are irresponsible. A complex world makes it harder to identify pandora's boxes lying all around. And that just amplifies irresponsibility at a speed and scale we haven't seen before.
    - nitrogen 11y ago
cubano 11y ago
He seems like a gifted writer, so I am sure, over time, he will make these platforms work for him, perhaps in greater ways then he could have ever imagined just using blogs. People I know use the "big-3" because it allows them to easily connect to their real-world friends and share tidbits with them, not because they are looking for a publishing platform to reach the entire world.
- ZenoArrow 11y ago
  One could argue that Tumblr fills the 'social publishing platform' niche, and it seems reasonably popular. I think the wider issue is content discovery outside social networks. I wonder whether there are still lingering issues for blogs after the death of Google Reader, or whether new services have been successful at filling that void.
xkarga00 11y ago
Great article that sums up the reasons why I am not using any of these social networks anymore. I am going to point this to anyone who asks me why I don't have a Facebook account, thanks.
SmallBets 11y ago
It seems the real shift is from the web's nodes being ideas/text, to being people/personas. Guided and organized not by what is said and the relationship of ideas, but by who said it, their relationship to me, and what liking it says about me. From ideas to identities. From the message to the messenger. The author nailed it when talking about "two of the most dominant, and most overrated, values of our times: newness and popularity" and the shift from a book to tv mentality. The newness/TV aspect is another way to look at FOMO...these things are exploiting deep fears about group status and exclusion. I don't think this means the death of ideas, but they are secondary now and spread when tied to a story/hero's journey involving a strong persona. Ironically, the author has a great one in being imprisoned for his ideas then freed.
- irixusr 11y ago
  "It seems the real shift is from the web's nodes being ideas/text, to being people/personas." Brilliant. I would add that just this point in itself is a sufficient reason to stand up for an internet whose technology and culture allows you to be anonymous
kevindeasis 11y ago
The author seems to fail to understand the new social dynamic present in the web. Just because the author fails to find his target audience does not mean these platforms are killing the web. I was a fan but not any more of the mentioned social media, but some of his statements are not insightful. These platforms are the gateway to a better web not born yet, which is just about to emerge. High-quality content is becoming more relevant. These social media websites are not killing the web. I'd argue it is doing something that is opposite to killing the web. People can find people who share the same ideologies in the social media platforms described. A decade ago, would you consider the web more prosperous without the presence of these social media platforms? I'd like to think that these platforms are gateway to a better web. Bloggers are still rock stars in contemporary time. Hossein Derakhshan is just looking at the wrong place. There is also more competition in the blogging space. What does he think happens when there is an inflow of supply? People are smarter now. In fact, they are getting really smart with the availability of knowledge, wisdom, skills, and ideas. If you want more people to read your blog? Better start finding ways to influence new people and affect their lives, while offering meaningful. Furthermore, I hope he finds a way to get the numbers he wants by out-competing other bloggers in his niche.
- quadrangle 11y ago
  > Just because the author fails to find his target audience does not mean these platforms are killing the web. He didn't make that claim, that's a strawman. The social media things are not the normal web anyway. His point isn't complaining about his audience issues, it's about the closed silo nature of these systems that give them massive power as gatekeepers in ways that the normal web doesn't. > People are smarter now. Now that's just the rantings of a myopic futurist-cultist.
  - kevindeasis 11y ago
    >He didn't make that claim, that's a strawman. Was it not implied from reading the whole article? >social media things are not the normal web anyway. What is normal? If billions of people are using social media would that not be normal still? How many people have to do a certain behaviour for it to become normal? >> People can find [other] people who share the same ideologies in the social media platforms described. It is a close silo. >Now that's just the rantings of a myopic futurist-cultist. Now that's just the rantings of a pessimist. How about things like the Flynn effect. Or do you have proof that people are not getting smarter or people are getting dumber?
kevin_thibedeau 11y ago
> On his release, he found the internet stripped of its power to change the world and instead serving up a stream of pointless social trivia. The web works just fine for me. I just route around the damage. It's not like anyone has a gun to your head forcing you to have an Instatwitbook account.
AdeptusAquinas 11y ago
I know that a big concern is the centralisation of power (something that might be mitigated by legislation, albeit problematically if the legislators are the ones to worry about) but aside from that, are aggregation sites like FB and such really that bad? His argument that they only show you what you like, keeping you in a little bubble, feels plausible, but is it true in practice? Those who are interested in new ideas will find them regardless of FB, and may even be shown them by FB if it works out that is what they will like. And those that are more passive get the benefit of the net without effort. Seems like a good arrangement, at least for now.
- gengkev 11y ago
  I think part of the problem is that one benefit of the web is to be exposed to new ideas, and passive users are hardly benefiting from seeing stuff that doesn't challenge them. Centralisation of power is not just a problem in that Facebook tailors content to your preferences, but also that it has the power to choose how it does so. For example, I believe that Facebook said that it might choose to ignore that a user clicked "Show me less of this", because what we say we want isn't always what we actually want. Another example is that when even people who have liked an organisation's page don't see its content, Facebook basically forces them to pay for advertising. Some of these ideas I found in a TED talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8ofWFx525s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8ofWFx525s
  - spc476 11y ago
    And some people like living in a bubble. A friend of mine "unfriended" me (and a few others) because we dared to present differing points of view to what he posted (in my case, it was a study that showed marijuana use had potential side effects). It's all too easy to remove yourself from alternative points of view, which was another prediction David Brin made in his novel Earth.
    - prebrov 11y ago
      _Most_ people like living it in a bubble and go to lengths to create a comfortable bubble. That's why we hang out with like-minded friends, choose jobs at companies we share values with, watch Vice and not Fox News (or vice versa), etc. Support and backing for the choices we make give us a warm and fuzzy feeling that we're in a good place or on the right path there. Bubble is good. Cognitive dissonance is a bitch.
adventured 11y ago
This is at least the third or fourth generation of whining I've been through about XYZ is going to kill the Web, in the last 20 years. AOL was going to kill the Web in its infancy, ensuring a walled off garden. Microsoft was going to kill the Web and dominate cyberspace by inserting various points of control. Magazine cover after magazine cover predicted and warned on this for years in the mid to late 1990s. Apps were going to kill the Web. Facebook, Twitter et al. are going to kill the Web. Four or five years from now: new thing is going to kill the Web. Rinse & repeat for an eternity. Absolutely nothing has changed in the argument, they just keep replacing one boogieman with another. I'm pretty sure after watching it for two decades that it's just an excuse to whine, forecast doom, and be overly dramatic. As it turns out, the Web is extraordinarily resilient + adaptive and will be just fine.
- ArchieT 11y ago
  Nothing kills the web, at least at a reliable time scope. Just the comfort of browsing and quality content decreases in the "main stream" (not to be confused with stream_(social networking)). In the past, there were nice, plain text peer-to-peer newsgroups, plain text chat (IRC, maybe XMPP), (almost) plain text websites, plain text emails. Nowadays, newsgroups are no longer popular enough to be considered a window to the world. People send bloated HTML emails and chat using proprietary services, requiring heavy GUI. Websites prompt for Java, JavaScript and Flash just to show you less than 2KB of text, and run tons of scripts to make you share a link to their content to the social networks, or even just to upvote their content on such. Almost nobody uses trackbacks. What people mean by "killing the web" can be compared to what people meant when talking about Eternal September, but now it got worse, and way more people are in it.
  - mschuster91 11y ago
    > Almost nobody uses trackbacks. No one sane allows trackbacks on his blog any more. Too abused and spam-ridden.
    - ArchieT 11y ago
      Is really trackback spamming still that popular amongst spammers? There are really more than 10 IPs a month? In 2015, when nobody uses trackbacks?
bikamonki 11y ago
This too is an endless stream of 'newness'. I log to HN as much as I do to FB. One pays with karma, the other with likes. Both are mostly garbage yet sometimes gems are found. I guess some of us are ready for curatedcontent.com
pizza 11y ago
Evgeny Morozov [0] has talked [1] and written extensively [2] about the capacity for social media to entrap those the regime deems social undesirables, and also about the naiveti of those in Silicon Valley who don't realize this capacity of their technology (insert Oppenheimer world-eater quote here...) From what I understand of my own family's experience, it is safe to say that far fewer butchers would have discovered safe havens in Rwanda (such as my grandmothers' -- my muzungu father calls it the Anne Frank house of Kigali. I never noticed the bullet holes littered throughout the bricks in her compound until my latest visit...) through their own self-determination, if the locations had not been broadcast on government radio channels... sigh [0] http://www.evgenymorozov.com http://www.evgenymorozov.com [1] https://www.ted.com/talks/evgeny_morozov_is_the_internet_what_orwell_feared?language=en https://www.ted.com/talks/evgeny_morozov_is_the_internet_wha... [2] See "To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism" by Evgeny Morozov
djKianoosh 11y ago
This is why it saddened me to see Prismatic News shut down. It was a really great way to find new and interesting things outside that filter bubble of fb and twitter.
gotchange 11y ago
"There’s a story in the Qur’an that I thought about a lot during my first eight months in solitary confinement. In it, a group of persecuted Christians find refuge in a cave. They, and a dog they have with them, fall into a deep sleep and wake up under the impression that they have taken a nap: in fact, it’s 300 years later. One version of the story tells of how one of them goes out to buy food – and I can only imagine how hungry they must have been after 300 years – and discovers that his money is obsolete now, a museum item. That’s when he realises how long they have been absent." Slightly off-topic, does he realize that this was a fable and not a true story as human beings can't live for 300 years much less without food, water and a way to expel waste?
andrepd 11y ago
This was surprisingly insightful, both at the human and the technical level (especially the thoughts on hyperlinks). Amazing read.
wahsd 11y ago
Well, Zuckerberg has said that he wants Facebook to replace the internet, at least in people's minds and actions; hence why he is ever expanding the walled garden.
xdinomode 11y ago
I disagree and here's why. The web platforms he mentions are for following the lives of people you like. Links get in the way on these specific apps. Especially on mobile where clicking links by accident is a dread. If you want to share your web links then post it on your blog. Make a link from Twitter to your blog. But DONT expect apps to allow you to spam your garbage links to others. That's what Reddit is for.
tim333 11y ago
Meh. Hypertexted linked blogs and web pages are still there. Facebook et al aren't killing them any more than radio killed books, TV killed radio or the internet killed TV. I doubt he would have lost his blog audience if he had not been imprisoned. It wasn't social media that did that.
- topspin 11y ago
  I would know nothing of this person or his views but for the concise, image/video free list of hyperlinks+descriptions I frequent on Hacker News. Ironic.
muddi900 11y ago
When Hossein Darekshan went to jail, the Internet was for the pioneers, an uncharted territory. It was a place for the brave, required arcane knowledge (computer literacy), and basic understanding of the underlying systems. When he came out it was settled. Was it the availability of easy to use technology (smartphones) that created the market for populist interfaces or the simplification of interaction that made the demand for simplified devices? That's a debate. However as more and more people came online, they didn't want to explore the frontier. They wanted their patch of land. They didn't want diverse ideas, but affirmations for their beliefs, as News media has trained us all to expect from the world. It was this way before. Most people's idea of music was limited to whatever was on the radio or MTV. Political discourse was limited to what was the news. The reason early Internet was the bastion of outsiders, freaks, geeks and degenerates because these people wanted to break new ground, wanted new ideas. Those people are still here, but they are minority. I do think Derakshan overestimates the value of the blogospheres. My primary interaction was message boards, which were closed-off, and in many cases private spaces. That is whete I discovered new music, new movies and new ideas. They too still exist, but they are also minority, as far as reach and influence are concerned.
marincounty 11y ago
I was watching Solyent Green last night. I have seen the movie so many tines, but last night it reminded me of my own eventual mortality. There's a scene when Charleton Heston shows his, I believe, father some refrence books that he stole from the rich guy. On the books, I saw report for 2016 to 2025. I thought to myself, I'm glad we are not living in a Solent Green world--yet. I thought about just how difficult it is to predict the future. That said, I don't like the direction of this internet. I loath FB. I loath it for various reasons. I'm trying to be objective. "Do I dislike it because I don't have a lot of friends?" I don't know? I just loath the site. Always have, but I'm a odd person. I'll cop to that. Somebody above me asked for solutions. I think we should share anything we have. Yes, there are poachers, with deep pockets, that will steal ideas, but we're talking something that was very special. I liked the Internet in 2008. I don't like it as much now. So, please offer solutions? (To the Downvoters, give people a chance to offer their ideas without your petty boos. It's not all about you, and your precious, fragile mood?)
hudell 11y ago
Other than social networks, I really miss the internet before youtube got so popular. These days, people put a video on youtube for everything. Things that used to be written, parsed and easily searchable, now are locked inside lengthy videos.
zkhalique 11y ago
Well, looks like he's back :) So many people reposting his article!
bronz 11y ago
I think this is an interesting problem. Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr et al dominate the internet. They are mostly used for garbage. There are more people on the web now than ever and they use these platforms like they use a permanent marker and a bathroom stall. At the same time, as has been mentioned elsewhere in these comments, it hasn't gotten much easier to run a blog. There are hosting costs to consider and the technical barrier is still there, although it is lower than it used to be. Also, perhaps most importantly, it is not immediately clear whether one can or cannot gain traction with a blog. People don't seem to read them as much as they used to and they don't have a fancy interface to subscribe and follow (at least not one that most people are familiar with today). Maybe someone could make a platform for people who want to make a blog but are dealing with these issues. Some kind of intellectual Tumlr? A place where making a blog is simple and you are sure to make traction because of the large readership of the platform. A place like Hacker News but with blog posts perhaps.
- wgx 11y ago
  I guess that's what Medium is aiming for. It's certainly how I use it.
TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
Forgive me for lacking the time or energy to read this article. I've read a previously posted on HN piece by the same author on the same subject, though. Those three services are quite different. Instagram is a stream of photos, nothing more, nothing less. It's not a site that links outward, it's not even a site you really link to. It is simply pretty pictures. There's nothing wrong with that, really. Instagram doesn't want to and doesn't need to be a communication tool. Facebook is website for keeping in touch with friends and relatives, organising your social life, viewing advertising videos, viewing plagiarised YouTube videos, and viewing sponsored BuzzFeed videos. It doesn't link outward much because that's not really what it's useful for. Facebook wants to deliver you a stream of mostly garbage, addictive and not-entirely-unpleasant content. It's almost useless as a platform for real communication, and nobody should expect it to be one, they'll be disappointed. Twitter is a website for following people who interest you, and sharing things with people interested in you. Twitter, unlike Facebook or Instagram, is actually very outward-looking: Twitter is a huge source of links to other websites. People use Twitter to share pieces they find interesting, to share content they have created, to comment on pieces they have seen. People use Twitter and end up finding new and wonderful websites. None of these are killing the web in the end.
- unusximmortalis 11y ago
  Who is then? What is then?
  - TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
    Perhaps people choosing to use sites which are inward-looking. It's not really the sites themselves' fault. And this really is a choice thing. Many people (myself included) can't afford not to be on Facebook, but I'd argue we do have the choice of whether or not to use it much.
MichaelMoser123 11y ago
i think that hyperlinks and decentralized blogs will make it back if the concept can generate value for advertisers. So if all blog hosts hand out the same sticky cookies and then exchange the tracking info to collectively spy on its users - that will be the killer app (or killing app) for hyperlinks and decentralized blogs ;-)
MichaelMoser123 11y ago
I think livejournal would be one of last remnants of the old web. In some quarters it is still quite popular
- MichaelMoser123 11y ago
  (second thought); I am not sure if the internet changed so much - there seems to be a fixed percentage of people who read and investigate things / are ready to hear alternative viewpoints, etc. These people were reading blogs in the olden times and are probably doing so right now. Now what happened is that the online audience got much wider - now my guess is that this added audience did not result in more people reading and investigating stuff - its the same old number. (the author probably lost touch with his former readership while in prison, but eventually they will come back - if the author is still valued, but that's a separate question). The net can't make us more curious all by itself...
thrw00 11y ago
Throwaway account for obvious reasons. At the time of Iranian disputed elections of 2009, I worked as an engineer for one of the biggest Iranian websites with millions of audience looking for reliable source of news, in the strict absence of any news, when people were getting killed on the streets of Tehran. I see the need to clarify who this self-titled 'blogfather' of Iran is. I see this need as things get out of control quickly on hn due to hype and links like this jump to get 1k votes, where most of the voters simply vote because others voted. For those who do not know, since just before the Iranian disputed elections of 2009, Hossein Derakhshan has been living in Iran. He was 'supposedly' in jail, but there were rumors about his collaboration with the Iranian government to build their cyber presence, which almost did not exist at the time. Shortly after his arrest, many anti government bloggers inside Iran were arrested too, there are speculations that he revealed their identities. Years before entering Iran, Derakhshan was busy with 'blogfathering' Iranian web space for a few years, explicitly being anti Iranian government, which always bring visitors. This way, at the rise of the weblog era, he was doing good. He had a big number of visitors which could make him enough money to not look for another job. During post golden era of weblogs, specially when the Iranian Digg copy websites appeared, his monopoly weblog business was going south. At that point, he started publishing more unconventional content in Iranian web space to gain attention. Mostly, they were of sexual nature. A good example is a video he published where he asks an Israeli girl to repeat graphic sexual words in Farsi (Persian) after him. The girl did not speak a word of that language. Another example is his dedicated website to naked pictures of Monica Bellucci. I am not writing this to reveal that Hossein Derakhshan is a successful web attention seeker. I am writing this to let you know that in summer of 2009, when our tiny team was trying to protect huge DDoS attacks on a handful of low budget EC2 instances funded by donations, we were convinced that on the other side of the line, Mr Derakhshan had made a deal to conduct the operations by hiring Russians. This was by tracing his old account on our website to multiple new accounts claiming how they enjoy taking down the website, and let me tell you this, if you write thousands of lines on the web with your identity, it is not easy to escape your writing style when you pretend to be someone else. Another elections is coming in a couple of months in Iran, where the government allows high profile media to report from inside Iran, hence this article pop up out of no where. This is a known pattern. I had to get this off my chest after so many year. It is disturbing to see links like this on the front page of hn, where people claim to be pro democracy and freedom. This hurts.

570 points by plg 11y ago

sehr 11y ago

Is there any way to, or rather, is it even worth fighting centralization? Has anything similar to this happened?

deleted 11y ago
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deleted 11y ago
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aaron-lebo 11y ago

But hyperlinks aren’t just the skeleton of the web: they are its eyes, a path to its soul. And a blind webpage, one without hyperlinks, can’t look or gaze at another webpage – and this has serious consequences for the dynamics of power on the web. More or less all theorists have thought of gaze in relation to power, and mostly in a negative sense: the gazer strips the gazed and turns her into a powerless object, devoid of intelligence or agency. But in the world of webpages, gaze functions differently: it is more empowering. When a powerful website – say Google or Facebook – gazes at, or links to, another webpage, it doesn’t just connect it , it brings it into existence; gives it life. Without this empowering gaze, your web page doesn’t breathe. No matter how many links you have placed in a webpage, unless somebody is looking at it, it is actually both dead and blind, and therefore incapable of transferring power to any outside web page. Apps like Instagram are blind, or almost blind. Their gaze goes inwards, reluctant to transfer any of their vast powers to others, leading them into quiet deaths. The consequence is that web pages outside social media are dying. Best part of the piece, imo.

personjerry 11y ago
But there are links both to and from social media sites, aren't there?
- soheil 11y ago
  As he also mentioned Instagram for instance doesn't allow links in posts.
- johnchristopher 11y ago
  Try keeping up with newspaper comments that are driven by Facebook. It's a nightmare to follow conversations.
- amirmansour 11y ago
  Yes, but I also think you have to consider how those links are presented and interacted with. It's not just a link, it's got "like" button. What you see is people posting and even crafting links to optimize for that "number of likes" metric. That's how you end up with the stream of junk on FB: quick bait links with the potential for instant gratification. Also for many people this stream is their one-stop-shop web, which is fine, do whatever you like, but now it has reached the point where social media has to be appeased just to get people to look beyond the stream, which I think goes against the openness philosophy of the internet. As the builders of the web (majority of HN base) we should stay conscious of this philosophy.
  - ethbro 11y ago
    Relevant Eli Pariser: https://www.ted.com/talks/eli_pariser_beware_online_filter_bubbles?language=en https://www.ted.com/talks/eli_pariser_beware_online_filter_b... I thought the "stream as something that only gazes inward" was a nice metaphor. "Aren't there outward links on Facebook?" is a less relevant question to the author's point than "What's the chance I click on a link in Facebook and it takes me to something unexpected?"
- ngoel36 11y ago
  Yes but the few social media sites get to control how a link to anywhere else appears. For example, try updating your Facebook status with a video. If you upload the raw mp4 directly, the video will autoplay in your friends' news feeds, generating more engagement & likes. If you instead post a YouTube link, your friends will see one screenshot in an ugly embedded player. Facebook, intentionally or not, gets to control part of YouTube's fate and relevance. It has every right to, but that's a bit scary when it's the only way to share a video with my friends.
pjbrunet 11y ago
And 90% of that falls on Mark Zuckerberg's shoulders, Facebook owns Instagram. But if Instagram suffocates the Internet, perhaps it's an opportunity for the arts. Renaissance. That's my take. I noticed the same thing happening (I wrote this same rant 10 mins ago on Facebook) and I have already shifted more of my focus to fine art and I have drawings for sale on Instagram as of a few days ago. If I can choose between making a $2000 web app or a $2000 painting, I'm going to do the painting if that's what people want, and then I get to teach painting, podcast about art, coach artists, the whole nine yards ;-)
- rpgmaker 11y ago
  He is giving people what they want. If it wasn't facebook they would still be using myspace, hi5 or some other crap. There's no one to blame here, just a realization: humanity screws everything up eventually. That being said, the "open web" still is a rich place if you know where to look, but it sure would be better if the vast majority of people on it weren't social media drones.
  - marincounty 11y ago
    What are some of these sites? My favorite sites are gone, or deemed illegial. I go to HN daily. Then--it's trying to avoid social media sites, or anything remotely related to Kardasian's.
    - TranceMan 11y ago
      Think the Internet - built by engineers - destroyed by social engineers.
open-source-ux 11y ago
A lot of sites seem terrified that users might (gasp!) leave their site to go elsewhere. The result is ridiculous articles like this: 42 startups that grew to be worth billions in 2015. Not a single link to any of the comapnies mentioned in the article. http://uk.businessinsider.com/new-billion-dollar-startup-unicorns-in-2015-2015-12 http://uk.businessinsider.com/new-billion-dollar-startup-uni... Another horrible trend is to hide links behind Javascript. Simple Hypertext links should never require Javascript to be clickable, on many websites they very often are.
- ethbro 11y ago
  This. I've tried to stop reading new articles from sites that seemingly only allow inward hyperlinks to be posted with their articles. Informally, through personal observation: if anyone has a list of actual editorial policies that preclude doing that, I'd be happy to look at it! BBC News, afaict, will typically drop an external link next to the article.
- petepete 11y ago
  Our company blog is like this, I left a comment on the related LinkedIn post (that links to our own website using some URL-shortening service!) saying "this doesn't really make any sense without citations and providing links to the services discussed" and received a request to remove my comment shortly after. The marketing team believe linking to sites other than our own drive people away. Instead they internally link to product/service pages that are often barely relevant and rarely (if ever) what anyone reading the post wants to see. It makes me want to throw the whole thing away and start over.
  - unusximmortalis 11y ago
    Yes yes, let's do that. Let's start over with all the lessons learned. Let's build something that will not be able to be morphed into something close to ... hidious.
- jacquesm 11y ago
  Pet peeve: pdf links on google. When you want to mail someone a link to a pdf you search for the pdf, then copy-and-paste the link from the results page and boom a whole screen full of garbage and a link that is next to unusable instead of the actual link to the document. Super annoying.
elorant 11y ago
As a counterargument, if Instagram allows links there is a very good chance it will become a spammer’s playground with affiliate links all over the place.
- bashinator 11y ago
  Perhaps that wouldn't be true, if the WWW were more of a federation and less of a republic.
  - jacquesm 11y ago
    That's a good point. Spammers know everything about ROI, if a platform isn't worth it spam won't be found there. The problem with that line of reasoning in relationship with the WWW is that the WWW is the platform and it is vast, federated or republic doesn't matter to the spammers, as long as there are forms and buttons to click spambots will come because the similarities between federated sites are still large enough to take advantage of them.
    - zmmmmm 11y ago
      >Spammers know everything about ROI, if a platform isn't worth it spam won't be found there. The problem is that the 'I' in ROI is tiny. I occasionally put up custom web forms for sending feedback about my software. All custom fields etc. And after a period they will start generating spam, despite the fact they send only to me and some spammer had to go and create a completely bespoke spam bot to fill it out. It is clearly worth it for spammers to hit just about every open web form on the internet, as far as I can tell.
      - icebraining 11y ago
        Not sure how custom your form was, but spammers do have "smart" bots that use heuristics to guess what they should fill in the fields.
    - bashinator 11y ago
      If a Federated Internet (see dscr in alt thread) allows for some spam, that's OK by me. I think some spam is the price you pay for having a well trafficed protocol.
noobermin 11y ago
It seems like a number of people commenting here don't use instagram other than passively. You aren't allowed to have links on instagram pics, and as others have mentioned that this helps with spam issues, but the idea that instagram "looks inwards" isn't doesn't lead to isolation and the same can be said for twitter. People do connect to each other across ig and twitter using hashtags, so in a way, hashtags help link people together in a way that links didn't. Something I like about hashtags over links is that the content you link to now isn't specific and thus there is no filter. This is how I discover content and content producers (photographers) I wouldn't have discovered otherwise. For example, something I love is #komorebi[0]. I have discovered and followed a number of people from Japan and elsewhere on the basis of that hashtag and I wouldn't have found them if I could only go link by link. Hashtags effectively make a large number of nodes in the graph adjacent to you, while with hyperlinks, you'd have to travel from node to node through one edge at a time, making finding interesting content more difficult. What might differ then with the old web is that people are no longer represented by websites, they are represented by profiles, profiles that are somewhat limited, somewhat forced into a mold, so that it is easier to polish and curate them. That is a discussion in and of itself, but the point I'm trying to make is that there is connection between people going on, and in some ways, better than before. [0] http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/181055/english-equivalent-of-komorebi-%E6%9C%A8%E6%BC%8F%E3%82%8C%E6%97%A5-sunshine-filtering-through-leaves http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/181055/english-eq... Using hashtags gives your content eyes and gives
- chippy 11y ago
  >but the idea that instagram "looks inwards" isn't Do instagram hashtags only work within Instagram? Do hashtags within Instagram look outwards, or inwards? How about Twitter? Does Twitter hashtags cross over to other "Content Producer" friendly applications?
  - hasenj 11y ago
    Exactly, which emphasizes why instagram only looks inwards. In effect it's an isolated web. A web of images.
Retric 11y ago
Google search killed the web. Links went from how you shared content to how you spam page-rank which promoted spammers swarming any popular site not because humans would click links but because dumb algorithms would do so. Further simply linking to interesting things became less useful so simply sharing link collections stopped being a thing.
- skj 11y ago
  Hah. I think it's only mildly controversial to assert that Google search created the web.
  - andybak 11y ago
    IMHO the golden age of the web was in-between the points where pagerank started having a major impact (leading to the rise of indepenent blogs as easily discoverable sources of writing and thought) and before they got crushed between the scylla and charybdis of spam blogs and over-optimized big content sites. Google started drowning in spam and began to tweak it's algorithms in favour of big content. Simultaneously Twitter/Facebook/Instagram and god knows what else captured the mainstream eyeball. There's still great independent content out there - but somehow it now feels like it's a side-channel rather than a vanguard.
  - astazangasta 11y ago
    It is? Google was created in 1998 and didn't hit it big for a few years thence. There was a vibrant web for several years before that, and other search engines (Lycos, AltaVista) did a perfectly fine job of doing what Google does now. Sites like Slashdot and Geocities existed long before Google came around. Google was a better search engine, but it hardly created the web.
    - contingencies 11y ago
      Agreed. In my memory, the years before were superior. Almost no commercial presence, what felt like more informed and less emotive opinion, small websites run for the love of them, the birth of Wikipedia and the growth of Linux, etc.
iamcreasy 11y ago
Also this part, The prominence of the stream today doesn’t just make vast chunks of the internet biased against quality – it also means a deep betrayal to the diversity that the world wide web had originally envisioned. and, The stream, mobile applications, and moving images all show a departure from a books-internet toward a television-internet. We seem to have gone from a non-linear mode of communication – nodes and networks and links – toward one that is linear, passive, programmed and inward-looking. When I log on to Facebook, my personal television starts. All I need to do is to scroll: New profile pictures by friends, short bits of opinion on current affairs, links to new stories with short captions, advertising, and of course self-playing videos. I occasionally click on the like or share button, read peoples’ comments or leave one, or open an article. But I remain inside Facebook, and it continues to broadcast what I might like. This is not the web I knew when I went to jail. This is not the future of the web. This future is television.
- Jormundir 11y ago
  Beautiful arguments. What's the solution put forward? Being critical is easy, but what's something better we can build with the internet?
  - iamcreasy 11y ago
    From the article, Hossein Derakhshan is currently working on an art project called Link-age to promote hyperlinks and the open web. Link-age : http://newmediasoc.com/projects/link-age/ http://newmediasoc.com/projects/link-age/
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - vvpan 11y ago
    Nothing wrong with being critical even when you don't have a solution.
  - coldtea 11y ago
    Well, getting off Facebook and Twitter is a good start.
mooreds 11y ago
Just a request for clarification. > Apps like Instagram are blind, or almost blind. Their gaze goes inwards, reluctant to transfer any of their vast powers to others, leading them into quiet deaths. Not clear what "them" refers to here. Is it instagram or "others"? > The consequence is that web pages outside social media are dying. This seems to imply that it is the "others", but I'd love a second opinion.
- wutbrodo 11y ago
  I read it unambiguously as others fwiw
lcedp 11y ago
Indeed Instagram is looking inward. But isn't large portion of both Facebook and Twitter posts is no more than a link to other sites with a brief comment?

onewaystreet 11y ago

Most of this is just a guy complaining becuse he can't adapt to the new world.

rvense 11y ago
Which is completely justified when the old world was better.
- onewaystreet 11y ago
  > old world was better For him.
  - wanda 11y ago
    I would not say that he is alone in his preference for this 'old world' and I would say that he certainly shouldn't be alone in preferring the 'old world'.
amirmansour 11y ago
I'm not sure we read the same article. I think you missed the larger point he made. He has no trouble adapting, he explained just how he himself uses Facebook. The point of the article were concerns regarding the implications of the rise stream-style activities of the web.
Sven7 11y ago
I agree. Donald Trump is showing us you don't need a donaldtrump.com to get elected. But it doesn't look like you can be (or become) a public figure anywhere in the world anymore without facebook, twitter etc.
- gkop 11y ago
  He does have the version with his middle initial "J": https://www.donaldjtrump.com https://www.donaldjtrump.com
TeMPOraL 11y ago

codecamper 11y ago

I wonder if there is really a smaller blog audience now than before. Or is it that a massive number of people have arrived to the Internet knowing only the FB, IG, and WA apps. Those people don't quite get it yet. Some of them are new because of finances. Computers and routing equipment too expensive 10 years ago. The smartphone has brought massive numbers of new arrivals. I think the problem could be app stores. Could be paid search results. But these are short term problems. I think eventually all these new people will discover blogs. And podcasts. Just like people these days are discovering grunge rock, and mullet hair. Or at least they were 8 years ago - last time I had a look.

pjbrunet 11y ago
I think it's the majority of people won't ever pay $10/year for a domain name. If domain registrations were free, that might help save the Internet as we know it. But $10/year vs. free Facebook, most people will take the free cookie.
- kuschku 11y ago
  Well, that’s why some ISPs in Germany give you a free website and a free domain (plus free self-hosted, managed email) with every contract. Mine (TNG) is one of them.
  - pjbrunet 11y ago
    Is the domain registered to you or is it user.company-owns-it.com ?
    - kuschku 11y ago
      It’s an actual, real .de domain registered to you. Do a WHOIS (with DENIC.de) for koschima.de, it’s an example for a domain that you get for free with them. (It’s what my dad got). (Don’t do a ICANN whois, because that only shows you the technical admin, not the domain owner).

enraged_camel 11y ago

He wrote something similar earlier this year that was discussed on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9994653 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9994653 There's definitely more to be said on this topic, though.

amirmansour 11y ago

The author also published a related article on the Matter publication on Medium titled. "The Web We Have to Save": https://medium.com/matter/the-web-we-have-to-save-2eb1fe15a426?mod=e2this#.6gdnjidkp https://medium.com/matter/the-web-we-have-to-save-2eb1fe15a4... His writing can be found on his personal site: http://hoder.ir/en http://hoder.ir/en

y04nn 11y ago
Thanks, that's why it was feeling déjà-vu.
dyadic 11y ago
And the same article was previously discussed here on HN at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9994653 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9994653

systems 11y ago

i have to strongly disagree i am egyptian, and the revolution that started in egypt in 25th Jan 2011, was more or less organized on facebook on a facebook page that started few years earlier to condemn the torture and killing of a young man "khaled Said" it was even kinda a surprise to the twitter crowd where most of the activists hanged out in the two following years, twitter played a major role in sharing information on whats happening in the streets vs what the controlled media show twitter and facebook did kill the web they revolutionised the world, literally

trentmb 11y ago
It's chilling, isn't it? Facebook/Twitter could have severely hampered (if not ended) the Arab Spring if they wanted.
mavdi 11y ago
I think your point sort of proves the case that a revolution that's guided by mass submissions of Twitter and sensationalism and populism rather than well thought out ideas will end up in the dust bin of history. Egypt is back exactly where it was pre Arab spring. If not a little worse. Hence the point this blogger makes.

jegoodwin3 11y ago

Finally, a blowhard too young to remember AOL and the Eternal September. I feel old.

mavdi 11y ago
Neither of which were experienced by anyone outside US.
- ableal 11y ago
  There was plenty of Internet outside the U.S. by 1990, mostly in Europe, but also in other continents. The web was invented in 1989 and came out of Geneve in 1993, for instance.
ZenoArrow 11y ago
Eternal September was different, in that it was the personalities of the collective that shifted, rather than how information was shared.

arthurcolle 11y ago

I feel like users don't really want to get switched out of apps as they scroll through a feed. I've noticed Facebook has many links that point outside of facebook.com/, but the constant new tab context switch is a pretty big distraction.

ngoel36 11y ago
Which is something they're definitely working on! Try clicking on a NYTimes article in your feed (on iOS).
gengkev 11y ago
This reminds me of when tabs were introduced to browsers (remember when you had to open a new window for each webpage in IE6?)

jseliger 11y ago

I'm sympathetic to this point of view—I write one blog and contribute to another!—but at the same time, it's not really FB, Instagram, and Twitter that're killing the web—it's us, every day, with every choice we make. Every time we fire up Facebook we choose to enable the proprietary web instead of the open web. It's fun pointing at corporate villains. I've done it. But it's more true and less satisfying to say that we enable the online world that has come to be.

asddubs 11y ago
He's the universal soldier, and he really is to blame. His orders come from far away no more, they come from him and you and me, and brothers can't you see, this is not the way we put an end to war
nitrogen 11y ago
"We" are extremely susceptible to psychological and emotional manipulation though, so it's still accurate to say that those doing the manipulation are to blame.
- munchhausen 11y ago
  Huh? No matter how susceptible someone is to something, a decision they make is their own. Trying to absolve the decision maker of responsibility for their decision is a sure way to disaster. If people at large start to feel that they are not to be blamed for their actions and it's considered acceptable to pin the blame on some corporate overlord, things will get out of hand real quick.
  - Sven7 11y ago
    ...and the same logic can be applied to the decisions made by the corporate overlords. It's why we have the law. People in general are irresponsible. A complex world makes it harder to identify pandora's boxes lying all around. And that just amplifies irresponsibility at a speed and scale we haven't seen before.
  - nitrogen 11y ago

cubano 11y ago

He seems like a gifted writer, so I am sure, over time, he will make these platforms work for him, perhaps in greater ways then he could have ever imagined just using blogs. People I know use the "big-3" because it allows them to easily connect to their real-world friends and share tidbits with them, not because they are looking for a publishing platform to reach the entire world.

ZenoArrow 11y ago
One could argue that Tumblr fills the 'social publishing platform' niche, and it seems reasonably popular. I think the wider issue is content discovery outside social networks. I wonder whether there are still lingering issues for blogs after the death of Google Reader, or whether new services have been successful at filling that void.

xkarga00 11y ago

Great article that sums up the reasons why I am not using any of these social networks anymore. I am going to point this to anyone who asks me why I don't have a Facebook account, thanks.

SmallBets 11y ago

It seems the real shift is from the web's nodes being ideas/text, to being people/personas. Guided and organized not by what is said and the relationship of ideas, but by who said it, their relationship to me, and what liking it says about me. From ideas to identities. From the message to the messenger. The author nailed it when talking about "two of the most dominant, and most overrated, values of our times: newness and popularity" and the shift from a book to tv mentality. The newness/TV aspect is another way to look at FOMO...these things are exploiting deep fears about group status and exclusion. I don't think this means the death of ideas, but they are secondary now and spread when tied to a story/hero's journey involving a strong persona. Ironically, the author has a great one in being imprisoned for his ideas then freed.

irixusr 11y ago
"It seems the real shift is from the web's nodes being ideas/text, to being people/personas." Brilliant. I would add that just this point in itself is a sufficient reason to stand up for an internet whose technology and culture allows you to be anonymous

kevindeasis 11y ago

The author seems to fail to understand the new social dynamic present in the web. Just because the author fails to find his target audience does not mean these platforms are killing the web. I was a fan but not any more of the mentioned social media, but some of his statements are not insightful. These platforms are the gateway to a better web not born yet, which is just about to emerge. High-quality content is becoming more relevant. These social media websites are not killing the web. I'd argue it is doing something that is opposite to killing the web. People can find people who share the same ideologies in the social media platforms described. A decade ago, would you consider the web more prosperous without the presence of these social media platforms? I'd like to think that these platforms are gateway to a better web. Bloggers are still rock stars in contemporary time. Hossein Derakhshan is just looking at the wrong place. There is also more competition in the blogging space. What does he think happens when there is an inflow of supply? People are smarter now. In fact, they are getting really smart with the availability of knowledge, wisdom, skills, and ideas. If you want more people to read your blog? Better start finding ways to influence new people and affect their lives, while offering meaningful. Furthermore, I hope he finds a way to get the numbers he wants by out-competing other bloggers in his niche.

quadrangle 11y ago
> Just because the author fails to find his target audience does not mean these platforms are killing the web. He didn't make that claim, that's a strawman. The social media things are not the normal web anyway. His point isn't complaining about his audience issues, it's about the closed silo nature of these systems that give them massive power as gatekeepers in ways that the normal web doesn't. > People are smarter now. Now that's just the rantings of a myopic futurist-cultist.
- kevindeasis 11y ago
  >He didn't make that claim, that's a strawman. Was it not implied from reading the whole article? >social media things are not the normal web anyway. What is normal? If billions of people are using social media would that not be normal still? How many people have to do a certain behaviour for it to become normal? >> People can find [other] people who share the same ideologies in the social media platforms described. It is a close silo. >Now that's just the rantings of a myopic futurist-cultist. Now that's just the rantings of a pessimist. How about things like the Flynn effect. Or do you have proof that people are not getting smarter or people are getting dumber?

kevin_thibedeau 11y ago

> On his release, he found the internet stripped of its power to change the world and instead serving up a stream of pointless social trivia. The web works just fine for me. I just route around the damage. It's not like anyone has a gun to your head forcing you to have an Instatwitbook account.

AdeptusAquinas 11y ago

I know that a big concern is the centralisation of power (something that might be mitigated by legislation, albeit problematically if the legislators are the ones to worry about) but aside from that, are aggregation sites like FB and such really that bad? His argument that they only show you what you like, keeping you in a little bubble, feels plausible, but is it true in practice? Those who are interested in new ideas will find them regardless of FB, and may even be shown them by FB if it works out that is what they will like. And those that are more passive get the benefit of the net without effort. Seems like a good arrangement, at least for now.

gengkev 11y ago
I think part of the problem is that one benefit of the web is to be exposed to new ideas, and passive users are hardly benefiting from seeing stuff that doesn't challenge them. Centralisation of power is not just a problem in that Facebook tailors content to your preferences, but also that it has the power to choose how it does so. For example, I believe that Facebook said that it might choose to ignore that a user clicked "Show me less of this", because what we say we want isn't always what we actually want. Another example is that when even people who have liked an organisation's page don't see its content, Facebook basically forces them to pay for advertising. Some of these ideas I found in a TED talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8ofWFx525s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8ofWFx525s
- spc476 11y ago
  And some people like living in a bubble. A friend of mine "unfriended" me (and a few others) because we dared to present differing points of view to what he posted (in my case, it was a study that showed marijuana use had potential side effects). It's all too easy to remove yourself from alternative points of view, which was another prediction David Brin made in his novel Earth.
  - prebrov 11y ago
    _Most_ people like living it in a bubble and go to lengths to create a comfortable bubble. That's why we hang out with like-minded friends, choose jobs at companies we share values with, watch Vice and not Fox News (or vice versa), etc. Support and backing for the choices we make give us a warm and fuzzy feeling that we're in a good place or on the right path there. Bubble is good. Cognitive dissonance is a bitch.

adventured 11y ago

This is at least the third or fourth generation of whining I've been through about XYZ is going to kill the Web, in the last 20 years. AOL was going to kill the Web in its infancy, ensuring a walled off garden. Microsoft was going to kill the Web and dominate cyberspace by inserting various points of control. Magazine cover after magazine cover predicted and warned on this for years in the mid to late 1990s. Apps were going to kill the Web. Facebook, Twitter et al. are going to kill the Web. Four or five years from now: new thing is going to kill the Web. Rinse & repeat for an eternity. Absolutely nothing has changed in the argument, they just keep replacing one boogieman with another. I'm pretty sure after watching it for two decades that it's just an excuse to whine, forecast doom, and be overly dramatic. As it turns out, the Web is extraordinarily resilient + adaptive and will be just fine.

ArchieT 11y ago
Nothing kills the web, at least at a reliable time scope. Just the comfort of browsing and quality content decreases in the "main stream" (not to be confused with stream_(social networking)). In the past, there were nice, plain text peer-to-peer newsgroups, plain text chat (IRC, maybe XMPP), (almost) plain text websites, plain text emails. Nowadays, newsgroups are no longer popular enough to be considered a window to the world. People send bloated HTML emails and chat using proprietary services, requiring heavy GUI. Websites prompt for Java, JavaScript and Flash just to show you less than 2KB of text, and run tons of scripts to make you share a link to their content to the social networks, or even just to upvote their content on such. Almost nobody uses trackbacks. What people mean by "killing the web" can be compared to what people meant when talking about Eternal September, but now it got worse, and way more people are in it.
- mschuster91 11y ago
  > Almost nobody uses trackbacks. No one sane allows trackbacks on his blog any more. Too abused and spam-ridden.
  - ArchieT 11y ago
    Is really trackback spamming still that popular amongst spammers? There are really more than 10 IPs a month? In 2015, when nobody uses trackbacks?

bikamonki 11y ago

This too is an endless stream of 'newness'. I log to HN as much as I do to FB. One pays with karma, the other with likes. Both are mostly garbage yet sometimes gems are found. I guess some of us are ready for curatedcontent.com

pizza 11y ago

Evgeny Morozov [0] has talked [1] and written extensively [2] about the capacity for social media to entrap those the regime deems social undesirables, and also about the naiveti of those in Silicon Valley who don't realize this capacity of their technology (insert Oppenheimer world-eater quote here...) From what I understand of my own family's experience, it is safe to say that far fewer butchers would have discovered safe havens in Rwanda (such as my grandmothers' -- my muzungu father calls it the Anne Frank house of Kigali. I never noticed the bullet holes littered throughout the bricks in her compound until my latest visit...) through their own self-determination, if the locations had not been broadcast on government radio channels... sigh [0] http://www.evgenymorozov.com http://www.evgenymorozov.com [1] https://www.ted.com/talks/evgeny_morozov_is_the_internet_what_orwell_feared?language=en https://www.ted.com/talks/evgeny_morozov_is_the_internet_wha... [2] See "To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism" by Evgeny Morozov

djKianoosh 11y ago

This is why it saddened me to see Prismatic News shut down. It was a really great way to find new and interesting things outside that filter bubble of fb and twitter.

gotchange 11y ago

"There’s a story in the Qur’an that I thought about a lot during my first eight months in solitary confinement. In it, a group of persecuted Christians find refuge in a cave. They, and a dog they have with them, fall into a deep sleep and wake up under the impression that they have taken a nap: in fact, it’s 300 years later. One version of the story tells of how one of them goes out to buy food – and I can only imagine how hungry they must have been after 300 years – and discovers that his money is obsolete now, a museum item. That’s when he realises how long they have been absent." Slightly off-topic, does he realize that this was a fable and not a true story as human beings can't live for 300 years much less without food, water and a way to expel waste?

andrepd 11y ago

This was surprisingly insightful, both at the human and the technical level (especially the thoughts on hyperlinks). Amazing read.

wahsd 11y ago

Well, Zuckerberg has said that he wants Facebook to replace the internet, at least in people's minds and actions; hence why he is ever expanding the walled garden.

xdinomode 11y ago

I disagree and here's why. The web platforms he mentions are for following the lives of people you like. Links get in the way on these specific apps. Especially on mobile where clicking links by accident is a dread. If you want to share your web links then post it on your blog. Make a link from Twitter to your blog. But DONT expect apps to allow you to spam your garbage links to others. That's what Reddit is for.

tim333 11y ago

Meh. Hypertexted linked blogs and web pages are still there. Facebook et al aren't killing them any more than radio killed books, TV killed radio or the internet killed TV. I doubt he would have lost his blog audience if he had not been imprisoned. It wasn't social media that did that.

topspin 11y ago
I would know nothing of this person or his views but for the concise, image/video free list of hyperlinks+descriptions I frequent on Hacker News. Ironic.

muddi900 11y ago

When Hossein Darekshan went to jail, the Internet was for the pioneers, an uncharted territory. It was a place for the brave, required arcane knowledge (computer literacy), and basic understanding of the underlying systems. When he came out it was settled. Was it the availability of easy to use technology (smartphones) that created the market for populist interfaces or the simplification of interaction that made the demand for simplified devices? That's a debate. However as more and more people came online, they didn't want to explore the frontier. They wanted their patch of land. They didn't want diverse ideas, but affirmations for their beliefs, as News media has trained us all to expect from the world. It was this way before. Most people's idea of music was limited to whatever was on the radio or MTV. Political discourse was limited to what was the news. The reason early Internet was the bastion of outsiders, freaks, geeks and degenerates because these people wanted to break new ground, wanted new ideas. Those people are still here, but they are minority. I do think Derakshan overestimates the value of the blogospheres. My primary interaction was message boards, which were closed-off, and in many cases private spaces. That is whete I discovered new music, new movies and new ideas. They too still exist, but they are also minority, as far as reach and influence are concerned.

marincounty 11y ago

I was watching Solyent Green last night. I have seen the movie so many tines, but last night it reminded me of my own eventual mortality. There's a scene when Charleton Heston shows his, I believe, father some refrence books that he stole from the rich guy. On the books, I saw report for 2016 to 2025. I thought to myself, I'm glad we are not living in a Solent Green world--yet. I thought about just how difficult it is to predict the future. That said, I don't like the direction of this internet. I loath FB. I loath it for various reasons. I'm trying to be objective. "Do I dislike it because I don't have a lot of friends?" I don't know? I just loath the site. Always have, but I'm a odd person. I'll cop to that. Somebody above me asked for solutions. I think we should share anything we have. Yes, there are poachers, with deep pockets, that will steal ideas, but we're talking something that was very special. I liked the Internet in 2008. I don't like it as much now. So, please offer solutions? (To the Downvoters, give people a chance to offer their ideas without your petty boos. It's not all about you, and your precious, fragile mood?)

hudell 11y ago

Other than social networks, I really miss the internet before youtube got so popular. These days, people put a video on youtube for everything. Things that used to be written, parsed and easily searchable, now are locked inside lengthy videos.

zkhalique 11y ago

Well, looks like he's back :) So many people reposting his article!

bronz 11y ago

I think this is an interesting problem. Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr et al dominate the internet. They are mostly used for garbage. There are more people on the web now than ever and they use these platforms like they use a permanent marker and a bathroom stall. At the same time, as has been mentioned elsewhere in these comments, it hasn't gotten much easier to run a blog. There are hosting costs to consider and the technical barrier is still there, although it is lower than it used to be. Also, perhaps most importantly, it is not immediately clear whether one can or cannot gain traction with a blog. People don't seem to read them as much as they used to and they don't have a fancy interface to subscribe and follow (at least not one that most people are familiar with today). Maybe someone could make a platform for people who want to make a blog but are dealing with these issues. Some kind of intellectual Tumlr? A place where making a blog is simple and you are sure to make traction because of the large readership of the platform. A place like Hacker News but with blog posts perhaps.

wgx 11y ago
I guess that's what Medium is aiming for. It's certainly how I use it.

TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago

Forgive me for lacking the time or energy to read this article. I've read a previously posted on HN piece by the same author on the same subject, though. Those three services are quite different. Instagram is a stream of photos, nothing more, nothing less. It's not a site that links outward, it's not even a site you really link to. It is simply pretty pictures. There's nothing wrong with that, really. Instagram doesn't want to and doesn't need to be a communication tool. Facebook is website for keeping in touch with friends and relatives, organising your social life, viewing advertising videos, viewing plagiarised YouTube videos, and viewing sponsored BuzzFeed videos. It doesn't link outward much because that's not really what it's useful for. Facebook wants to deliver you a stream of mostly garbage, addictive and not-entirely-unpleasant content. It's almost useless as a platform for real communication, and nobody should expect it to be one, they'll be disappointed. Twitter is a website for following people who interest you, and sharing things with people interested in you. Twitter, unlike Facebook or Instagram, is actually very outward-looking: Twitter is a huge source of links to other websites. People use Twitter to share pieces they find interesting, to share content they have created, to comment on pieces they have seen. People use Twitter and end up finding new and wonderful websites. None of these are killing the web in the end.

unusximmortalis 11y ago
Who is then? What is then?
- TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
  Perhaps people choosing to use sites which are inward-looking. It's not really the sites themselves' fault. And this really is a choice thing. Many people (myself included) can't afford not to be on Facebook, but I'd argue we do have the choice of whether or not to use it much.

MichaelMoser123 11y ago

i think that hyperlinks and decentralized blogs will make it back if the concept can generate value for advertisers. So if all blog hosts hand out the same sticky cookies and then exchange the tracking info to collectively spy on its users - that will be the killer app (or killing app) for hyperlinks and decentralized blogs ;-)

MichaelMoser123 11y ago

I think livejournal would be one of last remnants of the old web. In some quarters it is still quite popular

MichaelMoser123 11y ago
(second thought); I am not sure if the internet changed so much - there seems to be a fixed percentage of people who read and investigate things / are ready to hear alternative viewpoints, etc. These people were reading blogs in the olden times and are probably doing so right now. Now what happened is that the online audience got much wider - now my guess is that this added audience did not result in more people reading and investigating stuff - its the same old number. (the author probably lost touch with his former readership while in prison, but eventually they will come back - if the author is still valued, but that's a separate question). The net can't make us more curious all by itself...

thrw00 11y ago

Throwaway account for obvious reasons. At the time of Iranian disputed elections of 2009, I worked as an engineer for one of the biggest Iranian websites with millions of audience looking for reliable source of news, in the strict absence of any news, when people were getting killed on the streets of Tehran. I see the need to clarify who this self-titled 'blogfather' of Iran is. I see this need as things get out of control quickly on hn due to hype and links like this jump to get 1k votes, where most of the voters simply vote because others voted. For those who do not know, since just before the Iranian disputed elections of 2009, Hossein Derakhshan has been living in Iran. He was 'supposedly' in jail, but there were rumors about his collaboration with the Iranian government to build their cyber presence, which almost did not exist at the time. Shortly after his arrest, many anti government bloggers inside Iran were arrested too, there are speculations that he revealed their identities. Years before entering Iran, Derakhshan was busy with 'blogfathering' Iranian web space for a few years, explicitly being anti Iranian government, which always bring visitors. This way, at the rise of the weblog era, he was doing good. He had a big number of visitors which could make him enough money to not look for another job. During post golden era of weblogs, specially when the Iranian Digg copy websites appeared, his monopoly weblog business was going south. At that point, he started publishing more unconventional content in Iranian web space to gain attention. Mostly, they were of sexual nature. A good example is a video he published where he asks an Israeli girl to repeat graphic sexual words in Farsi (Persian) after him. The girl did not speak a word of that language. Another example is his dedicated website to naked pictures of Monica Bellucci. I am not writing this to reveal that Hossein Derakhshan is a successful web attention seeker. I am writing this to let you know that in summer of 2009, when our tiny team was trying to protect huge DDoS attacks on a handful of low budget EC2 instances funded by donations, we were convinced that on the other side of the line, Mr Derakhshan had made a deal to conduct the operations by hiring Russians. This was by tracing his old account on our website to multiple new accounts claiming how they enjoy taking down the website, and let me tell you this, if you write thousands of lines on the web with your identity, it is not easy to escape your writing style when you pretend to be someone else. Another elections is coming in a couple of months in Iran, where the government allows high profile media to report from inside Iran, hence this article pop up out of no where. This is a known pattern. I had to get this off my chest after so many year. It is disturbing to see links like this on the front page of hn, where people claim to be pro democracy and freedom. This hurts.