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What I find interesting is the call to action at the end: "Our power has always been in our web community – we are exceptionally good at creating movements and

What I find interesting is the call to action at the end: "Our power has always been in our web community – we are exceptionally good at creating movements and solving things, as a community. It’s time to dig deep and put as much time and effort into helping our community as we once did fixing browser quirks all those years ago." I think this is a common wishful thinking comment from people who don't understand how the world works. How is the 'community' of web designers going to do anything about companies wanting in-house staff or squarespace making week-long wordpress projects obsolete? Bottom line is: most people don't need a website. Squarespace covers a great deal of what very small websites need and frankly - a facebook page is good enough for most things. Why have a website at all? I don't know if selling t-shirts is a solved problem in web dev because I'm not in the loop but that seems to me - the last frontier, once you can sell t-shirts and other variety of items without needing much technical know-how, the game is over. I am glad it's over - who needs a billion bloated wordpress sites? I want everything online sold through amazon, events posted on facebook and news posted to a single platform (I use an RSS reader which makes dozens of websites look exactly the same). We don't need much web design, 100 different types of cars or 100 different shampoos, wake up, it's madness :)

enraged_camel 11y ago
>>I am glad it's over - who needs a billion bloated wordpress sites? I want everything online sold through amazon, events posted on facebook and news posted to a single platform (I use an RSS reader which makes dozens of websites look exactly the same). Really? You want a few private players on the market controlling all interactions and commerce through their closed-source platforms?
- pjlegato 11y ago
  It's already happened. Whether we want it or not is now beside the point. Sure, there will always be a few specialist sites, but the vast majority of commerce and interaction for most people has long since moved to Amazon and Facebook.
  - philovivero 11y ago
    We're more interested in your original statement, that you want it that way. I think most people educated on monopolies would probably not think that way. We're hoping you have some interesting insight here. But I'm starting to suspect what you really mean is: "Oops, I didn't meant I want it that way. I mean it is that way, and if it's going to be that way, why not take it to its logical extreme?" Which, if correct, is still an unusual sentiment. EDIT: I mis-read the comment tree and am conflating two commenters.
    - pjlegato 11y ago
      I didn't make the original statement. Someone else wrote the grandparent post.
  - learc83 11y ago
    I'm not sure if you can say that most people have moved to Amazon and Facebook. The majority of their customers didn't move there because they started there. Amazon and Facebook were the first things they used on the internet. There are so many more people and companies on the internet now than there were 15 years ago. There are probably more people running custom sites and shopping at sites other than Amazon than their were back then.
  - icebraining 11y ago
    Even in the US, Amazon still controls less than 40% of e-commerce spending. Outside the US, it's even less.
    - pjlegato 11y ago
      40% of ecommerce spending is a staggeringly high percentage. There are very few large industries where a single player controls 40% of the market. For comparison, Wal-Mart, the largest US brick and mortar retailer, has about 11% market share.[1] 1 - http://www.scdigest.com/assets/newsviews/13-07-26-1.php?cid=7260 http://www.scdigest.com/assets/newsviews/13-07-26-1.php?cid=...
  - 11y ago
- alexashka 11y ago
  Who do you think makes the internet possible to begin with? Competing entities? Or people working together? I want one currency and one universal language too. That probably sounds radical to a lot of people but really, look at your life - do you want parents competing to raise you properly or do you want them working together? Why do we have the same parents our whole lives? Because it works well that way. Competition as a means of arriving at the best solution to complex problems is an unfortunate artifact that'll be looked upon as barbaric not too long from now. Working together works much better in my experience.
  - pjc50 11y ago
    I think arguing for the Bolshevik abolition of the family is going to go down even less well on HN than the abolition of Wordpress. Irreconcilable differences of opinion on what the best way to do things are the reason why we can't all just join in one big cooperation; the alternative requires either total stagnation or the squashing of dissent. (See also The Tyranny of Structurelessness)
daodedickinson 11y ago
RedBubble has definitely wrapped up that "last frontier"
pjlegato 11y ago
Mistaking the order of this causality is a common error. The community of people developed secondarily to an overarching economic process -- money being spent to build websites. Now, Wix and Squarespace and Facebook are "good enough," so that huge middle market market doesn't exist anymore. They imagine that it was the other way around, that the economic process is secondary to the community, that the community created the economic process of web development, and can now control the economics of that. This is backwards. The web dev community only ever existed because there was a large and distributed economic need for lots of custom websites. Now that there is no economic motivation -- no outside money flowing into that community -- the community cannot sustain itself, except in greatly reduced form among a few hobbyists and high-end specialists. You might compare it to the community of horse saddle manufacturers. It was a huge industry 150 years ago. Today, only a few hobbyist and specialist shops still make saddles, because there is not much economic need for them now as compared to the previous period. It wouldn't have made any difference if all horse saddle manufacturers organized their community in 1910 or so -- most of them would still have gone out of business anyway, because cars took over the economic niche that drove their industry. They were disrupted, in startup-speak. No amount of wishful thinking or movement-building on the part of the community can change the underlying economics. The broad middle market for custom websites simply no longer exists. The best way to help the community of middle market web developers is to help each other retrain on other skillsets.
- alexashka 11y ago
  That was very well put, great stuff :)
- tajen 11y ago
  Between VPs trying to predict the unicorn bubble burst, the end of half of Yahoo, and the fall of the website design market, they're starting to convince me that a lot of developers will soon be on the market and the crisis is back. Now, I'm an entrepreneur, is it a good time to hire ;)
  - knieveltech 11y ago
    Sounds like you misspelled vulture. I say that knowing the downvotes are seconds away.
mathgeek 11y ago
> I want everything online sold through amazon I don't think this is a good goal. We could want everything available through Amazon, but not sold through Amazon. Monopolies almost always trend towards anti-consumer.
xlm1717 11y ago
Yes, I'm sure we would all love to go back to the days where our access to the internet was limited by a gatekeeper who insisted we only need their services, and told us wanting a billion websites was madness.
coldtea 11y ago
>I want everything online sold through amazon, events posted on facebook and news posted to a single platform That, as a trend, will be disastrous for everybody. First, it will make you and most people you know unemployed AND unemployable, as ever more markets get into the control of some monopoly player or another. Then it will fuck up the monopoly players themselves, as it's tough to make money off of people when they don't have a job providing them with money to give you in the first place. Between those two stages, the monopolies will abuse their powers to pad their profits and skew the market even more.
- alexashka 11y ago
  I think you've described the current trend of affairs pretty well. The faster and more aggressive the trend, the more likely a positive shift is to occur. I've heard that if you decide to boil a frog, if you gradually raise the temperature, it won't ever jump out, it'll cook to death. That's where we are at currently and I don't like being slowly cooked - I want to jump.

enraged_camel 11y ago

>>I am glad it's over - who needs a billion bloated wordpress sites? I want everything online sold through amazon, events posted on facebook and news posted to a single platform (I use an RSS reader which makes dozens of websites look exactly the same). Really? You want a few private players on the market controlling all interactions and commerce through their closed-source platforms?

pjlegato 11y ago
It's already happened. Whether we want it or not is now beside the point. Sure, there will always be a few specialist sites, but the vast majority of commerce and interaction for most people has long since moved to Amazon and Facebook.
- philovivero 11y ago
  We're more interested in your original statement, that you want it that way. I think most people educated on monopolies would probably not think that way. We're hoping you have some interesting insight here. But I'm starting to suspect what you really mean is: "Oops, I didn't meant I want it that way. I mean it is that way, and if it's going to be that way, why not take it to its logical extreme?" Which, if correct, is still an unusual sentiment. EDIT: I mis-read the comment tree and am conflating two commenters.
  - pjlegato 11y ago
    I didn't make the original statement. Someone else wrote the grandparent post.
- learc83 11y ago
  I'm not sure if you can say that most people have moved to Amazon and Facebook. The majority of their customers didn't move there because they started there. Amazon and Facebook were the first things they used on the internet. There are so many more people and companies on the internet now than there were 15 years ago. There are probably more people running custom sites and shopping at sites other than Amazon than their were back then.
- icebraining 11y ago
  Even in the US, Amazon still controls less than 40% of e-commerce spending. Outside the US, it's even less.
  - pjlegato 11y ago
    40% of ecommerce spending is a staggeringly high percentage. There are very few large industries where a single player controls 40% of the market. For comparison, Wal-Mart, the largest US brick and mortar retailer, has about 11% market share.[1] 1 - http://www.scdigest.com/assets/newsviews/13-07-26-1.php?cid=7260 http://www.scdigest.com/assets/newsviews/13-07-26-1.php?cid=...
- 11y ago
alexashka 11y ago
Who do you think makes the internet possible to begin with? Competing entities? Or people working together? I want one currency and one universal language too. That probably sounds radical to a lot of people but really, look at your life - do you want parents competing to raise you properly or do you want them working together? Why do we have the same parents our whole lives? Because it works well that way. Competition as a means of arriving at the best solution to complex problems is an unfortunate artifact that'll be looked upon as barbaric not too long from now. Working together works much better in my experience.
- pjc50 11y ago
  I think arguing for the Bolshevik abolition of the family is going to go down even less well on HN than the abolition of Wordpress. Irreconcilable differences of opinion on what the best way to do things are the reason why we can't all just join in one big cooperation; the alternative requires either total stagnation or the squashing of dissent. (See also The Tyranny of Structurelessness)

daodedickinson 11y ago

RedBubble has definitely wrapped up that "last frontier"

pjlegato 11y ago

Mistaking the order of this causality is a common error. The community of people developed secondarily to an overarching economic process -- money being spent to build websites. Now, Wix and Squarespace and Facebook are "good enough," so that huge middle market market doesn't exist anymore. They imagine that it was the other way around, that the economic process is secondary to the community, that the community created the economic process of web development, and can now control the economics of that. This is backwards. The web dev community only ever existed because there was a large and distributed economic need for lots of custom websites. Now that there is no economic motivation -- no outside money flowing into that community -- the community cannot sustain itself, except in greatly reduced form among a few hobbyists and high-end specialists. You might compare it to the community of horse saddle manufacturers. It was a huge industry 150 years ago. Today, only a few hobbyist and specialist shops still make saddles, because there is not much economic need for them now as compared to the previous period. It wouldn't have made any difference if all horse saddle manufacturers organized their community in 1910 or so -- most of them would still have gone out of business anyway, because cars took over the economic niche that drove their industry. They were disrupted, in startup-speak. No amount of wishful thinking or movement-building on the part of the community can change the underlying economics. The broad middle market for custom websites simply no longer exists. The best way to help the community of middle market web developers is to help each other retrain on other skillsets.

alexashka 11y ago
That was very well put, great stuff :)
tajen 11y ago
Between VPs trying to predict the unicorn bubble burst, the end of half of Yahoo, and the fall of the website design market, they're starting to convince me that a lot of developers will soon be on the market and the crisis is back. Now, I'm an entrepreneur, is it a good time to hire ;)
- knieveltech 11y ago
  Sounds like you misspelled vulture. I say that knowing the downvotes are seconds away.

mathgeek 11y ago

> I want everything online sold through amazon I don't think this is a good goal. We could want everything available through Amazon, but not sold through Amazon. Monopolies almost always trend towards anti-consumer.

xlm1717 11y ago

Yes, I'm sure we would all love to go back to the days where our access to the internet was limited by a gatekeeper who insisted we only need their services, and told us wanting a billion websites was madness.

coldtea 11y ago

>I want everything online sold through amazon, events posted on facebook and news posted to a single platform That, as a trend, will be disastrous for everybody. First, it will make you and most people you know unemployed AND unemployable, as ever more markets get into the control of some monopoly player or another. Then it will fuck up the monopoly players themselves, as it's tough to make money off of people when they don't have a job providing them with money to give you in the first place. Between those two stages, the monopolies will abuse their powers to pad their profits and skew the market even more.

alexashka 11y ago
I think you've described the current trend of affairs pretty well. The faster and more aggressive the trend, the more likely a positive shift is to occur. I've heard that if you decide to boil a frog, if you gradually raise the temperature, it won't ever jump out, it'll cook to death. That's where we are at currently and I don't like being slowly cooked - I want to jump.