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I think these "open web" movement people are mistaken about what made the web successful. The web succeeded because it let people connect more easily by removi

I think these "open web" movement people are mistaken about what made the web successful. The web succeeded because it let people connect more easily by removing friction. Of course the "openness" part was important in gaining initial adoption, but today "adoption" is not a problem anymore. Most of these open web movement people just want to make things open without any immediate, clear, and tangible benefit to end-users. Even if they did, these always come with caveats--inconvenience. Introducing inconvenience for the sake of making things more open is going backwards, and that's why it never gets any traction. I'm not saying being open is stupid, I'm just saying it's not gonna happen if all these guys think about is "how are we going to make the web more open?", they will keep building the same shit that no mainstream user cares about. If you want to make the web more open, build something that provides a unique unprecedented benefit, important enough that people will use it no matter how inconvenient it is, like Bitcoin, or Bittorrent.

formula1 10y ago
You are an ISP provider A social network "connect me" offers voip and is backed by billions in venture funding, including your own modest investment of a million. Its ok. A new social network arises and people are really into the bohemian feel. It also is a voip except its meant to be extremely high bitrate so that music doesnt lose as much qualify. Its nane is "Life Vibrations". What have insentive do you have to keep competition fair when you are invested in a competitor? When ventures explicitely pay you to be unfair, what insentive do you have to be fair? How much can you charge an individual to allow your ip to be publicly available? $100 a month? $400 a month? Forget the days of homegrown websites. The new economy is rising the barrier to entry. Another example is censorship Open web is as much about ensuring monopolies and centrelazion of power dont corrupt a very vibrant ecosystem. The web is as American as capitalism. Free and full of opportunity. The second you give a company the ability to say "no", you are now bound to the limitations of each ISP since some may provide your content only if you guve them a reason. And theres cases like the timewarner/comcast merger where they are effectively the same company but the law prevents them having the same name.
- cocktailpeanuts 10y ago
  If I understand correctly, you're saying open web is necessary because otherwise the world would be a worse place. And I agree with that, I even mentioned that in the original comment. My point was, at the end of the day you are building something for actual people to use (and not for a few philosophers), so you need to build something that's actually useful enough for people to switch from existing solutions. The open web people don't have that, they are philosophers who want an ideal world, and there's nothing wrong with pondering about and advocating idealism, but you know what's cooler? A philosopher who can actually change the world by building something people will actually use.
  - formula1 10y ago
    Im saying that competition will be stifled to the point of crony capitalism. You need a freind to gain entry rather than a superior product or even a solution to a problem. The only way to create things that "people actually use" is for those products to be available for use. If people cannot even access your products what you end up with is a handicapped communication form similar to what facebook offered india. Show me your vision. One where the only way to make a product available is to pay an absurd rent or sell to an ISP super company. Did we really go so far just to create a new form of feudalism?
  - wrongc0ntinent 10y ago
    Hard not to get angry about a comment like yours. The WWW did have a founding philosophy, one that was as close as you can get to "open web" without having lived through the ad industry takeover. Edit: Does someone actually need to point out what Tim Berners-Lee has been talking about for some years now? Or where the original "stack" comes from? Are we all either SV fodder or Stallmans now?
    - cocktailpeanuts 10y ago
      I think you're getting angry at your own interpretation of my comment.
  - 10y ago
oDot 10y ago
I view it differently. The benefit is being in control of your data, and there's not much of an inconvenience. It's up to competitors to implement the standard. The user will just have to press a "move" button.
- zdean 10y ago
  I'm not sure if that's a benefit to "mainstream users" as the original commentator specifies. I think most people that use the proprietary platforms never give much thought to who owns their data or even that there is an issue of ownership regarding their data that would affect/impact them.
  - brokenmachine 10y ago
    I disagree. They don't care as much as techie people do, but I think the average person does realize that Facebook/Google/whoever has too much information about them, but there is no usable alternative. Also because of Network effect, even if there was a usable alternative, there might not be enough people actually using it to make a change worthwhile. On the Australian ABC news the other day, the anchor was describing how "creepy" she found it that the google doodle on her birthday was a special birthday message to her. I think the average person is becoming more and more aware of such privacy and data ownership issues with every creepy experience.
justrossthings 10y ago
>build something that provides a unique unprecedented benefit, important enough that people will use it no matter how inconvenient it is As much as I like Tim I have to agree. My mom doesn't give a shit about controlling her data, much less know who has it or how it's being used. HN, What would be a killer user-experience that Solid could facilitate with it's data-silo'ing? => Enable 3rd party apps that use Solid's login to offer hyper-targeted onboarding and pre-fill more account creation inputs => Enable background cross-app communication to app's you've given permission to in order to facilitate great user-experiences? Eg. Spotify tells your Ticketmaster app what musicians you listen to, Ticketmaster gives you notifications when said musicians are coming to your town => ???
- lewisl9029 10y ago
  For me, interoperability is the killer feature of being in control of your own data as opposed to having it locked up in some private silo. If you are in control of your profile, contact list and message history data, for instance, you can switch between any chat app that has access to this data at any time and continue conversations without missing a beat. Everyone can use their own favorite chat apps to communicate without having to worry about what everyone else is using. Lock-in is suddenly no longer a thing. I think this is the only way to achieve a truly robust marketplace of apps and services that can compete on the strength of their value proposition to users, rather than relying on the strength of their network effects to lock out new players. Of course, most profit driven corporations aren't going to be eager to adopt this open ecosystem, at least until it gains enough traction that they no longer have a choice. So the burden is on independent and open-source developers to first create experiences on top of this open ecosystem that could be compelling enough to draw users away from the proprietary silos. I'd love to see this happen, and do plan to build apps that leverage open data systems like Solid myself, but it's definitely going to be an uphill battle, unfortunately. P.S. replikativ [1] is another lesser known project that has similar ambitions, though it only provides the decentralized data piece of the puzzle at the moment. [1] https://github.com/replikativ/replikativ https://github.com/replikativ/replikativ

formula1 10y ago

You are an ISP provider A social network "connect me" offers voip and is backed by billions in venture funding, including your own modest investment of a million. Its ok. A new social network arises and people are really into the bohemian feel. It also is a voip except its meant to be extremely high bitrate so that music doesnt lose as much qualify. Its nane is "Life Vibrations". What have insentive do you have to keep competition fair when you are invested in a competitor? When ventures explicitely pay you to be unfair, what insentive do you have to be fair? How much can you charge an individual to allow your ip to be publicly available? $100 a month? $400 a month? Forget the days of homegrown websites. The new economy is rising the barrier to entry. Another example is censorship Open web is as much about ensuring monopolies and centrelazion of power dont corrupt a very vibrant ecosystem. The web is as American as capitalism. Free and full of opportunity. The second you give a company the ability to say "no", you are now bound to the limitations of each ISP since some may provide your content only if you guve them a reason. And theres cases like the timewarner/comcast merger where they are effectively the same company but the law prevents them having the same name.

cocktailpeanuts 10y ago
If I understand correctly, you're saying open web is necessary because otherwise the world would be a worse place. And I agree with that, I even mentioned that in the original comment. My point was, at the end of the day you are building something for actual people to use (and not for a few philosophers), so you need to build something that's actually useful enough for people to switch from existing solutions. The open web people don't have that, they are philosophers who want an ideal world, and there's nothing wrong with pondering about and advocating idealism, but you know what's cooler? A philosopher who can actually change the world by building something people will actually use.
- formula1 10y ago
  Im saying that competition will be stifled to the point of crony capitalism. You need a freind to gain entry rather than a superior product or even a solution to a problem. The only way to create things that "people actually use" is for those products to be available for use. If people cannot even access your products what you end up with is a handicapped communication form similar to what facebook offered india. Show me your vision. One where the only way to make a product available is to pay an absurd rent or sell to an ISP super company. Did we really go so far just to create a new form of feudalism?
- wrongc0ntinent 10y ago
  Hard not to get angry about a comment like yours. The WWW did have a founding philosophy, one that was as close as you can get to "open web" without having lived through the ad industry takeover. Edit: Does someone actually need to point out what Tim Berners-Lee has been talking about for some years now? Or where the original "stack" comes from? Are we all either SV fodder or Stallmans now?
  - cocktailpeanuts 10y ago
    I think you're getting angry at your own interpretation of my comment.
- 10y ago

oDot 10y ago

I view it differently. The benefit is being in control of your data, and there's not much of an inconvenience. It's up to competitors to implement the standard. The user will just have to press a "move" button.

zdean 10y ago
I'm not sure if that's a benefit to "mainstream users" as the original commentator specifies. I think most people that use the proprietary platforms never give much thought to who owns their data or even that there is an issue of ownership regarding their data that would affect/impact them.
- brokenmachine 10y ago
  I disagree. They don't care as much as techie people do, but I think the average person does realize that Facebook/Google/whoever has too much information about them, but there is no usable alternative. Also because of Network effect, even if there was a usable alternative, there might not be enough people actually using it to make a change worthwhile. On the Australian ABC news the other day, the anchor was describing how "creepy" she found it that the google doodle on her birthday was a special birthday message to her. I think the average person is becoming more and more aware of such privacy and data ownership issues with every creepy experience.

justrossthings 10y ago

>build something that provides a unique unprecedented benefit, important enough that people will use it no matter how inconvenient it is As much as I like Tim I have to agree. My mom doesn't give a shit about controlling her data, much less know who has it or how it's being used. HN, What would be a killer user-experience that Solid could facilitate with it's data-silo'ing? => Enable 3rd party apps that use Solid's login to offer hyper-targeted onboarding and pre-fill more account creation inputs => Enable background cross-app communication to app's you've given permission to in order to facilitate great user-experiences? Eg. Spotify tells your Ticketmaster app what musicians you listen to, Ticketmaster gives you notifications when said musicians are coming to your town => ???

lewisl9029 10y ago
For me, interoperability is the killer feature of being in control of your own data as opposed to having it locked up in some private silo. If you are in control of your profile, contact list and message history data, for instance, you can switch between any chat app that has access to this data at any time and continue conversations without missing a beat. Everyone can use their own favorite chat apps to communicate without having to worry about what everyone else is using. Lock-in is suddenly no longer a thing. I think this is the only way to achieve a truly robust marketplace of apps and services that can compete on the strength of their value proposition to users, rather than relying on the strength of their network effects to lock out new players. Of course, most profit driven corporations aren't going to be eager to adopt this open ecosystem, at least until it gains enough traction that they no longer have a choice. So the burden is on independent and open-source developers to first create experiences on top of this open ecosystem that could be compelling enough to draw users away from the proprietary silos. I'd love to see this happen, and do plan to build apps that leverage open data systems like Solid myself, but it's definitely going to be an uphill battle, unfortunately. P.S. replikativ [1] is another lesser known project that has similar ambitions, though it only provides the decentralized data piece of the puzzle at the moment. [1] https://github.com/replikativ/replikativ https://github.com/replikativ/replikativ