4 ms·

I have to disagree with this sentiment. He's describing a future in which the web no longer exists and only google, facebook and amazon's network exists. Thi

I have to disagree with this sentiment. He's describing a future in which the web no longer exists and only google, facebook and amazon's network exists. This is a very literal interpretation of the term "web is dying", the web will no longer exist. If he's providing evidence that this is the case then the title is descriptive. That aside, we don't even really need additional evidence that this is the case, these companies have made it clear their intention to pull the ladder up behind themselves time and again, just look at Google's reversal of being opposed to net neutrality in general, this can only result in the consolidation of power in their hands. At most you can accuse this title of being apocalyptic. I.e. If people generally knew that Bono was dying already through other sources, a headline of "Bono is dying" would be shocking by the nature of what it is, but ultimately not clickbait.

drzaiusapelord 9y ago
> This is a very literal interpretation of the term "web is dying" Does smtp 'exist' now that most of it is over google, yahoo, and microsoft? Or linux considering RedHat/Cent/Fedora and Ubuntu/Debian are responsible for most installs. I think its rational to accept that big players will, naturally, take big slices and that doesn't mean you're kinda sorta making a 'x is dying' argument. If anything, the natural distribution of the network effect probably falls onto a ~80/20 relationship where the bigger players take 80% of the market and many smaller players take the remaining 20%. The web will be no exception to this. It just took a little while to get here. Its already happened to ISPs, remember early on when every city had multiple competing DSL resellers? PC operating systems (is anyone even pretending that Windows and MacOS as a distant second will ever have real competitors anymore?), PC GPUs (two real players now), 3D game engines (2 non-in house engines dominate), does Linkedin even have competition now?, etc, etc. Worse, the network effect for Facebook is tremendous. Its power isn't that its a great service, its mediocre at best, but its a such a pita to get everyone you know to switch over that it'll probably never happen. Back in the old days, bloggers had to get their own domain names, find their own hosting, write their own html/css/whatever, manage their own CMS (and install it on a linux system hosted somewhere and via the commandline/ftp/whatever), etc. This meant a lot of the early web was techie-oriented types who could perform these tasks (endless sites and discussions on who is the best Star Trek captain or which was the worst Star Wars movie, not many on fighting childhood malnutrition in the 3rd world). I'm not sure how this was 'better' than what we have today. Democratization will often lead to a network effect which will lead to consolidation. Philosophically, to some, a perfectly distributed system is 'better' but to pull that off you'd probably need communist-level social and economic controls and if you had that you most likely would never had the internet or the web. Just the fact that we use aggregators like HN or Reddit means that we accept a whole lot of consolidation without question and often see it as better than the old system of managing a dozen different topics spread on on various specialist sites and usenet. Or are we giving special exceptions to techie approved sites like Reddit (the 4th most popular site in the USA), which is missing from the article?
- TAForObvReasons 9y ago
  The web thrives on competition, but the author is suggesting that the major tech companies just stopped directly competing with each other and focused on their little bubbles. That shift, as posited by the author, happened around 2014 based on certain strategic decisions by FB and Google. And as a result, the competitive forces tapered off
- nautilus12 9y ago
  This is the most out of context invocation of the 80/20 rule i've ever seen.
  - MakeArtorDie 9y ago
    The 80/20 rule comes from the pareto distribution, which applies to things like hard drive error rates and the sizes of meteorites: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_distribution#Applications https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_distribution#Applicatio...
- sarreph 9y ago
  This is one of the caveats of debating in the HN echo-chamber... People start making bizarre analogies using 'parallels' from tech (in this case, SMTP), for the sake of it, hoping that the blatant inaccuracies of their comparison will fly over the heads of the audience, in favour of their esoteric appeal. Take some figures plucked from thin-air and you have a recipe for retort success! Thankfully, it's only a caveat that happens 20/80 of the time, sort of like how TCP does such a good job of filtering out the riff-raff. /s
  - rsync 9y ago
    "People start making bizarre analogies using 'parallels' from tech (in this case, SMTP), for the sake of it, hoping that the blatant inaccuracies of their comparison will fly over the heads of the audience, in favour of their esoteric appeal." I thought the analogy to SMTP was a very good one and, considering the audience, was not esoteric at all.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
ks22 9y ago
This is not the first time consolidation of power has happened. Intel and Microsoft pulled all kinds of stunts to hold on to their monopolies. Are you worried about your chip and OS today? I don't see Google(Search/Chrome/Android) and Amazon in the same sphere as Facebook/YouTube/Twitter in doing damage to the web. I am much more worried about the societal chaos that Facebook/YouTube/Twitter are producing across the globe than any net neutrality issues.
- eloisant 9y ago
  There was a good reason to be worried about Intel and Microsoft back in the day, and it's good we didn't let them get to full monopolies. Remember the Microsoft anti-trust trial?
  - krrrh 9y ago
    The anti-trust trail didn’t result in much in the end. The market forces that clipped Microsoft’s wings were a magnitude larger, and would have been the same regardless. The DOJ was nothing compared to Ballmer laughing the iPhone off, or Linux dominating embedded devices and internet servers despite all the FUD.
    - macintux 9y ago
      I don't think the picture is quite that clear. There's a fair bit of anecdotal evidence that Microsoft was genuinely gunshy about wielding its monopoly power thanks to the trial. Yes, Google and Apple found ways to break that monopoly, but a chastened Microsoft wasn't prepared to wage the type of scorched earth campaigns that it became famous for.
- loup-vaillant 9y ago
  > Are you worried about your chip and OS today? As a matter of fact, I am. And we have palpable consequences today, with that trusted computing débâcle (backdoors on CPUs that threaten to turn into full blown vulnerabilities…) As a GNU/Linux user, I'm not too worried about my own OS. But I am scared that Apple managed to locked down its systems in a way that would have Microsoft sharded into oblivion. Numeric prisons are now not only acceptable but downright fashionable.

drzaiusapelord 9y ago

> This is a very literal interpretation of the term "web is dying" Does smtp 'exist' now that most of it is over google, yahoo, and microsoft? Or linux considering RedHat/Cent/Fedora and Ubuntu/Debian are responsible for most installs. I think its rational to accept that big players will, naturally, take big slices and that doesn't mean you're kinda sorta making a 'x is dying' argument. If anything, the natural distribution of the network effect probably falls onto a ~80/20 relationship where the bigger players take 80% of the market and many smaller players take the remaining 20%. The web will be no exception to this. It just took a little while to get here. Its already happened to ISPs, remember early on when every city had multiple competing DSL resellers? PC operating systems (is anyone even pretending that Windows and MacOS as a distant second will ever have real competitors anymore?), PC GPUs (two real players now), 3D game engines (2 non-in house engines dominate), does Linkedin even have competition now?, etc, etc. Worse, the network effect for Facebook is tremendous. Its power isn't that its a great service, its mediocre at best, but its a such a pita to get everyone you know to switch over that it'll probably never happen. Back in the old days, bloggers had to get their own domain names, find their own hosting, write their own html/css/whatever, manage their own CMS (and install it on a linux system hosted somewhere and via the commandline/ftp/whatever), etc. This meant a lot of the early web was techie-oriented types who could perform these tasks (endless sites and discussions on who is the best Star Trek captain or which was the worst Star Wars movie, not many on fighting childhood malnutrition in the 3rd world). I'm not sure how this was 'better' than what we have today. Democratization will often lead to a network effect which will lead to consolidation. Philosophically, to some, a perfectly distributed system is 'better' but to pull that off you'd probably need communist-level social and economic controls and if you had that you most likely would never had the internet or the web. Just the fact that we use aggregators like HN or Reddit means that we accept a whole lot of consolidation without question and often see it as better than the old system of managing a dozen different topics spread on on various specialist sites and usenet. Or are we giving special exceptions to techie approved sites like Reddit (the 4th most popular site in the USA), which is missing from the article?

TAForObvReasons 9y ago
The web thrives on competition, but the author is suggesting that the major tech companies just stopped directly competing with each other and focused on their little bubbles. That shift, as posited by the author, happened around 2014 based on certain strategic decisions by FB and Google. And as a result, the competitive forces tapered off
nautilus12 9y ago
This is the most out of context invocation of the 80/20 rule i've ever seen.
- MakeArtorDie 9y ago
  The 80/20 rule comes from the pareto distribution, which applies to things like hard drive error rates and the sizes of meteorites: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_distribution#Applications https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_distribution#Applicatio...
sarreph 9y ago
This is one of the caveats of debating in the HN echo-chamber... People start making bizarre analogies using 'parallels' from tech (in this case, SMTP), for the sake of it, hoping that the blatant inaccuracies of their comparison will fly over the heads of the audience, in favour of their esoteric appeal. Take some figures plucked from thin-air and you have a recipe for retort success! Thankfully, it's only a caveat that happens 20/80 of the time, sort of like how TCP does such a good job of filtering out the riff-raff. /s
- rsync 9y ago
  "People start making bizarre analogies using 'parallels' from tech (in this case, SMTP), for the sake of it, hoping that the blatant inaccuracies of their comparison will fly over the heads of the audience, in favour of their esoteric appeal." I thought the analogy to SMTP was a very good one and, considering the audience, was not esoteric at all.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

ks22 9y ago

This is not the first time consolidation of power has happened. Intel and Microsoft pulled all kinds of stunts to hold on to their monopolies. Are you worried about your chip and OS today? I don't see Google(Search/Chrome/Android) and Amazon in the same sphere as Facebook/YouTube/Twitter in doing damage to the web. I am much more worried about the societal chaos that Facebook/YouTube/Twitter are producing across the globe than any net neutrality issues.

eloisant 9y ago
There was a good reason to be worried about Intel and Microsoft back in the day, and it's good we didn't let them get to full monopolies. Remember the Microsoft anti-trust trial?
- krrrh 9y ago
  The anti-trust trail didn’t result in much in the end. The market forces that clipped Microsoft’s wings were a magnitude larger, and would have been the same regardless. The DOJ was nothing compared to Ballmer laughing the iPhone off, or Linux dominating embedded devices and internet servers despite all the FUD.
  - macintux 9y ago
    I don't think the picture is quite that clear. There's a fair bit of anecdotal evidence that Microsoft was genuinely gunshy about wielding its monopoly power thanks to the trial. Yes, Google and Apple found ways to break that monopoly, but a chastened Microsoft wasn't prepared to wage the type of scorched earth campaigns that it became famous for.
loup-vaillant 9y ago
> Are you worried about your chip and OS today? As a matter of fact, I am. And we have palpable consequences today, with that trusted computing débâcle (backdoors on CPUs that threaten to turn into full blown vulnerabilities…) As a GNU/Linux user, I'm not too worried about my own OS. But I am scared that Apple managed to locked down its systems in a way that would have Microsoft sharded into oblivion. Numeric prisons are now not only acceptable but downright fashionable.