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A lot of the comments here seem to be quibbling. The analysis/argument isn't exactly how you/I would have phrased it. But beyond the details, I think it's hard

A lot of the comments here seem to be quibbling. The analysis/argument isn't exactly how you/I would have phrased it. But beyond the details, I think it's hard to argue with the main point. The web is much more of a large corporation's playground today, far more. That means new things will be built in a different, more giant friendly way. The part of that that worries me most is the cultural part, more than the economic side. My favourite example is wikipedia. If we didn't already have wikipedia, I don't think we'd be likely to get one on today's web. The culture is just far too corporate for wikipedia to be the end result. Youtube's another sort of example. Democratic media! A new culture factory!... Youtubes play by the rules these days. Copyright.. business friendly policy, erring on the side of restriction. It's just more manageable. Nudity? Why annoy politicians and advertisers? Just give us the purple hills version. Violence? Do what TV does. Revolution? Maybe, yes. Sure. Up the arab spring! Wait.. no. actually, wait. Hold on, not in america. Look.., no just means not here. Political ads, eh...? How about you leave us out of this. They are no longer interested in the unfolding and unpredictable consequences of their inventions. Facebook is the world's news stand & coffee house. Youtube's regional political radio, newsletters & party magazine. They do not want this job, so they're pretending it isn't they're job. Pretending they won't have to draw lines between truth and lies, free speech and hate speech, laws and despotism. The fear driven incumbent mentality. It's a pity we didn't get more wikipedia's back when the gettin was good. I would have preferred to see a giant wikipedia end up with the fake news problem (which I think these two giants almost created themselves).

zitterbewegung 9y ago
Most adtech aggregators / content hosters start out by bypassing copyright law. Then when they have clients and users large enough to care they lock it down. Also crunchyroll has the same model. The issue with competitors to YouTube is the fact that it has a large moat but Twitch shows you can cross it. I think an upcoming competitor that is interesting is Floatplane because they are bootstrapped and have no VC and have no intention of selling out . https://linustechtips.com/main/store/product/147-join-floatplane/ https://linustechtips.com/main/store/product/147-join-floatp...
- Laforet 9y ago
  Funny you mentioned crunchyroll, I regularly had to explain to people who they essentially copied youtube's bootstrapping strategy. GrooveShark is an example of failing to make it, although there are several successful clones elsewhere.
stcredzero 9y ago
From the article: The original vision for the Web according to its creator, Tim Berners-Lee, was a space with multilateral publishing and consumption of information. It was a peer-to-peer vision with no dependency on a single party. Tim himself claims the Web is dying: the Web he wanted and the Web he got are no longer the same. Parent comment: > The web is much more of a large corporation's playground today, far more. That means new things will be built in a different, more giant friendly way. The part of that that worries me most is the cultural part, more than the economic side. The fact that 2014 was cited as the start time of this cultural shift gives me pause, because it also coincides with the start of the campus cultural shift. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTQr1B4jGjk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTQr1B4jGjk
laretluval 9y ago
I'm confused. It sounds like you're criticising Youtube etc for not being democratic media, but also not for "drawing lines between truth and lies" -- in other words policing speech.
- ekanes 9y ago
  Can we please stop saying "I'm confused." like this? The rest of your comment is fine/great.
- dalbasal 9y ago
  I'm not accusing at all, just describing in a belligerent tone ;) What I'm accusing (bemoaning?) them of mostly is being big, corporate and basically reserving a big portion of media for that big-corporate voice. This isn't new in media, but it is in online media. On the point about policing truth (or maybe currating content)..this is just something they now have to deal with. Regimes have fallen on their platform, coups prevented, elections impacted.... They can't hide behind algorithmic moral neutrality as Google 1.0 did, at least least not without taking a bold (costly) stance in a free speech direction. At the moment Google and Facebook are trying to be neither democratic or undemocratic. Not unbiased, just unopinionated in their role as the media. This is something you could only say in a corporate tone of voice. These problems are all consequences of being enormous superpowers. I want stuff from GoogleFb, stuff I might feel I have a right to like speech or affiliation. I have to go to them for these. We don't have the "don't like my store, shop elsewhere" relationship anymore because they have all the stores where all the people buying and selling are.
chasd00 9y ago
"The web is much more of a large corporation's playground today, far more." I don't know, I can get a VM and a public IP much cheaper now than ever before. It's never been easier to put content or innovation in front of the entire Internet. Use to be when someone thought they could do something better they'd do it and let the Internet judge. For example, if you want a different social network then build one and get your friends to try it out. If they like it then maybe it'll grow. That's pretty much how every social site that was ever tried (including Facebook) started. Will your idea fail? Probably, but failure is just part of the process. Seems like here you read a lot of "well Google/Facebook exists so why even bother?". That mentality is the real problem.
- dalbasal 9y ago
  ..I can get a VM and a public IP.. This is true. There are also a lot more people using the internet that you can get to. Taking it even further you don't even need a virtual machine or IP to do most of things people were doing back then with a regular machine. You could just use facebook. I disagree with you on what this aggregates to. Controlling the path of least resistance as FB and Google do in online media (or just media if we project out somewhat) is a lot like controlling the medium entirely. This is (as I said above) not new in media but it is new in online media. In old media a small group controlled most of it. Now in online media, a few people do the same. I'm not saying why even bother. I am saying (echoing the article in saying) that we're moving into a world where ordinary innovation and competition is simply not going to move these beasts from their entrenched position, not easily. BTW, you can also start your own TV news show. Cameras are cheaper than ever. Doing a radio show (online obviously) is genuinely accessible since podcasting is still a largely open medium. That doesn't negate the point that entrenched incumbents dominate the market, structurally. HTTP is not how you get the content of your VM & IP to people. FB & Google is.
- Animats 9y ago
  I don't know, I can get a VM and a public IP much cheaper now than ever before. It's never been easier to put content or innovation in front of the entire Internet. No one will look at it. I had a Diaspora account. There's nothing and nobody there.
eighthnate 9y ago
Agreed. The most astounding part is how corporate america, government and the media changed the culture of the internet ( not just social media ) within a span of a couple of years. The rampant censorship is something I could not have envisioned. 5 years ago, if you told me censorship would be the norm on reddit, twitter, facebook, youtube, etc. I would not have believed you. 10 years ago, if you told me anyone would support banning/stealing of domains ( daily stormer, etc ), I would not have believed you. It is just astounding to witness the censorship powers of corporate + government + media. The promise of the internet as an open platform for ideas/speech/etc that I grew up with in the 90s/00s has ended. Perhaps it's the result of the centralization of the internet in the past 10 years. Hopefully the pendulum swings back towards a more decentralized version of the internet.
- distantwarning 9y ago
  I don't use Google, Facebook, Twitter, or any other large corporate account--for free or pay. I pay for my email with Fastmail, a trusted name. I've been with them since 2002. I don't even use Google, Bing, or any other large search engine. I don't need to. I block all ads, tracking, cookies, beacons, and browser fingerprinting pretty well. The way to win is to not play their game. I give my data to no one. Fastmail doesn't even have my address, just my name. I use Visa gift cards to buy stuff online. I've been in IT over three decades and my online life is just fine. I don't use or miss any of the big services. Like many, I preferred the Web of old, circa 1998. I miss Geocities, even.
  - zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y ago
    While I agree, I think that still misses a major problem: How do you have a voice in society from that position?
  - sushisource 9y ago
    "Just don't use it" isn't a reasonable solution to something a gigantic portion of the world uses every day. Arguments like these are about "how can we structurally change this problem so that society as a whole ends up in a better place". Your "well, I do it better" anecdote is neat, but doesn't really help anyone.
dboreham 9y ago
>My favourite example is wikipedia. If we didn't already have wikipedia, I don't think we'd be likely to get one on today's web. The culture is just far too corporate for wikipedia to be the end result. Encarta.com of course!
fragmede 9y ago
Hosting costs, especially at their scale, aren't cheap; Wikipedia takes donations, in many different formats - https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Ways_to_Give https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Ways_to_Give - if you like them, don't assume Wikipedia will simply keep existing, support them! We didn't get more Wikipedia's because most of us sold out. The allure of 8 or 9-figure paydays, with "FU" money almost within reach, hell yes I'm going to build the best social-media kitten-photo coupon-clipping app for my chance at that instead of slaving away to saving the Internet from ungrateful masses who don't understand the dangers of the corporations. From that era of the web, we also got archive.org and the EFF (please donate to them too!), both with very admirable missions, moreso these days. The other site from that era I can think of is Craigslist, and they're still committed to a purple-on-white mostly-text interface and they still don't charge for personal use. (A peek at their own jobs page says they're hiring for React and mobile developers in SF, so maybe they're also changing.)

zitterbewegung 9y ago

Most adtech aggregators / content hosters start out by bypassing copyright law. Then when they have clients and users large enough to care they lock it down. Also crunchyroll has the same model. The issue with competitors to YouTube is the fact that it has a large moat but Twitch shows you can cross it. I think an upcoming competitor that is interesting is Floatplane because they are bootstrapped and have no VC and have no intention of selling out . https://linustechtips.com/main/store/product/147-join-floatplane/ https://linustechtips.com/main/store/product/147-join-floatp...

Laforet 9y ago
Funny you mentioned crunchyroll, I regularly had to explain to people who they essentially copied youtube's bootstrapping strategy. GrooveShark is an example of failing to make it, although there are several successful clones elsewhere.

stcredzero 9y ago

From the article: The original vision for the Web according to its creator, Tim Berners-Lee, was a space with multilateral publishing and consumption of information. It was a peer-to-peer vision with no dependency on a single party. Tim himself claims the Web is dying: the Web he wanted and the Web he got are no longer the same. Parent comment: > The web is much more of a large corporation's playground today, far more. That means new things will be built in a different, more giant friendly way. The part of that that worries me most is the cultural part, more than the economic side. The fact that 2014 was cited as the start time of this cultural shift gives me pause, because it also coincides with the start of the campus cultural shift. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTQr1B4jGjk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTQr1B4jGjk

laretluval 9y ago

I'm confused. It sounds like you're criticising Youtube etc for not being democratic media, but also not for "drawing lines between truth and lies" -- in other words policing speech.

ekanes 9y ago
Can we please stop saying "I'm confused." like this? The rest of your comment is fine/great.
dalbasal 9y ago
I'm not accusing at all, just describing in a belligerent tone ;) What I'm accusing (bemoaning?) them of mostly is being big, corporate and basically reserving a big portion of media for that big-corporate voice. This isn't new in media, but it is in online media. On the point about policing truth (or maybe currating content)..this is just something they now have to deal with. Regimes have fallen on their platform, coups prevented, elections impacted.... They can't hide behind algorithmic moral neutrality as Google 1.0 did, at least least not without taking a bold (costly) stance in a free speech direction. At the moment Google and Facebook are trying to be neither democratic or undemocratic. Not unbiased, just unopinionated in their role as the media. This is something you could only say in a corporate tone of voice. These problems are all consequences of being enormous superpowers. I want stuff from GoogleFb, stuff I might feel I have a right to like speech or affiliation. I have to go to them for these. We don't have the "don't like my store, shop elsewhere" relationship anymore because they have all the stores where all the people buying and selling are.

chasd00 9y ago

"The web is much more of a large corporation's playground today, far more." I don't know, I can get a VM and a public IP much cheaper now than ever before. It's never been easier to put content or innovation in front of the entire Internet. Use to be when someone thought they could do something better they'd do it and let the Internet judge. For example, if you want a different social network then build one and get your friends to try it out. If they like it then maybe it'll grow. That's pretty much how every social site that was ever tried (including Facebook) started. Will your idea fail? Probably, but failure is just part of the process. Seems like here you read a lot of "well Google/Facebook exists so why even bother?". That mentality is the real problem.

dalbasal 9y ago
..I can get a VM and a public IP.. This is true. There are also a lot more people using the internet that you can get to. Taking it even further you don't even need a virtual machine or IP to do most of things people were doing back then with a regular machine. You could just use facebook. I disagree with you on what this aggregates to. Controlling the path of least resistance as FB and Google do in online media (or just media if we project out somewhat) is a lot like controlling the medium entirely. This is (as I said above) not new in media but it is new in online media. In old media a small group controlled most of it. Now in online media, a few people do the same. I'm not saying why even bother. I am saying (echoing the article in saying) that we're moving into a world where ordinary innovation and competition is simply not going to move these beasts from their entrenched position, not easily. BTW, you can also start your own TV news show. Cameras are cheaper than ever. Doing a radio show (online obviously) is genuinely accessible since podcasting is still a largely open medium. That doesn't negate the point that entrenched incumbents dominate the market, structurally. HTTP is not how you get the content of your VM & IP to people. FB & Google is.
Animats 9y ago
I don't know, I can get a VM and a public IP much cheaper now than ever before. It's never been easier to put content or innovation in front of the entire Internet. No one will look at it. I had a Diaspora account. There's nothing and nobody there.

eighthnate 9y ago

Agreed. The most astounding part is how corporate america, government and the media changed the culture of the internet ( not just social media ) within a span of a couple of years. The rampant censorship is something I could not have envisioned. 5 years ago, if you told me censorship would be the norm on reddit, twitter, facebook, youtube, etc. I would not have believed you. 10 years ago, if you told me anyone would support banning/stealing of domains ( daily stormer, etc ), I would not have believed you. It is just astounding to witness the censorship powers of corporate + government + media. The promise of the internet as an open platform for ideas/speech/etc that I grew up with in the 90s/00s has ended. Perhaps it's the result of the centralization of the internet in the past 10 years. Hopefully the pendulum swings back towards a more decentralized version of the internet.

distantwarning 9y ago
I don't use Google, Facebook, Twitter, or any other large corporate account--for free or pay. I pay for my email with Fastmail, a trusted name. I've been with them since 2002. I don't even use Google, Bing, or any other large search engine. I don't need to. I block all ads, tracking, cookies, beacons, and browser fingerprinting pretty well. The way to win is to not play their game. I give my data to no one. Fastmail doesn't even have my address, just my name. I use Visa gift cards to buy stuff online. I've been in IT over three decades and my online life is just fine. I don't use or miss any of the big services. Like many, I preferred the Web of old, circa 1998. I miss Geocities, even.
- zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y ago
  While I agree, I think that still misses a major problem: How do you have a voice in society from that position?
- sushisource 9y ago
  "Just don't use it" isn't a reasonable solution to something a gigantic portion of the world uses every day. Arguments like these are about "how can we structurally change this problem so that society as a whole ends up in a better place". Your "well, I do it better" anecdote is neat, but doesn't really help anyone.

dboreham 9y ago

>My favourite example is wikipedia. If we didn't already have wikipedia, I don't think we'd be likely to get one on today's web. The culture is just far too corporate for wikipedia to be the end result. Encarta.com of course!

fragmede 9y ago

Hosting costs, especially at their scale, aren't cheap; Wikipedia takes donations, in many different formats - https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Ways_to_Give https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Ways_to_Give - if you like them, don't assume Wikipedia will simply keep existing, support them! We didn't get more Wikipedia's because most of us sold out. The allure of 8 or 9-figure paydays, with "FU" money almost within reach, hell yes I'm going to build the best social-media kitten-photo coupon-clipping app for my chance at that instead of slaving away to saving the Internet from ungrateful masses who don't understand the dangers of the corporations. From that era of the web, we also got archive.org and the EFF (please donate to them too!), both with very admirable missions, moreso these days. The other site from that era I can think of is Craigslist, and they're still committed to a purple-on-white mostly-text interface and they still don't charge for personal use. (A peek at their own jobs page says they're hiring for React and mobile developers in SF, so maybe they're also changing.)