5 ms·

These articles are annoying. They completely miss the point. The web as it was in the early 90s was an alternative to major content delivery platforms (TV, pre

by d--b 9y ago

These articles are annoying. They completely miss the point. The web as it was in the early 90s was an alternative to major content delivery platforms (TV, press, mostly). So there was these massive systems that were the press and the TV who would own most of our attention span. And then there was this cute alternative technology with a great community that was yet unpolluted by the big guys. Today, the big content guys colonized the medium, so it no longer feels like the web is "a cacophony of different sites and voices" to quote the article. But in fact, we're in the same situation: big guys with money and loads of content on one side and small guys with communities on the other side. The web as it is today doesn't prevent you from spreading your ideas to the world on your very own server... And websites like reddit and hacker news are great amplifiers of small voices. I would probably never have read this article if it had been published in the 90s. Since it's #1 on HN, perhaps 50k people have read it today! The way I use the web feels very much like the 90s: a few aggregation sites, a lot of excellent content written by independent guys, links between them... Who cares about the centralized internet when the internet that we've loved since the 90s is still there and thriving?

_bxg1 9y ago
It's more a question of culture. Theoretically, yes, nothing has been lost since the 90s. All those technologies still exist. But culturally, the norms of the web have shifted. The proposal is to create technologies that encourage/empower regular people (people who don't read hacker news) to make a cultural shift back to the web's original vision.
- loceng 9y ago
  Culture shifts with awareness, education, and well-designed solutions being available. The next "Facebook" platform that isn't designed to control or have a strategy to collect or hoard data will exist. The layman doesn't generally know what's good for them in any specialized area, that's quite clear when we saw the level of technical understanding shown during questions to Mark Zuckerberg; it's obvious career politicians will need to eventually evolve over to successful people with strong holistic standing of all systems, with the ability to learn in depth and have strong critical thinking. We need to do a better job as a society of developing these people, and of capturing society's attention with genuine interest and excitement, and not merely with hype and paid-for reach.
kristianc 9y ago
Which works great, until ISPs start offering subsidized plans for Facebook, Gmail, Spotify, Twitter, and expensive plans for everything else. When that happens, there is very little economic incentive to have smaller websites, smaller e-commerce websites end up being part of Amazon, and Google starts providing more and more of its own content.
- emddudley 9y ago
  I agree that could be an outcome, but could there not also be a reverse "Eternal September" where niche communities thrive? Since people would need to make a conscious, meaningful choice to join them?
  - kristianc 9y ago
    The evidence thus far has seemed to suggest that when deprived of the oxygen of search & RSS traffic & the independent blogosphere and niche communities have withered on the vine. Less traffic and less commenting means less incentive to post, which means less posting. What seems to have happened is people have gathered around the last remaining campfires for warmth.
- _pmf_ 9y ago
  > until ISPs start offering subsidized plans for Facebook, Gmail, Spotify, Twitter, and expensive plans for everything else. Is priced content worse than the current situation, where services are monetized exclusively by essentially running malware on the user's machine?
  - AlexB138 9y ago
    Those are two separate things. OP is talking about the pipe being monetized. That is an extra charge we will pay just to get to the sites that then monetize via ads or gathering our data.
    - _pmf_ 9y ago
      My point is that there might be kickbacks from pipe operator to content mill.
ataturk 9y ago
The little guy spreading ideas is not as easy as it was, though. If the search engines don't index your site, if Youtube removes the informative videos you made, if FB and Instagram are filtering you out, who is going to see it? No, the Web has been weaponized by a collusion between corporations and government in order to press as hard as they can for censorship and thought control. Because at the end of the day, if people realized they didn't need big government or big corporations, where would that leave all these billionaires with their revolving doors in and out of publicly appointed power roles? I honestly get depressed when I think about the dream of open government and more widespread knowledge that was supposed to come about with all this technology working for the little guy. Well, some of it came true, but as soon as it became a threat to the orthodoxy, they found a way to shut it down. And now the baseline model for all these companies is China. Google would be happy to censor Americans in the same way they censor content for the Chinese Communists. One policy for the whole world, and it's not a policy of freedom and openness, but one of oppression, as usual.
dagaci 9y ago
There is some irony in painting the major content delivery platforms in the 90s as bad actors when in actuality much of 90s media (like BBC) had much higher standards than so much of what comes via the web today. Today we don't "pay" for quality content. Today content simply has authority if a lot of people who think like "me" read it _else_ -1.
- dec0dedab0de 9y ago
  There is some irony in painting the major content delivery platforms in the 90s as bad actors when in actuality much of 90s media (like BBC) had much higher standards than so much of what comes via the web today. I don't think that really means anything. There is so much junk, that anything that honestly attempts to be good is better than "so much of what comes via the web today."
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
gregwtmtno 9y ago
It's a discoverability problem. All that great small community content isn't monetizable and gets de-incentivized over time by algorithmic changes in search engines and link aggregators. Everyone is being nudged to where there's money to be made.
- hnal943 9y ago
  The pre-google internet also had a discovery problem. Remember webrings? I think OP is right that the decentralized internet is the same as in the "golden era".
- monkeynotes 9y ago
  > Everyone is being nudged to where there's money to be made. This is an ass-backward way of looking at what actually happens. People (you, me, CEOs of large corporations) are the entire system. You and I want a thing, there is a demand, smart people notice that demand and fill it. Folk flock to the product that satisfies their demands. I admit there is clever marketing that manipulates our ape brains in very effective ways, perhaps that nudges us toward one thing over another, but there is legitimate demand beyond the marketing. Then there are communities and marketplaces. These products are largely successful because of a demand for an agreed meeting place to share ideas, sell things, exchange messages. You don't need to be 'nudged' toward these places, they just happen to be objectively very useful places because everyone else agrees they are. Money being made is a byproduct of the success of these places. I am so tired of people looking at big successful corporations as somehow being existential to an otherwise utopian perfect system. Regular people give power to corporations by patronizing them, it's as simple as that. Most-always no one is forcing anyone to go to one place over another, we almost always have a choice. We need to recognize that as consumers we should take responsibility for the companies we promote to the forefront. If you don't like marketing or large corporations, reject them! Take responsibility for how you spend your money, we have the power.
guy98238710 9y ago
The problem is that the average user is being nudged (pushed, coerced) to submit his content for free to a publisher who then forwards it to others with advertising or other monetization attached. Self-publishing is very rare.
creatonez 9y ago
> I would probably never have read this article if it had been published in the 90s. Since it's #1 on HN, perhaps 50k people have read it today! The way I use the web feels very much like the 90s: a few aggregation sites, a lot of excellent content written by independent guys, links between them... Don't forget that you're on Hacker News, a relatively small site with a very aggressive name for "normies" :)

by d--b 9y ago

_bxg1 9y ago

It's more a question of culture. Theoretically, yes, nothing has been lost since the 90s. All those technologies still exist. But culturally, the norms of the web have shifted. The proposal is to create technologies that encourage/empower regular people (people who don't read hacker news) to make a cultural shift back to the web's original vision.

loceng 9y ago
Culture shifts with awareness, education, and well-designed solutions being available. The next "Facebook" platform that isn't designed to control or have a strategy to collect or hoard data will exist. The layman doesn't generally know what's good for them in any specialized area, that's quite clear when we saw the level of technical understanding shown during questions to Mark Zuckerberg; it's obvious career politicians will need to eventually evolve over to successful people with strong holistic standing of all systems, with the ability to learn in depth and have strong critical thinking. We need to do a better job as a society of developing these people, and of capturing society's attention with genuine interest and excitement, and not merely with hype and paid-for reach.

kristianc 9y ago

Which works great, until ISPs start offering subsidized plans for Facebook, Gmail, Spotify, Twitter, and expensive plans for everything else. When that happens, there is very little economic incentive to have smaller websites, smaller e-commerce websites end up being part of Amazon, and Google starts providing more and more of its own content.

emddudley 9y ago
I agree that could be an outcome, but could there not also be a reverse "Eternal September" where niche communities thrive? Since people would need to make a conscious, meaningful choice to join them?
- kristianc 9y ago
  The evidence thus far has seemed to suggest that when deprived of the oxygen of search & RSS traffic & the independent blogosphere and niche communities have withered on the vine. Less traffic and less commenting means less incentive to post, which means less posting. What seems to have happened is people have gathered around the last remaining campfires for warmth.
_pmf_ 9y ago
> until ISPs start offering subsidized plans for Facebook, Gmail, Spotify, Twitter, and expensive plans for everything else. Is priced content worse than the current situation, where services are monetized exclusively by essentially running malware on the user's machine?
- AlexB138 9y ago
  Those are two separate things. OP is talking about the pipe being monetized. That is an extra charge we will pay just to get to the sites that then monetize via ads or gathering our data.
  - _pmf_ 9y ago
    My point is that there might be kickbacks from pipe operator to content mill.

ataturk 9y ago

The little guy spreading ideas is not as easy as it was, though. If the search engines don't index your site, if Youtube removes the informative videos you made, if FB and Instagram are filtering you out, who is going to see it? No, the Web has been weaponized by a collusion between corporations and government in order to press as hard as they can for censorship and thought control. Because at the end of the day, if people realized they didn't need big government or big corporations, where would that leave all these billionaires with their revolving doors in and out of publicly appointed power roles? I honestly get depressed when I think about the dream of open government and more widespread knowledge that was supposed to come about with all this technology working for the little guy. Well, some of it came true, but as soon as it became a threat to the orthodoxy, they found a way to shut it down. And now the baseline model for all these companies is China. Google would be happy to censor Americans in the same way they censor content for the Chinese Communists. One policy for the whole world, and it's not a policy of freedom and openness, but one of oppression, as usual.

dagaci 9y ago

There is some irony in painting the major content delivery platforms in the 90s as bad actors when in actuality much of 90s media (like BBC) had much higher standards than so much of what comes via the web today. Today we don't "pay" for quality content. Today content simply has authority if a lot of people who think like "me" read it _else_ -1.

dec0dedab0de 9y ago
There is some irony in painting the major content delivery platforms in the 90s as bad actors when in actuality much of 90s media (like BBC) had much higher standards than so much of what comes via the web today. I don't think that really means anything. There is so much junk, that anything that honestly attempts to be good is better than "so much of what comes via the web today."
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

gregwtmtno 9y ago

It's a discoverability problem. All that great small community content isn't monetizable and gets de-incentivized over time by algorithmic changes in search engines and link aggregators. Everyone is being nudged to where there's money to be made.

hnal943 9y ago
The pre-google internet also had a discovery problem. Remember webrings? I think OP is right that the decentralized internet is the same as in the "golden era".
monkeynotes 9y ago
> Everyone is being nudged to where there's money to be made. This is an ass-backward way of looking at what actually happens. People (you, me, CEOs of large corporations) are the entire system. You and I want a thing, there is a demand, smart people notice that demand and fill it. Folk flock to the product that satisfies their demands. I admit there is clever marketing that manipulates our ape brains in very effective ways, perhaps that nudges us toward one thing over another, but there is legitimate demand beyond the marketing. Then there are communities and marketplaces. These products are largely successful because of a demand for an agreed meeting place to share ideas, sell things, exchange messages. You don't need to be 'nudged' toward these places, they just happen to be objectively very useful places because everyone else agrees they are. Money being made is a byproduct of the success of these places. I am so tired of people looking at big successful corporations as somehow being existential to an otherwise utopian perfect system. Regular people give power to corporations by patronizing them, it's as simple as that. Most-always no one is forcing anyone to go to one place over another, we almost always have a choice. We need to recognize that as consumers we should take responsibility for the companies we promote to the forefront. If you don't like marketing or large corporations, reject them! Take responsibility for how you spend your money, we have the power.

guy98238710 9y ago

The problem is that the average user is being nudged (pushed, coerced) to submit his content for free to a publisher who then forwards it to others with advertising or other monetization attached. Self-publishing is very rare.

creatonez 9y ago

> I would probably never have read this article if it had been published in the 90s. Since it's #1 on HN, perhaps 50k people have read it today! The way I use the web feels very much like the 90s: a few aggregation sites, a lot of excellent content written by independent guys, links between them... Don't forget that you're on Hacker News, a relatively small site with a very aggressive name for "normies" :)