8 ms·

Bringing people back to the open web

96 points by ChrisHardie 8y ago

kuschku 8y ago
This is a good idea – but impossible. Google and Facebook have tenthousands of developers. And not just any devs, some of the best in the industry. Google and Facebook have tons of userdata for training ML models. How do you compete with that? The only way your projects would ever be able to outcompete Google and Facebook on technology is if you’d somehow get a ton of engineers willing to work for a good cause. But that doesn’t happen. There’s not enough engineers that would volunteer their time for this. In fact, most engineers either don’t care at all about this stuff, or they drank the kool aid and believe Google and Facebook are doing good. As long as there’s so many developers that want to work at Facebook, as long as Google has more resources than you, you won’t be able to outcompete them on technology.
- Pxtl 8y ago
  What blows my mind is how much money Facebook gets from ads. I've never clicked a Facebook ad except by accident. And yet they get paid more for my presence than I'd ever be willing to pay for a social network. That's the real rub for me. I mean, we imagine the ideal "decentrialized but user-friendly web". Like, there's an online open architecture of servers where you have a cryptographically-controlled "account" for your family and you can easily buy plug-ins to add features to this account. Like an app store but for webapps all linked to your private migrateable data store. And you can sync that data down to some kind of ubiquitous home box appliance as a local back-up/cache, or move it over to another host because it's an open architecture. Presumably, if you wanted to enroll your family into a social network that's not based on selling you, you'd have to pay for it. So how much is a social network worth? I sure wouldn't pay $50/year for that program for my family.
  - DrPhish 8y ago
    That's potentially the loophole that could work: The end user gets paid the ad money, and has direct access to the datastore that the advertisers are using in order to edit out bad or undesirable data.
- pmlnr 8y ago
  Devs are not the problem, especially not the amount of them. Google has so many devs, sure, maybe that's why we now have 7 messaging app from them... The tools for the open web are present, just check https//indieweb.org Comformist, lazy people, our own friends, are the problem. I'd love to see how to make them care.
  - groby_b 8y ago
    I'd start by not calling your own friends "conformist" and "lazy". And instead, try to understand where they come from. We won't solve problems by shouting at each other.
    - pmlnr 8y ago
      I lost contact with many people because none of them respected me constantly asking to keep in touch outside of facebook - email, for example. I don't have lighter words, even if I consider them friends. Moving on from grammar and culture (in my read, I wasn't offensive, merely stated a fact), what actual solutions, proposals, ideas, can you contribute?
      - groby_b 8y ago
        Culture is the issue. The long standing Internet tradition of "I didn't intend to be offensive, so it's fine that I was, and I should continue to be" is at the root of the entire problem. Most people don't care for that kind of environment. And so we splinter, and wall off. We're using technological restrictions as a substitute for cultural norms. And so, my original statement still stands - if you want to change the situations, change what your norms are, and influence global norms that way.
        pmlnr 8y ago
        So... how and what do you propose to reach people who keep using walled gardens, despite what's known about them, and that they even have people trying to get them to used something else?
      - 8y ago
- bitwize 8y ago
  A free OS for PCs is a good idea -- but impossible. Microsoft and Apple have tenthousands of developers. And not just any devs, some of the best in the industry. Microsoft and Apple have research labs where they can subject their OS to hundreds of thousands of user-hours of testing for usability, scalability, and robustness. How do you compete with that?
  - butterfi 8y ago
    Linux?
    - lwhsiao 8y ago
      I believe the parent was intentionally mirroring the grandparent comment to make the argument that Linux is a good counterexample.
      - bitwize 8y ago
        Not only that, but I was almost directly quoting the arguments that were routinely used against Linux back in the 90s.
    - DirtyDan 8y ago
      I believe he was being sarcastic
  - kuschku 8y ago
    With tenthousands of corporate developers from RedHat, Google, IBM? Do you seriously think Torvalds, Stallmann and a few dozen enthusiasts could maintain all of the Linux ecosystem?
    - bitwize 8y ago
      Red Hat and Google got into their advantageous positions by building their businesses on top of Linux in the first place, back when people were saying it would never compete with Microsoft or big-iron Unix.
- barkingtoad 8y ago
  This same argument has been made countless times. "Linux has no chance in the corporate world. HP has thousands of paid devs working on HP-UX." It turned out there were a greater number of devs NOT at HP... and today, there are more devs NOT at Facebook.
  - kuschku 8y ago
    But Linux only worked because there's many companies contributing to it. So which company would have the resources and reasons for contributing to an entirely open social network, with no way to monetize it?
    - TuringTest 8y ago
      > But Linux only worked because there's many companies contributing to it. Who says this won't happen as well to an open collaboration platform? Who says companies wouldn't benefit from it, or that they need to monetize it directly? Companies contributed to Linux because they got benefits by participating in the operating system. Open source works like that; adding to a common resource is beneficial for oneself and the community at the same time. Similarly, an open platform like matrix.org can provide huge benefits for internal communication in a company; and making public the tweaks that you create internally is a great way to influence the direction of the software, as well as making it easier to integrate the improvements made by others. This is how Linux grew to what it is today, after all.
      - kuschku 8y ago
        Of course it could happen. But we've had open source alternatives for many of these things for many years, and no company has gone to support any of them. There's no company backing mastodon, and very little support for similar tools. Of course it could happen. But it's not happening.
        TuringTest 8y ago
        Right, but my point is that the reason for not happening is not a lack of monetization strategies, but one of critical mass. If a free software collaboration platform gains traction in the enterprise, it could be pushed as a safe alternative in the next data scandal, and maybe enough people could switch to it to become a viable public resource like Linux and Apache have been since the turn of the century. It's a plausible scenario, even if it's not guaranteed to happen soon.
- sigstoat 8y ago
  > Google and Facebook have tenthousands of developers. And not just any devs, some of the best in the industry. Google and Facebook have tons of userdata for training ML models. and many of them are bent towards developing internal garbage, or services that you just don't need if you're not hoping to create huge monoliths. or, as others have pointed out, making the same service over and over. > How do you compete with that? having different goals reduces the extent to which you're competing, and different goals leads to different (possibly easier to satisfy) constraints.
- s73v3r_ 8y ago
  Most people don't worry about ML models or anything like that. They just want something that works, and works well. And, at least in the case of FB, something that their friends/relatives are also available on. You don't need open source devs working on the technical side; you need open source work done on the interface side. You need things that non-technically inclined people can pick up and use.
superkuh 8y ago
>If the closed web is a place where hate speech, harassment and bullying thrives, the open web can be, needs to be an experience where it does not. I am strongly against this appeal to censorship. Luckily in the real open web, where you host your own content the incentives and mechanisms for censorship are few and difficult to achieve. No, my dream of the open web is diverse. Full of things people hate and full of things people love. Not just some gentrified, marketable, set of opinions from a narrow slice of the possible. The overton window has shrunk enough. That's how the web was and how it can be again. Without extremes there's nothing exceptional.
- ChrisHardie 8y ago
  I believe there is a middle ground between hate speech being "allowed-but-not-thriving" and censorship, and I think we can do a better job of finding it than we do now.
- pmlnr 8y ago
  On the open web, registrars regularly suspend domains, isps block ips, in the name of 'we are protecting you'. But at least you own your data and you can move it to somewhere else.
- untog 8y ago
  "thrives" != "exists" I don't see a contradiction between allowing hateful content to exist but not actively promoting it to users. Time and time again we've seen algorithmic feeds that are entirely dedicated to making users click on more things serve up more and more hateful content (think: YouTube's recommended videos). As I interpret it, the OP is calling for a return to neutrality on the open web, not censorship. No-one uses YouTube because they're enthusiastic about the recommended content that appears after their video. They use it because the potential audience is huge, and in many ways it's the only choice if you want to start a successful video career. The linked post is asking what if people had a choice? Take Twitter for example. There was a mild uproar a while back because they started banning alt-right accounts. Those banned users then set up Gab (I think?), a Twitter alternative for the alt-right. In an open world where dozens of different social networks exist this wouldn't be an issue at all, in fact it would be how things should work. Anyone can make their own playground, and anyone can decide their own rules. But the closed, centralised world we have today gives companies like Twitter far too much power, and far too broad an audience to effectively use that power.
throw7 8y ago
We did have a way. It was called a kill file. Unfortunately, we don't have adults anymore. We have children that need to be protected from hearing anything they don't like to hear and must be giving the right to shutdown people's speech they disagree with ("heckler's veto").
- cptskippy 8y ago
  > Unfortunately, we don't have adults anymore. We have children that need to be protected I absolutely agree and this is a problem of our own design. This issue goes beyond the web. We hear about how a neighbor called the police when a child was left unattended in their front yard. Or the countless posts on community forums starting out with "who do I contact to report XYZ?" and the most controversial response is always "did you talk to the person?" Everyone today is so afraid that they're being exploited and taken advantage of by everyone who isn't. They don't want to speak out or stand up to anything, they'd rather just have someone come and take care of it for them.
- DanBC 8y ago
  But kill files didn't work. Many newsgroups were destroyed because people relied on killfiles instead of allowing proper moderating tools. Trolling your way past a killfile was trivial, and sock-puppeting evolved on Usenet as a troll technique.
- ebiester 8y ago
  In a walled garden, like facebook, I have a private/public space. I can send out a message to a subset of my friends. The open web does not have these controls. Further, if one of the people I thought was trustworthy starts abusing that trust, I can kick them out. Because it's a walled garden. I don't have to worry about spam. I don't have to worry about hate speech. I don't have to worry about any of that shit. Facebook means that I can approve anyone from seeing that content individually. As of now, we don't have an equivalent way to handle that on the open web. Facebook means I don't have to deal with spam to have a conversation with anyone involved. As of now, the equivalent ways to handle that on the open web take far too much time to be practical. Facebook, over the last decade, has solved a legitimately hard problem, and I don't see "kill file" as a sufficient solution. The open web is about public space. Facebook is a more private space.
carapace 8y ago
What if the Internet itself is the problem? We might be witnessing the Eternal September of the entire network. Humans + networked Turing machines = shit-show Are we doomed? Can we have a fundamentally different relationship with these machines? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
- lainga 8y ago
  > networked Turing machines Brainfuck over UDP...?
galactus 8y ago
I don't believe there will be any silver bullet that will make people back to the open web any soon by sheer technical merit. In the meantime, we should not abandon efforts to make people understand why huge centralized walled gardens such as facebook are a problem. It would be like if society had stopped anti-smoking campaigns in the past, waiting for a miraculous safe cigarette to solve the problem.
bertil 8y ago
I would love this idea to take off and be successful but I have many reservations on the feasibility of such a project. Two are fairly simple: innovation and trusted hosting. Let’s assume that we have a protocol that allows us to have the same interactions as Facebook/Instagram/Twitter: a multi-media flow of posts, comments, etc. Let’s assume that we have distinct hosts that let you befriend and follow people with a different service, just like we have with email. We can even imagine that those services have internal tweaks (like the integration of Google Calendar in GMail) that provide some network effect, but overall there is a push to make such improvements universal (like providing a compatible .ics file, etc.) and part of the protocol. I expect that the overall protocol adoption will be slower, so I expect that things like Gif comments that display (rather than a link; admittedly not the most loved feature among HN’s crowd) or editable comment (with a version control system; probably more within HN’s preference) will be slower. I don’t think that most of those project imagine how to address that issue. It’s distinct from open source (which admittedly innovates faster than closed code in the areas that I’m familiar with) and more akin to how no new feature has been adopted by email since probably the 80s. I also wonder who people would trust with their personal data: intimate conversations, dirty secrets… We’ve learned the hard way that security is hard, and even serious projects like Telegram have had their issue. At the moment, that information is indeed clustered on few servers with a reasonably good security team protecting them. I suspect that more hosts with a lesser team would not really make it safer. You could try extreme dilution, but I suspect that people would not want to host anything themselves and would frown upon letting their nerdy cousin hold the keys of that server, over a cold company who presumably monetise their data but at least is not really expected to pry and gossip. That leaves large-ish commercial entities. I see that area concentrating fast, like email did, and the upside of using internal features winning people over to two or three platforms, like today. It would be great to have that platform be open and allow you to host your own server compatible with Facebook, but that kind of openness is what got us the latest scandal.
optimuspaul 8y ago
technology isn't going to solve a culture problem. I also don't think that the walled gardens are even part of the problem. It's that anonymity gives too many people the license to treat others poorly. I'm not saying we need to take anonymity away, we need to change the culture (of the world) that regards mutual respect as a default even when remaining anonymous.
ianbicking 8y ago
Open Source has done a lot for developers, but it's not very present on the actual surface of the web – the surface that people interact with, and that defines the Open Web. If developers are going to build up the open web, then it feels like this is something of an issue. To live up to one's potential as a developer, you can't just make your own choices in support of the open web, you have to facilitate other people. But I sure as hell don't want to run a service hosting people's content. It's a pain in the ass! And to top it off I have to pay for the privilege. Building up a whole company in support of a service is an option, but then I'm not a developer, certainly not an open source developer, I've instead become an "entrepreneur". I don't want to be an entrepreneur! Hell, that's even more of a pain in the ass than giving stuff away. I think we (open source developers) really need a platform to build on. An actual hosted platform. One where, as a developer, I can do interesting things that empower people, things that participate in the web as a whole, things other people can build on. I'd be willing to compromise SO MUCH if it means I can give people cool things without any of the incurred debt. As a strawman, maybe it could start as just a bit of static hosting, with easy discovery and management from in-browser code. Neocities has an API, for example (https://neocities.org/api https://neocities.org/api), but you have to already use Neocities, so I couldn't publish an app that would be easily used by non-Neocities users.
AmIFirstToThink 8y ago
>Instead, it's up to the developers, designers, entrepreneurs and technology leaders to create a version of the open web that also happens to be the best version of the web. "We messed it up big time, let us fix it, pretty please, with sugar on top." Is that the argument? People need to stop thinking that they can fix humanity by themselves by being "developer, designers, entrepreneurs, and technology leaders". Oh, the hubris of "this is my guilt, MINE!" The horse is so high, I am sure an apology tour around the globe is being dreamed of. You don't need technologist, you need philosophers, and psychologists, and politicians, and people. The technology should be like paper and pencil, without opinion, and then let humanity work it out for itself. Hey look, Trump is making a phone call using his private phone. Should Samsung intervene? If humanity is doomed because we are humans then there is nothing technology can do. I think Internet Technology needs to realize that just like the car before it, it doesn't get to have an opinion. Once Ford sells the car, it can't control who drives it, to where and for what purpose. Internet based platforms for public voice should be like a car or pepper&pencil.

96 points by ChrisHardie 8y ago

This is a good idea – but impossible. Google and Facebook have tenthousands of developers. And not just any devs, some of the best in the industry. Google and Facebook have tons of userdata for training ML models. How do you compete with that? The only way your projects would ever be able to outcompete Google and Facebook on technology is if you’d somehow get a ton of engineers willing to work for a good cause. But that doesn’t happen. There’s not enough engineers that would volunteer their time for this. In fact, most engineers either don’t care at all about this stuff, or they drank the kool aid and believe Google and Facebook are doing good. As long as there’s so many developers that want to work at Facebook, as long as Google has more resources than you, you won’t be able to outcompete them on technology.

Pxtl 8y ago
What blows my mind is how much money Facebook gets from ads. I've never clicked a Facebook ad except by accident. And yet they get paid more for my presence than I'd ever be willing to pay for a social network. That's the real rub for me. I mean, we imagine the ideal "decentrialized but user-friendly web". Like, there's an online open architecture of servers where you have a cryptographically-controlled "account" for your family and you can easily buy plug-ins to add features to this account. Like an app store but for webapps all linked to your private migrateable data store. And you can sync that data down to some kind of ubiquitous home box appliance as a local back-up/cache, or move it over to another host because it's an open architecture. Presumably, if you wanted to enroll your family into a social network that's not based on selling you, you'd have to pay for it. So how much is a social network worth? I sure wouldn't pay $50/year for that program for my family.
- DrPhish 8y ago
  That's potentially the loophole that could work: The end user gets paid the ad money, and has direct access to the datastore that the advertisers are using in order to edit out bad or undesirable data.
pmlnr 8y ago
Devs are not the problem, especially not the amount of them. Google has so many devs, sure, maybe that's why we now have 7 messaging app from them... The tools for the open web are present, just check https//indieweb.org Comformist, lazy people, our own friends, are the problem. I'd love to see how to make them care.
- groby_b 8y ago
  I'd start by not calling your own friends "conformist" and "lazy". And instead, try to understand where they come from. We won't solve problems by shouting at each other.
  - pmlnr 8y ago
    I lost contact with many people because none of them respected me constantly asking to keep in touch outside of facebook - email, for example. I don't have lighter words, even if I consider them friends. Moving on from grammar and culture (in my read, I wasn't offensive, merely stated a fact), what actual solutions, proposals, ideas, can you contribute?
    - groby_b 8y ago
      Culture is the issue. The long standing Internet tradition of "I didn't intend to be offensive, so it's fine that I was, and I should continue to be" is at the root of the entire problem. Most people don't care for that kind of environment. And so we splinter, and wall off. We're using technological restrictions as a substitute for cultural norms. And so, my original statement still stands - if you want to change the situations, change what your norms are, and influence global norms that way.
      - pmlnr 8y ago
        So... how and what do you propose to reach people who keep using walled gardens, despite what's known about them, and that they even have people trying to get them to used something else?
    - 8y ago
bitwize 8y ago
A free OS for PCs is a good idea -- but impossible. Microsoft and Apple have tenthousands of developers. And not just any devs, some of the best in the industry. Microsoft and Apple have research labs where they can subject their OS to hundreds of thousands of user-hours of testing for usability, scalability, and robustness. How do you compete with that?
- butterfi 8y ago
  Linux?
  - lwhsiao 8y ago
    I believe the parent was intentionally mirroring the grandparent comment to make the argument that Linux is a good counterexample.
    - bitwize 8y ago
      Not only that, but I was almost directly quoting the arguments that were routinely used against Linux back in the 90s.
  - DirtyDan 8y ago
    I believe he was being sarcastic
- kuschku 8y ago
  With tenthousands of corporate developers from RedHat, Google, IBM? Do you seriously think Torvalds, Stallmann and a few dozen enthusiasts could maintain all of the Linux ecosystem?
  - bitwize 8y ago
    Red Hat and Google got into their advantageous positions by building their businesses on top of Linux in the first place, back when people were saying it would never compete with Microsoft or big-iron Unix.
barkingtoad 8y ago
This same argument has been made countless times. "Linux has no chance in the corporate world. HP has thousands of paid devs working on HP-UX." It turned out there were a greater number of devs NOT at HP... and today, there are more devs NOT at Facebook.
- kuschku 8y ago
  But Linux only worked because there's many companies contributing to it. So which company would have the resources and reasons for contributing to an entirely open social network, with no way to monetize it?
  - TuringTest 8y ago
    > But Linux only worked because there's many companies contributing to it. Who says this won't happen as well to an open collaboration platform? Who says companies wouldn't benefit from it, or that they need to monetize it directly? Companies contributed to Linux because they got benefits by participating in the operating system. Open source works like that; adding to a common resource is beneficial for oneself and the community at the same time. Similarly, an open platform like matrix.org can provide huge benefits for internal communication in a company; and making public the tweaks that you create internally is a great way to influence the direction of the software, as well as making it easier to integrate the improvements made by others. This is how Linux grew to what it is today, after all.
    - kuschku 8y ago
      Of course it could happen. But we've had open source alternatives for many of these things for many years, and no company has gone to support any of them. There's no company backing mastodon, and very little support for similar tools. Of course it could happen. But it's not happening.
      - TuringTest 8y ago
        Right, but my point is that the reason for not happening is not a lack of monetization strategies, but one of critical mass. If a free software collaboration platform gains traction in the enterprise, it could be pushed as a safe alternative in the next data scandal, and maybe enough people could switch to it to become a viable public resource like Linux and Apache have been since the turn of the century. It's a plausible scenario, even if it's not guaranteed to happen soon.
sigstoat 8y ago
> Google and Facebook have tenthousands of developers. And not just any devs, some of the best in the industry. Google and Facebook have tons of userdata for training ML models. and many of them are bent towards developing internal garbage, or services that you just don't need if you're not hoping to create huge monoliths. or, as others have pointed out, making the same service over and over. > How do you compete with that? having different goals reduces the extent to which you're competing, and different goals leads to different (possibly easier to satisfy) constraints.
s73v3r_ 8y ago
Most people don't worry about ML models or anything like that. They just want something that works, and works well. And, at least in the case of FB, something that their friends/relatives are also available on. You don't need open source devs working on the technical side; you need open source work done on the interface side. You need things that non-technically inclined people can pick up and use.

superkuh 8y ago

>If the closed web is a place where hate speech, harassment and bullying thrives, the open web can be, needs to be an experience where it does not. I am strongly against this appeal to censorship. Luckily in the real open web, where you host your own content the incentives and mechanisms for censorship are few and difficult to achieve. No, my dream of the open web is diverse. Full of things people hate and full of things people love. Not just some gentrified, marketable, set of opinions from a narrow slice of the possible. The overton window has shrunk enough. That's how the web was and how it can be again. Without extremes there's nothing exceptional.

ChrisHardie 8y ago
I believe there is a middle ground between hate speech being "allowed-but-not-thriving" and censorship, and I think we can do a better job of finding it than we do now.
pmlnr 8y ago
On the open web, registrars regularly suspend domains, isps block ips, in the name of 'we are protecting you'. But at least you own your data and you can move it to somewhere else.
untog 8y ago
"thrives" != "exists" I don't see a contradiction between allowing hateful content to exist but not actively promoting it to users. Time and time again we've seen algorithmic feeds that are entirely dedicated to making users click on more things serve up more and more hateful content (think: YouTube's recommended videos). As I interpret it, the OP is calling for a return to neutrality on the open web, not censorship. No-one uses YouTube because they're enthusiastic about the recommended content that appears after their video. They use it because the potential audience is huge, and in many ways it's the only choice if you want to start a successful video career. The linked post is asking what if people had a choice? Take Twitter for example. There was a mild uproar a while back because they started banning alt-right accounts. Those banned users then set up Gab (I think?), a Twitter alternative for the alt-right. In an open world where dozens of different social networks exist this wouldn't be an issue at all, in fact it would be how things should work. Anyone can make their own playground, and anyone can decide their own rules. But the closed, centralised world we have today gives companies like Twitter far too much power, and far too broad an audience to effectively use that power.

throw7 8y ago

We did have a way. It was called a kill file. Unfortunately, we don't have adults anymore. We have children that need to be protected from hearing anything they don't like to hear and must be giving the right to shutdown people's speech they disagree with ("heckler's veto").

cptskippy 8y ago
> Unfortunately, we don't have adults anymore. We have children that need to be protected I absolutely agree and this is a problem of our own design. This issue goes beyond the web. We hear about how a neighbor called the police when a child was left unattended in their front yard. Or the countless posts on community forums starting out with "who do I contact to report XYZ?" and the most controversial response is always "did you talk to the person?" Everyone today is so afraid that they're being exploited and taken advantage of by everyone who isn't. They don't want to speak out or stand up to anything, they'd rather just have someone come and take care of it for them.
DanBC 8y ago
But kill files didn't work. Many newsgroups were destroyed because people relied on killfiles instead of allowing proper moderating tools. Trolling your way past a killfile was trivial, and sock-puppeting evolved on Usenet as a troll technique.
ebiester 8y ago
In a walled garden, like facebook, I have a private/public space. I can send out a message to a subset of my friends. The open web does not have these controls. Further, if one of the people I thought was trustworthy starts abusing that trust, I can kick them out. Because it's a walled garden. I don't have to worry about spam. I don't have to worry about hate speech. I don't have to worry about any of that shit. Facebook means that I can approve anyone from seeing that content individually. As of now, we don't have an equivalent way to handle that on the open web. Facebook means I don't have to deal with spam to have a conversation with anyone involved. As of now, the equivalent ways to handle that on the open web take far too much time to be practical. Facebook, over the last decade, has solved a legitimately hard problem, and I don't see "kill file" as a sufficient solution. The open web is about public space. Facebook is a more private space.

carapace 8y ago

What if the Internet itself is the problem? We might be witnessing the Eternal September of the entire network. Humans + networked Turing machines = shit-show Are we doomed? Can we have a fundamentally different relationship with these machines? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

lainga 8y ago
> networked Turing machines Brainfuck over UDP...?

galactus 8y ago

I don't believe there will be any silver bullet that will make people back to the open web any soon by sheer technical merit. In the meantime, we should not abandon efforts to make people understand why huge centralized walled gardens such as facebook are a problem. It would be like if society had stopped anti-smoking campaigns in the past, waiting for a miraculous safe cigarette to solve the problem.

bertil 8y ago

I would love this idea to take off and be successful but I have many reservations on the feasibility of such a project. Two are fairly simple: innovation and trusted hosting. Let’s assume that we have a protocol that allows us to have the same interactions as Facebook/Instagram/Twitter: a multi-media flow of posts, comments, etc. Let’s assume that we have distinct hosts that let you befriend and follow people with a different service, just like we have with email. We can even imagine that those services have internal tweaks (like the integration of Google Calendar in GMail) that provide some network effect, but overall there is a push to make such improvements universal (like providing a compatible .ics file, etc.) and part of the protocol. I expect that the overall protocol adoption will be slower, so I expect that things like Gif comments that display (rather than a link; admittedly not the most loved feature among HN’s crowd) or editable comment (with a version control system; probably more within HN’s preference) will be slower. I don’t think that most of those project imagine how to address that issue. It’s distinct from open source (which admittedly innovates faster than closed code in the areas that I’m familiar with) and more akin to how no new feature has been adopted by email since probably the 80s. I also wonder who people would trust with their personal data: intimate conversations, dirty secrets… We’ve learned the hard way that security is hard, and even serious projects like Telegram have had their issue. At the moment, that information is indeed clustered on few servers with a reasonably good security team protecting them. I suspect that more hosts with a lesser team would not really make it safer. You could try extreme dilution, but I suspect that people would not want to host anything themselves and would frown upon letting their nerdy cousin hold the keys of that server, over a cold company who presumably monetise their data but at least is not really expected to pry and gossip. That leaves large-ish commercial entities. I see that area concentrating fast, like email did, and the upside of using internal features winning people over to two or three platforms, like today. It would be great to have that platform be open and allow you to host your own server compatible with Facebook, but that kind of openness is what got us the latest scandal.

optimuspaul 8y ago

technology isn't going to solve a culture problem. I also don't think that the walled gardens are even part of the problem. It's that anonymity gives too many people the license to treat others poorly. I'm not saying we need to take anonymity away, we need to change the culture (of the world) that regards mutual respect as a default even when remaining anonymous.

ianbicking 8y ago

Open Source has done a lot for developers, but it's not very present on the actual surface of the web – the surface that people interact with, and that defines the Open Web. If developers are going to build up the open web, then it feels like this is something of an issue. To live up to one's potential as a developer, you can't just make your own choices in support of the open web, you have to facilitate other people. But I sure as hell don't want to run a service hosting people's content. It's a pain in the ass! And to top it off I have to pay for the privilege. Building up a whole company in support of a service is an option, but then I'm not a developer, certainly not an open source developer, I've instead become an "entrepreneur". I don't want to be an entrepreneur! Hell, that's even more of a pain in the ass than giving stuff away. I think we (open source developers) really need a platform to build on. An actual hosted platform. One where, as a developer, I can do interesting things that empower people, things that participate in the web as a whole, things other people can build on. I'd be willing to compromise SO MUCH if it means I can give people cool things without any of the incurred debt. As a strawman, maybe it could start as just a bit of static hosting, with easy discovery and management from in-browser code. Neocities has an API, for example (https://neocities.org/api https://neocities.org/api), but you have to already use Neocities, so I couldn't publish an app that would be easily used by non-Neocities users.

AmIFirstToThink 8y ago

>Instead, it's up to the developers, designers, entrepreneurs and technology leaders to create a version of the open web that also happens to be the best version of the web. "We messed it up big time, let us fix it, pretty please, with sugar on top." Is that the argument? People need to stop thinking that they can fix humanity by themselves by being "developer, designers, entrepreneurs, and technology leaders". Oh, the hubris of "this is my guilt, MINE!" The horse is so high, I am sure an apology tour around the globe is being dreamed of. You don't need technologist, you need philosophers, and psychologists, and politicians, and people. The technology should be like paper and pencil, without opinion, and then let humanity work it out for itself. Hey look, Trump is making a phone call using his private phone. Should Samsung intervene? If humanity is doomed because we are humans then there is nothing technology can do. I think Internet Technology needs to realize that just like the car before it, it doesn't get to have an opinion. Once Ford sells the car, it can't control who drives it, to where and for what purpose. Internet based platforms for public voice should be like a car or pepper&pencil.