3 ms·

Too be fair, these silos are the internet for a vast swathe of people. Google has always been a gateway to discovering new places on the internet and as she poi

Too be fair, these silos are the internet for a vast swathe of people. Google has always been a gateway to discovering new places on the internet and as she pointed out, they are actively suppressing search results they don't like. They don't know there are or can't find the places outside the silos.

krapp 8y ago
Is that really true enough to be considered axiomatic, or is it just an expression of the tendency of technical people to assume the typical user is little smarter than a ham sandwich? Using a small number of sites doesn't mean you don't know other sites exist. Consider the olden days of the web when discovery was, arguably, more difficult than today (the problem search engines emerged to solve.) Did people not comprehend that the web existed outside of Geocities or Yahoo? No, they still knew it was there. They may not have been able to find it, or cared to find it, but they still understood there was more "internet" out there. Nowadays, meanwhile, almost every business has a website. Authors have websites. Political leaders, countries, movements and offices have websites. Celebrities have websites. Fandoms and communities have websites. Have you ever paid attention to just how many URLS you encounter outside of the silos, in real life, throughout the day? People are inundated with them. And, those silos tend to be content aggregators which let people post content from third party websites. There may be some truth to the premise, but I suspect the extend is overstated in order to sell the narrative that the web is existentially under threat of corporate control and political censorship.
- progval 8y ago
  All student organizations at my (small) university have a website and an active public mailing list. Yet, there is a constant push from their members for maintaining an account on Facebook. They know Facebook is evil, but "everyone is on Facebook and we have to be there to be visible". And unfortunately they are right: announcing an event on Facebook makes it more popular.

krapp 8y ago

Is that really true enough to be considered axiomatic, or is it just an expression of the tendency of technical people to assume the typical user is little smarter than a ham sandwich? Using a small number of sites doesn't mean you don't know other sites exist. Consider the olden days of the web when discovery was, arguably, more difficult than today (the problem search engines emerged to solve.) Did people not comprehend that the web existed outside of Geocities or Yahoo? No, they still knew it was there. They may not have been able to find it, or cared to find it, but they still understood there was more "internet" out there. Nowadays, meanwhile, almost every business has a website. Authors have websites. Political leaders, countries, movements and offices have websites. Celebrities have websites. Fandoms and communities have websites. Have you ever paid attention to just how many URLS you encounter outside of the silos, in real life, throughout the day? People are inundated with them. And, those silos tend to be content aggregators which let people post content from third party websites. There may be some truth to the premise, but I suspect the extend is overstated in order to sell the narrative that the web is existentially under threat of corporate control and political censorship.

progval 8y ago
All student organizations at my (small) university have a website and an active public mailing list. Yet, there is a constant push from their members for maintaining an account on Facebook. They know Facebook is evil, but "everyone is on Facebook and we have to be there to be visible". And unfortunately they are right: announcing an event on Facebook makes it more popular.