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Tim's letter: https://webfoundation.org/2019/03/web-birthday-30/ https://webfoundation.org/2019/03/web-birthday-30/ I actually thought it was pretty carefull

Tim's letter: https://webfoundation.org/2019/03/web-birthday-30/ https://webfoundation.org/2019/03/web-birthday-30/ I actually thought it was pretty carefully worded and not super alarmist (despite the BBC headline). I personally think it is worse than he presents it. Perhaps it is just nostalgia, but today's web / internet seems to have given up on open standards and cooperation. Instead most of the money and effort is going into figuring out how to capture people in a walled garden such as Facebook etc.. so you can mine their data and advertise to them. For all its downsides, Bitcoin is the last exciting open standard I can remember that has done well and maybe has a future. We seem to have failed as a community to solve chat with an open standard (that has broken out enough to win), which is a serious shame. That's a hugely important medium today and we have essentially handed that to WhatsApp / Facebook / whoever. Imagine if we had done the same with email or the web itself. I wonder if it is just a cultural difference somehow. The Stalman's of the world seem farther and farther apart, or perhaps just the internet has become so monetized that the best talent just can't refuse the $$$s from a FANG job that focuses on crushing the competition and owning everything. I don't know, but it makes me sad.

pmoriarty 8y ago
"today's web / internet seems to have given up on open standards and cooperation. Instead most of the money and effort is going into figuring out how to capture people in a walled garden such as Facebook etc.. so you can mine their data and advertise to them." How are open standards and cooperation supposed to stop tracking and advertising? Tracking and unsolicited advertising should be tackled head on: by banning them.
- bhl 8y ago
  Ideally, open standards would mean that the network effects, which today keep people trapped in walled gardens like Facebook, would create a more distributed / federated community instead of a winner-takes-all model. I think this is largely true, since if you could still communicate with your friends and family on Facebook but be on a different paid platform which doesn't track or advertise products to you, most people would go for it.
  - nicpottier 8y ago
    Right, exactly. You can choose a different email provider if you hate the ads or what your current one is doing with your data. You can't pick a different Facebook and still communicate with your friends there.
    - pmoriarty 8y ago
      You can pick a different one, but if they're all spying on you, tracking you, and advertising to you, it's not really going to make a difference. Also, splitting up Facebook alone isn't going to stop data sharing between its various parts, nor is it going to address tracking or advertising at all.
      - nilskidoo 8y ago
        But we can count the moments til a sacrificial lamb pops up, as with Bernie Madoff, or the epipen guy for pharma. Token examples without stopping the potential for their crimes to be repeated by everyone else in practice in the slightest. We need to uninvent the wheel.
        Nasrudith 8y ago
        That will be a problem as you can't unring a bell - it is far easier to unscramble an egg.
      - bhl 8y ago
        With an open standard, I don't see why you can't host your own social network similar to how people host their own email servers or websites right now.
        dmitriid 8y ago
        What's an "open standard for a social network"?
        8y ago
- alkonaut 8y ago
  If there e.g. was an open standard by which I could give advertisers information rather than them trying to steal and trade it, I'd happily fill out a little key/value thing in my browser to specify a few of my interests, age group etc. I'm happy to see targeted ads if I created the target data myself.
  - krapp 8y ago
    But vendors would still have your data, still be able to trade that data with other vendors, would still build profiles on you and be able to track and predict your behavior to some degree. You can't have effective advertising on the web without tracking. Advertising only works when the advertiser knows with some degree of certainty that an ad is being viewed, how often and if by demographics they find meaningful. The existence of targeted advertising presupposes the existence of a functioning apparatus of surveillance and psychological influence.
    - JohnFen 8y ago
      > You can't have effective advertising on the web without tracking. I see no reason at all to think this is true.
      - deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
    - wrycoder 8y ago
      Like billboards?
  - imtringued 8y ago
    Remember when crypto mining in the browser was used as an alternative to ads? In the end websites used both to maximize profits. The same will happen in your idealized situation. You fill in a form with your personal data and then they secretly track you anyway.
sn41 8y ago
Walled gardens are partly due to the emergence of huge corporations who harvest and aggregate personal data to build profiles ostensibly to aid advertising. I find this baffling - traditional shopkeepers never used to ask for the personal details of the customers. That's why the phrase "it's just business" makes sense. Elizabeth Warren seems to have spoken of breaking up some of Facebook and Google. This might be the only way to combat the data hawkishness of corporate leaders like Eric Schmidt.
- zdragnar 8y ago
  > traditional shopkeepers never used to ask for the personal details of the customers Based on that statement, it sounds like you never lived in a small town, or you lived in a twilight zone version of one.
  - 908087 8y ago
    I've never been to a small town where the shopkeeper asks for my address book and to briefly scan my personal communications for keywords "to improve our services and deliver a more relevant shopping experience".
  - JohnFen 8y ago
    I don't know, I've lived in a few real-world small towns and have never had a shopkeeper ask for personal details as part of a transaction.
- onion2k 8y ago
  Walled gardens are partly due to the emergence of huge corporations who harvest and aggregate personal data to build profiles ostensibly to aid advertising. The FAANG companies built surveillance networks to target adverts at the beginning, but I think things have changed so much that advertising is just one of many uses of the surveillance data now. Take Android's location tracking as an example; Google doesn't need minute-by-minute location information of where everyone is to sell more adverts. They gather that data, and use it in Maps for live traffic tracking which is ostensibly useful, but it's not for advertising. These companies are at the point now where they soak up whatever data they can get just in case they can think of a use for it in the future. Advertising is the excuse, not the reason.
mikekchar 8y ago
Every once in a while I feel the same way. It's hard to reply to this sentiment, though, because I think there is also a lot of wishful thinking mixed in. Years ago, standards processes were as much about screwing your competition as it was about cooperation. Take the telephone protocol standards. They are open, but the idea was always to rush an implementation that was different from your competition, push through that implementation in the standards committee and then force your competition to rewrite their code. The early days of web "standards" went that way as well (as I'm sure many people will remember). However, the other thing to keep in mind is that proprietary solutions designed to force customers into vendor lock-in has always been the dominant situation. In fact, things are dramatically better than they were ages ago. Things like TCP/IP were not the solutions that the big vendors wanted. They wanted their walled gardens (and worked hard to produce them). Even HTTP and the web only became popular because of NCSA Mosaic, which was proprietary software. It's also interesting to see the list of original licencees [1] The only company that currently exists is Fujitsu. Netscape Navigator was written by many of the same authors as Mosaic and they only decided to open source it in 1998 -- a move that literally shocked the development world. This eventually led to Mozilla. Back in the day, people "in the know" knew about free software, the FSF, Emacs, Vi/Vim, Posix, etc, etc. The average programmer knew nothing about it, except for being forced to learn vi in university perhaps. These days, you can't swing a cat without hitting someone who is passionate about at least open source, even if they don't necessarily quite understand software freedom. I don't think we are in a worse position than we used to be. Granted, there are more and more users (billions now) that don't know anything about free and open systems. 30 or 40 years ago, those people were similarly ignorant, but weren't using computers. So when your aunt Martha is hooked up to Facebook, it seems like we've lost (or at least are loosing). But these open platforms and protocols have always been niche and our niche is much bigger than it was before. While you may never be able to chat with your aunt Martha with a free and open system run by people who are more interested in providing a service than somehow extracting money from you, you can chat with a lot more people than you ever could before. I think the key thing to remember is that you've never been able to chat with your aunt Martha using that free and open system. I think it is perfectly acceptable (and probably even preferable) to turn inward and mostly ignore what's happening in the proprietary world. I think it's probably a good idea, at least for now, to ignore fashion and popularity and instead concentrate on building free and open applications that work the way you want. There are more than enough people around with the same ideals to make it work. If you build it, they might not come, but if you don't build it, they definitely will not come. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosaic_(web_browser) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosaic_(web_browser)
ilovecaching 8y ago
There are still Stallmans, it's just much harder for a single person to have as great an impact as the various computing verticals have gained inertia. Not to downplay the importance of early pioneers, but a lot of success comes down to timing, being in the greenfield where your ideas can be fully realized without any prior art getting in the way, or needing to reach feature parity with the status quo. The trade off is that those pioneers had to work with very little, while we have very nice computing environments, but there are a ridiculous number of us, a lot of who are brilliant, and a lot of the great ideas are already taken.
Pristina 8y ago
All the open standards are still out there. Just because now there are 2 billions slaved to walled gardens doesn't mean all the good stuff disappeared. It just seems like everything is walled garden because the wall-to-unwalled ratio has decreased. IRC still exists, email still exists, just because whatsapp also exists and because a lot of people use it doesn't mean the web has gone down. all your film cameras don't stop working when digital came out.
- paulmd 8y ago
  Email doesn't really work anymore. Have you tried to send to Gmail addresses via your own SMTP server any time recently? Good luck not getting spam-filtered. An analogy to HTTP might be if browsers stop accepting HTTP and only acknowledge HTTPS to exist (mandatory web-wide encryption on anything except localhost/designated intranet IP blocks). At that point you are forced into one walled garden or another - there may be good actors like Lets Encrypt but you are still forced into either their garden or someone else's. The days of running the web server in your basement with no say-so from anyone else would come to an end. And I think maybe in the next 10 or 20 years we start moving towards that. The film cameras didn't stop working when digital came out, but nobody will develop your Kodachrome anymore. You can also run your SMTP server and send packets into the void as much as you want.
  - icebraining 8y ago
    > Have you tried to send to Gmail addresses via your own SMTP server any time recently? I do it all the time (from a VPS), it requires crossing all the Ts (SPF, DKM, etc), but never had any issues with Gmail, only with other self-hosted systems. > The days of running the web server in your basement with no say-so from anyone else would come to an end. That was never true, you had to have permission from your ISP, and many forbade it (and some outright blocked those ports).
    - pbhjpbhj 8y ago
      I've never knowingly had an UK ISP that restricted services I provide from my home computer. I've not been particularly careful in choosing either -- is that castrating of users a USA thing? Gmail from a VPS has been a problem for me though, Microsoft mail has been worse (yes I look after the jots and tittles).
profalseidol 8y ago
> Bitcoin is the last exciting open standard I can remember that has done well and maybe has a future. And that future we call Ethereum.
cf498 8y ago
I think its more then just the lack of wide usage of open standards. Centralization was what sunk the ship. And it did so for a reason. Mailinglists became twitter, Forums became subreddits and dont even get me started on youtube and facebook. I dont think we have a viable concept anymore how to finance independent infrastructure, or maybe we never had one to begin with. Sadly the end of year push to collect enough to cover the server costs was always a common occurrence. I dont see how something like video streaming in a watchable resolution can be crowed founded.
duckMuppet 8y ago
of course it's cultural. People would now rather watch twitch, cat videos, or Instagram than Waste it on what ppl used to spend it on.. People now would rather pay for some proprietary SaaS or pay with their data than take some piece of software, learn it, make it better, then host it for other users for little to no compensation. There are fewer people to create truecrypt, fewer Stallmans in the world now because the culture isn't conducive to the libertarian ideas that a Stallman of that time period might have... Let's have a looksee: -The internet is shit now because the government hasn't regulated it. -The internet is again shit because greedy corporations force me to use their walled gardens, how the hell else would I communicate with anyone if I didn't allow them to siphon my data as payment to these fascist overlords. -The internet is a shitshow because not everyone has accepted that both https and JavaScript should be mandatory.. It must be the children of anti-vaxxers, somehow refusing to believe the science, a clear byproduct of not having the first point and an easy solution. -the internet is again a shitshow because the government hasn't told these fascist hardware manufacturers that I can't be bothered to read the quick start guides which clearly say change my router and IP cam password from 123456 to pa$$word.. Who the hell has time to do that with both pewdiepie and GoT having so much new content.. If the govt just had those clowns hard code pa$$word in the first place I'd be fine. Better yet, just let me get it as a service, they can just update it for me, then I can add nigahiga to my watch list. -The internet is finally a massive shitshow because, all these companies making money from me being the product have no right to, especially if I'm not getting a piece of the action. Time to break up these corporate capitalists and redistribute the wealth to the people where it belongs. I can keep going, but I'm certain it's scorched earth now. The truth is, a society that prefers the government give them things or provide their safety net, the Stallmans are going to be harder to find, because the ideas that go with such are very threatening. Pretty soon, it'll lead to making decisions for yourself AND taking blame for the outcome, good or bad, with or without a physical profit.
- krapp 8y ago
  >People would now rather watch twitch, cat videos, or Instagram than Waste it on what ppl used to spend it on.. What's wrong with that? I've seen a lot of complaints about social media, mainstream web culture, "cat videos and memes," etc. The web was meant for everyone, and most people want to use it for entertainment and talking to their friends. There's nothing wrong with using the web for mundane and trivial things. You want people to embrace an open web? Stop talking to them about freedom and censorship resistance and how the fascist capitalist overlords have turned them into sheep and make it easy for them to share their cat pictures.
Illniyar 8y ago
You mean giving up on standards like IE6 and below, adobe/macromedia flash, RealPlayer, Quiktime and ActiveX ? You mean the open web of ICQ, Skype, AOL's walled garden? The web of 5, 10 and 15 years ago was much less standardized then we have today. Even though chrome is basically the only major browser left, almost all content you browse today is written in to an open standard. Walled gardens existed in the past just as much. We just didn't really consider them walled gardens because there was really no real alternative. The only difference now then in the past is scale. It seems that a closed and non-standard platform is ok if it is small, but the things that forgiven for a site with a few hundred thousands users is not for a site with billions. Which is as it should be, I think. We should have different moral standards for different sizes of market domination (the same way we have for monopolies), but let's not paint it as if the web was more open in the past.
- shard972 8y ago
  > You mean the open web of ICQ, Skype, AOL's walled garden? I get your general point but i would point out that in regards to something as simple as messaging, ICQ/AOL/MSN/GChat/Facebook. It wasn't that many years ago that I could have all those clients loaded up in one chat client. Noways i think ICQ is about all that's left that allows you to connect to their chat services outside of proprietary software.
  - pferde 8y ago
    Not anymore. Sometimes in late December, ICQ users received following message: "We are discontinuing support of older ICQ versions and other unofficial clients. To continue chatting, you need: 1. Link a phone number to your account here https://icq.com/<redacted>/verifyphone?sc=<redacted> https://icq.com/<redacted>/verifyphone?sc=<redacted> 2. Log in using the official ICQ client which can be downloaded at https://icq.com" https://icq.com" I can still log in with an alternative client, see my contacts' status and receive text messages, but any message I send is either lost, or delayed by several days.
  - omnimus 8y ago
    Also lets not forget that time when you could send messages between almost all of those prividers including Gchat and Facebook messenger because it was all federated XMPP.
rimliu 8y ago
The main problem I see with the web is that we forgot about users. Dev's got so obsessed with means that they started to completely ignore the ends. I don't remember where I saw this phrase but I like it a lot: "make harder for databases, easier for the users". Alas, seems like desire to use the coolest tech or the only tech devs know trumps everything. The main question now is should we use Redux or MobX. Not "should we user React at all here? Does this project warrant to be a SPA?". And who needs accessibility anyway?
rjf72 8y ago
I think it's about something much more insidious: FOMO. Today it's easier than ever to create e.g. a decentralized or independent means of doing pretty much anything that could easily let people escape those walled gardens, if they wanted. The problem is people don't want to: FOMO. If they leave the walled garden, they have the Fear Of Missing Out on what's happening inside the walled garden. You can even see this phenomena in real life. You have a dozen people at a table or whatever. Unless you have some good sample bias, a good chunk of them will be constantly glancing at their phones if not having their noses glued to them. You have significant things that could be happening in your immediate vicinity, supplanted out of concern for missing what are invariably trivialities in a mostly fake world. This is a people problem - not a business or technology problem. And the worst part is that it's so incredibly insidious that people don't realize the harm involved. A person addicted to gambling will trend towards the same thing as a person addicted to drugs - losing everything they have. And so it's quite easy to see the consequences. A person who's mind is increasingly fogged and attention driven entirely to the pale glow of that screen and the little dopamine bumps it provides, by contrast, will see no immediately visible negative effects. And the addiction is so ubiquitous that even as consequences do begin to emerge, they're not really noted because it's 'normal.'
- hevi_jos 8y ago
  I believe you miss the main issue: Most people don't know or don't want to do computer systems administration. People don't need to know mechanics to drive a car, or architect to live in a house and Facebook, Google... are doing the same with computers. You don't need to know anything about how computers work in order to use them. There is no FOVO when you can convince your friends or family members to use a different and better alternative. The problem is that there is no alternative. There is no alternative. There is not some kind of box I can buy for 30 dollars, connect to my network and instantly being able to connect with my friends, family or workers with another box automatically and without work on my and their side like you can do with a physical telephone. There are lots of tinkering boxes for geeks. But they are too complex.
  - TeMPOraL 8y ago
tastroder 8y ago
>For all its downsides, Bitcoin is the last exciting open standard I can remember that has done well and maybe has a future. If you don't mind elaborating, this point comes up rather frequently nowadays about bitcoin/other blockchain tech. So far the only thing that fell into the "exciting" category for me was ipfs and even that didn't really convince me that it's a viable thing. I get that blockchain tech is an industry nowadays but from my outside perspective 99% of it and the applications they promote seem rather, for the lack of a better word, self serving. Either that or it's some niche that I don't see will get any mass adoption anytime soon. Lots of these technologies seem to be technical solutions to problems that are social in nature and thus, again - from my outside perspective, prone to failure. Proof of X tech often looks like stuff that's solved as soon as parties agree on using it in the first place. edit: formatting
- m-i-l 8y ago
  > > For all its downsides, Bitcoin is the last exciting open standard I can remember > I get that blockchain tech is an industry nowadays but from my outside perspective 99% of it and the applications they promote seem rather, for the lack of a better word, self serving Blockchain might have been as exciting as the internet at the start, but it has turned bad (i.e. been exploited for profit by big corporations at the user's expense) much more quickly. In my view it is because blockchain puts money before technology rather than the other way around, i.e. during the dot-com era it was often "let's just build something useful and worry about monetisation later" whereas with blockchain it is more "we've got the monetisation in place and we'll worry about actual use cases for the technology and mass user adoption later".
  - type0 8y ago
    In other words it's a solution in search of a problem
    - m-i-l 8y ago
      I think its a bit more subtle than that. Imagine on one hand if a printing press was invented that outputs the printed material to anyone in the world for free. At first there could be lots of great materials printed with it, but then the question would be asked - can we start charging money for some of it? Imagine on the other hand if a silver church collection tray was invented that could collect money from anyone of that particular religious persuasion anywhere in the world. At first it could collect great amounts of money, but then the question would be asked - can we do anything else with this silver church collection tray besides collecting money?
DennisP 8y ago
That link gets a 404 now. You seem to have the right url, the link from the article is broken too.
type0 8y ago
Indeed, "a public square" and "a doctor’s office" - all one in the same and who cares right, remember there was once a thing called privacy; our grandchildren will read about it in the history books (or probably not, since maybe there won't be such things as books).
JustSomeNobody 8y ago
We missed our opportunity with chat about a decade or so ago. When all the disparate chat protocols (MSN, Yahoo, AOL, etc) were battling it out, we should have decided on a protocol then. Sure, we'd see some growing pains now with how to deal with encryption, but at least we'd have a ubiquitous chat protocol. Chat is now worth billions of dollars apparently, so that proverbial cat is nowhere near the bag. I would love to be able to sign up with, say, Fastmail for chat and be able to chat with whomever I wish and it just work. As it is, I have be signed up with 4 different services and they don't talk to each other. Sigh.
908087 8y ago
> Imagine if we had done the same with email or the web itself. Give it time, we've certainly been trying. See: chrome, amp, gmail, etc.
dave_sid 8y ago
Current status of the web? HTTP 417
apostacy 8y ago
I think it is worse than we admit. IMAP will soon be dead, and the only way we can check our emails will be on the terms of Google or whoever. And because of how websites work now, ad blocking is an uphill battle that will only get harder, as server side rendering becomes more common. So, welcome to a future where you can't check your email unless it is on a multicore computing device with out least 2G of RAM, running an OS that is less than two years old. And you have to submit to email tracking beacons. (But don't worry, they will be proxies through Google so marketers will only know you opened them, but not your IP). Google will make concessions for accessibility of course, but it will be strictly on their terms, and the screen reader will still need absurd system requirements and have to execute javascript quickly, to be able to read static text. This WILL happen, and soon. And tech journalists will celebrate this, and say that IMAP was obsolete and "needed to die". They will praise the responsive and fashionable UX (the only interface allowed), and there won't be any serious pushback. Maybe Google will require that you run an app or use some browser extension to fully utilize features that you used to get for free. And the OSS community will obediently scramble to implement these regressive requirements, because if Firefox and Ubuntu don't play ball with the latest DRM/restriction garbage, then they wouldn't be cool or something. Federated email will slowly get squeezed out and die with a whimper. OK, maybe an exaggeration, but is it really far fetched? And this is just a microcosm of where technology is going. The reason I am pessimistic is that the developer culture that I knew is dying out. Younger developers just accept that the centralized corporate internet is the internet. And people I think are far more obedient with technology than they used to be. But what's so frustrating is that they are accepting and obedient I think partially for very shallow and superficial reasons, and wanting to be cool and accepted. As if people think that Apple is too shiny to and cool to betray us. "So what if it's horribly intrusive DRM, It's Apple, come on. Nobody wants that second best obsolete crap. It is obsolete because that cool guy said so. And Google is 'the best' so we have to implement it their way. Please don't laugh at me." I have said it many times before, but I just wish that people were as skeptical of Google and Apple as slashdotters of old were about "Micro$oft" or Oracle.
tareqak 8y ago
Didn't Tim Berners-Lee have a hand in approving Web DRM and abandoning consensus? He did [0][1][2]. For all his accomplishments in creating the Web as we know it today, his considerably more recent involvement shows that even he has given up on open standards, cooperation, and consensus. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14720591 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14720591 [1] https://boingboing.net/2017/07/07/eschatology-watch.html https://boingboing.net/2017/07/07/eschatology-watch.html [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15278883 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15278883
JohnFen 8y ago
> perhaps just the internet has become so monetized I think this is really the core issue.
rando_cal 8y ago
> For all its downsides, Bitcoin is the last exciting open standard I can remember that has done well and maybe has a future. I'd argue, though less exciting, that the addition of emojis into Unicode is another such silo-busting standard. Nowadays, if you built a chat client from scratch, you would benefit from the network effects of those standardized emoticons.

pmoriarty 8y ago

"today's web / internet seems to have given up on open standards and cooperation. Instead most of the money and effort is going into figuring out how to capture people in a walled garden such as Facebook etc.. so you can mine their data and advertise to them." How are open standards and cooperation supposed to stop tracking and advertising? Tracking and unsolicited advertising should be tackled head on: by banning them.

bhl 8y ago
Ideally, open standards would mean that the network effects, which today keep people trapped in walled gardens like Facebook, would create a more distributed / federated community instead of a winner-takes-all model. I think this is largely true, since if you could still communicate with your friends and family on Facebook but be on a different paid platform which doesn't track or advertise products to you, most people would go for it.
- nicpottier 8y ago
  Right, exactly. You can choose a different email provider if you hate the ads or what your current one is doing with your data. You can't pick a different Facebook and still communicate with your friends there.
  - pmoriarty 8y ago
    You can pick a different one, but if they're all spying on you, tracking you, and advertising to you, it's not really going to make a difference. Also, splitting up Facebook alone isn't going to stop data sharing between its various parts, nor is it going to address tracking or advertising at all.
    - nilskidoo 8y ago
      But we can count the moments til a sacrificial lamb pops up, as with Bernie Madoff, or the epipen guy for pharma. Token examples without stopping the potential for their crimes to be repeated by everyone else in practice in the slightest. We need to uninvent the wheel.
      - Nasrudith 8y ago
        That will be a problem as you can't unring a bell - it is far easier to unscramble an egg.
    - bhl 8y ago
      With an open standard, I don't see why you can't host your own social network similar to how people host their own email servers or websites right now.
      - dmitriid 8y ago
        What's an "open standard for a social network"?
        8y ago
alkonaut 8y ago
If there e.g. was an open standard by which I could give advertisers information rather than them trying to steal and trade it, I'd happily fill out a little key/value thing in my browser to specify a few of my interests, age group etc. I'm happy to see targeted ads if I created the target data myself.
- krapp 8y ago
  But vendors would still have your data, still be able to trade that data with other vendors, would still build profiles on you and be able to track and predict your behavior to some degree. You can't have effective advertising on the web without tracking. Advertising only works when the advertiser knows with some degree of certainty that an ad is being viewed, how often and if by demographics they find meaningful. The existence of targeted advertising presupposes the existence of a functioning apparatus of surveillance and psychological influence.
  - JohnFen 8y ago
    > You can't have effective advertising on the web without tracking. I see no reason at all to think this is true.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
  - wrycoder 8y ago
    Like billboards?
- imtringued 8y ago
  Remember when crypto mining in the browser was used as an alternative to ads? In the end websites used both to maximize profits. The same will happen in your idealized situation. You fill in a form with your personal data and then they secretly track you anyway.

sn41 8y ago

Walled gardens are partly due to the emergence of huge corporations who harvest and aggregate personal data to build profiles ostensibly to aid advertising. I find this baffling - traditional shopkeepers never used to ask for the personal details of the customers. That's why the phrase "it's just business" makes sense. Elizabeth Warren seems to have spoken of breaking up some of Facebook and Google. This might be the only way to combat the data hawkishness of corporate leaders like Eric Schmidt.

zdragnar 8y ago
> traditional shopkeepers never used to ask for the personal details of the customers Based on that statement, it sounds like you never lived in a small town, or you lived in a twilight zone version of one.
- 908087 8y ago
  I've never been to a small town where the shopkeeper asks for my address book and to briefly scan my personal communications for keywords "to improve our services and deliver a more relevant shopping experience".
- JohnFen 8y ago
  I don't know, I've lived in a few real-world small towns and have never had a shopkeeper ask for personal details as part of a transaction.
onion2k 8y ago
Walled gardens are partly due to the emergence of huge corporations who harvest and aggregate personal data to build profiles ostensibly to aid advertising. The FAANG companies built surveillance networks to target adverts at the beginning, but I think things have changed so much that advertising is just one of many uses of the surveillance data now. Take Android's location tracking as an example; Google doesn't need minute-by-minute location information of where everyone is to sell more adverts. They gather that data, and use it in Maps for live traffic tracking which is ostensibly useful, but it's not for advertising. These companies are at the point now where they soak up whatever data they can get just in case they can think of a use for it in the future. Advertising is the excuse, not the reason.

mikekchar 8y ago

Every once in a while I feel the same way. It's hard to reply to this sentiment, though, because I think there is also a lot of wishful thinking mixed in. Years ago, standards processes were as much about screwing your competition as it was about cooperation. Take the telephone protocol standards. They are open, but the idea was always to rush an implementation that was different from your competition, push through that implementation in the standards committee and then force your competition to rewrite their code. The early days of web "standards" went that way as well (as I'm sure many people will remember). However, the other thing to keep in mind is that proprietary solutions designed to force customers into vendor lock-in has always been the dominant situation. In fact, things are dramatically better than they were ages ago. Things like TCP/IP were not the solutions that the big vendors wanted. They wanted their walled gardens (and worked hard to produce them). Even HTTP and the web only became popular because of NCSA Mosaic, which was proprietary software. It's also interesting to see the list of original licencees [1] The only company that currently exists is Fujitsu. Netscape Navigator was written by many of the same authors as Mosaic and they only decided to open source it in 1998 -- a move that literally shocked the development world. This eventually led to Mozilla. Back in the day, people "in the know" knew about free software, the FSF, Emacs, Vi/Vim, Posix, etc, etc. The average programmer knew nothing about it, except for being forced to learn vi in university perhaps. These days, you can't swing a cat without hitting someone who is passionate about at least open source, even if they don't necessarily quite understand software freedom. I don't think we are in a worse position than we used to be. Granted, there are more and more users (billions now) that don't know anything about free and open systems. 30 or 40 years ago, those people were similarly ignorant, but weren't using computers. So when your aunt Martha is hooked up to Facebook, it seems like we've lost (or at least are loosing). But these open platforms and protocols have always been niche and our niche is much bigger than it was before. While you may never be able to chat with your aunt Martha with a free and open system run by people who are more interested in providing a service than somehow extracting money from you, you can chat with a lot more people than you ever could before. I think the key thing to remember is that you've never been able to chat with your aunt Martha using that free and open system. I think it is perfectly acceptable (and probably even preferable) to turn inward and mostly ignore what's happening in the proprietary world. I think it's probably a good idea, at least for now, to ignore fashion and popularity and instead concentrate on building free and open applications that work the way you want. There are more than enough people around with the same ideals to make it work. If you build it, they might not come, but if you don't build it, they definitely will not come. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosaic_(web_browser) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosaic_(web_browser)

ilovecaching 8y ago

There are still Stallmans, it's just much harder for a single person to have as great an impact as the various computing verticals have gained inertia. Not to downplay the importance of early pioneers, but a lot of success comes down to timing, being in the greenfield where your ideas can be fully realized without any prior art getting in the way, or needing to reach feature parity with the status quo. The trade off is that those pioneers had to work with very little, while we have very nice computing environments, but there are a ridiculous number of us, a lot of who are brilliant, and a lot of the great ideas are already taken.

Pristina 8y ago

All the open standards are still out there. Just because now there are 2 billions slaved to walled gardens doesn't mean all the good stuff disappeared. It just seems like everything is walled garden because the wall-to-unwalled ratio has decreased. IRC still exists, email still exists, just because whatsapp also exists and because a lot of people use it doesn't mean the web has gone down. all your film cameras don't stop working when digital came out.

paulmd 8y ago
Email doesn't really work anymore. Have you tried to send to Gmail addresses via your own SMTP server any time recently? Good luck not getting spam-filtered. An analogy to HTTP might be if browsers stop accepting HTTP and only acknowledge HTTPS to exist (mandatory web-wide encryption on anything except localhost/designated intranet IP blocks). At that point you are forced into one walled garden or another - there may be good actors like Lets Encrypt but you are still forced into either their garden or someone else's. The days of running the web server in your basement with no say-so from anyone else would come to an end. And I think maybe in the next 10 or 20 years we start moving towards that. The film cameras didn't stop working when digital came out, but nobody will develop your Kodachrome anymore. You can also run your SMTP server and send packets into the void as much as you want.
- icebraining 8y ago
  > Have you tried to send to Gmail addresses via your own SMTP server any time recently? I do it all the time (from a VPS), it requires crossing all the Ts (SPF, DKM, etc), but never had any issues with Gmail, only with other self-hosted systems. > The days of running the web server in your basement with no say-so from anyone else would come to an end. That was never true, you had to have permission from your ISP, and many forbade it (and some outright blocked those ports).
  - pbhjpbhj 8y ago
    I've never knowingly had an UK ISP that restricted services I provide from my home computer. I've not been particularly careful in choosing either -- is that castrating of users a USA thing? Gmail from a VPS has been a problem for me though, Microsoft mail has been worse (yes I look after the jots and tittles).

profalseidol 8y ago

> Bitcoin is the last exciting open standard I can remember that has done well and maybe has a future. And that future we call Ethereum.

cf498 8y ago

I think its more then just the lack of wide usage of open standards. Centralization was what sunk the ship. And it did so for a reason. Mailinglists became twitter, Forums became subreddits and dont even get me started on youtube and facebook. I dont think we have a viable concept anymore how to finance independent infrastructure, or maybe we never had one to begin with. Sadly the end of year push to collect enough to cover the server costs was always a common occurrence. I dont see how something like video streaming in a watchable resolution can be crowed founded.

duckMuppet 8y ago

of course it's cultural. People would now rather watch twitch, cat videos, or Instagram than Waste it on what ppl used to spend it on.. People now would rather pay for some proprietary SaaS or pay with their data than take some piece of software, learn it, make it better, then host it for other users for little to no compensation. There are fewer people to create truecrypt, fewer Stallmans in the world now because the culture isn't conducive to the libertarian ideas that a Stallman of that time period might have... Let's have a looksee: -The internet is shit now because the government hasn't regulated it. -The internet is again shit because greedy corporations force me to use their walled gardens, how the hell else would I communicate with anyone if I didn't allow them to siphon my data as payment to these fascist overlords. -The internet is a shitshow because not everyone has accepted that both https and JavaScript should be mandatory.. It must be the children of anti-vaxxers, somehow refusing to believe the science, a clear byproduct of not having the first point and an easy solution. -the internet is again a shitshow because the government hasn't told these fascist hardware manufacturers that I can't be bothered to read the quick start guides which clearly say change my router and IP cam password from 123456 to pa$$word.. Who the hell has time to do that with both pewdiepie and GoT having so much new content.. If the govt just had those clowns hard code pa$$word in the first place I'd be fine. Better yet, just let me get it as a service, they can just update it for me, then I can add nigahiga to my watch list. -The internet is finally a massive shitshow because, all these companies making money from me being the product have no right to, especially if I'm not getting a piece of the action. Time to break up these corporate capitalists and redistribute the wealth to the people where it belongs. I can keep going, but I'm certain it's scorched earth now. The truth is, a society that prefers the government give them things or provide their safety net, the Stallmans are going to be harder to find, because the ideas that go with such are very threatening. Pretty soon, it'll lead to making decisions for yourself AND taking blame for the outcome, good or bad, with or without a physical profit.

krapp 8y ago
>People would now rather watch twitch, cat videos, or Instagram than Waste it on what ppl used to spend it on.. What's wrong with that? I've seen a lot of complaints about social media, mainstream web culture, "cat videos and memes," etc. The web was meant for everyone, and most people want to use it for entertainment and talking to their friends. There's nothing wrong with using the web for mundane and trivial things. You want people to embrace an open web? Stop talking to them about freedom and censorship resistance and how the fascist capitalist overlords have turned them into sheep and make it easy for them to share their cat pictures.

Illniyar 8y ago

You mean giving up on standards like IE6 and below, adobe/macromedia flash, RealPlayer, Quiktime and ActiveX ? You mean the open web of ICQ, Skype, AOL's walled garden? The web of 5, 10 and 15 years ago was much less standardized then we have today. Even though chrome is basically the only major browser left, almost all content you browse today is written in to an open standard. Walled gardens existed in the past just as much. We just didn't really consider them walled gardens because there was really no real alternative. The only difference now then in the past is scale. It seems that a closed and non-standard platform is ok if it is small, but the things that forgiven for a site with a few hundred thousands users is not for a site with billions. Which is as it should be, I think. We should have different moral standards for different sizes of market domination (the same way we have for monopolies), but let's not paint it as if the web was more open in the past.

shard972 8y ago
> You mean the open web of ICQ, Skype, AOL's walled garden? I get your general point but i would point out that in regards to something as simple as messaging, ICQ/AOL/MSN/GChat/Facebook. It wasn't that many years ago that I could have all those clients loaded up in one chat client. Noways i think ICQ is about all that's left that allows you to connect to their chat services outside of proprietary software.
- pferde 8y ago
  Not anymore. Sometimes in late December, ICQ users received following message: "We are discontinuing support of older ICQ versions and other unofficial clients. To continue chatting, you need: 1. Link a phone number to your account here https://icq.com/<redacted>/verifyphone?sc=<redacted> https://icq.com/<redacted>/verifyphone?sc=<redacted> 2. Log in using the official ICQ client which can be downloaded at https://icq.com" https://icq.com" I can still log in with an alternative client, see my contacts' status and receive text messages, but any message I send is either lost, or delayed by several days.
- omnimus 8y ago
  Also lets not forget that time when you could send messages between almost all of those prividers including Gchat and Facebook messenger because it was all federated XMPP.

rimliu 8y ago

The main problem I see with the web is that we forgot about users. Dev's got so obsessed with means that they started to completely ignore the ends. I don't remember where I saw this phrase but I like it a lot: "make harder for databases, easier for the users". Alas, seems like desire to use the coolest tech or the only tech devs know trumps everything. The main question now is should we use Redux or MobX. Not "should we user React at all here? Does this project warrant to be a SPA?". And who needs accessibility anyway?

rjf72 8y ago

I think it's about something much more insidious: FOMO. Today it's easier than ever to create e.g. a decentralized or independent means of doing pretty much anything that could easily let people escape those walled gardens, if they wanted. The problem is people don't want to: FOMO. If they leave the walled garden, they have the Fear Of Missing Out on what's happening inside the walled garden. You can even see this phenomena in real life. You have a dozen people at a table or whatever. Unless you have some good sample bias, a good chunk of them will be constantly glancing at their phones if not having their noses glued to them. You have significant things that could be happening in your immediate vicinity, supplanted out of concern for missing what are invariably trivialities in a mostly fake world. This is a people problem - not a business or technology problem. And the worst part is that it's so incredibly insidious that people don't realize the harm involved. A person addicted to gambling will trend towards the same thing as a person addicted to drugs - losing everything they have. And so it's quite easy to see the consequences. A person who's mind is increasingly fogged and attention driven entirely to the pale glow of that screen and the little dopamine bumps it provides, by contrast, will see no immediately visible negative effects. And the addiction is so ubiquitous that even as consequences do begin to emerge, they're not really noted because it's 'normal.'

hevi_jos 8y ago
I believe you miss the main issue: Most people don't know or don't want to do computer systems administration. People don't need to know mechanics to drive a car, or architect to live in a house and Facebook, Google... are doing the same with computers. You don't need to know anything about how computers work in order to use them. There is no FOVO when you can convince your friends or family members to use a different and better alternative. The problem is that there is no alternative. There is no alternative. There is not some kind of box I can buy for 30 dollars, connect to my network and instantly being able to connect with my friends, family or workers with another box automatically and without work on my and their side like you can do with a physical telephone. There are lots of tinkering boxes for geeks. But they are too complex.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago

tastroder 8y ago

>For all its downsides, Bitcoin is the last exciting open standard I can remember that has done well and maybe has a future. If you don't mind elaborating, this point comes up rather frequently nowadays about bitcoin/other blockchain tech. So far the only thing that fell into the "exciting" category for me was ipfs and even that didn't really convince me that it's a viable thing. I get that blockchain tech is an industry nowadays but from my outside perspective 99% of it and the applications they promote seem rather, for the lack of a better word, self serving. Either that or it's some niche that I don't see will get any mass adoption anytime soon. Lots of these technologies seem to be technical solutions to problems that are social in nature and thus, again - from my outside perspective, prone to failure. Proof of X tech often looks like stuff that's solved as soon as parties agree on using it in the first place. edit: formatting

m-i-l 8y ago
> > For all its downsides, Bitcoin is the last exciting open standard I can remember > I get that blockchain tech is an industry nowadays but from my outside perspective 99% of it and the applications they promote seem rather, for the lack of a better word, self serving Blockchain might have been as exciting as the internet at the start, but it has turned bad (i.e. been exploited for profit by big corporations at the user's expense) much more quickly. In my view it is because blockchain puts money before technology rather than the other way around, i.e. during the dot-com era it was often "let's just build something useful and worry about monetisation later" whereas with blockchain it is more "we've got the monetisation in place and we'll worry about actual use cases for the technology and mass user adoption later".
- type0 8y ago
  In other words it's a solution in search of a problem
  - m-i-l 8y ago
    I think its a bit more subtle than that. Imagine on one hand if a printing press was invented that outputs the printed material to anyone in the world for free. At first there could be lots of great materials printed with it, but then the question would be asked - can we start charging money for some of it? Imagine on the other hand if a silver church collection tray was invented that could collect money from anyone of that particular religious persuasion anywhere in the world. At first it could collect great amounts of money, but then the question would be asked - can we do anything else with this silver church collection tray besides collecting money?

DennisP 8y ago

That link gets a 404 now. You seem to have the right url, the link from the article is broken too.

type0 8y ago

Indeed, "a public square" and "a doctor’s office" - all one in the same and who cares right, remember there was once a thing called privacy; our grandchildren will read about it in the history books (or probably not, since maybe there won't be such things as books).

JustSomeNobody 8y ago

We missed our opportunity with chat about a decade or so ago. When all the disparate chat protocols (MSN, Yahoo, AOL, etc) were battling it out, we should have decided on a protocol then. Sure, we'd see some growing pains now with how to deal with encryption, but at least we'd have a ubiquitous chat protocol. Chat is now worth billions of dollars apparently, so that proverbial cat is nowhere near the bag. I would love to be able to sign up with, say, Fastmail for chat and be able to chat with whomever I wish and it just work. As it is, I have be signed up with 4 different services and they don't talk to each other. Sigh.

908087 8y ago

> Imagine if we had done the same with email or the web itself. Give it time, we've certainly been trying. See: chrome, amp, gmail, etc.

dave_sid 8y ago

Current status of the web? HTTP 417

apostacy 8y ago

I think it is worse than we admit. IMAP will soon be dead, and the only way we can check our emails will be on the terms of Google or whoever. And because of how websites work now, ad blocking is an uphill battle that will only get harder, as server side rendering becomes more common. So, welcome to a future where you can't check your email unless it is on a multicore computing device with out least 2G of RAM, running an OS that is less than two years old. And you have to submit to email tracking beacons. (But don't worry, they will be proxies through Google so marketers will only know you opened them, but not your IP). Google will make concessions for accessibility of course, but it will be strictly on their terms, and the screen reader will still need absurd system requirements and have to execute javascript quickly, to be able to read static text. This WILL happen, and soon. And tech journalists will celebrate this, and say that IMAP was obsolete and "needed to die". They will praise the responsive and fashionable UX (the only interface allowed), and there won't be any serious pushback. Maybe Google will require that you run an app or use some browser extension to fully utilize features that you used to get for free. And the OSS community will obediently scramble to implement these regressive requirements, because if Firefox and Ubuntu don't play ball with the latest DRM/restriction garbage, then they wouldn't be cool or something. Federated email will slowly get squeezed out and die with a whimper. OK, maybe an exaggeration, but is it really far fetched? And this is just a microcosm of where technology is going. The reason I am pessimistic is that the developer culture that I knew is dying out. Younger developers just accept that the centralized corporate internet is the internet. And people I think are far more obedient with technology than they used to be. But what's so frustrating is that they are accepting and obedient I think partially for very shallow and superficial reasons, and wanting to be cool and accepted. As if people think that Apple is too shiny to and cool to betray us. "So what if it's horribly intrusive DRM, It's Apple, come on. Nobody wants that second best obsolete crap. It is obsolete because that cool guy said so. And Google is 'the best' so we have to implement it their way. Please don't laugh at me." I have said it many times before, but I just wish that people were as skeptical of Google and Apple as slashdotters of old were about "Micro$oft" or Oracle.

tareqak 8y ago

Didn't Tim Berners-Lee have a hand in approving Web DRM and abandoning consensus? He did [0][1][2]. For all his accomplishments in creating the Web as we know it today, his considerably more recent involvement shows that even he has given up on open standards, cooperation, and consensus. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14720591 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14720591 [1] https://boingboing.net/2017/07/07/eschatology-watch.html https://boingboing.net/2017/07/07/eschatology-watch.html [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15278883 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15278883

JohnFen 8y ago

> perhaps just the internet has become so monetized I think this is really the core issue.

rando_cal 8y ago

> For all its downsides, Bitcoin is the last exciting open standard I can remember that has done well and maybe has a future. I'd argue, though less exciting, that the addition of emojis into Unicode is another such silo-busting standard. Nowadays, if you built a chat client from scratch, you would benefit from the network effects of those standardized emoticons.