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It feels like the author was exposed to the rhetoric of the web having been ruined by tech giants due to centralisation, and decided to write an article about t

It feels like the author was exposed to the rhetoric of the web having been ruined by tech giants due to centralisation, and decided to write an article about that, expecting clicks and views, all without trying to first understand what the people behind such a rhetoric actually mean. I mean the article discusses the issue of a centralised web by stating the russian inference in the US elections. How does that illustrate the centralisation issue of the web platform, and how can a decentralised solution prevent that? Also the article is only accessible through a subscription, so I couldn't finish it, which is ironic because this is exactly what's broken with today's web.

cartoonworld 7y ago
I think the author was arguing that the siloing off of internet users, combined with hypersaturated markets is what made that election scandal possible in the first place. To be clear about what I mean by that I am referring to unregulated political advertising that nobody checks. An example of the bad advertising would be: Running an ad campaign referring to the wrong date of the physical vote to a target audience of 9-to-five 18-35 wage workers with kids and no college education hoping that it tricks some percent of them into not voting because they requested the wrong day off. Oops! People (Ad people) simply noticed that the ads were a communication channel in and of themselves, and using the (for example) facebook tools to lazily target a particular demographic, they got huge numbers of eyeballs. Stir in some classic astroturfing and social-media influencers (Derisively known as shills), likes, comments and you've got a quick minilove and truth. Except even better because anyone with cash who resides in any country on earth can buy in. The author was pointing out the now obvious fact that "tech companies" look like an information service for connecting friends but are actually ad generating theme parks. Since the value of the data your users bring is only very useful if you have a lot of it, the organizations who have replaced both Nielsen and News Papers have simply followed the incentives and coalesced into larger and larger gravitational bodies. By having all the content, users, tracking pixels, sales data, and ads, it increases the value of all of those things if you can meaningfuly connect them together by engaging with users through next-generation enterprise-grade disruptive orthogonal innovation at-scale. They're saying a centralized web is more valuable to its corporate sponsors, because when there are fewer places you need to advertise or track/monetize user data in this world, the corporate value compounds even more. Likewise abusing these themeparks will be even more effective, because whatever mechanism sells soda pop will likely also sell antidepresants and anything else. Walking into the stables might get you a big sack of oats, but you wont find anything other than what they hand over the gate.
- theboywho 7y ago
  Thanks for reporting back about what is discussed in the rest of the article. I still think the author is confused about two different things: popularity and centralisation. The issue is not that now, a bunch of very few popular services is where most of online activity happens, the issue is that these services have access to users’ data and privacy, by design, and most of all, they are not censorship resistant.
  - cartoonworld 7y ago
    >the author is confused about two different things: popularity and centralisation. I strongly disagree. the author has noted the connection between popularity and centralization and points out its impressive drawbacks. The pluses are disruptive corporate profitability, the minus makes Church and Pike look like Tuskegee. Or maybe the other way around.
- jacquesm 7y ago
  The bigger problem at times of elections is that every idiot now has an amplifier the strength of which allows them to reach the rest of their country, including all like thinking idiots. This makes idiots less likely to change their mind based on their environment because they feel vindicated in their beliefs.
  - wdewind 7y ago
    Honest question for you: how is this different from criticisms of the early days of the printing press?
    - theclaw 7y ago
      Which criticisms are you referring to?
      - wdewind 7y ago
        > every idiot now has an amplifier the strength of which allows them to reach the rest of their country, including all like thinking idiots
zxcb1 7y ago
A centralized register is more valuable to those who need access and control, also true for malicious actors of the unwanted kind; a single transformation can affect the whole or precisely targeted parts. This is a much harder task in a scenario of multiple interconnected systems of varied design. They represent parallel solutions to the same problem; implementation and values. Compare to the necessity of genetic variation in agriculture, a single fungus or virus can now do more damage due to uniformity from optimization. Eventually we will (through trial and error?) probably figure out why nature is organized the way it is.
ramphastidae 7y ago
> Also the article is only accessible through a subscription, so I couldn't finish it, which is ironic because this is exactly what's broken with today's web. Do you work for free? Do you have proof of a better business model?
- theboywho 7y ago
  I'm not saying the content should be given away for free, I'm just observing the ironic case of what sounds like a call to action to "save" the web ("Time for a reboot") being hidden behind a paywall. I personally find the subscription model to be broken, I can't economically subscribe to the wsj, the nytimes, washingtonpost, etc. I'll also probably only read one article of each per month on average so it's not even interesting to me as a deal. It will be interesting to see the evolution of movies and tv shows streaming now with Apple, netflix, amazon, disney all offering a subscription service with exclusive content. My guess is that pirating is coming back.
- mkhalil 7y ago
  I don't agree with your assumption that OP thinks the author shouldn't be paid for this article. But having to subscribe to the whole newspaper to read text that is accessible for free if coming from a different referrer - for example Google - is something that sound broken to me. Aside from OP assumptions - IMHO, if online news companies were happy with ad model, which was barely one cent per view - why not try a model sort of equivalent.[0] I might be a minority, but I have an Apple News+ subscription[1]. If Apple created a browser extension that allowed me to browse the same content they let me in the News app, I would be pretty happy with that. And I'd bet I wouldn't be the only one. [0]: Please spare responding with examples of "X Micro-payment" company that failed. This works best with agreements between major players. Not, "here's the Github, add it to your site" (not that I disagree with that model entirely) [1]: I subscribed to News+ mostly for the tech and art magazines. It's barely usable at best unless - and probably even if - you are using a Magic Trackpad or an iPad. No two page full screen scrolling, and the weirdest, most unintuitive, slowest page navigation UX I have ever eXperienced for any reader. If you aren't using a touch mouse, horizontal navigation is a mini-game.
mkhalil 7y ago
https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.wsj.com/articles/tech-giants-have-hijacked-the-web-its-time-for-a-reboot-11572062420 https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.wsj.com/articles/te...
- oschvr 7y ago
  The irony....
  - andrewstuart2 7y ago
    This really is the cherry on top. Thanks to the influence of a centralized tech giant whose services are invaluable to WSJ, and who indexes the open web, we can get equal access to WSJ's centralized resources that they wanted to pretend were open, when it came to Google crawlers.
droithomme 7y ago
> the article discusses the issue of a centralised web by stating the russian inference in the US elections Yes, it mentions: > since Russian agents used Facebook in an attempt to manipulate the U.S. public in the 2016 election I strongly recommend people look into the actual substance of these claims. One Russian ad farm company spent a small amount of money running a small number of ads seen by at most a few thousand people promoting: Black Lives Matter, Jill Stein, the Dakota Access Pipeline protests, and Jesus being able to stop you from masturbating. Clicking on the ad led to link farm sites that were set up to collect revenue from referrals. A common scam. And no sane tech person who has seen this scam would interpret it as election interference, either attempted or accomplished. Yet this hoax gets repeated over and over and over and over again as if a fact.
formercoder 7y ago
You think that being required to pay in order to consume a good that was produced is what’s broken with the web?

cartoonworld 7y ago

I think the author was arguing that the siloing off of internet users, combined with hypersaturated markets is what made that election scandal possible in the first place. To be clear about what I mean by that I am referring to unregulated political advertising that nobody checks. An example of the bad advertising would be: Running an ad campaign referring to the wrong date of the physical vote to a target audience of 9-to-five 18-35 wage workers with kids and no college education hoping that it tricks some percent of them into not voting because they requested the wrong day off. Oops! People (Ad people) simply noticed that the ads were a communication channel in and of themselves, and using the (for example) facebook tools to lazily target a particular demographic, they got huge numbers of eyeballs. Stir in some classic astroturfing and social-media influencers (Derisively known as shills), likes, comments and you've got a quick minilove and truth. Except even better because anyone with cash who resides in any country on earth can buy in. The author was pointing out the now obvious fact that "tech companies" look like an information service for connecting friends but are actually ad generating theme parks. Since the value of the data your users bring is only very useful if you have a lot of it, the organizations who have replaced both Nielsen and News Papers have simply followed the incentives and coalesced into larger and larger gravitational bodies. By having all the content, users, tracking pixels, sales data, and ads, it increases the value of all of those things if you can meaningfuly connect them together by engaging with users through next-generation enterprise-grade disruptive orthogonal innovation at-scale. They're saying a centralized web is more valuable to its corporate sponsors, because when there are fewer places you need to advertise or track/monetize user data in this world, the corporate value compounds even more. Likewise abusing these themeparks will be even more effective, because whatever mechanism sells soda pop will likely also sell antidepresants and anything else. Walking into the stables might get you a big sack of oats, but you wont find anything other than what they hand over the gate.

theboywho 7y ago
Thanks for reporting back about what is discussed in the rest of the article. I still think the author is confused about two different things: popularity and centralisation. The issue is not that now, a bunch of very few popular services is where most of online activity happens, the issue is that these services have access to users’ data and privacy, by design, and most of all, they are not censorship resistant.
- cartoonworld 7y ago
  >the author is confused about two different things: popularity and centralisation. I strongly disagree. the author has noted the connection between popularity and centralization and points out its impressive drawbacks. The pluses are disruptive corporate profitability, the minus makes Church and Pike look like Tuskegee. Or maybe the other way around.
jacquesm 7y ago
The bigger problem at times of elections is that every idiot now has an amplifier the strength of which allows them to reach the rest of their country, including all like thinking idiots. This makes idiots less likely to change their mind based on their environment because they feel vindicated in their beliefs.
- wdewind 7y ago
  Honest question for you: how is this different from criticisms of the early days of the printing press?
  - theclaw 7y ago
    Which criticisms are you referring to?
    - wdewind 7y ago
      > every idiot now has an amplifier the strength of which allows them to reach the rest of their country, including all like thinking idiots

zxcb1 7y ago

A centralized register is more valuable to those who need access and control, also true for malicious actors of the unwanted kind; a single transformation can affect the whole or precisely targeted parts. This is a much harder task in a scenario of multiple interconnected systems of varied design. They represent parallel solutions to the same problem; implementation and values. Compare to the necessity of genetic variation in agriculture, a single fungus or virus can now do more damage due to uniformity from optimization. Eventually we will (through trial and error?) probably figure out why nature is organized the way it is.

ramphastidae 7y ago

> Also the article is only accessible through a subscription, so I couldn't finish it, which is ironic because this is exactly what's broken with today's web. Do you work for free? Do you have proof of a better business model?

theboywho 7y ago
I'm not saying the content should be given away for free, I'm just observing the ironic case of what sounds like a call to action to "save" the web ("Time for a reboot") being hidden behind a paywall. I personally find the subscription model to be broken, I can't economically subscribe to the wsj, the nytimes, washingtonpost, etc. I'll also probably only read one article of each per month on average so it's not even interesting to me as a deal. It will be interesting to see the evolution of movies and tv shows streaming now with Apple, netflix, amazon, disney all offering a subscription service with exclusive content. My guess is that pirating is coming back.
mkhalil 7y ago
I don't agree with your assumption that OP thinks the author shouldn't be paid for this article. But having to subscribe to the whole newspaper to read text that is accessible for free if coming from a different referrer - for example Google - is something that sound broken to me. Aside from OP assumptions - IMHO, if online news companies were happy with ad model, which was barely one cent per view - why not try a model sort of equivalent.[0] I might be a minority, but I have an Apple News+ subscription[1]. If Apple created a browser extension that allowed me to browse the same content they let me in the News app, I would be pretty happy with that. And I'd bet I wouldn't be the only one. [0]: Please spare responding with examples of "X Micro-payment" company that failed. This works best with agreements between major players. Not, "here's the Github, add it to your site" (not that I disagree with that model entirely) [1]: I subscribed to News+ mostly for the tech and art magazines. It's barely usable at best unless - and probably even if - you are using a Magic Trackpad or an iPad. No two page full screen scrolling, and the weirdest, most unintuitive, slowest page navigation UX I have ever eXperienced for any reader. If you aren't using a touch mouse, horizontal navigation is a mini-game.

mkhalil 7y ago

https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.wsj.com/articles/tech-giants-have-hijacked-the-web-its-time-for-a-reboot-11572062420 https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.wsj.com/articles/te...

oschvr 7y ago
The irony....
- andrewstuart2 7y ago
  This really is the cherry on top. Thanks to the influence of a centralized tech giant whose services are invaluable to WSJ, and who indexes the open web, we can get equal access to WSJ's centralized resources that they wanted to pretend were open, when it came to Google crawlers.

droithomme 7y ago

> the article discusses the issue of a centralised web by stating the russian inference in the US elections Yes, it mentions: > since Russian agents used Facebook in an attempt to manipulate the U.S. public in the 2016 election I strongly recommend people look into the actual substance of these claims. One Russian ad farm company spent a small amount of money running a small number of ads seen by at most a few thousand people promoting: Black Lives Matter, Jill Stein, the Dakota Access Pipeline protests, and Jesus being able to stop you from masturbating. Clicking on the ad led to link farm sites that were set up to collect revenue from referrals. A common scam. And no sane tech person who has seen this scam would interpret it as election interference, either attempted or accomplished. Yet this hoax gets repeated over and over and over and over again as if a fact.

formercoder 7y ago

You think that being required to pay in order to consume a good that was produced is what’s broken with the web?