Businesses gonna business. Can’t really blame them for exploiting the artificial bottlenecks created by the lazy thoughtless corner-cutting geeks who (ostensibl

Businesses gonna business. Can’t really blame them for exploiting the artificial bottlenecks created by the lazy thoughtless corner-cutting geeks who (ostensibly) designed the thing. To copy-paste myself (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21181707 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21181707): -- HTTP hyperlinks FTF. Vannevar Bush hypothesized much a higher-level “mesh of associative trails”, with relationships formed directly and largely automatically. The closest today’s WWW has gotten to this is search engines, but again these are centralized, controlled, and first and foremost in service to vendor, not users. However, I would argue a far greater problem was the early lack of editability; Berners-Lee originally conceived of his WWW as a network of editable documents, where every user could read and write with equal ease. His prototype web browser was, to use a desktop analogy, a “Word for the Web”; a true web editor, Opening and Saving documents stored online, just as Microsoft Word directly opens and saves documents stored locally. But Tim got lazy and impatient, and shipped his first public browser as a cut-down web viewer. Which Mosaic then copied; and, before anyone knew any different, the web was recast as a read-only medium of the masses, with web editing the exclusive domain of technical and corporate elites only. A single thoughtless corner-cutting mistake, creating an artificial bottleneck upon which trillion-dollar global empires have now been built. You can still see the remnants of the original direct interaction model in HTTP’s PUT and DELETE verbs, like the hindlimbs in a blue whale, rendered just as powerless from the ignorance and avarice of this new web’s Intelligent Design. Tony Hoare named NULL his billion-dollar mistake, but that’s a rounding error on the scale of TBL’s fuckup. -- Which isn’t to say that had the web’s architects not completely FUBARed manual document editing/publishing and automated relationship-building that various self-interested parties wouldn’t have locked it up in other ways. But look at SOAP and Dropbox and even Facebook; were the basic building blocks working as designed, none of those would exist because the key services they provide are just standard everyday operations that a correctly-functioning web would already provide to everyone for free. But they don’t, so again and again we end up with this instead: https://thedailywtf.com/articles/The_Inner-Platform_Effect https://thedailywtf.com/articles/The_Inner-Platform_Effect Honestly, our modern “web” can make a Matryoshka doll blush, it’s so anything but.