21 ms·

The Web Began Dying in 2014 (2017)

370 points by pcr910303 7y ago

dang 7y ago
Discussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15584456 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15584456
ropiwqefjnpoa 7y ago
FTA: "GOOG and FB ceased competing directly, focusing on what they do best instead." “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices” - Adam Smith Some things never change.
- ci5er 7y ago
  Why else would you meet with a competitor? :-) Most of my friends are co-workers, or other people in the industry, including competitors (more the field/sales types than the corporate/management types, because you see them when you are bidding for a client's buisiness). One of my friends used to be an employee. He quit. He then forked me. He then undercut me (or, well, my prices). Somehow, I don't know how, maybe because I am such a sterling man of honor (ed: throwaway prince Andrew reference), we are still friends. But I've got to tell you! In terms of price? It's kind of still a race to the bottom. (At least for the vanilla, not the value-add, product) So - even though Adam Smith has it right (he often does!), the public does not. We are enjoying shared stories of battle, over large accounts, and the blow-by-blows during large-account acquisitions go, and toasting one another's accomplishments, after battle, but ... the prices end up going down. It is the nature of competition.
- tialaramex 7y ago
  I think Smith is almost right, a _conspiracy_ is likely in the broadest sense but he's wrong to suppose it will necessarily be against the public. So, the CAB is maybe a useful contrasting example. The CA/Browser Forum (CA/B or CAB for short) was a meeting that happened as a mixture of conference calls and email lists back in 2011 or so. This is where Extended Validation (the green bar) comes from, but ultimately CA/B metamorphosed into a standing (in the sense of ongoing, not you can't sit down) meeting, still going on today, for the Certificate Authorities and the Browsers (today in practice the Operating System vendors, but with Mozilla standing in for the Free Unixes) to get together to figure out what the rules are. Because of what Smith notes, the CA/B's rules are explicit that discussion about prices, product offerings and so on is prohibited, if you want to conspire to raise prices you'll have to do it somewhere else. But plenty of _good_ things can be agreed this way. Contrast the many years it took to get rid of MD5 from certificates (which happened before CA/B existed) despite collisions being known - against SHA-1 where CA/B was able to co-ordinate industry wide discontinuation of SHA-1 with only a handful of minor defections before even a single proven collision of the hash was published. More broadly I'd argue that the IETF, and certainly the thrice annual IETF physical meetings (the most recent was in Singapore last week) are exactly "people of the same trade... meet together" and you could characterise plenty of the work done at many Working Groups (obviously DPRIVE and QUIC but I don't see any reason you couldn't make this claim for KITTEN for example) as a conspiracy, just that it's only "against the public" if you think global surveillance was what "the public" wanted...
- peteradio 7y ago
  Sometimes I wonder how you balance that Adam Smith quote with "Tragedy of the commons".
mirimir 7y ago
Actually, the web began dying in the late 90s.
- sporkologist 7y ago
  Yes right after Mosaic 1.0 was released. RIP
- devin 7y ago
  Hard to tell if you’re joking. If you do actually believe this, I assume you also believe that e-commerce broke everything?
  - mirimir 7y ago
    No, I'm not joking. It's not so much e-commerce that broke everything. Although there were many who did argue that. For me, it's been the shift from self-published (and indeed, self-hosted) to Google, Facebook and cloud services. And the tide turned in the late 90s. Edit: When I first got online, it was AOL, CompuServe, EcoNet and The Well. I was on all of them except AOL. And then we had Usenet and websites. And networks of websites. The prospect of citizen-based journalism. But now we're back to something a lot more like AOL.
    - rootw0rm 7y ago
      or something a lot like Prodigy...
      - mirimir 7y ago
        Damn, forgot Prodigy. I was mainly a CompuServe geek.
    - z3t4 7y ago
      It has never been more easy to self publish ... via Twitter and Instagram. But the real problem is that you only have 1 hour of free time, spread out in five minute intervals during the day. Being an adult sux.
Apocryphon 7y ago
So what's changed in the two years since?
na85 7y ago
>Internet Service Providers (ISPs) are probably soon going to dictate what traffic can or cannot arrive at people’s end devices. This was the money quote for me. FANG may kill the web, but the idea that ISPs (in my opinion some of the scummiest corporations out there) get to decide what content they serve me and what they don't has the potential to kill the Internet as we know it.
- blackflame 7y ago
  Naw, with the coming of 5G it will destroy their monopolies on the communication lines which should open the door to more local competition.
  - bransonf 7y ago
    But what makes wireless telecom giants any better than ISPs?
    - doctorshady 7y ago
      I think their point is more competition is better regardless; every one of them will try to find some way to make themselves seem better than the other. Though the problem with that regardless is that from a business perspective, there's a very finite amount of spectrum, and it's being gobbled up exclusively by four (maybe soon to be three with the pending Sprint merger) companies. From a technical perspective, there's definitely been mixed reactions to the effectiveness of 5G technology. That's another topic in and of itself, though.
  - m10i 7y ago
    Could you elaborate on this?
  - randomsearch 7y ago
    5G isn’t a substitute for fibre.
  - Teknoman117 7y ago
    That assumes that you'll have a healthy offering of wireless providers. If you're from Europe, then I understand that's the norm there, but in the US, it's the same story as your local ISPs. For home internet, you'll be beholden to whatever companies own the towers near your property.
tuxt 7y ago
What is "Web"? Side note: both FB and Google cannot be accessed from China.
- jabbany 7y ago
  ... But they both had basically equivalent local counterparts
- VvR-Ox 7y ago
  Yes they can by using a VPN for example.
  - jacobwilliamroy 7y ago
    The VPN can access them, but not from china.
    - VvR-Ox 7y ago
      At least in 2018 I was able to.
      - jacobwilliamroy 7y ago
        I was trying to say, if the VPN was in china, people in china wouldn't be able to access google and facebook through the VPN.
- jacobwilliamroy 7y ago
  Uhh... I think it's http. Or maybe it's just any data that a web-browser can handle. Definitely a few OSI layers above the internet.
  - BlueTemplar 7y ago
    No question about HTTP. However I'd argue that when HTTP is used for weird purposes that aren't directly related to serving hypertext pages (often to go around draconian firewall policies), or to run arbitrary code (JavaScript), then it's not the Web anymore. (Yes, this means that "Webapps" is an oxymoron.)
pcd_effect 7y ago
Personally, I think both Google and Facebook are only a few short years away from imploding. Why? The internal documents are slowly getting leaked, which will soon make open communication inside these organizations quite precarious [1]. Not merely ironic, but also poetically just, considering that these two companies have done exactly that to nearly the entire human population. Already, the only folks who are left at these companies are politically correct drones (PCDs) who cannot say anything which doesn't toe the party line. Soon the hiring process will start optimizing for PCDs, and then you will have the usual churn, and finally everyone will be PCDs who start talking, acting and thinking like each other. [1] You can ask James Damore. And on a somewhat hilarious side note. I once knew an ex-Facebook employee who claimed that Facebook was "completely open and transparent" with its employees. His tenure actually coincided with a lot of scandals, such as the friendly fraud case. He probably wishes he never used those words, because by definition he has basically acknowledged he knew about these scandals. I am not in touch with him anymore, so I don't really know how he feels about this. :-)
EGreg 7y ago
Look I know this is going to get downvoted because of the token thing, but really, read it: https://qbix.com/token https://qbix.com/token This is how we can rescue the Web, and maybe fulfill the vision of Xanadu
- Kye 7y ago
  You can avoid the downvotes by (1) not predicting downvotes, and (2) expanding on how this will rescue the web.
- Nextgrid 7y ago
  I think the downvotes are more about the fact that you're shilling this thing on pretty much every social-media-related post.
  - EGreg 7y ago
    If a post is about how the web needs rescuing, and it takes years to design an actual solution, why is posting this solution considered shilling? Fine, let’s just let the Web keep becoming a feudal society like it was with AOL MSN and Compuserve. A free open source platform to prevent it should not be mentioned, that’s shilling! Btw by that logic isn’t Andre Staltz shilling Scuttlebutt every time he writes about the Web? He should just not mention it, right?
FpUser 7y ago
People used to sit on a couch and watch TV for hours and also spent hours on the old phones talking about the most exciting shade of nail polish. Shopping is also fun. Now all that activities largely moved to Internet. Thanks to omnipresence of smartphones the hours dedicated to those activities had also increased. Of course share of general Joe Doe's website got smaller as said website does not always cater to few most popular people's activities. That does not mean that the total amount of Joe Doe's websites decreased. It is growing, just not as fast as the amount of my cat videos. Sure big companies may try to subvert the Internet but I think that creative type of the populace will always find ways.
- cft 7y ago
  Except that it's drowning in noise. The SNR is definitely dropping.
  - FpUser 7y ago
    Well I would say that web search takes good care of SNR. So far no troubles finding interesting stuff.
    - VvR-Ox 7y ago
      "Finding interesting stuff" maybe. But finding a lot of the things I used to find some years ago is just not possible anymore. Somehow searching changed as well as the ecosystem of the web itself. The big global players dominate nearly every inch of the web and many sites look like clones of each other. There is a lot more effort being put into censorship and also more threats to ordinary users in my opinion. When I loved to use the web it was like a big playground and it seemed that the most people there where extremely curious and open-minded. Today there is so much hate - no real discussion (this community is a rare anomaly considering this argument) and I think it's not about discussions for these people who spread hate. Also it's all about the money. In the earlier days people used to write blogs and create sites just for fun but today everyone wants to get some money or measurable attention (likes, views, followers etc.). Constantly you are being bothered by advertisement which gets more invasive from time to time, cryptominers and other malicious software that creeps into your system if you just click on the wrong link. Don't remember that from the beginnings and I'd love to experience that again some day.
cryptozeus 7y ago
Wait but goog fb and amzn have been aggressively trying to capture global markets. They have been increasing the footprint, does not that count for % increase from 2014 to 2017 ?? Does not make sense ..point about web is dying is opinionated. Today I can watch Netflix, order from doordash and connect with my family through FaceTime. All via web.
- shadowgovt 7y ago
  Yep. Author is romanticizing the "democratic" web of the time before facilitating companies simplified the process of getting and being online. The reality I remember is that it wasn't a democracy; it was a technocracy and the barrier to entry was high. It still is; hosting one's own full-fledged web server that is secure and reliable has only grown in complexity in the past decade, improvements like Docker notwithstanding, and it's no wonder average users have flocked to Facebook, Google, and Amazon for simplicity of access. To take Facebook as example, people seem to often forget that the primary feature Facebook offers the average user is simple low-cost blogging of small thoughts and reliable auto-aggregation of those blogs. No fussing about with running one's own RSS feed or managing RSS subscriptions. If the "web is dying," it's dying like a wooly mammoth---ill-suited to a changing climate. The mentioned companies created an ecosystem where the fundamentals of communication, location, and commerce can be accomplished without the technology getting in the way. It's no surprise users flock to them.
- BlueTemplar 7y ago
  Don't know about doordash, but Netflix and FaceTime are clearly NOT part of the Web. (They are still part of the Internet of course.)
mojuba 7y ago
In addition, what's changed between 2017 and now is that back then Google was still admired by the tech people. "Google is evil" sounded ridiculous only a few years ago. I've been ridiculed by my colleagues and fellow engineers every time I said it. But I think it began to change with the introduction of AMP, a growing list of products discontinued for no apparent reason, failures of some of the new products often practically at launch, and finally the decline of quality and coverage of Search (more spam and more older sites dropping out). Google like no other tech giant always relied on the credibility among the tech people. Whether it's a new end-user product or a new programming language, it would go full avalanche with minimal marketing effort. Losing our support, on top of poor product management and inability to innovate will be more and more difficult for them to handle. Rolling out poorly designed and poorly targeted products is already a sign of a disconnect from reality. They are slowly becoming less and less relevant and most importantly, less respected by the tech community. In a way it's the Microsoft of the 2000s when the revenue figures still weren't bad but the signs of the decline were apparent. Yet unfortunately there's no competition to Search on the horizon and "google" is still a commonly used verb that will be very difficult to remove from the language. Microsoft seems to be happy with Bing's position today, which looks and feels like Google Search and maybe internally even mimics all the stupid and "evil" things Google Search does judging from their search results. I think it is time (if not a bit too late) to try to challenge Google Search with something new, a new perspective on how the information on the Internet can be indexed and searched. I bet a lot of people are constantly thinking about this, but the window of opportunity may be now while Google is putting a lot of their time and effort on ML/AI. I doubt you can compete with them by building a ML-based search, so it must be something else both in terms of technology and possibly even the UI. I don't know what the bottom line here is. Google is not dying any time soon, but the time to challenge them could be now.
- Ygg2 7y ago
  I like your parallel between Microsoft and Google. To me, it also implies Google probably won't ever lose the search crown directly, the same way Microsoft never lost it's OS crown, to Linux or MacOS. However, Windows is dwarfed by the Android install base.
Cougher 7y ago
Interesting article that's somewhat ruined by a click-baity title that it can't support. I first got on the web in 1994. There was far more difference between 1994 and 2014 than from 2014 to 2017. And that's the crux of it: just because it's different doesn't mean it's dying.
- mojuba 7y ago
  The difference between 1994 and 2014 seems more quantitative though. Here we are talking about the ownership of the referral traffic and how those companies who own it try to benefit from it. Nothing that happened between 1994 and 2014 comes close to it in terms of the impact on how people see the Internet and by extension how they see the world today.
  - Cougher 7y ago
    I agree with most of what you're saying, but disagreeing with this part of it. The change between 1994 and 2014 is the difference between the internet growing to global dominance in everything from social connections to . . . well, is there anything about our lives that hasn't rested somehow on our usage of the internet since well before 2014? It seems to me that the internet of MSDOS 3.10based computers and dial-up modems to online shopping and the creation of billionaires is more different than what's changed from 2014-2017.
    - mojuba 7y ago
      It is true that online shopping and online ads alone have created a whole new industry in a very business sense of the word. The change happened some time towards the end of the 1990s. However, imagine you discover a new continent with vast resources and invite everyone to share the land and start producing and trading. When all land grabbing is done you begin to notice the rise of some powerful players who buy out or simply squeeze out smaller land owners. At one point your whole continent and the traffic within it becomes either directly owned or dependent on these giants to such an extent that you simply die if you don't play by their rules. Your continent now more looks like a conglomerate controlled by only a few powerful corporations rather than a free republic. And we can't even be sure they didn't make arrangements between them behind the scenes. So it's the ownership that's different now, which is nothing new really, we all kind of know about it.
johnpowell 7y ago
In 1994 I was junior in high school and took as many years of auto-tech as possible. In the end we were rebuilding engines and air-conditioning units. And yeah, our high school had welding, cnc, woodworking, auto-cad, and even lumber-jacking as electives. But I took a lot of auto-tech, three years of it. And the funny thing is I have never gotten my license. I'm nearly 45 years old and have never been able to legally drive a car. But I was living with my sister at the time who was 18 and our landlord had a weird crush on her. Our landlord also owned a ton of properties in Eugene. And he would have me mow as many lawns as I wanted for 8 bucks a hour. Most of his rentals were to elderly people. I was making double the minimum wage and had no shortage of work. But I also had a girlfriend and skateboarding and bowling league to attend to. I did the minimum to maintain to healthy balance. If I needed new shoes I would mow a extra lawn. Skateboarding is hard on shoes. I would go through a pair a month. But eventually I found myself doing auto stuff for people after mowing their lawns. I would get scheduled for oil changes, filters, plugs, brakes.. Eventually I was mostly doing auto maintenance for people and I charged significantly more. I had a lot of cash for a kid in high school with a Operation Ivy T-shirt. Enter the internet. My buddy Billy went to the University and could get me a cheap computer. This was back when Apple had serious discounts for students. I got a Performa 6214, Stylewriter 1200, and 14" Multisync monitor for about $900. A significant discount. And Bill gave me his dial-up info into his university account. He gave it out to a lot of people. They didn't check if multiple people were using it. Back then we mostly looked up stuff about how to make LSD and mortal kombat fatality codes. It was Amazing. And a lot of very slow loading scans from porno mags. But a person that was exploring this new thing that was non-commercial with me had a forward-thinking father. He was a real-estate agent and thought the internet was cool. So he wanted to put his listings on the internet that nobody would ever possibly use for looking at houses. Images were brutal since dial-up was the norm. And we used tables since css wasn't a thing back then. But we made a commercial site. A site for a real-estate agent. And we hosted it on the university's of Oregon's site since we didn't really know how to get a domain name or find hosting. But it was pure HTML. He paid us well to update the site with new listings. But then the dot.com thing happened and I got a job at a movie theater and wouldn't touch the internet until 2002. edit :: I forgot to add that I think I might have been responsible for making the internet worse.
- 7y ago
dolantrump 7y ago
mmm
Havoc 7y ago
I don't think it's accurate to count stuff like youtube and google cloud as part of the %. It's gigabyte heavy but attention light. Just raw data about cat videos. Compare it with say whatsapp traffic - that has a crazy high amount of attention crammed into each gigabyte. Doesn't really change the message/conclusion but the metric used here seem flawed.
- greggyb 7y ago
  I had the same reaction. Bandwidth is only one metric of interest. I think time spent is a better proxy to the true metric of interest, which you rightly called out as attention.
RupertEisenhart 7y ago
I've always the held the somewhat cynical position that this sort of stuff would push [the interesting] people towards other, decentralized Internets. I'm a big fan of new projects like IPFS and DAT, and GNUnet had a great call to arms on their about page (which seems to have been moderated a little) [1] saying very similar things to the article. Maybe the internet of things will save us after all, by finally providing the vast, dense network of interconnected wireless devices that is needed to provide a robust structure to a really distributed net. [1] https://gnunet.org/en/about.html https://gnunet.org/en/about.html
- buboard 7y ago
  > [the interesting] people I don't think those people have to leave. We just need to collectively realize that, just like with old media , there is a 'mainstream', people who mostly use the internet (the facebook crowd, who are now the bulk of the web traffic), and the more eclectic crowd who care about the internet (largely, the pre-FB mass of the internet). These are two distinct crowds. Considering that the FB crowd contains mostly people who did not use the internet before, and don't really know its culture, it's going to take a decade or more until this mass of people is replaced by younger internet-natives. Until then, the net is living in a transitory phase
  - RupertEisenhart 7y ago
    That's interesting, I like the idea that digital natives will have more of a vested interest in caring about the internet, but I'm not sure if it will play out, especially if there continues to be such a strong focus on things like Instagram and tiktok which are largely disconnected from the net at large.
mlacks 7y ago
I am learning Japanese. I am spending an increasing amount of time searching for things in Japanese, and am starting to notice how often a 'trinet' website even comes up on the first page. Virtually zero. I wonder if the 'the web is dying' mentality is only restricted to English? I would be surprised if English websites made up even half of all internet traffic
Merrill 7y ago
The next consolidation will be cleaning up the plethora of apps for mobile. User's interactions can be simplified with a few well-designed multifunctional apps. WeChat probably points the way in this regard.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
TheBobinator 7y ago
Google is interested in building an AI that is designed to turn people into its products. What do you do with a product when you're done with it? What do these people become? All you need to do is search google for weight loss advice or anything that could remotely have a commercial interest and what pops up? Pages and pages of irrelevant clickbait. If you ever wanted to build an encyclopedia of nudges, persuaders, and other such exploits of the human mind, now would be a good time. The entire game is forcing you to take actions, like answering "yes" to a sales guy over and over to build the habit so you'll agree to the sale. It's taxing on the mind, and like television, it got to the point you had to see 30 minutes of garbage ad's for 20 minutes of entertainment, that it's no longer worth it. The "Trinet" is dieing because it has become useless; something far more useful will come along to replace it because people are viewing the recent infestation of marketing people as damage and are routing around it.
loraa 7y ago
Interestingly enough, we had a good reason to label MS as evil. I have spoken to enough millennials I the field that still feel this, but stumble to answer, and then usually say something witty about why they use Apple products. Is Google evil to us older folks that were here before google and saw it evolve to what it is now, or is it just evil to the younger folk looking for a scapegoat for this generation? I think Microsoft is a much better company now, and as much as I try not to use Google or give them my data, this seems to be the evolution of tech companies. Weepy SJWs now believe tech companies should not do things like make money. In order to always make shareholders happy you have to increase profits every quarter, and to do that you need to keep growing and of course to keep growing it's always wise to diversify. People should probably realize politicians are evil, because no one is going to say no to a company like Google dumping money into the economy.
Jamie452 7y ago
It makes me sad the web isn't what it used to be.
ttldude 7y ago
Why on earth is he naming them "GOOG", "FB" and "AMZN"?
- mindw0rk 7y ago
  It is ticker symbols of their stocks in the market.
  - majewsky 7y ago
    It's a virtue signal that he's in the know about the stock market.
    - ttldude 7y ago
      Does that help create credibility in some circles?
  - ttldude 7y ago
    Oh help, you can't be serious that he uses those on purpose.
    - hnuser77 7y ago
      It's a neat trick: it emphasizes that they are amoral companies required to do nothing but make money, and simultaneously that they're only companies like the thousands of other gyrating tickers on the stock market. This same author frequently uses the term "Microsoft Github".
      - ttldude 7y ago
        Thank you, it's framing. Now that makes sense.
    - WaltPurvis 7y ago
      It's a quite common practice to refer to companies by their ticker symbols. I see it all the time and it has never struck me as odd or noteworthy.
Proven 7y ago
> In the long-term, supporting routing for the old internet and the old Web would be an overhead, so it could be beneficial to cut support for the diverse internet on the protocol and hardware level. That's how it was in the 90's. Dial-up numbers connected you to CompuServe's or AOL's "Internet".
chrisweekly 7y ago
Great analysis; highly-recommended reading. I want to bring attention to the followup article Staltz wrote about what we might do about the problems he enumerated in the OP: https://staltz.com/a-plan-to-rescue-the-web-from-the-internet.html https://staltz.com/a-plan-to-rescue-the-web-from-the-interne...
PaulDavisThe1st 7y ago
There's a fundamental error, or at least assumption, in this piece that really needs to be called out. The author states it this way: "Any website aspiring for significant traffic depends on Search and Social traffic." This is stated in the context of a discussing of what the web was and might have been. Let's be clear: when the web was tiny, having "significant traffic" wasn't a particularly difficult target to met. Get yourself on the netscape "What's New" list, and that's more or less the end of it. But the web (really, the internet) is now unimaginably huge compared to the days referred to at the beginning of the article. Having "significant traffic" now is not a realistic goal, or even a worthwhile goal, unless you define "significant" in a way that isn't strongly related to simple numerics. If you're interested in and/or aspiring to the sort of web that seemed possible/desirable in 1994, then you're not really interested in building sites that attract "significant traffic" in the sense of huge numbers. Attracting the right people is a much more important goal, and that still relies on the same basics of "how to write a good web page" that existed in 1994. In short, the dominance of "the trinet" in driving web/internet traffic only restates what could have been before computers: most of what humans do is related to commerce and mass entertainment, and attempts to do other stuff may succeed but will never be as visible or dominant as those two.
ALittleLight 7y ago
>The Web’s diversity has granted space for multiple businesses to innovate and thrive, independent hobbyist communities to grow, and personal sites to be hosted on whatever physical servers can host them. A few months ago I was feeling the same way, especially about personal websites. I tried to find StumbleUpon as that seemed like a good alternative to see random unique websites. However, I was saddened to see it had shut down or transformed itself into a kind of Pinterest like clone. Given that StumbleUpon was gone, I tried to quickly recreate the core functionality - click button get random website, at https://stumblingon.com https://stumblingon.com - there are still a bunch of small, personal, interesting websites out there. We just need a good way to find them.
- cvhashim 7y ago
  This is pretty cool. Thanks.
- solwyvern 7y ago
  First result was a coolie cutter website selling seo services The creative web is truly dying
  - ALittleLight 7y ago
    I don't see anything wrong with trying to sell services. I wouldn't want a generic, fraudulent, big business, or cookie cutter site in there though. If you recall what website it was (or check the history after reloading stumblingon) and let me know the URL I can reconsider whether or not it belongs.
Paianni 7y ago
The web has never been particularly robust.
Mauricio_ 7y ago
Small pet peeve: why do some people write GOOG, AMZN, etc instead of Google and Amazon when the context has nothing to do with the stock market?
- BlueTemplar 7y ago
  EL GOOG!
- stev0lution 7y ago
  I'm guessing to easily refer to the parent company (not sure if these collections are still called companies, english is not my native language). Instead of GOOG one could probably use Alphabet but differentiating between Facebook and FACEBOOK might be a bit confusing and for Amazon that might just be to be consistent with the rest of the article.
8bitsrule 7y ago
The web 'began dying'? What does that mean, Boomer? If you were to ask when it began being corrupted that would be more to the point. How are children corrupted? What is the cure? After PCs came along it was all fun and games until people noticed there was gold involved. Stir in some greed and ego. Old forumula.
jgalt212 7y ago
Traffic is just so hard to measure if you equating page views or hits, or packets with relevance, economic value, importance, etc.

370 points by pcr910303 7y ago

dang 7y ago

Discussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15584456 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15584456

FTA: "GOOG and FB ceased competing directly, focusing on what they do best instead." “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices” - Adam Smith Some things never change.

ci5er 7y ago
Why else would you meet with a competitor? :-) Most of my friends are co-workers, or other people in the industry, including competitors (more the field/sales types than the corporate/management types, because you see them when you are bidding for a client's buisiness). One of my friends used to be an employee. He quit. He then forked me. He then undercut me (or, well, my prices). Somehow, I don't know how, maybe because I am such a sterling man of honor (ed: throwaway prince Andrew reference), we are still friends. But I've got to tell you! In terms of price? It's kind of still a race to the bottom. (At least for the vanilla, not the value-add, product) So - even though Adam Smith has it right (he often does!), the public does not. We are enjoying shared stories of battle, over large accounts, and the blow-by-blows during large-account acquisitions go, and toasting one another's accomplishments, after battle, but ... the prices end up going down. It is the nature of competition.
tialaramex 7y ago
I think Smith is almost right, a _conspiracy_ is likely in the broadest sense but he's wrong to suppose it will necessarily be against the public. So, the CAB is maybe a useful contrasting example. The CA/Browser Forum (CA/B or CAB for short) was a meeting that happened as a mixture of conference calls and email lists back in 2011 or so. This is where Extended Validation (the green bar) comes from, but ultimately CA/B metamorphosed into a standing (in the sense of ongoing, not you can't sit down) meeting, still going on today, for the Certificate Authorities and the Browsers (today in practice the Operating System vendors, but with Mozilla standing in for the Free Unixes) to get together to figure out what the rules are. Because of what Smith notes, the CA/B's rules are explicit that discussion about prices, product offerings and so on is prohibited, if you want to conspire to raise prices you'll have to do it somewhere else. But plenty of _good_ things can be agreed this way. Contrast the many years it took to get rid of MD5 from certificates (which happened before CA/B existed) despite collisions being known - against SHA-1 where CA/B was able to co-ordinate industry wide discontinuation of SHA-1 with only a handful of minor defections before even a single proven collision of the hash was published. More broadly I'd argue that the IETF, and certainly the thrice annual IETF physical meetings (the most recent was in Singapore last week) are exactly "people of the same trade... meet together" and you could characterise plenty of the work done at many Working Groups (obviously DPRIVE and QUIC but I don't see any reason you couldn't make this claim for KITTEN for example) as a conspiracy, just that it's only "against the public" if you think global surveillance was what "the public" wanted...
peteradio 7y ago
Sometimes I wonder how you balance that Adam Smith quote with "Tragedy of the commons".

mirimir 7y ago

Actually, the web began dying in the late 90s.

sporkologist 7y ago
Yes right after Mosaic 1.0 was released. RIP
devin 7y ago
Hard to tell if you’re joking. If you do actually believe this, I assume you also believe that e-commerce broke everything?
- mirimir 7y ago
  No, I'm not joking. It's not so much e-commerce that broke everything. Although there were many who did argue that. For me, it's been the shift from self-published (and indeed, self-hosted) to Google, Facebook and cloud services. And the tide turned in the late 90s. Edit: When I first got online, it was AOL, CompuServe, EcoNet and The Well. I was on all of them except AOL. And then we had Usenet and websites. And networks of websites. The prospect of citizen-based journalism. But now we're back to something a lot more like AOL.
  - rootw0rm 7y ago
    or something a lot like Prodigy...
    - mirimir 7y ago
      Damn, forgot Prodigy. I was mainly a CompuServe geek.
  - z3t4 7y ago
    It has never been more easy to self publish ... via Twitter and Instagram. But the real problem is that you only have 1 hour of free time, spread out in five minute intervals during the day. Being an adult sux.

Apocryphon 7y ago

So what's changed in the two years since?

na85 7y ago

>Internet Service Providers (ISPs) are probably soon going to dictate what traffic can or cannot arrive at people’s end devices. This was the money quote for me. FANG may kill the web, but the idea that ISPs (in my opinion some of the scummiest corporations out there) get to decide what content they serve me and what they don't has the potential to kill the Internet as we know it.

blackflame 7y ago
Naw, with the coming of 5G it will destroy their monopolies on the communication lines which should open the door to more local competition.
- bransonf 7y ago
  But what makes wireless telecom giants any better than ISPs?
  - doctorshady 7y ago
    I think their point is more competition is better regardless; every one of them will try to find some way to make themselves seem better than the other. Though the problem with that regardless is that from a business perspective, there's a very finite amount of spectrum, and it's being gobbled up exclusively by four (maybe soon to be three with the pending Sprint merger) companies. From a technical perspective, there's definitely been mixed reactions to the effectiveness of 5G technology. That's another topic in and of itself, though.
- m10i 7y ago
  Could you elaborate on this?
- randomsearch 7y ago
  5G isn’t a substitute for fibre.
- Teknoman117 7y ago
  That assumes that you'll have a healthy offering of wireless providers. If you're from Europe, then I understand that's the norm there, but in the US, it's the same story as your local ISPs. For home internet, you'll be beholden to whatever companies own the towers near your property.

tuxt 7y ago

What is "Web"? Side note: both FB and Google cannot be accessed from China.

jabbany 7y ago
... But they both had basically equivalent local counterparts
VvR-Ox 7y ago
Yes they can by using a VPN for example.
- jacobwilliamroy 7y ago
  The VPN can access them, but not from china.
  - VvR-Ox 7y ago
    At least in 2018 I was able to.
    - jacobwilliamroy 7y ago
      I was trying to say, if the VPN was in china, people in china wouldn't be able to access google and facebook through the VPN.
jacobwilliamroy 7y ago
Uhh... I think it's http. Or maybe it's just any data that a web-browser can handle. Definitely a few OSI layers above the internet.
- BlueTemplar 7y ago
  No question about HTTP. However I'd argue that when HTTP is used for weird purposes that aren't directly related to serving hypertext pages (often to go around draconian firewall policies), or to run arbitrary code (JavaScript), then it's not the Web anymore. (Yes, this means that "Webapps" is an oxymoron.)

pcd_effect 7y ago

Personally, I think both Google and Facebook are only a few short years away from imploding. Why? The internal documents are slowly getting leaked, which will soon make open communication inside these organizations quite precarious [1]. Not merely ironic, but also poetically just, considering that these two companies have done exactly that to nearly the entire human population. Already, the only folks who are left at these companies are politically correct drones (PCDs) who cannot say anything which doesn't toe the party line. Soon the hiring process will start optimizing for PCDs, and then you will have the usual churn, and finally everyone will be PCDs who start talking, acting and thinking like each other. [1] You can ask James Damore. And on a somewhat hilarious side note. I once knew an ex-Facebook employee who claimed that Facebook was "completely open and transparent" with its employees. His tenure actually coincided with a lot of scandals, such as the friendly fraud case. He probably wishes he never used those words, because by definition he has basically acknowledged he knew about these scandals. I am not in touch with him anymore, so I don't really know how he feels about this. :-)

EGreg 7y ago

Look I know this is going to get downvoted because of the token thing, but really, read it: https://qbix.com/token https://qbix.com/token This is how we can rescue the Web, and maybe fulfill the vision of Xanadu

Kye 7y ago
You can avoid the downvotes by (1) not predicting downvotes, and (2) expanding on how this will rescue the web.
Nextgrid 7y ago
I think the downvotes are more about the fact that you're shilling this thing on pretty much every social-media-related post.
- EGreg 7y ago
  If a post is about how the web needs rescuing, and it takes years to design an actual solution, why is posting this solution considered shilling? Fine, let’s just let the Web keep becoming a feudal society like it was with AOL MSN and Compuserve. A free open source platform to prevent it should not be mentioned, that’s shilling! Btw by that logic isn’t Andre Staltz shilling Scuttlebutt every time he writes about the Web? He should just not mention it, right?

FpUser 7y ago

People used to sit on a couch and watch TV for hours and also spent hours on the old phones talking about the most exciting shade of nail polish. Shopping is also fun. Now all that activities largely moved to Internet. Thanks to omnipresence of smartphones the hours dedicated to those activities had also increased. Of course share of general Joe Doe's website got smaller as said website does not always cater to few most popular people's activities. That does not mean that the total amount of Joe Doe's websites decreased. It is growing, just not as fast as the amount of my cat videos. Sure big companies may try to subvert the Internet but I think that creative type of the populace will always find ways.

cft 7y ago
Except that it's drowning in noise. The SNR is definitely dropping.
- FpUser 7y ago
  Well I would say that web search takes good care of SNR. So far no troubles finding interesting stuff.
  - VvR-Ox 7y ago
    "Finding interesting stuff" maybe. But finding a lot of the things I used to find some years ago is just not possible anymore. Somehow searching changed as well as the ecosystem of the web itself. The big global players dominate nearly every inch of the web and many sites look like clones of each other. There is a lot more effort being put into censorship and also more threats to ordinary users in my opinion. When I loved to use the web it was like a big playground and it seemed that the most people there where extremely curious and open-minded. Today there is so much hate - no real discussion (this community is a rare anomaly considering this argument) and I think it's not about discussions for these people who spread hate. Also it's all about the money. In the earlier days people used to write blogs and create sites just for fun but today everyone wants to get some money or measurable attention (likes, views, followers etc.). Constantly you are being bothered by advertisement which gets more invasive from time to time, cryptominers and other malicious software that creeps into your system if you just click on the wrong link. Don't remember that from the beginnings and I'd love to experience that again some day.

cryptozeus 7y ago

Wait but goog fb and amzn have been aggressively trying to capture global markets. They have been increasing the footprint, does not that count for % increase from 2014 to 2017 ?? Does not make sense ..point about web is dying is opinionated. Today I can watch Netflix, order from doordash and connect with my family through FaceTime. All via web.

shadowgovt 7y ago
Yep. Author is romanticizing the "democratic" web of the time before facilitating companies simplified the process of getting and being online. The reality I remember is that it wasn't a democracy; it was a technocracy and the barrier to entry was high. It still is; hosting one's own full-fledged web server that is secure and reliable has only grown in complexity in the past decade, improvements like Docker notwithstanding, and it's no wonder average users have flocked to Facebook, Google, and Amazon for simplicity of access. To take Facebook as example, people seem to often forget that the primary feature Facebook offers the average user is simple low-cost blogging of small thoughts and reliable auto-aggregation of those blogs. No fussing about with running one's own RSS feed or managing RSS subscriptions. If the "web is dying," it's dying like a wooly mammoth---ill-suited to a changing climate. The mentioned companies created an ecosystem where the fundamentals of communication, location, and commerce can be accomplished without the technology getting in the way. It's no surprise users flock to them.
BlueTemplar 7y ago
Don't know about doordash, but Netflix and FaceTime are clearly NOT part of the Web. (They are still part of the Internet of course.)

mojuba 7y ago

In addition, what's changed between 2017 and now is that back then Google was still admired by the tech people. "Google is evil" sounded ridiculous only a few years ago. I've been ridiculed by my colleagues and fellow engineers every time I said it. But I think it began to change with the introduction of AMP, a growing list of products discontinued for no apparent reason, failures of some of the new products often practically at launch, and finally the decline of quality and coverage of Search (more spam and more older sites dropping out). Google like no other tech giant always relied on the credibility among the tech people. Whether it's a new end-user product or a new programming language, it would go full avalanche with minimal marketing effort. Losing our support, on top of poor product management and inability to innovate will be more and more difficult for them to handle. Rolling out poorly designed and poorly targeted products is already a sign of a disconnect from reality. They are slowly becoming less and less relevant and most importantly, less respected by the tech community. In a way it's the Microsoft of the 2000s when the revenue figures still weren't bad but the signs of the decline were apparent. Yet unfortunately there's no competition to Search on the horizon and "google" is still a commonly used verb that will be very difficult to remove from the language. Microsoft seems to be happy with Bing's position today, which looks and feels like Google Search and maybe internally even mimics all the stupid and "evil" things Google Search does judging from their search results. I think it is time (if not a bit too late) to try to challenge Google Search with something new, a new perspective on how the information on the Internet can be indexed and searched. I bet a lot of people are constantly thinking about this, but the window of opportunity may be now while Google is putting a lot of their time and effort on ML/AI. I doubt you can compete with them by building a ML-based search, so it must be something else both in terms of technology and possibly even the UI. I don't know what the bottom line here is. Google is not dying any time soon, but the time to challenge them could be now.

Ygg2 7y ago
I like your parallel between Microsoft and Google. To me, it also implies Google probably won't ever lose the search crown directly, the same way Microsoft never lost it's OS crown, to Linux or MacOS. However, Windows is dwarfed by the Android install base.

Cougher 7y ago

Interesting article that's somewhat ruined by a click-baity title that it can't support. I first got on the web in 1994. There was far more difference between 1994 and 2014 than from 2014 to 2017. And that's the crux of it: just because it's different doesn't mean it's dying.

mojuba 7y ago
The difference between 1994 and 2014 seems more quantitative though. Here we are talking about the ownership of the referral traffic and how those companies who own it try to benefit from it. Nothing that happened between 1994 and 2014 comes close to it in terms of the impact on how people see the Internet and by extension how they see the world today.
- Cougher 7y ago
  I agree with most of what you're saying, but disagreeing with this part of it. The change between 1994 and 2014 is the difference between the internet growing to global dominance in everything from social connections to . . . well, is there anything about our lives that hasn't rested somehow on our usage of the internet since well before 2014? It seems to me that the internet of MSDOS 3.10based computers and dial-up modems to online shopping and the creation of billionaires is more different than what's changed from 2014-2017.
  - mojuba 7y ago
    It is true that online shopping and online ads alone have created a whole new industry in a very business sense of the word. The change happened some time towards the end of the 1990s. However, imagine you discover a new continent with vast resources and invite everyone to share the land and start producing and trading. When all land grabbing is done you begin to notice the rise of some powerful players who buy out or simply squeeze out smaller land owners. At one point your whole continent and the traffic within it becomes either directly owned or dependent on these giants to such an extent that you simply die if you don't play by their rules. Your continent now more looks like a conglomerate controlled by only a few powerful corporations rather than a free republic. And we can't even be sure they didn't make arrangements between them behind the scenes. So it's the ownership that's different now, which is nothing new really, we all kind of know about it.

johnpowell 7y ago

In 1994 I was junior in high school and took as many years of auto-tech as possible. In the end we were rebuilding engines and air-conditioning units. And yeah, our high school had welding, cnc, woodworking, auto-cad, and even lumber-jacking as electives. But I took a lot of auto-tech, three years of it. And the funny thing is I have never gotten my license. I'm nearly 45 years old and have never been able to legally drive a car. But I was living with my sister at the time who was 18 and our landlord had a weird crush on her. Our landlord also owned a ton of properties in Eugene. And he would have me mow as many lawns as I wanted for 8 bucks a hour. Most of his rentals were to elderly people. I was making double the minimum wage and had no shortage of work. But I also had a girlfriend and skateboarding and bowling league to attend to. I did the minimum to maintain to healthy balance. If I needed new shoes I would mow a extra lawn. Skateboarding is hard on shoes. I would go through a pair a month. But eventually I found myself doing auto stuff for people after mowing their lawns. I would get scheduled for oil changes, filters, plugs, brakes.. Eventually I was mostly doing auto maintenance for people and I charged significantly more. I had a lot of cash for a kid in high school with a Operation Ivy T-shirt. Enter the internet. My buddy Billy went to the University and could get me a cheap computer. This was back when Apple had serious discounts for students. I got a Performa 6214, Stylewriter 1200, and 14" Multisync monitor for about $900. A significant discount. And Bill gave me his dial-up info into his university account. He gave it out to a lot of people. They didn't check if multiple people were using it. Back then we mostly looked up stuff about how to make LSD and mortal kombat fatality codes. It was Amazing. And a lot of very slow loading scans from porno mags. But a person that was exploring this new thing that was non-commercial with me had a forward-thinking father. He was a real-estate agent and thought the internet was cool. So he wanted to put his listings on the internet that nobody would ever possibly use for looking at houses. Images were brutal since dial-up was the norm. And we used tables since css wasn't a thing back then. But we made a commercial site. A site for a real-estate agent. And we hosted it on the university's of Oregon's site since we didn't really know how to get a domain name or find hosting. But it was pure HTML. He paid us well to update the site with new listings. But then the dot.com thing happened and I got a job at a movie theater and wouldn't touch the internet until 2002. edit :: I forgot to add that I think I might have been responsible for making the internet worse.

7y ago

dolantrump 7y ago

mmm

Havoc 7y ago

I don't think it's accurate to count stuff like youtube and google cloud as part of the %. It's gigabyte heavy but attention light. Just raw data about cat videos. Compare it with say whatsapp traffic - that has a crazy high amount of attention crammed into each gigabyte. Doesn't really change the message/conclusion but the metric used here seem flawed.

greggyb 7y ago
I had the same reaction. Bandwidth is only one metric of interest. I think time spent is a better proxy to the true metric of interest, which you rightly called out as attention.

RupertEisenhart 7y ago

I've always the held the somewhat cynical position that this sort of stuff would push [the interesting] people towards other, decentralized Internets. I'm a big fan of new projects like IPFS and DAT, and GNUnet had a great call to arms on their about page (which seems to have been moderated a little) [1] saying very similar things to the article. Maybe the internet of things will save us after all, by finally providing the vast, dense network of interconnected wireless devices that is needed to provide a robust structure to a really distributed net. [1] https://gnunet.org/en/about.html https://gnunet.org/en/about.html

buboard 7y ago
> [the interesting] people I don't think those people have to leave. We just need to collectively realize that, just like with old media , there is a 'mainstream', people who mostly use the internet (the facebook crowd, who are now the bulk of the web traffic), and the more eclectic crowd who care about the internet (largely, the pre-FB mass of the internet). These are two distinct crowds. Considering that the FB crowd contains mostly people who did not use the internet before, and don't really know its culture, it's going to take a decade or more until this mass of people is replaced by younger internet-natives. Until then, the net is living in a transitory phase
- RupertEisenhart 7y ago
  That's interesting, I like the idea that digital natives will have more of a vested interest in caring about the internet, but I'm not sure if it will play out, especially if there continues to be such a strong focus on things like Instagram and tiktok which are largely disconnected from the net at large.

mlacks 7y ago

I am learning Japanese. I am spending an increasing amount of time searching for things in Japanese, and am starting to notice how often a 'trinet' website even comes up on the first page. Virtually zero. I wonder if the 'the web is dying' mentality is only restricted to English? I would be surprised if English websites made up even half of all internet traffic

Merrill 7y ago

The next consolidation will be cleaning up the plethora of apps for mobile. User's interactions can be simplified with a few well-designed multifunctional apps. WeChat probably points the way in this regard.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

TheBobinator 7y ago

Google is interested in building an AI that is designed to turn people into its products. What do you do with a product when you're done with it? What do these people become? All you need to do is search google for weight loss advice or anything that could remotely have a commercial interest and what pops up? Pages and pages of irrelevant clickbait. If you ever wanted to build an encyclopedia of nudges, persuaders, and other such exploits of the human mind, now would be a good time. The entire game is forcing you to take actions, like answering "yes" to a sales guy over and over to build the habit so you'll agree to the sale. It's taxing on the mind, and like television, it got to the point you had to see 30 minutes of garbage ad's for 20 minutes of entertainment, that it's no longer worth it. The "Trinet" is dieing because it has become useless; something far more useful will come along to replace it because people are viewing the recent infestation of marketing people as damage and are routing around it.

loraa 7y ago

Interestingly enough, we had a good reason to label MS as evil. I have spoken to enough millennials I the field that still feel this, but stumble to answer, and then usually say something witty about why they use Apple products. Is Google evil to us older folks that were here before google and saw it evolve to what it is now, or is it just evil to the younger folk looking for a scapegoat for this generation? I think Microsoft is a much better company now, and as much as I try not to use Google or give them my data, this seems to be the evolution of tech companies. Weepy SJWs now believe tech companies should not do things like make money. In order to always make shareholders happy you have to increase profits every quarter, and to do that you need to keep growing and of course to keep growing it's always wise to diversify. People should probably realize politicians are evil, because no one is going to say no to a company like Google dumping money into the economy.

Jamie452 7y ago

It makes me sad the web isn't what it used to be.

ttldude 7y ago

Why on earth is he naming them "GOOG", "FB" and "AMZN"?

mindw0rk 7y ago
It is ticker symbols of their stocks in the market.
- majewsky 7y ago
  It's a virtue signal that he's in the know about the stock market.
  - ttldude 7y ago
    Does that help create credibility in some circles?
- ttldude 7y ago
  Oh help, you can't be serious that he uses those on purpose.
  - hnuser77 7y ago
    It's a neat trick: it emphasizes that they are amoral companies required to do nothing but make money, and simultaneously that they're only companies like the thousands of other gyrating tickers on the stock market. This same author frequently uses the term "Microsoft Github".
    - ttldude 7y ago
      Thank you, it's framing. Now that makes sense.
  - WaltPurvis 7y ago
    It's a quite common practice to refer to companies by their ticker symbols. I see it all the time and it has never struck me as odd or noteworthy.

Proven 7y ago

> In the long-term, supporting routing for the old internet and the old Web would be an overhead, so it could be beneficial to cut support for the diverse internet on the protocol and hardware level. That's how it was in the 90's. Dial-up numbers connected you to CompuServe's or AOL's "Internet".

chrisweekly 7y ago

Great analysis; highly-recommended reading. I want to bring attention to the followup article Staltz wrote about what we might do about the problems he enumerated in the OP: https://staltz.com/a-plan-to-rescue-the-web-from-the-internet.html https://staltz.com/a-plan-to-rescue-the-web-from-the-interne...

PaulDavisThe1st 7y ago

There's a fundamental error, or at least assumption, in this piece that really needs to be called out. The author states it this way: "Any website aspiring for significant traffic depends on Search and Social traffic." This is stated in the context of a discussing of what the web was and might have been. Let's be clear: when the web was tiny, having "significant traffic" wasn't a particularly difficult target to met. Get yourself on the netscape "What's New" list, and that's more or less the end of it. But the web (really, the internet) is now unimaginably huge compared to the days referred to at the beginning of the article. Having "significant traffic" now is not a realistic goal, or even a worthwhile goal, unless you define "significant" in a way that isn't strongly related to simple numerics. If you're interested in and/or aspiring to the sort of web that seemed possible/desirable in 1994, then you're not really interested in building sites that attract "significant traffic" in the sense of huge numbers. Attracting the right people is a much more important goal, and that still relies on the same basics of "how to write a good web page" that existed in 1994. In short, the dominance of "the trinet" in driving web/internet traffic only restates what could have been before computers: most of what humans do is related to commerce and mass entertainment, and attempts to do other stuff may succeed but will never be as visible or dominant as those two.

ALittleLight 7y ago

>The Web’s diversity has granted space for multiple businesses to innovate and thrive, independent hobbyist communities to grow, and personal sites to be hosted on whatever physical servers can host them. A few months ago I was feeling the same way, especially about personal websites. I tried to find StumbleUpon as that seemed like a good alternative to see random unique websites. However, I was saddened to see it had shut down or transformed itself into a kind of Pinterest like clone. Given that StumbleUpon was gone, I tried to quickly recreate the core functionality - click button get random website, at https://stumblingon.com https://stumblingon.com - there are still a bunch of small, personal, interesting websites out there. We just need a good way to find them.

cvhashim 7y ago
This is pretty cool. Thanks.
solwyvern 7y ago
First result was a coolie cutter website selling seo services The creative web is truly dying
- ALittleLight 7y ago
  I don't see anything wrong with trying to sell services. I wouldn't want a generic, fraudulent, big business, or cookie cutter site in there though. If you recall what website it was (or check the history after reloading stumblingon) and let me know the URL I can reconsider whether or not it belongs.

Paianni 7y ago

The web has never been particularly robust.

Mauricio_ 7y ago

Small pet peeve: why do some people write GOOG, AMZN, etc instead of Google and Amazon when the context has nothing to do with the stock market?

BlueTemplar 7y ago
EL GOOG!
stev0lution 7y ago
I'm guessing to easily refer to the parent company (not sure if these collections are still called companies, english is not my native language). Instead of GOOG one could probably use Alphabet but differentiating between Facebook and FACEBOOK might be a bit confusing and for Amazon that might just be to be consistent with the rest of the article.

8bitsrule 7y ago

The web 'began dying'? What does that mean, Boomer? If you were to ask when it began being corrupted that would be more to the point. How are children corrupted? What is the cure? After PCs came along it was all fun and games until people noticed there was gold involved. Stir in some greed and ego. Old forumula.

jgalt212 7y ago

Traffic is just so hard to measure if you equating page views or hits, or packets with relevance, economic value, importance, etc.