3 ms·

It's not just the aggregation aspect or the built in audience that the centralized platforms offer. It's the simplicity. It is very easy to "publish" your own c

It's not just the aggregation aspect or the built in audience that the centralized platforms offer. It's the simplicity. It is very easy to "publish" your own content. Following a 90/9/1 rule [1], where most of the users are consumers, it becomes difficult for "average" people to contribute content when you've raised the bar so high that they need to have a personal site. That level of overhead will hinder many people. It's not just the technical aspect either -- just the problem of choosing a color scheme or layout is a roadblock to many people. When you can just type a post into a short input box or in a webform and just let Twitter and Facebook worry about the "publishing", that's a much lower bar to cross. And when you lower the cost of entry, you'll have significantly more participation. I think that's the main draw of the current centralized services -- the bar of entry is low enough that the proverbial mom or grandmother can now use Facebook (or whatever) to post their own content. Unfortunately, that leads to one of the downsides of the centralized services, which was your point. Now that 9% of people who want to contribute content and learn about how to do it (design their site, wire up the services, etc...) now don't have as big of a potential audience. Which I guess we have the same point, just from different angles (consumers vs producers). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture)

CaptArmchair 7y ago
You have to keep in mind that HTML, HTTP and URI's where never developed with the intention to cater to the needs of billions. They were build as robust tools to quickly share and connect research notes in academia. They survived thus far because their are build on top of a few solid first principles that boost that robustness. They promote interoperability, but that's about it. Their crude design has led to the fact that every iteration of the past 30 years is pretty much trying to solve the same problems: discoverability, interactivity, easy-of-use, scalability, security, performance and so on. We try to fix things without breaking the world. More to the point, HTML, HTTP or URI don't give you the tools to actually promote your content. They just enable you to put a node in a large network of hypertext. That's it. HTML is meant to structure content by adding cues / tags in such a way that machines can grok that content. But it doesn't tell you how to interpret the content. HTTP just allows you to connect a client to a server and exchange HTTP messages. It doesn't define what's in those messages. And a URI is simply a spec that defines an identifier, not what it defines exactly nor how things could or should be linked. It's only when the Web became this pile of hypertext, too large to index by hand, that the current denizens of the Web started to pop up. Google is ultimately nothing more then a fancy telephone book. And social media are at their core just a single big shared wall where everyone can tack on messages. Arguably, building a website is the least efficient way of reaching a large audience, simply because the core tools of the Web weren't inherently designed to do that. Hence why we've seen how SEO and marketing hackers are at odds to game search indexes and their algorithms. It used to be that their influence was limited to the space telephone book publishers reserved for advertising. Isn't it that then strange how SEO marketeers aren't effectively not doing things that different from what their forebearers did in the 1950's? The big power of the Web isn't the fact that your page can be found just by Google or shared via a social network. That's a reductionist form of looking at what you can accomplish. The true power is that you can connect to others without needing advertising companies or moloch telephone book publishers. See, the same crude robustness provided by those open standards allows you to create your own network of hypertext between you and many friends. The Web is not a single glob of content; it can be many globs of content that are interconnected and can transform as human relationships and interaction transforms. It's not a static thing that needs to be held down by incumbents merely because mom and pop don't know how to write HTML. You can perfectly have your own web presence and be part of a centralized service as well. Try looking at principles such as POSSE (https://indieweb.org/POSSE https://indieweb.org/POSSE) You can have your cake and eat it at the same time. That's totally possible. See, if Google and big tech try to slay URL's; they effectively disconnect themselves from the Web. They isolate themselves. And that's a bigger risk to themselves then it is to the survival of the Web. Because although the Web is huge, it's resilience is found in it's ability to adapt and evolve as provided by the core design principles that underpin the entire tech stack. Everything else is mainly sugar and sprinkles.

CaptArmchair 7y ago

You have to keep in mind that HTML, HTTP and URI's where never developed with the intention to cater to the needs of billions. They were build as robust tools to quickly share and connect research notes in academia. They survived thus far because their are build on top of a few solid first principles that boost that robustness. They promote interoperability, but that's about it. Their crude design has led to the fact that every iteration of the past 30 years is pretty much trying to solve the same problems: discoverability, interactivity, easy-of-use, scalability, security, performance and so on. We try to fix things without breaking the world. More to the point, HTML, HTTP or URI don't give you the tools to actually promote your content. They just enable you to put a node in a large network of hypertext. That's it. HTML is meant to structure content by adding cues / tags in such a way that machines can grok that content. But it doesn't tell you how to interpret the content. HTTP just allows you to connect a client to a server and exchange HTTP messages. It doesn't define what's in those messages. And a URI is simply a spec that defines an identifier, not what it defines exactly nor how things could or should be linked. It's only when the Web became this pile of hypertext, too large to index by hand, that the current denizens of the Web started to pop up. Google is ultimately nothing more then a fancy telephone book. And social media are at their core just a single big shared wall where everyone can tack on messages. Arguably, building a website is the least efficient way of reaching a large audience, simply because the core tools of the Web weren't inherently designed to do that. Hence why we've seen how SEO and marketing hackers are at odds to game search indexes and their algorithms. It used to be that their influence was limited to the space telephone book publishers reserved for advertising. Isn't it that then strange how SEO marketeers aren't effectively not doing things that different from what their forebearers did in the 1950's? The big power of the Web isn't the fact that your page can be found just by Google or shared via a social network. That's a reductionist form of looking at what you can accomplish. The true power is that you can connect to others without needing advertising companies or moloch telephone book publishers. See, the same crude robustness provided by those open standards allows you to create your own network of hypertext between you and many friends. The Web is not a single glob of content; it can be many globs of content that are interconnected and can transform as human relationships and interaction transforms. It's not a static thing that needs to be held down by incumbents merely because mom and pop don't know how to write HTML. You can perfectly have your own web presence and be part of a centralized service as well. Try looking at principles such as POSSE (https://indieweb.org/POSSE https://indieweb.org/POSSE) You can have your cake and eat it at the same time. That's totally possible. See, if Google and big tech try to slay URL's; they effectively disconnect themselves from the Web. They isolate themselves. And that's a bigger risk to themselves then it is to the survival of the Web. Because although the Web is huge, it's resilience is found in it's ability to adapt and evolve as provided by the core design principles that underpin the entire tech stack. Everything else is mainly sugar and sprinkles.