3 ms·

More protocols, fewer platforms. Significantly reducing the money in web advertising and especially the monetizability/utility of data by and about users is pro

More protocols, fewer platforms. Significantly reducing the money in web advertising and especially the monetizability/utility of data by and about users is probably necessary for that to happen. It's not for technical reasons that we stopped having a smallish number of viable standards with many implementations each, and started having many wholly incompatible and deliberately non-interoperable implementations of basically the same thing. I doubt Email could be invented today. [EDIT] point is capturing and controlling communication is currently a top priority of big tech players, and that won't change until it is, one way or another, no longer highly rewarded—until then, every no-funds or paid-for-by-actual-users solution is competing with bottomless pockets and "free".

mongol 7y ago
Yes, yes, yes. There needs to be more emphasis on common protocols. This space is much less vibrant in the, say, past 15 years, than before that. If we exclude cryptocurrency I can not think of any common, groundbreaking protocol introduced since Bittorrent. I am probably missing some, but in the 90s and early 00s protocols were where the exciting stuff happened.
- dcolkitt 7y ago
  I think one reason this might be the case is because modern cloud-computing makes scaling a single centralized service super easy and straightforward. In the early 2000s if you wanted to build something "at scale", the only real way forward (besides raising tons of money upfront) was to build a decentralized protocol. Offload most of the compute, bandwidth and storage to the end nodes. Nowadays, you can just an AWS auto-scaling group behind a load-balancer and a CDN, and you can pretty much handle infinite traffic.
barnabee 7y ago
This. If a company wants to to be a platform and enjoy certain protections from responsibility for content posted by its users, it should be required to open the protocol and the data and prevented from exercising absolute control over the user interface and from being able to deny access to some organisations, 3rd party clients, etc. If that kills a bunch of business models, do be it.

mongol 7y ago

Yes, yes, yes. There needs to be more emphasis on common protocols. This space is much less vibrant in the, say, past 15 years, than before that. If we exclude cryptocurrency I can not think of any common, groundbreaking protocol introduced since Bittorrent. I am probably missing some, but in the 90s and early 00s protocols were where the exciting stuff happened.

dcolkitt 7y ago
I think one reason this might be the case is because modern cloud-computing makes scaling a single centralized service super easy and straightforward. In the early 2000s if you wanted to build something "at scale", the only real way forward (besides raising tons of money upfront) was to build a decentralized protocol. Offload most of the compute, bandwidth and storage to the end nodes. Nowadays, you can just an AWS auto-scaling group behind a load-balancer and a CDN, and you can pretty much handle infinite traffic.

barnabee 7y ago

This. If a company wants to to be a platform and enjoy certain protections from responsibility for content posted by its users, it should be required to open the protocol and the data and prevented from exercising absolute control over the user interface and from being able to deny access to some organisations, 3rd party clients, etc. If that kills a bunch of business models, do be it.