13 ms·

Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web (2017)

353 points by stargrave 6y ago

headalgorithm 6y ago
See previous discussion from 2017: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15611122 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15611122
- Pick-A-Hill2019 6y ago
  The contrast in comments between the 2017 version vs. this 2020 post is fascinating so my thanks :) For what it's worth I strongly agreed with the author at the time and feel doubly-so in 2020.
- divbzero 6y ago
  See also discussion about a complementary article by the same author: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23326329 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23326329
benjaminjosephw 6y ago
The author talks about the web as "one of humanity's greatest inventions." which is now in crisis: > And now, we the architects of the modern web — web designers, UX designers, developers, creative directors, social media managers, data scientists, product managers, start-up people, strategists — are destroying it. The interests of tech companies, investors and web professionals have not always aligned with the best interests of end-users and so there has been a gradual erosion of the freedoms embedded in the foundations of the web itself. My favourite StarTrek moment is Captain Pike's statement "We are always in a fight for the future". Given the current state of the web, this feels truer than ever. Unlike the author, however, I don't think the answer is better web pages. Any chance of us winning the fight for user freedoms must be bigger and bolder than that. There has been an entire generation of entrepreneurs and investors who have thought and planned strategically how to shape the web to work in their best interests. A meaningful counter has to be equally intentional and coordinated to stand a chance at shaping the course technology takes. We are in a fight for the future and we need to think bigger to stand a chance of winning that fight.
- throwaway_pdp09 6y ago
  Agreed, but what are you personally going to do, very specifically, to fight back?
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - zdkl 6y ago
    Understand the user needs that are being fulfilled by the walled gardens, Build and sell simple, useful and if not open then transparent services or products in order to foster variety in the face of anticompetitive or monopolistic entities, Help resellers/repackagers/... to configure, integrate or adapt such services even if not my own. Y'know, "do one thing and do it well"-style.
  - saagarjha 6y ago
    Personally, I run a website which I use to push my ideals of what the web should look like. I try to educate people on why I think that way and what I think is wrong what they might be doing. If you’re really devoted, you could try contributing to a browser engine to help reign (typo: rein) in the web.
    - tigerlily 6y ago
      There's already a browser engine that reigns in the web. What we need is a browser engine to help rein in the web.
      - saagarjha 6y ago
        Oops, thanks for catching that! Let me fix it.
      - marcus_holmes 6y ago
        took me reading that twice to get what you did there hehe
  - 6y ago
fossuser 6y ago
I really liked this article (I found it after reading his newer one that was posted earlier today). It’s also interesting that he links to a Cambridge Analytica talk to make his point in 2017 (before the scandal broke). It’s even more accurate three years later.
thePunisher 6y ago
I've been thinking about writing a new webbrowser with very limited functionality which could be used on secure networks, such as Tor. It would only support a limited subset of HTTP and HTML / CSS and HTML Video. No Javascript / frames or anything else that could impart the safety. I've been meaning to pitch it to the Tor Project, but haven't gotten around to it yet.
- amedvednikov 6y ago
  I think it's a great idea. Fresh start, clean and simple, just displaying HTML content.
- 1bc29b36f623ba8 6y ago
  That sounds like Dillo using a TOR proxy. It's quite usable, but it's limited CSS-capabilities break more sites than the missing JS support does.
  - thePunisher 6y ago
    I was thinking of using this as a starting point: https://archive.codeplex.com/?p=htmlrenderer https://archive.codeplex.com/?p=htmlrenderer
  - augustk 6y ago
    I love Dillo and its philosophy. It's snappy like few other (currently maintained) GUI applications. I wish there was an e-mail client with the same goals.
    - boomlinde 6y ago
      > I wish there was an e-mail client with the same goals. I recommend giving Sylpheed a try.
      - augustk 6y ago
        Thanks for the tip. It seems to have improved since I last tried it.
lanevorockz 6y ago
Seems interesting how he predicted how social media would turn users into commodities.
- mpswardle 6y ago
  i think that happened way before when this article was published in 2017.
buzzkillington 6y ago
That's a very fall of man rhetoric. All electronic networks, from the original arpanet to tor, have suffered from the same problem: someone needs to pay for them yet each individual transaction is too small to matter. Surveillance capitalism is the one model that scaled better than 'let the army and universities pay for it' and it's the one we're stuck with until Xanadu becomes something more than vaporware.
- salawat 6y ago
  Uh... How you figure? Only the infrastructure needs to be paid for. The "switching fabric" if you will. And of course the power you use to run the computer. It costs nothing else to put a packet out there on the Net sans doing so through a draconian metered connection, and surveillance capitalism had nothing to do with that. In fact, if anything, the fact the Net was free did more to boost surveillance capitalism than anything else. If companies actually had to pay to collect, hold, operate on, and be privy to information about people; In Short, if there were acknowledged data privacy rights in play with regard to people's meta-information, and it was not just handed to corporations as a blank check money making asset, surveillance capitalism couldn't have gotten off the ground.
onebot 6y ago
This really hits home for me. Somehow the centralized web became better, maybe its a user experience thing. One can't help but wonder if these are solvable in a decentralized or even federated approach?
- decasteve 6y ago
  > Somehow the centralized web became better... That "somehow" was billions of dollars for development, acquisitions, and marketing. Sites loved to market themselves as ad-free havens that are making the world a better place. Everyone bought it. Once they achieve platform dominance, the ads come in, slowly at first, and then ratcheted up over the next decade until we have what we have now. The federated approach is great in my opinion. It's where I hang my hat. Not everyone finds a home on a federated site but there are vibrant communities. The problem I have is when governments and community organizations start to use walled gardens exclusively. Having to submit to a site's ToS just to get official government communications, releases, streamed video, and take part in discussions around it, is a threat to democracy.
f055 6y ago
The author highlights tracking, profiling & targeting. Just yesterday, I Asked HN but none responded: can't we just flood the trackers with random data instead of fight so hard to block them? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23324946 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23324946
- MattGaiser 6y ago
  1. It would be hard to build a system that couldn’t be filtered out. Something is liked and unliked? Just don’t include it. Mouse isn’t moving randomly on the page? captcha time. Not to mention that they could randomize the element class names and ids or at least change them regularly so it would be a constant arms race to keep up. 2. You don’t want to be randomly liking crazy stuff on Facebook or randomly retweeting. There are real world consequences for doing the wrong thing there.
  - baryphonic 6y ago
    I agree that these are technical challenges, but they're not insurmountable. Any extension could itself track normal user behavior (e.g. mouse movement speed, scrolling), and "learn" to mimic that. And as long as the "likes" are themselves quite randomized per extension, it's unlikely that the random likes will have much of an impact. It also seems not hard to filter out porn, politics and religion from the subjects being liked. I think the bigger risk is one or credibility - once the ad-revenue disruptor thing is in place, the creators might be tempted to sell their user data for a profit.
- benjaminjosephw 6y ago
  Like a chrome extension that sends trackers lots of randomized user actions and garbled data instead of just blocking them? We'd make the data unreliable and render it useless! What an incredibly sly counter-attack. I think it could take a fair amount of work to be effective (i.e. reverse engineering APIs, formatting payloads, etc) but I'm sure a community of engineers would support those efforts if it were in wide enough use. The problem here is that those engineers may be deterred by the possibility of getting sucked into legal battles. Maybe if it were backed by an organization that could allay that fear like the EFF, Mozilla or the FSF then I could see this actually having a shot of being genuinely effective.
jonnypotty 6y ago
Anything sufficiently successful will always be consumed by the powerful and will ultimately become their tool
- benjaminjosephw 6y ago
  Which is why a robust and intentional defense against this behaviour is needed. We can't simply roll over and accept a dystopian fate. History tells us that even the most entrenched powers can be displaced.
- munificent 6y ago
  The yin and yang of human society is: 1. Those with power will use their power to gain more, causing power to concentrate into fewer and fewer people over time. 2. The more concentrated the power is, the more greatly the powerful are outnumbered and the more people there are with aligned interests who want to take away or limit their power. The Industrial Revolution created a ton of power and led to massive power imbalances due to #1. At his peak John D. Rockefeller was worth almost 2% of the entire US economy. Eventually that led to anti-trust cases driven by a democratic government, the labor movement, and other causes. World War II, especially in the US, was a big shake-up that reset many power dynamics. But, since then, #1 has been doing the incremental growth it always done. My hunch is that we're starting to approach an "organized information" movement like we had an "organized labor" movement after the Industrial Revolution. The elites in power will fight it tooth and nail. But they will lose, because they are outnumbered.
  - jonnypotty 6y ago
    People generally revolt when they're hungry, not depressed.
    - antepodius 6y ago
      We haven't had the latter without the former very often in world history. I'd say this is still pretty novel ground.
slx26 6y ago
I really like it when people try to give practical advice after describing problems. Agree with most of what's written in the post. But I'd like to discuss one part of it: > [...] the major websites of today's web are not built for the visitor, but as means of using her. To me, here lies a key point that both the writer and many commenters here in HN seemed to miss in 2017. What's written here is just a consequence, and the post goes on to develop it through all its length... but why did the dynamics change in that way? What's the underlying reason for the shift? Some comments here in HN mentioned it: internet becoming a marketplace. With both its good and bad side-effects. It's an extremely complex issue, but money does completely shape dynamics of current society, and therefore internet too, and it leaves us without spaces that aren't conditioned by it. At small scale it doesn't seem a big problem, or we rationalize it because everyone needs money to survive... But it really shapes the world, and we can't simply ignore the ugly sides of it and pretend we can solve it without ever involving the discussion about money and the dynamics it generates. The "magic" the post talks about only needs three ingredients: human curiosity, time (to develop that curiosity), and spaces (to host those humans and their time). Human curiosity and creativity will always exist as long as we don't go extinct. About time... well, we can satisfy our basic needs more efficiently than ever... and yet, ironically, we are using the newly freed time to create "more competitive" products that focus on enslaving the potential of our fellow human beings through infinite-scroll addiction, fear of missing out, instant gratification, attention grabbing and other kinds of biases and "bugs" in the human system. And finally spaces. Well, nothing left. If the only accessible spaces require money or work-to-generate-money, you close the circle and can't scape the landscape and conditioning I was describing. Even if there are some spaces left, they tend to fell into oblivion against the competition. Too hard to escape, too easy to rationalize. And honestly, I don't think there's any game-changer discussion about morality standards here. Morals must play a very important part in getting us to start a change (and by us I mean the kind of people that's most directly involved in tech, like this HN crowd), but as long as we don't try to really disrupt at least some of the dynamics generated by money-profit-survival-motivations, I'm somewhat skeptical we will be able to move the needle, because efforts will be eaten by the competition even if we never wanted to play under those rules. Let's hope I'm mistaken and it's easier to solve.
- kubanczyk 6y ago
isolli 6y ago
In the time since the article was published (2017), the GDPR has come into effect. I wonder how it affected third-party traffic, if at all. Especially for European websites such as lemonde.fr (used as an example by the author).
- nicbou 6y ago
  In my experience, not at all. They replaced silent tracking with obnoxiously loud tracking. Extracting consent became a new art form.
gexla 6y ago
Did the web sort of start out a super walled garden for millions of people? My embarrassing story was starting out with an AOL disk in the mail. I thought the "web" was great fun and apparently I wasn't alone. Often I couldn't even log in because the web was all busy signals. It was the AOL fail wail. In those early explorations, I found a button with the label "www." I didn't know what it was, but I did know that it sucked! I don't think I bothered with the www again until after I moved away from AOL. All the things we complain about on the web today should have its place. We just don't need to go there. It's not actually that hard to avoid tracking, etc. The majority of HN could probably work out some sort of Stallman type of setup over a weekend or two. If we can't avoid, then maybe we could create "personas" instead. Like in an MMORPG, create an avatar. Maybe we can create noise machines to throw people off. Do the opposite of the Brave browser. Run bots and clicking operations in the background (IMO clicking ads served to me with no intent to buy is only bad when I intend to profit or help someone I know to profit from it. If I have a process to do things randomly to obscure my tracks, then I'm fine?) I think if we're really going to make a dent, we need to work to create an ecosystem elsewhere. Look at the dark web for example. It's crap, but you can buy drugs there! Open source developers maybe need to jump on the tooling. Writers need to add the content. Then of course we'll just start the cycle over again. But maybe distributed next time.
- reaperducer 6y ago
  Did the web sort of start out a super walled garden for millions of people? If you define "web" as web sites on the internet, then no. But if you define "web" as people communicating en masse via computer, then yes. I remember when even something as basic as e-mail would only work within a single e-mail service. Eventually gateways were built between networks, but not every network connected to every other network, so in order to send an e-mail message from User A to User B, you'd have to send it through Gateway X, Gateway Y, and Gateway Z. For content, we were all in the walled gardens of CompuServe, The Source, The WELL, HAL-PC, and dozens other commercial services, plus tens of thousands of private mini-gardens in the form of BBSes.
- bergstromm466 6y ago
  > Did the web sort of start out a super walled garden for millions of people? > I think if we're really going to make a dent, we need to work to create an ecosystem elsewhere. There is an attempt being made to build what you're describing - and it's called Ceptr (http://ceptr.org http://ceptr.org) by it's creators. The underlying pattern that has emerged in their work is a 'holograhic' chain (Holochain) that allows users to create small modular distributed apps that come together in a coherent way to form apps and online meeting places that aren't mediated by the corporate structure. In some places it is called Protocol Cooperavitism. The idea is that Protocol Cooperavitism will slowly start replacing/evolve into Platform Capitalism. So yeah, Holochian is a protocol development framework, like Ruby on Rails but for serverless protocols instead of centralized servers. Holochain is a framework for writing fully distributed peer-to-peer applications. It is not based on blockchain technology. Nor is Holochain a single platform like Ethereum. It is rather like a decentralized Ruby on Rails, a toolkit that produces stand-alone programs but for serverless high-profile applications. Source: https://medium.com/holochain/holochain-reinventing-applications-d2ac1e4f25ef https://medium.com/holochain/holochain-reinventing-applicati...
jefreybulla 6y ago
In case people are interested: I created a list of alternatives to Google and Facebook services. https://jefreybulla.github.io/beprivate/ https://jefreybulla.github.io/beprivate/
x32n23nr 6y ago
If you want a better web, we need to figure out two things, none of which appear in the author's article: 1. How to pay for stuff in the web in the same way you can pay with cash in the real world. 2. How to regulate the new-age, digital-good, information-aggregation monopolies. I suspect this will have to be done by either a state-forced, or a highly-useful interoperability protocol for building new tech.
- Frost1x 6y ago
  >1. How to pay for stuff in the web in the same way you can pay with cash in the real world. This one is a bit easier. Prepaid credit cards are frequently accepted online and can be purchased with cash. The fees are a bit high as is but there's no reason merchants can't create more of these and likely even lower the prices. Alternatively your CC provider could potentially act as a privacy guard by providing randomized rotating onetime transaction numbers as well, I know some pay services like Samsung pay do this to some degree already by creating virtual cards that require a third party to authenticate without giving your actual account, though I believe those virtual cards remain fairly static. With more potential entropy (large GUID), it seems reasonable you could rotate those on the fly.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - syshum 6y ago
    Unfortunately PrePaid Credit cards are not widely accepted for many things, For example you can not use a Prepaid Credit Card to fund a PayPal account or a Patreaon Account. This is largely down to "Know your Customer" laws and the concern they will be used for Money Laundering
  - kiddlethorp 6y ago
    My wife's (Indonesian) bank only allows online payments using a randomly generated CC number. It seems pretty obvious, and I'm a little surprised it's not supported by my western country banks. (It's true, I don't know how many of these virtual card numbers exist. It may be that there aren't enough.)
crazygringo 6y ago
> But most of the time we spend on the web today is no longer on the open Internet - it's on private services like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Ultimately there are three good reasons for this, which the author doesn't address at all. The first is spam and abuse. The problem with a purely "open web" is that there's no solution to those, because of bad actors. The only solution we've found so far are centralized organizations which can run sophisticated machine learning and hire thousands of moderators. The second is aggregation and discoverability. What good is it to publish if nobody finds you? Matching what people want to read, with the content they'll like (and not turning it into a firehose) is a really hard problem which, again, open standards basically do nothing for. And then of course the third is monetization. There's a lot of amazing content on, e.g. YouTube, that wouldn't have been created if it weren't for monetization, because it takes content creators time that they'd otherwise have to spend at a job. Now if we can create open standards that work as well as centralized solutions for all three of these... then we're talking.
- chisleu 6y ago
  > The first is spam and abuse Opt in systems solve these in open social media platforms, but introduce their own vulnerabilities such as information/reality bubbles and difficulty in growing networks. > The second is aggregation and discoverability Advertising takes many forms, including word of mouth. > monetization This is true enough, but most content on the internet isn't monetized by the creator via the platform, and there are many examples of creators who monetize independent of the platform. It also depends on how low you want to go w/ what you call the platform. Some pay for a platform in order to monetize. I don't have stats on this, so maybe it's experiential bias.
- ordinaryradical 6y ago
  > The only solution we've found so far are centralized organizations which can run sophisticated machine learning and hire thousands of moderators. I’m pretty sure HN, the site were literally posting on, does not have either of these, or at least not at that scale and yet it’s miles better than anything on fb or twitter so I’m not sure I buy this argument.
stakkur 6y ago
Some days, I miss telnet-ing into BBSes.
mr_custard 6y ago
"Consider minimalist browsers like Min ..." Oh! Exciting! I dutifully went to check out the Min browser web page. "Oh shit, it's another Electron app". Noped it out of there.
- cosmojg 6y ago
  Moving to Min from Chrome is certainly moving in the right direction, though. After all, Electron is just a stripped-down version of Chromium, and thus quite a bit more minimal by default.
  - mr_custard 6y ago
    Electron contains the Chromium browser code, yes. But you still have to render to that browser. Electron also contains a back-end Node.js process and a bunch of related JS APIs for building and hosting these apps. Anyway, I accept your point that I'd be replacing a browser with... well a browser and some other stuff. The problem though is the proliferation of Electron apps everywhere... suddenly your OS is full of these things and you don't get the memory management benefits of running just one Chrome or Chromium. Each app having its own copy of Chromium and Node.js merrily consuming CPU and RAM like they're the only ones doing it. Signal, GitHub, Slack, VS Code, Skype, Notion, Tusk, WhatsApp etc. It's a cancer, I tell ya! Ughh. And We're not even talking about the security issues here. Sigh. I'm going out now, to buy more RAM.
michaelyoshika 6y ago
It's just consequence of some niche thing becoming popular. There is no way to fix it other than inventing a new niche thing.
peter_d_sherman 6y ago
I (as an armchair philosopher, and not a very good one at that), argue that the problem is not the web, nor technology, but Complexity Vs. Convenience. In order to create the modern world, in order to create its conveniences, systems, sometimes very complex systems, must be implemented underneath, as infrastructure, to support all of that convenience. Sometimes they are "systems of systems", that is, infrastructures heaped on top of other infrastructures, etc. They provide conveniences; that's true, but they conversely create a series of corner-cases, a series of circumstances where the complexity creates additional problems, where the complexity serves to be the problem. Consider a future sci-fi scenario of robot war... What happened? What went wrong? Here's what went wrong: Robots were created to serve humanity, but over many centuries, many generations, the knowledge of how they were created (and what it took to control them) was lost, as mankind became lazier and lazier, and deferred all work to the robots. The complexity of the robots (and their AI) increased, whereas the knowledge humanity possessed about them decreased. At a certain time, at a certain critical juncture, because of the increasing knowledge asymmetry, creator (humanity) and creation switched roles, and now the creation caused great problems for the creator, who had basically lost the knowledge, ("lost the manual for" <g>), how to control the creation. We see this pattern repeat in a variety of formats, in a variety of historic and present-day contexts; it includes (but is not limited to!): Technology, Religion, Law, Governments, Social Systems, etc. Basically, all of those things were created to serve man, to serve mankind... And (depending upon where you are in history, or what your knowledge (or lack of knowledge) of them is, in the present day), some of them either will, or at least have the apparency of, the loss of control by their creator -- mankind. Frankenstein, by Mary Shelly, is an allegory of this theme, that is, of a creator that creates something for beneficial purposes, only that with enough time (and/or loss of knowledge), the creation turns on the creator... Understood properly, here's the reason why all societies eventually fail, and why far in mankind's past, there may have been a high-tecnology society (Atlantis?) which was destroyed, because with all of the solutions it brought, it also brought additional problems, such that those could not be controlled, and eventually it was destroyed, or was the cause of its own destruction... The Greek myth of Sisyphus -- is also an allegory for this phenomena... If the stone which he has to roll up a hill (only to watch it roll back down again! "There goes the neighborhood!" <g>) represents society, then he is fated to roll it up the hill to its pinacle -- only to watch it roll back down again... over and over and over, for eternity... So, Complexity Vs. Convenience. With every new convenience, you require more complexity, and you generate a new set of problems...

353 points by stargrave 6y ago

See previous discussion from 2017: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15611122 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15611122

Pick-A-Hill2019 6y ago
The contrast in comments between the 2017 version vs. this 2020 post is fascinating so my thanks :) For what it's worth I strongly agreed with the author at the time and feel doubly-so in 2020.
divbzero 6y ago
See also discussion about a complementary article by the same author: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23326329 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23326329

benjaminjosephw 6y ago

The author talks about the web as "one of humanity's greatest inventions." which is now in crisis: > And now, we the architects of the modern web — web designers, UX designers, developers, creative directors, social media managers, data scientists, product managers, start-up people, strategists — are destroying it. The interests of tech companies, investors and web professionals have not always aligned with the best interests of end-users and so there has been a gradual erosion of the freedoms embedded in the foundations of the web itself. My favourite StarTrek moment is Captain Pike's statement "We are always in a fight for the future". Given the current state of the web, this feels truer than ever. Unlike the author, however, I don't think the answer is better web pages. Any chance of us winning the fight for user freedoms must be bigger and bolder than that. There has been an entire generation of entrepreneurs and investors who have thought and planned strategically how to shape the web to work in their best interests. A meaningful counter has to be equally intentional and coordinated to stand a chance at shaping the course technology takes. We are in a fight for the future and we need to think bigger to stand a chance of winning that fight.

throwaway_pdp09 6y ago
Agreed, but what are you personally going to do, very specifically, to fight back?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- zdkl 6y ago
  Understand the user needs that are being fulfilled by the walled gardens, Build and sell simple, useful and if not open then transparent services or products in order to foster variety in the face of anticompetitive or monopolistic entities, Help resellers/repackagers/... to configure, integrate or adapt such services even if not my own. Y'know, "do one thing and do it well"-style.
- saagarjha 6y ago
  Personally, I run a website which I use to push my ideals of what the web should look like. I try to educate people on why I think that way and what I think is wrong what they might be doing. If you’re really devoted, you could try contributing to a browser engine to help reign (typo: rein) in the web.
  - tigerlily 6y ago
    There's already a browser engine that reigns in the web. What we need is a browser engine to help rein in the web.
    - saagarjha 6y ago
      Oops, thanks for catching that! Let me fix it.
    - marcus_holmes 6y ago
      took me reading that twice to get what you did there hehe
- 6y ago

fossuser 6y ago

I really liked this article (I found it after reading his newer one that was posted earlier today). It’s also interesting that he links to a Cambridge Analytica talk to make his point in 2017 (before the scandal broke). It’s even more accurate three years later.

thePunisher 6y ago

I've been thinking about writing a new webbrowser with very limited functionality which could be used on secure networks, such as Tor. It would only support a limited subset of HTTP and HTML / CSS and HTML Video. No Javascript / frames or anything else that could impart the safety. I've been meaning to pitch it to the Tor Project, but haven't gotten around to it yet.

amedvednikov 6y ago
I think it's a great idea. Fresh start, clean and simple, just displaying HTML content.
1bc29b36f623ba8 6y ago
That sounds like Dillo using a TOR proxy. It's quite usable, but it's limited CSS-capabilities break more sites than the missing JS support does.
- thePunisher 6y ago
  I was thinking of using this as a starting point: https://archive.codeplex.com/?p=htmlrenderer https://archive.codeplex.com/?p=htmlrenderer
- augustk 6y ago
  I love Dillo and its philosophy. It's snappy like few other (currently maintained) GUI applications. I wish there was an e-mail client with the same goals.
  - boomlinde 6y ago
    > I wish there was an e-mail client with the same goals. I recommend giving Sylpheed a try.
    - augustk 6y ago
      Thanks for the tip. It seems to have improved since I last tried it.

lanevorockz 6y ago

Seems interesting how he predicted how social media would turn users into commodities.

mpswardle 6y ago
i think that happened way before when this article was published in 2017.

buzzkillington 6y ago

That's a very fall of man rhetoric. All electronic networks, from the original arpanet to tor, have suffered from the same problem: someone needs to pay for them yet each individual transaction is too small to matter. Surveillance capitalism is the one model that scaled better than 'let the army and universities pay for it' and it's the one we're stuck with until Xanadu becomes something more than vaporware.

salawat 6y ago
Uh... How you figure? Only the infrastructure needs to be paid for. The "switching fabric" if you will. And of course the power you use to run the computer. It costs nothing else to put a packet out there on the Net sans doing so through a draconian metered connection, and surveillance capitalism had nothing to do with that. In fact, if anything, the fact the Net was free did more to boost surveillance capitalism than anything else. If companies actually had to pay to collect, hold, operate on, and be privy to information about people; In Short, if there were acknowledged data privacy rights in play with regard to people's meta-information, and it was not just handed to corporations as a blank check money making asset, surveillance capitalism couldn't have gotten off the ground.

onebot 6y ago

This really hits home for me. Somehow the centralized web became better, maybe its a user experience thing. One can't help but wonder if these are solvable in a decentralized or even federated approach?

decasteve 6y ago
> Somehow the centralized web became better... That "somehow" was billions of dollars for development, acquisitions, and marketing. Sites loved to market themselves as ad-free havens that are making the world a better place. Everyone bought it. Once they achieve platform dominance, the ads come in, slowly at first, and then ratcheted up over the next decade until we have what we have now. The federated approach is great in my opinion. It's where I hang my hat. Not everyone finds a home on a federated site but there are vibrant communities. The problem I have is when governments and community organizations start to use walled gardens exclusively. Having to submit to a site's ToS just to get official government communications, releases, streamed video, and take part in discussions around it, is a threat to democracy.

f055 6y ago

The author highlights tracking, profiling & targeting. Just yesterday, I Asked HN but none responded: can't we just flood the trackers with random data instead of fight so hard to block them? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23324946 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23324946

MattGaiser 6y ago
1. It would be hard to build a system that couldn’t be filtered out. Something is liked and unliked? Just don’t include it. Mouse isn’t moving randomly on the page? captcha time. Not to mention that they could randomize the element class names and ids or at least change them regularly so it would be a constant arms race to keep up. 2. You don’t want to be randomly liking crazy stuff on Facebook or randomly retweeting. There are real world consequences for doing the wrong thing there.
- baryphonic 6y ago
  I agree that these are technical challenges, but they're not insurmountable. Any extension could itself track normal user behavior (e.g. mouse movement speed, scrolling), and "learn" to mimic that. And as long as the "likes" are themselves quite randomized per extension, it's unlikely that the random likes will have much of an impact. It also seems not hard to filter out porn, politics and religion from the subjects being liked. I think the bigger risk is one or credibility - once the ad-revenue disruptor thing is in place, the creators might be tempted to sell their user data for a profit.
benjaminjosephw 6y ago
Like a chrome extension that sends trackers lots of randomized user actions and garbled data instead of just blocking them? We'd make the data unreliable and render it useless! What an incredibly sly counter-attack. I think it could take a fair amount of work to be effective (i.e. reverse engineering APIs, formatting payloads, etc) but I'm sure a community of engineers would support those efforts if it were in wide enough use. The problem here is that those engineers may be deterred by the possibility of getting sucked into legal battles. Maybe if it were backed by an organization that could allay that fear like the EFF, Mozilla or the FSF then I could see this actually having a shot of being genuinely effective.

jonnypotty 6y ago

Anything sufficiently successful will always be consumed by the powerful and will ultimately become their tool

benjaminjosephw 6y ago
Which is why a robust and intentional defense against this behaviour is needed. We can't simply roll over and accept a dystopian fate. History tells us that even the most entrenched powers can be displaced.
munificent 6y ago
The yin and yang of human society is: 1. Those with power will use their power to gain more, causing power to concentrate into fewer and fewer people over time. 2. The more concentrated the power is, the more greatly the powerful are outnumbered and the more people there are with aligned interests who want to take away or limit their power. The Industrial Revolution created a ton of power and led to massive power imbalances due to #1. At his peak John D. Rockefeller was worth almost 2% of the entire US economy. Eventually that led to anti-trust cases driven by a democratic government, the labor movement, and other causes. World War II, especially in the US, was a big shake-up that reset many power dynamics. But, since then, #1 has been doing the incremental growth it always done. My hunch is that we're starting to approach an "organized information" movement like we had an "organized labor" movement after the Industrial Revolution. The elites in power will fight it tooth and nail. But they will lose, because they are outnumbered.
- jonnypotty 6y ago
  People generally revolt when they're hungry, not depressed.
  - antepodius 6y ago
    We haven't had the latter without the former very often in world history. I'd say this is still pretty novel ground.

slx26 6y ago

I really like it when people try to give practical advice after describing problems. Agree with most of what's written in the post. But I'd like to discuss one part of it: > [...] the major websites of today's web are not built for the visitor, but as means of using her. To me, here lies a key point that both the writer and many commenters here in HN seemed to miss in 2017. What's written here is just a consequence, and the post goes on to develop it through all its length... but why did the dynamics change in that way? What's the underlying reason for the shift? Some comments here in HN mentioned it: internet becoming a marketplace. With both its good and bad side-effects. It's an extremely complex issue, but money does completely shape dynamics of current society, and therefore internet too, and it leaves us without spaces that aren't conditioned by it. At small scale it doesn't seem a big problem, or we rationalize it because everyone needs money to survive... But it really shapes the world, and we can't simply ignore the ugly sides of it and pretend we can solve it without ever involving the discussion about money and the dynamics it generates. The "magic" the post talks about only needs three ingredients: human curiosity, time (to develop that curiosity), and spaces (to host those humans and their time). Human curiosity and creativity will always exist as long as we don't go extinct. About time... well, we can satisfy our basic needs more efficiently than ever... and yet, ironically, we are using the newly freed time to create "more competitive" products that focus on enslaving the potential of our fellow human beings through infinite-scroll addiction, fear of missing out, instant gratification, attention grabbing and other kinds of biases and "bugs" in the human system. And finally spaces. Well, nothing left. If the only accessible spaces require money or work-to-generate-money, you close the circle and can't scape the landscape and conditioning I was describing. Even if there are some spaces left, they tend to fell into oblivion against the competition. Too hard to escape, too easy to rationalize. And honestly, I don't think there's any game-changer discussion about morality standards here. Morals must play a very important part in getting us to start a change (and by us I mean the kind of people that's most directly involved in tech, like this HN crowd), but as long as we don't try to really disrupt at least some of the dynamics generated by money-profit-survival-motivations, I'm somewhat skeptical we will be able to move the needle, because efforts will be eaten by the competition even if we never wanted to play under those rules. Let's hope I'm mistaken and it's easier to solve.

kubanczyk 6y ago

isolli 6y ago

In the time since the article was published (2017), the GDPR has come into effect. I wonder how it affected third-party traffic, if at all. Especially for European websites such as lemonde.fr (used as an example by the author).

nicbou 6y ago
In my experience, not at all. They replaced silent tracking with obnoxiously loud tracking. Extracting consent became a new art form.

gexla 6y ago

Did the web sort of start out a super walled garden for millions of people? My embarrassing story was starting out with an AOL disk in the mail. I thought the "web" was great fun and apparently I wasn't alone. Often I couldn't even log in because the web was all busy signals. It was the AOL fail wail. In those early explorations, I found a button with the label "www." I didn't know what it was, but I did know that it sucked! I don't think I bothered with the www again until after I moved away from AOL. All the things we complain about on the web today should have its place. We just don't need to go there. It's not actually that hard to avoid tracking, etc. The majority of HN could probably work out some sort of Stallman type of setup over a weekend or two. If we can't avoid, then maybe we could create "personas" instead. Like in an MMORPG, create an avatar. Maybe we can create noise machines to throw people off. Do the opposite of the Brave browser. Run bots and clicking operations in the background (IMO clicking ads served to me with no intent to buy is only bad when I intend to profit or help someone I know to profit from it. If I have a process to do things randomly to obscure my tracks, then I'm fine?) I think if we're really going to make a dent, we need to work to create an ecosystem elsewhere. Look at the dark web for example. It's crap, but you can buy drugs there! Open source developers maybe need to jump on the tooling. Writers need to add the content. Then of course we'll just start the cycle over again. But maybe distributed next time.

reaperducer 6y ago
Did the web sort of start out a super walled garden for millions of people? If you define "web" as web sites on the internet, then no. But if you define "web" as people communicating en masse via computer, then yes. I remember when even something as basic as e-mail would only work within a single e-mail service. Eventually gateways were built between networks, but not every network connected to every other network, so in order to send an e-mail message from User A to User B, you'd have to send it through Gateway X, Gateway Y, and Gateway Z. For content, we were all in the walled gardens of CompuServe, The Source, The WELL, HAL-PC, and dozens other commercial services, plus tens of thousands of private mini-gardens in the form of BBSes.
bergstromm466 6y ago
> Did the web sort of start out a super walled garden for millions of people? > I think if we're really going to make a dent, we need to work to create an ecosystem elsewhere. There is an attempt being made to build what you're describing - and it's called Ceptr (http://ceptr.org http://ceptr.org) by it's creators. The underlying pattern that has emerged in their work is a 'holograhic' chain (Holochain) that allows users to create small modular distributed apps that come together in a coherent way to form apps and online meeting places that aren't mediated by the corporate structure. In some places it is called Protocol Cooperavitism. The idea is that Protocol Cooperavitism will slowly start replacing/evolve into Platform Capitalism. So yeah, Holochian is a protocol development framework, like Ruby on Rails but for serverless protocols instead of centralized servers. Holochain is a framework for writing fully distributed peer-to-peer applications. It is not based on blockchain technology. Nor is Holochain a single platform like Ethereum. It is rather like a decentralized Ruby on Rails, a toolkit that produces stand-alone programs but for serverless high-profile applications. Source: https://medium.com/holochain/holochain-reinventing-applications-d2ac1e4f25ef https://medium.com/holochain/holochain-reinventing-applicati...

jefreybulla 6y ago

In case people are interested: I created a list of alternatives to Google and Facebook services. https://jefreybulla.github.io/beprivate/ https://jefreybulla.github.io/beprivate/

x32n23nr 6y ago

If you want a better web, we need to figure out two things, none of which appear in the author's article: 1. How to pay for stuff in the web in the same way you can pay with cash in the real world. 2. How to regulate the new-age, digital-good, information-aggregation monopolies. I suspect this will have to be done by either a state-forced, or a highly-useful interoperability protocol for building new tech.

Frost1x 6y ago
>1. How to pay for stuff in the web in the same way you can pay with cash in the real world. This one is a bit easier. Prepaid credit cards are frequently accepted online and can be purchased with cash. The fees are a bit high as is but there's no reason merchants can't create more of these and likely even lower the prices. Alternatively your CC provider could potentially act as a privacy guard by providing randomized rotating onetime transaction numbers as well, I know some pay services like Samsung pay do this to some degree already by creating virtual cards that require a third party to authenticate without giving your actual account, though I believe those virtual cards remain fairly static. With more potential entropy (large GUID), it seems reasonable you could rotate those on the fly.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- syshum 6y ago
  Unfortunately PrePaid Credit cards are not widely accepted for many things, For example you can not use a Prepaid Credit Card to fund a PayPal account or a Patreaon Account. This is largely down to "Know your Customer" laws and the concern they will be used for Money Laundering
- kiddlethorp 6y ago
  My wife's (Indonesian) bank only allows online payments using a randomly generated CC number. It seems pretty obvious, and I'm a little surprised it's not supported by my western country banks. (It's true, I don't know how many of these virtual card numbers exist. It may be that there aren't enough.)

crazygringo 6y ago

> But most of the time we spend on the web today is no longer on the open Internet - it's on private services like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Ultimately there are three good reasons for this, which the author doesn't address at all. The first is spam and abuse. The problem with a purely "open web" is that there's no solution to those, because of bad actors. The only solution we've found so far are centralized organizations which can run sophisticated machine learning and hire thousands of moderators. The second is aggregation and discoverability. What good is it to publish if nobody finds you? Matching what people want to read, with the content they'll like (and not turning it into a firehose) is a really hard problem which, again, open standards basically do nothing for. And then of course the third is monetization. There's a lot of amazing content on, e.g. YouTube, that wouldn't have been created if it weren't for monetization, because it takes content creators time that they'd otherwise have to spend at a job. Now if we can create open standards that work as well as centralized solutions for all three of these... then we're talking.

chisleu 6y ago
> The first is spam and abuse Opt in systems solve these in open social media platforms, but introduce their own vulnerabilities such as information/reality bubbles and difficulty in growing networks. > The second is aggregation and discoverability Advertising takes many forms, including word of mouth. > monetization This is true enough, but most content on the internet isn't monetized by the creator via the platform, and there are many examples of creators who monetize independent of the platform. It also depends on how low you want to go w/ what you call the platform. Some pay for a platform in order to monetize. I don't have stats on this, so maybe it's experiential bias.
ordinaryradical 6y ago
> The only solution we've found so far are centralized organizations which can run sophisticated machine learning and hire thousands of moderators. I’m pretty sure HN, the site were literally posting on, does not have either of these, or at least not at that scale and yet it’s miles better than anything on fb or twitter so I’m not sure I buy this argument.

stakkur 6y ago

Some days, I miss telnet-ing into BBSes.

mr_custard 6y ago

"Consider minimalist browsers like Min ..." Oh! Exciting! I dutifully went to check out the Min browser web page. "Oh shit, it's another Electron app". Noped it out of there.

cosmojg 6y ago
Moving to Min from Chrome is certainly moving in the right direction, though. After all, Electron is just a stripped-down version of Chromium, and thus quite a bit more minimal by default.
- mr_custard 6y ago
  Electron contains the Chromium browser code, yes. But you still have to render to that browser. Electron also contains a back-end Node.js process and a bunch of related JS APIs for building and hosting these apps. Anyway, I accept your point that I'd be replacing a browser with... well a browser and some other stuff. The problem though is the proliferation of Electron apps everywhere... suddenly your OS is full of these things and you don't get the memory management benefits of running just one Chrome or Chromium. Each app having its own copy of Chromium and Node.js merrily consuming CPU and RAM like they're the only ones doing it. Signal, GitHub, Slack, VS Code, Skype, Notion, Tusk, WhatsApp etc. It's a cancer, I tell ya! Ughh. And We're not even talking about the security issues here. Sigh. I'm going out now, to buy more RAM.

michaelyoshika 6y ago

It's just consequence of some niche thing becoming popular. There is no way to fix it other than inventing a new niche thing.

peter_d_sherman 6y ago

I (as an armchair philosopher, and not a very good one at that), argue that the problem is not the web, nor technology, but Complexity Vs. Convenience. In order to create the modern world, in order to create its conveniences, systems, sometimes very complex systems, must be implemented underneath, as infrastructure, to support all of that convenience. Sometimes they are "systems of systems", that is, infrastructures heaped on top of other infrastructures, etc. They provide conveniences; that's true, but they conversely create a series of corner-cases, a series of circumstances where the complexity creates additional problems, where the complexity serves to be the problem. Consider a future sci-fi scenario of robot war... What happened? What went wrong? Here's what went wrong: Robots were created to serve humanity, but over many centuries, many generations, the knowledge of how they were created (and what it took to control them) was lost, as mankind became lazier and lazier, and deferred all work to the robots. The complexity of the robots (and their AI) increased, whereas the knowledge humanity possessed about them decreased. At a certain time, at a certain critical juncture, because of the increasing knowledge asymmetry, creator (humanity) and creation switched roles, and now the creation caused great problems for the creator, who had basically lost the knowledge, ("lost the manual for" <g>), how to control the creation. We see this pattern repeat in a variety of formats, in a variety of historic and present-day contexts; it includes (but is not limited to!): Technology, Religion, Law, Governments, Social Systems, etc. Basically, all of those things were created to serve man, to serve mankind... And (depending upon where you are in history, or what your knowledge (or lack of knowledge) of them is, in the present day), some of them either will, or at least have the apparency of, the loss of control by their creator -- mankind. Frankenstein, by Mary Shelly, is an allegory of this theme, that is, of a creator that creates something for beneficial purposes, only that with enough time (and/or loss of knowledge), the creation turns on the creator... Understood properly, here's the reason why all societies eventually fail, and why far in mankind's past, there may have been a high-tecnology society (Atlantis?) which was destroyed, because with all of the solutions it brought, it also brought additional problems, such that those could not be controlled, and eventually it was destroyed, or was the cause of its own destruction... The Greek myth of Sisyphus -- is also an allegory for this phenomena... If the stone which he has to roll up a hill (only to watch it roll back down again! "There goes the neighborhood!" <g>) represents society, then he is fated to roll it up the hill to its pinacle -- only to watch it roll back down again... over and over and over, for eternity... So, Complexity Vs. Convenience. With every new convenience, you require more complexity, and you generate a new set of problems...