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I don't think the internet was ever going to become regulated. What did occur post-2007 was that what made the internet work as a disparate ecosystem of loosely

by kodah 6y ago

I don't think the internet was ever going to become regulated. What did occur post-2007 was that what made the internet work as a disparate ecosystem of loosely connected destinations (news groups, message boards, blogs, misc websites) that all played their own very important role, controlled and owned by their own communities became one platform under Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc... and was controlled and owned by people who had no identity-based connection to the people using those platforms. This is largely based on my own observations and could be wrong, but it's my theory. Tech companies robbed an internet culture they didn't even realize or appreciate existed, and then shoved a bunch of people who had never used the internet before on it and convinced them that Facebook was the internet. Or rather, that the standards, norms, and culture on Facebook was somehow reflective of everything outside of Facebook. Just replace Facebook with the growing list of companies who engage in "platforms" in varying degrees. tldr: this obsession with centralization made no sense to the way we do things as a human species, any of our values, any of our culture, and we let it happen anyway. The chickens have come home to roost.

naringas 6y ago
imo the need for 'centralization' comes from the fact that in order for different people to understand each other, they must use the same dictionary (so to say). So the 'dictionary' is a centralized construction. It must be the same for everybody. If our dictionaries vary to much in their definitions then our communication becomes more and more difficult. Maybe dictionary is not the best analogy (this is just an analogy) but I hope I'm getting my point across with this example.
- neltnerb 6y ago
  I used the internet without facebook before it existed. I had a Facebook account for over a decade. I haven't had a Facebook account in two years. To the extent that what you are saying is true, it is only true because these companies have walled themselves off. You used to be able to chat with Facebook users over XMPP even.
  - kodah 6y ago
    Yeah, I agree. If I remember XMPP was dropped while using that old adage of "scale", which maybe was real, but in the end the net effect is the same. Advanced users know a broader breadth of the internet while most internet users only know the depth of Facebook and other various platforms.
    - neltnerb 6y ago
      I guess once they got big enough there was no longer a point in interoperability, it seems like a pretty big phase transition got hit about a decade ago where suddenly each walled garden got big and valuable enough that isolation was a better strategy for them. It just sucks for the internet. I don't think, if those companies ceased to exist, that they would automatically get recreated because of some inevitable niche or market law. I think that they got where they are because of a fluke of the times they were created in -- people could not grasp how they make money.
- kodah 6y ago
  I understand the motivation. I work on platforms teams internally for companies (and have for a number of years). In smaller scale, this concept largely makes sense because developers at a single company come from a single culture which those developers largely have already bought into or are actively being shoveled into by corporate work. This is the role a lot of developer advocates play at companies who don't have external developer customers. In large scale, what you're asking is more dubious. If you concede that the United States alone has 11 major cultures, then you have to begin a process of "on-boarding" everyone onto your new, structured culture that your platform is designed around. That's why these debates about who is represented in the building of the platform come about, because under that model those concerns take center stage and they should. I guess what I'm saying is the whole problem never needed to exist. There's better ways to share information than being on one platform.
jbay808 6y ago
I definitely think that what you're saying is true, and is part of the explanation. But another part is that the Wild West internet also had its own major issues -- roving bandits, to carry the analogy -- and these big companies did solve real problems that were only growing with time. Gmail's spam filtering. Recaptcha's bot rejection. Facebook's identity verification. Paypal's secure credit card processing. Google de-ranking link farms. Youtube's hosting costs. All of these very effectively solved real problems with the old web, and those problems were growing as bad actors became more sophisticated. I like the old web too, but I do appreciate that an attempt to return to it would still require very effective tools to solve at least some of these problems, and they'd require constant improvement to keep the roving bandits at bay.
- nyanpasu64 6y ago
  > Gmail's spam filtering. Recaptcha's bot rejection. > Facebook's identity verification. The ability to choose an identity online not connected to your legal or in-person name, to make it more difficult to find and stalk you in person, is a feature, not a bug.
  - jbay808 6y ago
    I don't disagree, but a lot of websites these days choose to offload their login systems to Google and Facebook to certify that a unique human is on the other end. It solves real problems for them like password management, bot detection, astroturfing, sockpuppetry, stolen accounts, and so on. For these purposes, an actual Real Verified Name is overkill, and a unique identity number would be enough. But Facebook offers that service for Free(TM) so there's not much incentive to the site operator to aim for something more minimal. And with GPT-3 and other systems inching closer to passing the Turing test, this only makes alternatives more challenging for them. Those are problems in the Wild West that would need solutions if we were to reclaim the net from Facebook and Google.
    - kodah 6y ago
      What links those accounts is not special, it's OAuth2. I don't think there's anything stopping different groups from running open OAuth2 endpoints that just provide a PGP based identity service. I actually wondered why Keybase didn't start an OAuth2 endpoint, because it'd put a big dent in some of the services you described.

by kodah 6y ago

naringas 6y ago

imo the need for 'centralization' comes from the fact that in order for different people to understand each other, they must use the same dictionary (so to say). So the 'dictionary' is a centralized construction. It must be the same for everybody. If our dictionaries vary to much in their definitions then our communication becomes more and more difficult. Maybe dictionary is not the best analogy (this is just an analogy) but I hope I'm getting my point across with this example.

neltnerb 6y ago
I used the internet without facebook before it existed. I had a Facebook account for over a decade. I haven't had a Facebook account in two years. To the extent that what you are saying is true, it is only true because these companies have walled themselves off. You used to be able to chat with Facebook users over XMPP even.
- kodah 6y ago
  Yeah, I agree. If I remember XMPP was dropped while using that old adage of "scale", which maybe was real, but in the end the net effect is the same. Advanced users know a broader breadth of the internet while most internet users only know the depth of Facebook and other various platforms.
  - neltnerb 6y ago
    I guess once they got big enough there was no longer a point in interoperability, it seems like a pretty big phase transition got hit about a decade ago where suddenly each walled garden got big and valuable enough that isolation was a better strategy for them. It just sucks for the internet. I don't think, if those companies ceased to exist, that they would automatically get recreated because of some inevitable niche or market law. I think that they got where they are because of a fluke of the times they were created in -- people could not grasp how they make money.
kodah 6y ago
I understand the motivation. I work on platforms teams internally for companies (and have for a number of years). In smaller scale, this concept largely makes sense because developers at a single company come from a single culture which those developers largely have already bought into or are actively being shoveled into by corporate work. This is the role a lot of developer advocates play at companies who don't have external developer customers. In large scale, what you're asking is more dubious. If you concede that the United States alone has 11 major cultures, then you have to begin a process of "on-boarding" everyone onto your new, structured culture that your platform is designed around. That's why these debates about who is represented in the building of the platform come about, because under that model those concerns take center stage and they should. I guess what I'm saying is the whole problem never needed to exist. There's better ways to share information than being on one platform.

jbay808 6y ago

I definitely think that what you're saying is true, and is part of the explanation. But another part is that the Wild West internet also had its own major issues -- roving bandits, to carry the analogy -- and these big companies did solve real problems that were only growing with time. Gmail's spam filtering. Recaptcha's bot rejection. Facebook's identity verification. Paypal's secure credit card processing. Google de-ranking link farms. Youtube's hosting costs. All of these very effectively solved real problems with the old web, and those problems were growing as bad actors became more sophisticated. I like the old web too, but I do appreciate that an attempt to return to it would still require very effective tools to solve at least some of these problems, and they'd require constant improvement to keep the roving bandits at bay.

nyanpasu64 6y ago
> Gmail's spam filtering. Recaptcha's bot rejection. > Facebook's identity verification. The ability to choose an identity online not connected to your legal or in-person name, to make it more difficult to find and stalk you in person, is a feature, not a bug.
- jbay808 6y ago
  I don't disagree, but a lot of websites these days choose to offload their login systems to Google and Facebook to certify that a unique human is on the other end. It solves real problems for them like password management, bot detection, astroturfing, sockpuppetry, stolen accounts, and so on. For these purposes, an actual Real Verified Name is overkill, and a unique identity number would be enough. But Facebook offers that service for Free(TM) so there's not much incentive to the site operator to aim for something more minimal. And with GPT-3 and other systems inching closer to passing the Turing test, this only makes alternatives more challenging for them. Those are problems in the Wild West that would need solutions if we were to reclaim the net from Facebook and Google.
  - kodah 6y ago
    What links those accounts is not special, it's OAuth2. I don't think there's anything stopping different groups from running open OAuth2 endpoints that just provide a PGP based identity service. I actually wondered why Keybase didn't start an OAuth2 endpoint, because it'd put a big dent in some of the services you described.