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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 issue

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.
  - nyanpasu64 6y ago
    I see GitHub OAuth logins in some programmer-centric websites. I prefer that over Google login (and god forbid Facebook). It's just as bad from a login-centralization perspective, but GitHub allows you to control your identity freely, instead of mandating (and more-or-less enforcing) your legal name like Facebook. (Google no longer rejects or bans you for fake-sounding names, ever since the Google+ controversy, but it still enforces a Western-style first/last name instead of other cultures' name formats or single-part usernames.)
    - xenophonf 6y ago
      WebAuthn is right there and built into Windows 10 and macOS now. I don't understand why it isn't seeing more adoption.
skratlo 6y ago
I don't think you're right. > Facebook's identity verification in real life, do you need to know the real name of the cashier and see their contract so you can trust them with your payment? You don't, you use common sense. > Google de-ranking link farms hey, haha, and what do we get instead? Monopoly on ad-driven search engine, great, I'd rather have link farms since I can easily filter those out with little brain-power. I can't do that with paid-for-propaganda Now imagine we'd leave the way it was, people would learn how to deal with it, the same way you learned you can't leave unlocked bicycle in a city. It's a price to pay for anonymity, and we should all have right to be anonymous on internet.
- dhimes 6y ago
  Yeah, Google kind of created the link-farm ecosystem because it rewarded links— again, without verification etc. but just algorithmically.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
kodah 6y ago
100%, I agree, going back to the Wild Wild West probably isn't the thing to do, but I think we can look at decentralization through the lens of modern tools for a brighter and more equitable future for the internets new and old denizens. A couple of ideas I've had: - Leverage PGP and trust rings for identity without a need for non-anonymity. This could be structured in a nuanced manner so that we respect pseudo-anonymity while also maintaining the integrity that real identity brings. - A wholesale education of the populace, instead of an education by fear, of the power of anonymity and services which further anonymity. - A move away from the advertising and services-exploitation business model. Not that we can't have service oriented businesses, but those businesses cannot be exploiting people to do labor and a bottom line price. - A data ownership model which establishes a monetary value for different types of data. We already do data classification inside mega-corps, and we're able to establish and correlate it's sensitivity. Extrapolating this to value would not be stretch. Users consent which data they give up in exchange for services. The price for the service is adjusted based on what data they give up, and how they choose it will be used (Data for marketing may be more valuable than say data for behavior research, or even vice versa!)
jjav 6y ago
I believe this is an overly rosy-glasses view of the current heavily centralized internet. Gmail spam filtering? Isn't particularly good. I run my own email infrastructure and I get way less spam through it than on my gmail address. And I don't do anything particularly special other than configure postfix correctly. Recaptcha? Was there ever a more hated piece of user abusive technology? Plenty of rage against it here in many discussions. I won't do business anymore with any site that won't let me buy without identifying 27 traffic lights in slow motion (looking at you adorama). We're all better off if this dies. Facebook verification? Don't know what value this brings to anyone other than FB. Youtube? Granted.. Hopefully with bandwidth costs reducing over time, decentralization becomes more viable. Paypal? Always pay with credit card directly. The regulatory consumer protection for that was well in place before internet commerce even took off. The original potential of the internet was in its fully decentralized functionality. Usenet being a great example (owned by nobody, hosted peer to peer) which should be studied a bit more now that we have generations of developers coming up never having known it. Of course, it was (mostly) overrun by spam. But unlike email where spam is pretty much defeated, there was never a meaningful effort in addressing spam on Usenet (forums and mailing lists took over instead). Applying the same techniques to NNTP could well be equally successful. If there is any desire to avoid the internet becoming fully a new cable-tv controlled by just a few major player we need to pursue research into decentralized services as a priority. (If nothing else, consider at least running your own email infrastructure if you're technically capable. Keep the foot in the door so it doesn't close permanently.)
- jbay808 6y ago
  It's more of an attempt at a steelman. Just for the record, I don't like the current centralized internet; I've all but deactivated my facebook account; when a site requires a Google or Facebook verified login ID without their own "create account" option I avoid them at all costs; I avoid Paypal now because there are better alternatives (but in the early '00s, I would not have trusted most sites enough to pay with a card). And so on. I'm not trying to advocate for their position, but just understand the problems that they solve and why we got here. And while I hate using recaptcha, I also had the even more unpleasant experience of watching a forum that I moderated die under a crushing assault of spam bots that were smart enough to make it past the built-in CAPTCHA. Recaptcha isn't there to solve problems for the people who interact with it, it's solving problems for the people who chose to put it on their site. I wrote in a sibling comment what value Facebook's login brings to the sites that opt into it. (Offload all the work of password handling, claims about stolen accounts, preventing sockpuppetry and catfishing, etc).

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.
- nyanpasu64 6y ago
  I see GitHub OAuth logins in some programmer-centric websites. I prefer that over Google login (and god forbid Facebook). It's just as bad from a login-centralization perspective, but GitHub allows you to control your identity freely, instead of mandating (and more-or-less enforcing) your legal name like Facebook. (Google no longer rejects or bans you for fake-sounding names, ever since the Google+ controversy, but it still enforces a Western-style first/last name instead of other cultures' name formats or single-part usernames.)
  - xenophonf 6y ago
    WebAuthn is right there and built into Windows 10 and macOS now. I don't understand why it isn't seeing more adoption.

skratlo 6y ago

I don't think you're right. > Facebook's identity verification in real life, do you need to know the real name of the cashier and see their contract so you can trust them with your payment? You don't, you use common sense. > Google de-ranking link farms hey, haha, and what do we get instead? Monopoly on ad-driven search engine, great, I'd rather have link farms since I can easily filter those out with little brain-power. I can't do that with paid-for-propaganda Now imagine we'd leave the way it was, people would learn how to deal with it, the same way you learned you can't leave unlocked bicycle in a city. It's a price to pay for anonymity, and we should all have right to be anonymous on internet.

dhimes 6y ago
Yeah, Google kind of created the link-farm ecosystem because it rewarded links— again, without verification etc. but just algorithmically.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

kodah 6y ago

100%, I agree, going back to the Wild Wild West probably isn't the thing to do, but I think we can look at decentralization through the lens of modern tools for a brighter and more equitable future for the internets new and old denizens. A couple of ideas I've had: - Leverage PGP and trust rings for identity without a need for non-anonymity. This could be structured in a nuanced manner so that we respect pseudo-anonymity while also maintaining the integrity that real identity brings. - A wholesale education of the populace, instead of an education by fear, of the power of anonymity and services which further anonymity. - A move away from the advertising and services-exploitation business model. Not that we can't have service oriented businesses, but those businesses cannot be exploiting people to do labor and a bottom line price. - A data ownership model which establishes a monetary value for different types of data. We already do data classification inside mega-corps, and we're able to establish and correlate it's sensitivity. Extrapolating this to value would not be stretch. Users consent which data they give up in exchange for services. The price for the service is adjusted based on what data they give up, and how they choose it will be used (Data for marketing may be more valuable than say data for behavior research, or even vice versa!)

jjav 6y ago

I believe this is an overly rosy-glasses view of the current heavily centralized internet. Gmail spam filtering? Isn't particularly good. I run my own email infrastructure and I get way less spam through it than on my gmail address. And I don't do anything particularly special other than configure postfix correctly. Recaptcha? Was there ever a more hated piece of user abusive technology? Plenty of rage against it here in many discussions. I won't do business anymore with any site that won't let me buy without identifying 27 traffic lights in slow motion (looking at you adorama). We're all better off if this dies. Facebook verification? Don't know what value this brings to anyone other than FB. Youtube? Granted.. Hopefully with bandwidth costs reducing over time, decentralization becomes more viable. Paypal? Always pay with credit card directly. The regulatory consumer protection for that was well in place before internet commerce even took off. The original potential of the internet was in its fully decentralized functionality. Usenet being a great example (owned by nobody, hosted peer to peer) which should be studied a bit more now that we have generations of developers coming up never having known it. Of course, it was (mostly) overrun by spam. But unlike email where spam is pretty much defeated, there was never a meaningful effort in addressing spam on Usenet (forums and mailing lists took over instead). Applying the same techniques to NNTP could well be equally successful. If there is any desire to avoid the internet becoming fully a new cable-tv controlled by just a few major player we need to pursue research into decentralized services as a priority. (If nothing else, consider at least running your own email infrastructure if you're technically capable. Keep the foot in the door so it doesn't close permanently.)

jbay808 6y ago
It's more of an attempt at a steelman. Just for the record, I don't like the current centralized internet; I've all but deactivated my facebook account; when a site requires a Google or Facebook verified login ID without their own "create account" option I avoid them at all costs; I avoid Paypal now because there are better alternatives (but in the early '00s, I would not have trusted most sites enough to pay with a card). And so on. I'm not trying to advocate for their position, but just understand the problems that they solve and why we got here. And while I hate using recaptcha, I also had the even more unpleasant experience of watching a forum that I moderated die under a crushing assault of spam bots that were smart enough to make it past the built-in CAPTCHA. Recaptcha isn't there to solve problems for the people who interact with it, it's solving problems for the people who chose to put it on their site. I wrote in a sibling comment what value Facebook's login brings to the sites that opt into it. (Offload all the work of password handling, claims about stolen accounts, preventing sockpuppetry and catfishing, etc).