22 ms·

Why do I care the open web is dying?

390 points by archajain 6y ago

fractionalhare 6y ago
This article starts by citing problems which could be solved using a more "open web." But then the author proposes their own centralized discovery service, Insight, as an aggregated platform for comparison. It seems pretty obvious that the endgame of this product would be just another Amazon. Why would it turn out any differently for the "curators" on the Insight "platform"? Beyond that the author's specific arguments don't feel very convincing to me: > Think about the last time you did some research, e.g. choosing a phone plan. You asked your friends, compared on forums, looked at the official sites, scribbled some notes and made a decision. Even if this journey was quick, you likely traversed a dozen services and products to do this. The only site I went to is reddit. reddit is where I go to get on the ground crowdsourced recommendations (e.g. I buy coffee equipment by researching on r/coffee). In fact I avoid searching for this kind of thing widely, because I get a bunch of random blogs and content marketing sites of questionable provenance and accuracy. > Over the years you keep shopping there, until you've forgotten that - free 2 day shipping is now near universal - amazon isn't often the cheapest place Well no, free 2 day shipping is not "near universal." I still find most sites which aren't themselves backed by giant corporations (and even so which are!) don't even have multiple shipping speed options, let alone free 2 day shipping. I also have a degree of trust in Prime shipping and I've never personally had a painful experience returning anything to Amazon.
- pretendscholar 6y ago
  Wait until reddit is fully captured by the groups that do that sort of content marketing.
  - fractionalhare 6y ago
    Yeah, that might happen. I'd have to find an alternative in that case. Whatever I replace it with would probably still be another highly centralized source though.
  - MattGaiser 6y ago
    I know a couple of people who go through these types of Reddit threads and embed referral links into their answers. Quora is already filled with growth hacker answers. We are more captured than we think.
    - fractionalhare 6y ago
      Doesn't reddit automatically strip referral links and put in their own? I thought they started doing that a few years ago as a monetization strategy but I could be wrong.
      - csa 6y ago
        The content marketers have had a work around for that for years. Just answer the asked question relatively narrowly, then link to a detailed write up on their affiliate site. Note that the article may have already been there (not that uncommon), but sometimes the article was custom-written for that specific reddit post. It is really tough for reddit to capture money from these posts or prevent links to the affiliate site because the content marketer is providing (perhaps minimal) value to the community, and a link to their more detailed response is usually not a link that will get reported or deleted because it prevents "walls of text"/detailed answers that some redditors seem to despise.
        TeMPOraL 6y ago
        Does anybody click on such articles? I'd think any subreddit I used for product recommendation would immediately delete such comment and ban the author. I'd also think content marketers would be smarter than to do that.
        csa 6y ago
        Yes. It really depends on if it looks scammy or not. Some criteria: 1. The question asked on Reddit needs to be answered completely on Reddit — that is, without a need to click on a link. 2. The linked article need to be relevant and informative to the asked question, while also providing more relevant information than was originally asked for but might actually be desired. If all of these links to articles were instantly deleted, then it would be a disservice to the community. 3. Some subreddits are absolutely sticklers about affiliate sites, and I imagine affiliate marketers avoid them. Moderation is not easy, but it does require a balance between meeting the needs of the passive users and the content creators.
  - tw25261371 6y ago
    Reddit, along with Wikipedia, seems to have already slowly been claimed by groups pushing you to buy, only they're seeking something besides (direct) transfer of stuff for cash: buy-in and validation of which political positions are even valid to consider holding, let alone actually adopting. I'm on the left myself (although I think in terms of being liberal first over being "a part of the left"), and as Jon Stewart said during simpler times, "Reality has a liberal bias!", so I don't see it as much a direct threat to my existence as say a center-right conservative would, but oh geez. It's been getting really intense over the last year or two. Over the summer I was listening to a podcast where someone was discussing the remarks of a non-partisan entity (can't remember who, but the podcast itself was The Fifth Column), and the hosts referred to the undertones of those remarks as having an "implied 'we'". Because the fervor doesn't match what I see in real life, I really do wonder how much of what's happening reflects actual public sentiment, and how much of it is the result of more subtle, nefarious things at play. I recently found a Wikipedia article where some media organization had published an interview with a public entertainer, only rather than linking to this interview, the Wikipedia article in an attempt to cite a reference for the entertainer's quote linked instead to a Vox article that was, in consideration of prosaic matters alone, much worse than the original source. Of course it was really heavy-handed, too, and overstuffed with "implied 'we'". How did that happen, that piece getting linked in place of the original? Was it the result of laziness, ignorance, or something more intentional? I didn't dive into it (too much of a quagmire to try to wade in and correct it, either), but I wouldn't doubt if there was some monetary cause related to the big business of politics. It's certainly happening in other places.
    - cthor 6y ago
      It's probably related to their policy of preferring secondary sources[1]. (Without a link to the article in question though I can only guess.) You could argue this is a bad policy, but it's certainly not a new one. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_original_research#Primary,_secondary_and_tertiary_sources https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_original_research...
      - tw25261371 6y ago
  - quantummkv 6y ago
    I'd argue that is already is. Wasn't there some big controversy about a SuperMod that was paid by companies to manage Reddit for them all day? The only place left for good recommendations is the same place that was good for it all those years ago - closed small niche forums (discord servers fill that gap nowdays) and personal recommendations by people you know in real life
- klerpi 6y ago
  When I want to search "the best something", the query is always preceded by "site:reddit.com". It's really hard to get an honest review otherwise. But considering how easy it is to game reddit I'm not so sure I can trust it anymore. All r/hailcorporate I guess...
  - abhinavsharma 6y ago
    Hi, blog post OP here. While Reddit has its own challenges, it proven quite resilient to this particular form of content quality drop. We found that this is such a common workflow with our first few users that we've built it in as a default search engine suggestion and also I wrote this extension for it that we use. http://share.insightbrowser.com/4 http://share.insightbrowser.com/4
  - eng2prog 6y ago
    Yeah I seen if you post a specific corporation name, your topic will be bombarded by some companies astroturfing. You bet every fortune 500 company has a reputation management company willing to "guide the conversation" with a few positive comments and a barrage of upvotes/downvoted.
- dnautics 6y ago
  > I also shop at Amazon because I have a degree of trust in Prime items and I've never personally had a painful experience returning something. My degree of trust in prime is rapidly eroding and returning things is painful in general (because it's a physical item, not because it's amazon)
  - RandallBrown 6y ago
    I ordered a small food scale to replace one I thought I had lost in a move. Of course the day the replacement arrived, my wife pulled the old one out of the closet she had stashed it in. I went to return the one I just bought and Amazon simply said to keep it and they would refund me because it wasn't worth shipping back to them. Obviously won't work for everything and I imagine if I do that very often they won't let me anymore, but it's the best return experience I've ever had.
    - s5300 6y ago
      I accidentally ordered $200 worth of items through prime pantry, 95% non-perishables (including 24pk Monster, Solo cups, paper plates/bowls) to my home in the MidWest instead of where I was at on the West Coast. 2 minute phonecall, said keep everything and instantly refunded the entire order as a credit (my choice) Luckily had somebody to bring everything inside back home too, haha.
  - cortesoft 6y ago
    I use the "return at Kohl's" option for amazon items, and it has been super easy. Don't even have to box the item up.
- aaron32311 6y ago
  Anecdotally I got some great recommendations to gym equipment on Twitter. I tweeted what was best for small space living and got great responses immediately.
- tayo42 6y ago
  > reddit is where I go to get on the ground crowdsourced recommendations I would be careful about this on reddit. Subreddit communities are heavily influenced by fotm, everyone repeating the same thing(there's a word for this and i cant think of it...) Dissenting opinions to what ever is main stream gets downvoted. Reddit communities are also heavy on beginners. Those beginners often don't realize how much depth of knowledge they are missing. It might be a place to bounce ideas off, but I would only go there after doing some of my own research. It should only be one tool of many. In areas I consider myself knowledgeable, I see terrible advice given out. Often parroted by beginners. Like people in the headphone subreddit can give recommendations without listening to them. cscareerquestions is the blind leading the blind more often then not. There's no way to differentiate experience with someone fishing for upvotes or think they're being helpful by repeating someone else's advice. I also think there's some astroturfing going on sometimes
  - BalinKing 6y ago
    > everyone repeating the same thing Maybe "hive mind" is what you were thinking of (at least, I see it a lot in reference to Reddit)?
    - rei0 6y ago
      I think it's called "echo chamber".
      - tayo42 6y ago
        yes there it is, though the other is accurate too
  - Threeve303 6y ago
    > I also think there's some astroturfing going on sometimes Marketing companies figured this out a long time ago. Even HN had a headline recently that was something like "use subreddits to drive app adoption".
  - lame-robot-hoax 6y ago
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago
  > I've never personally had a painful experience returning anything to Amazon. This is the number one reason I buy from Amazon. 90% of the time, it doesn't make a difference for me whether my purchase arrives in 2 days or 4 days. What matters is that if I do not like it, it is super simple and convenient for me to return it. I don't even have to put it in a box of print a label these days. I can just take the items to UPS or Kohl's, show them my phone code, and give it to them. No other online retailer comes close to this level of convenience for returns.
- abhinavsharma 6y ago
  Hi, and thanks for the feedback! I'm the original author of that post. > Insight, as an aggregated platform for comparison. It seems pretty obvious that the endgame of this product would be just another Amazon. Why would it turn out any differently for the "curators" on the Insight "platform"? Perhaps some of the writing was unclear, but I just wanted to clarify that Insight the is not a centralized service. It's an extensible mobile browser where you can choose as the user what the alternative services will be. We suggest a few out of the box because we think that's important to making extensions lower friction and easier to discover, but ultimately you can override them with your own choice. I think this is important to give the user that power in client app, and our schema for extensions is expressible in JSON for interoperability. Thanks for the comment and for pointing this out!
aaron32311 6y ago
I think these walled gardens show how important distribution is. Everyone complaints about record labels but artists are still signing onto deals. With some talent and the right amount of luck (discoverability), unheard of people can float to the top.
hlieberman 6y ago
I hope their programmers are better than their lawyers; the terms of service for their website require you to attest that "you are a physician or other healthcare professional". (https://insight.space/terms https://insight.space/terms)
- MattGaiser 6y ago
  Where is that? I cannot find it.
  - hlieberman 6y ago
    They deleted it -- but you can still tell it was there. Look at the last paragraph in '1. Access to services'. The list beginning 'You represent and warrant to Company that' is missing an element because they deleted without reindexing. It looks like they copied the terms of service directly from another one of their products, a browser for doctors: https://www.lumosbrowser.com/terms.pdf https://www.lumosbrowser.com/terms.pdf This also explains the broken formatting: they copied from a PDF.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
wrycoder 6y ago
I never use the Amazon app on my iPhone. I much prefer using the information dense webpage, even though I have to hold it in landscape and zoom around. I would be offended if Amazon decided to nanny me and change the experience, simply because it detected I was using a mobile screen. OTOH, the Amazon Prime Video app is great, much better than the desktop website.
- coldtea 6y ago
  >I never use the Amazon app on my iPhone. I much prefer using the information dense webpage, even though I have to hold it in landscape and zoom around. Yes, but that's a usability choice. What if the app was better and faster, usability wise, than the web page?
euske 6y ago
I was kinda surprised that the phrase "long tail" didn't come up in the OP. I think that the author's point can be well summed up as "the open web protects the long tail / diversity". After all, why diversity is good for the society overall is a tricky question to answer.
- fireattack 6y ago
  >After all, why diversity is good for the society overall is a tricky question to answer. Indeed. There are plenty of cultures seem to value "homogeneity" over diversity (at least by Western's world standard).
  - Technically 6y ago
    This sounds like it's true, but I haven't seen convincing evidence that "western culture" is particularly concerned with "diversity" at all (outside of PR culture), or that other such "homogenous" cultures have significantly less tolerance for "diversity". If someone is arguing for diversity in good faith they can explain exactly what kind of diversity they're arguing for and why. Japan, for instance, appears culturally homogenous only until you compare culture across economic classes; only a very shallow definition of diversity would fail to capture this. In fact, that's true for many societies. The quirk of america is that we've internalized the diversity of the working class as uniquely american, class be damned, even if that's trivially a false characterization of the upper class. American media is not careful about how they use the word, and does not call out substance-less uses of it, so it's become an easy target for mocking lack of substance in political and cultural discussions.
- Barrin92 6y ago
  because diversity is an information discovery mechanism. More (or different) eyes see more. Diversity makes it so that your company figures out that the soap dispenser doesn't recognise dark skinned people in development, not when it already lands on the store shelf.
- abhinavsharma 6y ago
  This phrase was definitely in the back of my mind while writing this and something I use in everyday conversation. I just hesitated to use it because its one of those terms that's very common in search but has mixed usage levels outside search/ml/stats/data people, and I wanted to focus this post primarily on the UX aspect.
forgotmypw17 6y ago
If you care about the Web's openness and accessibility, register your own domain, host it yourself, and write Lynx-compatible HTML. HTTP access for older browsers is a nice touch. If your site works with Netscape and Mosaic, it shows you mean business.
- aboringusername 6y ago
  How do you register a domain? Can I do this without using JS and Google knowing? What's that, I need to do a Captcha and use my real information so that if I post ANYTHING someone doesn't like I can be shot in the head once they find me via WHOIS which every LEA on the planet has access to? "Open", sure.
  - tannhaeuser 6y ago
    DNS and its per-TLD registration procedures/rules and mandatory protocols for transferring your domain to another registrar (depending on the respective TLD) are about as open as it gets. Which is probably why Google et al want to kill it via DNS-over-HTTP and complex amendments to the DNS protocols themselves.
- bitwize 6y ago
  Traffic to and from an HTTP site can be intercepted and spoofed by third parties. Use HTTPS, always and everywhere.
  - forgotmypw17 6y ago
    HTTPS has its own downsides, and I disagree that you should always use it. When accessibility is paramount, HTTP is still better, because the risk of MITM is overtaken by all the things that can break with HTTPS, such as: Wrong SSL version Client date is off Client doesn't have proper certs installed Server cert is broken or misconfigured SSL takes too long to set up over slow connection No one's going to MITM my blog, while using HTTPS often impairs my own ability to use it. Also, if you think HTTPS can't be intercepted and spoofed by anyone, you're kidding yourself.
zemo 6y ago
The three listed criteria (ease of publishing, consuming, and remixing) accurately describe TikTok, so ... I'm not convinced this is a particularly useful definition of "the open web".
screamingninja 6y ago
> Download the Insight Beta for iOS I thought the whole article was about how mobile apps are taking away from the open web.
chewzerita 6y ago
Okay so I just signed up for the beta of their web browser, why not give it a shot, right? It turns out that its just a reskin of mobile Firefox, with an extremely, and I mean extremely, limited if-then "extensions" feature. Doing a great job at "showcasing the web's infinite extensibility and customizability". They also tout the (Firefox's) adblocker, even going as far as to say it will "Block every ad..." on their marketing page (technically impossible). Just because a company has an orange Y on their homepage doesn't mean their product is good. I'm not saying that it won't be good in the future, but steer clear for now. Money got us into the mess we are in[1], it is up to the real[2] community to get us out. [1] Standardized DRM, the impossibility of building a browser engine, etc [2] By "real" I don't mean corporations that symbolically showcase their "<3 of open source", while profiting off of it
- abhinavsharma 6y ago
  Thanks for the feedback! As the site mentions, we're still in beta, so feedback is super helpful. 1. Yes, it's forked from Firefox, this is a fairly common starting codebase and compatible license for making a browser, Brave does the same thing. Also, I used to work at Mozilla so I trust their codebase a lot as a starting point. There's a lot more that Insight can do that Firefox doesn't but that isn't apparent, then I think the onus is on us for communicating that to new users better. 2. The AdBlocking ruleset is actually a superset of Firefox, but it is still limited by Safari's 50k rule limit — https://www.zdnet.com/article/apple-neutered-ad-blockers-in-safari-but-unlike-chrome-users-didnt-say-a-thing/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/apple-neutered-ad-blockers-in-... The main thing we can do to get in addition to this is the ability to inject JS (this is a class of extension) to block anything else you see fit. 3. Apple enforces OS and API level restrictions on a browser, (e.g. must use WKWebView). There's some things you just can't do that you could if you say forked Chromium or Firefox on desktop. In general, we're trying to make a browser within the UI and technical constraints of iOS that is 1. very easy to build extensions for (usually no code) 2. has an easy to use interface without the complexity of desktop extensions In order to achieve that, we did have to simplify compared to WebExtensions. Even though the basic interface is IF-THEN (we adopted this so the easiest level of making extensions can be no-code), you should be able to do a lot with it via JS. Let me know if there's important use cases you have that you have for a mobile browser that you feel is impossible within our framework — that'd be really helpful feedback as well. Thanks for trying it out! > Money got us into the mess we are in[1], it is up to the real[2] community to get us out. I would state this as - enabling businesses to be as extractive as they currently are got us into a difficult place. People I know hold views on what can get us out on the full range from: a)the solutions having to be structurally decentralized to b) only heavy centralization can wield enough distribution power to mount a strong opposition. The position we're taking as a startup with this product is that we have to walk the walk of making the web actually more user-centric than the app alternatives because there's really no reason to adopt us unless we deliver on these promises.
fabrice_d 6y ago
The article states that one strong characteristic of the open web is: "Ease of publishing: anyone can publish to it freely or at least very cheaply, and is on the same footing with a globally accessible URL" I'm working on a web-based OS (KaiOS), and let me tell you that many app authors actually see the need to setup hosting as a hurdle. Being able to just upload a package to a store is seen as the ultimate "easy publishing". Yes they lose some control, but they don't feel they need it in the first place.
- teruakohatu 6y ago
  Distribution of applications is only a subset of publishing. Mobile app developers often willing live in the walled garden because it is easier and more profitable, at least initially.
eng2prog 6y ago
For starters let's stop using "Walled garden" as the phrasing. "Absolute dictatorship" is more like it. The users and developers are at the will of our FAANG dictators. As much as I hate Google for getting rid of services, I love how easy it is to distribute apks without Google. And if you play ball with Apple, you are encouraging the problem.
gfxgirl 6y ago
What evidence is there the open web is dying? At least here on HN I'd categorize 25 of the top 30 links as open web links.
- tiborsaas 6y ago
  Evidence is not provided since it's not dying. With the sentiment that the title suggests is really easy to attract attention compared to a happy and optimistic title which says the everything is fine.
mulmen 6y ago
There’s a lot of talk in the HN comment section recently about the death of general computing and the open web. I’m not convinced. There’s definitely closed platforms both hard and soft but the web still exists and general purpose computers are still available. When I see these complaints I see people talking about how they want other people to use the Internet and computers. That smells like authoritarianism. If you want to contribute to an open web then do it. It’s not your job to get our metaphorical racist uncles on mastodon or something. Why would you even want that? The romanticized “old web” was just a product of massive selection bias that still exists. If you want that experience it is still out there. Just stop worrying about what other people are doing.
- chii 6y ago
  > they want other people to use the Internet and computers.' they want other people's content to be available on the open web (not just their own content).
  - fractalb 6y ago
    > they want other people's content to be available on the open web (not just their own content). It’s precisely because of that the biggest corps of the current day came into existence. Is it even possible for Google, Amazon, Facebook to become this big without the free software that was available on the web?
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - mulmen 6y ago
      Could free software exist without closed hardware and software? Was anything created in an ideologically pure vacuum?
      - anonymou2 6y ago
        Originally all software was free, it just wasn't called that because there was no closed software. It was shared like cooking recipes.
RestlessMind 6y ago
Doing interesting things on open web today is about as hard as it was in 2000.
Kirr 6y ago
The article presents a dichotomy between "web" and "app". This fails for users who consider a web browser itself to be an "app", which is indeed well suited for solving a problem of "browsing web". For as long as this problem remains well solved by a specialized app (browser), I don't need any redundant tools for e.g. reading news, interacting with communities, etc.
piyushpr134 6y ago
I wrote a blog about this in 2015. In developing economies like India, this trend is more pronounced due to rapid adoption of mobile apps http://pranjan.blogspot.com/2015/04/is-app-only-economy-going-to-kill.html http://pranjan.blogspot.com/2015/04/is-app-only-economy-goin...
paultopia 6y ago
Quibble, but... free 2 day shipping is now near universal ... uh, since when? Maybe for giant companies that can get sweetheart deals from FedEx or just build out their own last mile networks. But for all the small companies actually associated with the open web shipping still costs almost as much as the thing you're trying to buy.
Teknoman117 6y ago
I don't understand why people keep making the jump that net neutrality means that ISPs and companies can't come to a deal that makes their websites "work faster." I'm totally onboard that charging more or less for specific websites is a nasty move, but streaming systems wouldn't be nearly as workable if being able to place hardware in network POPs wasn't allowed.
- Ensorceled 6y ago
  > I'm totally onboard that charging more or less for specific websites is a nasty move, but streaming systems wouldn't be nearly as workable if being able to place hardware in network POPs wasn't allowed. Well, it isn't allowed. For most of us. Try it. Ask a major ISP if you can install hardware in their NOC. They'll say no. Unless you are a Netflix, YouTube or Prime and can both pay and have traffic is so large that the ISP will save money allowing it. Now try to compete as a new entrant into the space when your competition has actual hardware embedded at the ISP level.
yangvz 6y ago
It's too late to try to revive the open web and what not. Its death was already an obvious trend when Jobs introduced iPhone.
mdoms 6y ago
This is just an ad.
masa331 6y ago
Reading people complaining how open web is dying is like listening to my uncle whining about his job as a butcher and miserable life in general. Yet he goes to supermarket every day to buy a cheap meat and salami to make a "good meal" and spends the rest of his day sitting in front of TV drinking beer and vodka. Every day. Web is still the same. There are walled gardens and there are gardens without walls. And that is a manifestation of openess. Everybody can build anything and hang around anywhere he pleases. What a beautiful and truly open world. This article is mostly ad to a browser. That's another manifestation how open web is. You. can. make. own. browsers.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- pumpkingsanew 6y ago
  >You. can. make. own. browsers With the growing marketshare of chromium-only based browsers, I'm concerned that this will not be the case for long. It doesen't matter how many browsers there are if they can't implement the monopoly's proprietary standards
  - masa331 6y ago
    What proprietary standards do you mean? Web technologies aren't proprietary.
    - aboringusername 6y ago
      Great. Go build me a browser capable of streaming 4k video across all major streaming providers and accessing Windvine DRM (all levels). Oh, and make it work flawlessly across every site (including the top 10,000 alexa sites) without any issues at all. And try and wade through the mountains of chroumium exclusive bullshit (Google makes the standards). Go talk to Mozilla about how easy that is (they even have to spoof UA strings to make things work properly). Good luck.
      - 6y ago
jhoechtl 6y ago
Blogs are a thing of the past. Forums dead. News-groups pale compared to what they used to be a decade ago. Instead we have twitter stories written in images, medium articles where I am asked to login and/or subscribe and Facebook groups open to those who want to participate in their ad machinery. When Googling for my hobbies, all I get are commercial web sites, no mor enews groups, fora, blogs, ... What a desaster.
throwawaygimp 6y ago
So decades of cooperation created the most incredible thing humans have created, then a bunch of kids come along and say 'Thanks! Fuck you. I'm just going to crap all over your efforts, profit from it, and there is nothing you can do about it'. Thanks Zuck. I'd love to see you sit down with some people I know who have spent their entire lives contributing to RFCs and actually building the open internet for everyone. These people aren't rich. They worked hard all their lives and lived with good values. It wasn't all wasted but you've massively devalued their work. I'd love to see you defend yourself to them, one on one. No PR people. Just techie on techie.
- epicureanideal 6y ago
  On the positive side, the people who are enjoying the walled gardens are probably not the people who would've participated in the open web with much positive outcome anyway. I'm actually quite happy that certain old-time online communities are available and haven't been swamped by all the people who are online merely to use the walled gardens. The open web can survive. And the 10% of people who will use it are the same 10% who would've used the open web to cooperative in a positive manner in the first place.
  - onion2k 6y ago
    On the positive side, the people who are enjoying the walled gardens are probably not the people who would've participated in the open web with much positive outcome anyway. That's a false dichotomy. It's not a choice between "open and hard to participate in" versus "closed but user friendly". There's no reason why the web can't be open and cater for users who want to have easy-to-use and enjoyable experiences like Facebook and YouTube. The only thing necessary for that to happen is for companies like Facebook and Google to make it possible to connect with things outside of their sites in meaningful ways.
    - yoz-y 6y ago
      Shouldn’t the onus be on the open platform to become attractive and provide services that a closed platform can’t or won’t?
forgotmypw17 6y ago
(Copied) The Web itself remains, and so does the freedom to write compatible code. This wonderful, miraculous platform has remained stable enough over this time for me to be able to plan ahead and not be caught off-guard by something like “we’re deprecating version 2.0, please use new version 3.0 syntax” or “your platform is now obsolete, please switch to the new HTML.NET”. The W3C gang tries, and they fail, because HTML is stronger and bigger than them. The Web is stronger and bigger than all of them combined. Many have tried to contain it, to own it, to be the main one calling the shots, and HTML laughs in all their collective faces. All thanks to its basic concept of “be strict with yourself, and accepting with others.” Mosaic was the first browser for which “best viewed with” buttons were used. They failed to own the Web. Then came Netscape, “Mosaic killa”, and they managed to kill Mosaic, but they failed to tame HTML, because HTML will not be owned. Netscape was destroyed by Microsoft-IE, who also wanted to tame and own HTML, and they also failed, because HTML is not ownable. Then Firefox came and fucked up IE, and things were good for a while, Mozilla was a decent steward. Then Google came and took ownership of Mozilla, and together with Chrome they also tried to tame HTML. They will fail just like the others. HTML cannot be tamed or owned. The Web was built for freedom. If you want composable, future-proof GUI, open up your notepad.exe and write this: <html> <head> <title>Hello, World!</title> </head> <body> <h1>Hello, World!</h1> <p> This is demonstration of proper composable, future-proof, accessible GUI. </p> <form action="/"> <input type=text size=80 name=comment> <br> <input type=submit value=Go> </form> </body> </html> This GUI will work as expected and render in 25+ years worth of platform. And it could have been composed by a 10-year-old.
- dingaling 6y ago
  > This GUI will work as expected and render in 25+ years worth of platform It's not about syntax and language, it's about environment. Compile 10 lines of hello_world.c into an ARM executable and send it to a friend using a 'walled garden' phone. It'll be useless to them even though it's technically correct. Likewise the Web is being continually tightened and centralised. That HTML you wrote will soon require an HTTPS server, probably in a VPS because many ISPs block port 443. And the VPS provider has implemented a captcha in front to reduce botting, which links your visitor's data to another huge Internet corporation. Open web?
xweb 6y ago
Well. This article conflates three different complaints as one problem. That their browser supposedly mitigates. There are good articles about the open web vs closed for-profit ecosystems. This is not one of those articles.
bvcvbuiy 6y ago
I have two personal websites. My main problem is that it is very hard to share them. Half of the subreddits don't accept links thanks to spammers. I don't use other social media... They are not the typical Hacker News link. Generally speaking, thanks to spammer linking has become impossible outside of social media platforms.
dimitar 6y ago
Maybe I'm an optimist but my guess is that as these companies begin to try harder to please shareholders (like the recent increase of YouTube ads), the walled gardens will become less attractive. Walled gardens aren't even something new, AOL was a walled garden example from the 90s and people moved on quickly to a more open web. What we need to ensure is that the open web is still technically feasible. I guess CDNs are not that important if your site isn't bloated, but it is a worrying trend.
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betwixthewires 6y ago
The open web isn't dying. It's just that everyone isn't using it daily. Think about this: back in the good old days that you harken back to when you say "open web", could you send your grandma a meme? No? So then what's wrong with the fact that the current open web is, although not all encompassing of internet users, many times larger than it was back then? Why do we say the real internet is dying just because the 5 most used websites aren't open? The open web is very, very open. But your mom doesn't use it to watch videos. You've got Gemini, ActivityPub, Tor, bittorrent, i2p, IPFS, OpenNIC, and hundreds of other cool things that nobody can stop or control. Many of these things are less than 10 years old. There's an open web, it is growing, it is rich with information, creativity and diversity (including diversity of thought for the monoculture members out there), and all you have to do to use it is to take an interest. If you don't like the closed web. Stop using it.
- DanBC 6y ago
  > back in the good old days that you harken back to when you say "open web", could you send your grandma a meme? No? Yes. You'd put it in email.
  - TeMPOraL 6y ago
    Hell, I remember as a kid in the 1990s, my dad would sometimes bring us memes... on paper. He worked in a bank, and back in those days, an e-mail chain full of jokes was common in an office environment. He'd occasionally print one out and show it to us.
    - raxxorrax 6y ago
      Office life was so much better back then. Now it is basically a fortress only a few chosen can flee from. I would like to give that back to the less fortunate, but there are other dynamics that make this very difficult. One think is certain though: It certainly didn't increase productivity.
shuringai 6y ago
> preach about the open web and breaking the habit of forcing publishers to pay in order to survive > "solution" is a pro-only subscription model
ngcc_hk 6y ago
It was dead long time ago. China shut it off in decades. I guess like history meant western history, philosophy meant western philosophy hence no one noticed it is mostly a way trip - chinese firm can freely roam internet (but not chinese) but western firm cannot roam there. In fact whilst not always if you start from us and uk some chinese firm now block you. It is like who, un, ... the stronger china meant a broken system as they are not really open up. Free trade if benefit then. No free information if not. After 2 decades and the west still not wake up. Good luck to humanity.
ngcc_hk 6y ago
The web is not that bad if you just look at the western side. There is no war in the western front. Just child play cf with the real war.
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keyle 6y ago
I don't know how we can get people to write protocols over writing products. Nowadays it's the natural evolution of thing, write a product from an idea, lock it down, and try to cash in as much as possible. There is no financially viable paths for writing protocols and open source implementations of an idea. At least there is no clear path and it's far less viable. Also seriously, who can be F'ed with RFCs.
sfg 6y ago
It might exist, but I couldn't find the URI of any RSS feed for this blog, but a link to their Twitter profile was easy to find, which, all together, given their open web advocacy, is odd.
jrockway 6y ago
To me, it's clear that discoverability is the problem with the open web. People are not willing to sink time and effort into creating something unless they have some assurance that they are going to get an audience. From a raw mechanics standpoint, it's relatively straightforward to put some content up on the Internet and give it a URL. But nobody will ever see it. That is why people put everything they do on some sort of site with discoverability. Streamers stream content on Twitch, because it has that sidebar with people playing the same game and your stream could show up there, and people might click it. People upload videos to YouTube because YouTube will figure out what kind of video it is and recommend it to people interested in that type of video. People post to Facebook and Twitter because their friends can retweet it and spread it around their sphere of influence. People upload their apps to the app store because that's where people go for apps. (This is not new. People that create physical products certainly want to have their product on store shelves, so that people can randomly discover it.) I think, honestly, Google cancelling Google Reader is what killed the open web. Google Reader made it easy for anyone to become a mini Facebook. If someone liked your writing, you were pretty much assured that they would be back when you wrote your next post. Google Reader gave them an app in which to random discover your next blog post, and there was enough stuff other than you in there to get people into the habit of checking for "something" every day (and that something was occasionally you). But, it is a little unfair to say that's what killed it. What killed it was a "better way". Social media pretty much guarantees that someone will see and engage with your work, and that's what motivates people to do work. If you can bring that to the open web, you'll kill Facebook and Twitter overnight. Good luck. (There are other things that contributed. One thing that bugs me in particular is Reddit's unwritten rule of not being allowed to submit your own work. Of course, there is too much spam when people submit their own stuff -- people are too emotionally invested in their creation to notice that it's bad or off-topic -- but it basically forces someone else to be the discoverability method. You have to post it to Twitter and hope that someone picks it up and puts it on Reddit. Or you have to build your audience some other way and make your own subreddit that people opt into. That sort of thing is helping social media and hurting the traditional link aggregator. HN does a much better job, but HN has the benefit of being relatively small, focused, and having professional moderation.)
harryf 6y ago
If I was going write a response to this it would be with the title "The Open Web is dead. Long live the Open Web" People often look to Tim Berners-Lee for thought leadership on the web, as the pioneer of hypertext and now director of the W3C. But if you read, say, Roy Fielding's REST paper you'd notice things like this https://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertation/rest_arch_style.htm#sec_5_2_1_1 https://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertation/rest_arc... (and remember Roy was a co-founder of the Apache HTTP Server and contributor to https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2616.txt https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2616.txt) "Since centralized link servers are an anathema to the immense scale and multi-organizational domain requirements of the Web, REST relies instead on the author choosing a resource identifier that best fits the nature of the concept being identified. Naturally, the quality of an identifier is often proportional to the amount of money spent to retain its validity, which leads to broken links as ephemeral (or poorly supported) information moves or disappears over time." The two things I take away here were... - The guys working on the fundamentals of the web at that time couldn't imagine it would be possible to scale centralised services to serve links - Money was a key consideration to determining "system quality" - they were not building utopian systems here - they knew there would be a relationship between which information would "succeed" and how much money was behind it That in turn means the key to making a "better open web" is making it more economically viable and able to out-compete existing centralized services. That doesn't necessarily mean "distributed web" is the right answer
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nunodonato 6y ago
This is a great reminder why I should continue to work on my rss-based "social network" :)
- pedro1976 6y ago
  I agree. An RSS-based social network is a network that you fully own. Unfortunately the subscription experience lacks of some aspects, e.g. engagement with other users/author is much harder. We should implement some tools to overcome this. For all the sites that lack of feed support use gap fillers [0], [1] and others. [0] https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge [1] https://github.com/damoeb/rss-proxy https://github.com/damoeb/rss-proxy
  - nunodonato 6y ago
    Well I'm adding extra meta data on top of feeds to add some more "social" aspects. Of course those remain centralized, but every persons' timeline is standard rss so you can read it anywhere
    - pedro1976 6y ago
      What kind of metadata do you add?
      - nunodonato 6y ago
        the social features: "likes", comments, reshares (still pondering on all this, not yet implemented)
        pedro1976 6y ago
        Very interesting, do you already have a placeholder repo, that I can watch?
        nunodonato 6y ago
yepthatsreality 6y ago
You should care because that little trick you used to hop careers into a successful programming career isn’t because Google and Apple built really cool and powerful software and phones.
einpoklum 6y ago
That article is part of a sales pitch for the "insight browser" - a browser for iOS. People who care about the Open Web should probably want to avoid a device manufactured by/for one of the companies which makes it a point to keep its users in a closed garden. Just saying.

390 points by archajain 6y ago

This article starts by citing problems which could be solved using a more "open web." But then the author proposes their own centralized discovery service, Insight, as an aggregated platform for comparison. It seems pretty obvious that the endgame of this product would be just another Amazon. Why would it turn out any differently for the "curators" on the Insight "platform"? Beyond that the author's specific arguments don't feel very convincing to me: > Think about the last time you did some research, e.g. choosing a phone plan. You asked your friends, compared on forums, looked at the official sites, scribbled some notes and made a decision. Even if this journey was quick, you likely traversed a dozen services and products to do this. The only site I went to is reddit. reddit is where I go to get on the ground crowdsourced recommendations (e.g. I buy coffee equipment by researching on r/coffee). In fact I avoid searching for this kind of thing widely, because I get a bunch of random blogs and content marketing sites of questionable provenance and accuracy. > Over the years you keep shopping there, until you've forgotten that - free 2 day shipping is now near universal - amazon isn't often the cheapest place Well no, free 2 day shipping is not "near universal." I still find most sites which aren't themselves backed by giant corporations (and even so which are!) don't even have multiple shipping speed options, let alone free 2 day shipping. I also have a degree of trust in Prime shipping and I've never personally had a painful experience returning anything to Amazon.

pretendscholar 6y ago
Wait until reddit is fully captured by the groups that do that sort of content marketing.
- fractionalhare 6y ago
  Yeah, that might happen. I'd have to find an alternative in that case. Whatever I replace it with would probably still be another highly centralized source though.
- MattGaiser 6y ago
  I know a couple of people who go through these types of Reddit threads and embed referral links into their answers. Quora is already filled with growth hacker answers. We are more captured than we think.
  - fractionalhare 6y ago
    Doesn't reddit automatically strip referral links and put in their own? I thought they started doing that a few years ago as a monetization strategy but I could be wrong.
    - csa 6y ago
      The content marketers have had a work around for that for years. Just answer the asked question relatively narrowly, then link to a detailed write up on their affiliate site. Note that the article may have already been there (not that uncommon), but sometimes the article was custom-written for that specific reddit post. It is really tough for reddit to capture money from these posts or prevent links to the affiliate site because the content marketer is providing (perhaps minimal) value to the community, and a link to their more detailed response is usually not a link that will get reported or deleted because it prevents "walls of text"/detailed answers that some redditors seem to despise.
      - TeMPOraL 6y ago
        Does anybody click on such articles? I'd think any subreddit I used for product recommendation would immediately delete such comment and ban the author. I'd also think content marketers would be smarter than to do that.
        csa 6y ago
        Yes. It really depends on if it looks scammy or not. Some criteria: 1. The question asked on Reddit needs to be answered completely on Reddit — that is, without a need to click on a link. 2. The linked article need to be relevant and informative to the asked question, while also providing more relevant information than was originally asked for but might actually be desired. If all of these links to articles were instantly deleted, then it would be a disservice to the community. 3. Some subreddits are absolutely sticklers about affiliate sites, and I imagine affiliate marketers avoid them. Moderation is not easy, but it does require a balance between meeting the needs of the passive users and the content creators.
- tw25261371 6y ago
  Reddit, along with Wikipedia, seems to have already slowly been claimed by groups pushing you to buy, only they're seeking something besides (direct) transfer of stuff for cash: buy-in and validation of which political positions are even valid to consider holding, let alone actually adopting. I'm on the left myself (although I think in terms of being liberal first over being "a part of the left"), and as Jon Stewart said during simpler times, "Reality has a liberal bias!", so I don't see it as much a direct threat to my existence as say a center-right conservative would, but oh geez. It's been getting really intense over the last year or two. Over the summer I was listening to a podcast where someone was discussing the remarks of a non-partisan entity (can't remember who, but the podcast itself was The Fifth Column), and the hosts referred to the undertones of those remarks as having an "implied 'we'". Because the fervor doesn't match what I see in real life, I really do wonder how much of what's happening reflects actual public sentiment, and how much of it is the result of more subtle, nefarious things at play. I recently found a Wikipedia article where some media organization had published an interview with a public entertainer, only rather than linking to this interview, the Wikipedia article in an attempt to cite a reference for the entertainer's quote linked instead to a Vox article that was, in consideration of prosaic matters alone, much worse than the original source. Of course it was really heavy-handed, too, and overstuffed with "implied 'we'". How did that happen, that piece getting linked in place of the original? Was it the result of laziness, ignorance, or something more intentional? I didn't dive into it (too much of a quagmire to try to wade in and correct it, either), but I wouldn't doubt if there was some monetary cause related to the big business of politics. It's certainly happening in other places.
  - cthor 6y ago
    It's probably related to their policy of preferring secondary sources[1]. (Without a link to the article in question though I can only guess.) You could argue this is a bad policy, but it's certainly not a new one. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_original_research#Primary,_secondary_and_tertiary_sources https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_original_research...
    - tw25261371 6y ago
- quantummkv 6y ago
  I'd argue that is already is. Wasn't there some big controversy about a SuperMod that was paid by companies to manage Reddit for them all day? The only place left for good recommendations is the same place that was good for it all those years ago - closed small niche forums (discord servers fill that gap nowdays) and personal recommendations by people you know in real life
klerpi 6y ago
When I want to search "the best something", the query is always preceded by "site:reddit.com". It's really hard to get an honest review otherwise. But considering how easy it is to game reddit I'm not so sure I can trust it anymore. All r/hailcorporate I guess...
- abhinavsharma 6y ago
  Hi, blog post OP here. While Reddit has its own challenges, it proven quite resilient to this particular form of content quality drop. We found that this is such a common workflow with our first few users that we've built it in as a default search engine suggestion and also I wrote this extension for it that we use. http://share.insightbrowser.com/4 http://share.insightbrowser.com/4
- eng2prog 6y ago
  Yeah I seen if you post a specific corporation name, your topic will be bombarded by some companies astroturfing. You bet every fortune 500 company has a reputation management company willing to "guide the conversation" with a few positive comments and a barrage of upvotes/downvoted.
dnautics 6y ago
> I also shop at Amazon because I have a degree of trust in Prime items and I've never personally had a painful experience returning something. My degree of trust in prime is rapidly eroding and returning things is painful in general (because it's a physical item, not because it's amazon)
- RandallBrown 6y ago
  I ordered a small food scale to replace one I thought I had lost in a move. Of course the day the replacement arrived, my wife pulled the old one out of the closet she had stashed it in. I went to return the one I just bought and Amazon simply said to keep it and they would refund me because it wasn't worth shipping back to them. Obviously won't work for everything and I imagine if I do that very often they won't let me anymore, but it's the best return experience I've ever had.
  - s5300 6y ago
    I accidentally ordered $200 worth of items through prime pantry, 95% non-perishables (including 24pk Monster, Solo cups, paper plates/bowls) to my home in the MidWest instead of where I was at on the West Coast. 2 minute phonecall, said keep everything and instantly refunded the entire order as a credit (my choice) Luckily had somebody to bring everything inside back home too, haha.
- cortesoft 6y ago
  I use the "return at Kohl's" option for amazon items, and it has been super easy. Don't even have to box the item up.
aaron32311 6y ago
Anecdotally I got some great recommendations to gym equipment on Twitter. I tweeted what was best for small space living and got great responses immediately.
tayo42 6y ago
> reddit is where I go to get on the ground crowdsourced recommendations I would be careful about this on reddit. Subreddit communities are heavily influenced by fotm, everyone repeating the same thing(there's a word for this and i cant think of it...) Dissenting opinions to what ever is main stream gets downvoted. Reddit communities are also heavy on beginners. Those beginners often don't realize how much depth of knowledge they are missing. It might be a place to bounce ideas off, but I would only go there after doing some of my own research. It should only be one tool of many. In areas I consider myself knowledgeable, I see terrible advice given out. Often parroted by beginners. Like people in the headphone subreddit can give recommendations without listening to them. cscareerquestions is the blind leading the blind more often then not. There's no way to differentiate experience with someone fishing for upvotes or think they're being helpful by repeating someone else's advice. I also think there's some astroturfing going on sometimes
- BalinKing 6y ago
  > everyone repeating the same thing Maybe "hive mind" is what you were thinking of (at least, I see it a lot in reference to Reddit)?
  - rei0 6y ago
    I think it's called "echo chamber".
    - tayo42 6y ago
      yes there it is, though the other is accurate too
- Threeve303 6y ago
  > I also think there's some astroturfing going on sometimes Marketing companies figured this out a long time ago. Even HN had a headline recently that was something like "use subreddits to drive app adoption".
- lame-robot-hoax 6y ago
RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago
> I've never personally had a painful experience returning anything to Amazon. This is the number one reason I buy from Amazon. 90% of the time, it doesn't make a difference for me whether my purchase arrives in 2 days or 4 days. What matters is that if I do not like it, it is super simple and convenient for me to return it. I don't even have to put it in a box of print a label these days. I can just take the items to UPS or Kohl's, show them my phone code, and give it to them. No other online retailer comes close to this level of convenience for returns.
abhinavsharma 6y ago
Hi, and thanks for the feedback! I'm the original author of that post. > Insight, as an aggregated platform for comparison. It seems pretty obvious that the endgame of this product would be just another Amazon. Why would it turn out any differently for the "curators" on the Insight "platform"? Perhaps some of the writing was unclear, but I just wanted to clarify that Insight the is not a centralized service. It's an extensible mobile browser where you can choose as the user what the alternative services will be. We suggest a few out of the box because we think that's important to making extensions lower friction and easier to discover, but ultimately you can override them with your own choice. I think this is important to give the user that power in client app, and our schema for extensions is expressible in JSON for interoperability. Thanks for the comment and for pointing this out!

aaron32311 6y ago

I think these walled gardens show how important distribution is. Everyone complaints about record labels but artists are still signing onto deals. With some talent and the right amount of luck (discoverability), unheard of people can float to the top.

hlieberman 6y ago

I hope their programmers are better than their lawyers; the terms of service for their website require you to attest that "you are a physician or other healthcare professional". (https://insight.space/terms https://insight.space/terms)

MattGaiser 6y ago
Where is that? I cannot find it.
- hlieberman 6y ago
  They deleted it -- but you can still tell it was there. Look at the last paragraph in '1. Access to services'. The list beginning 'You represent and warrant to Company that' is missing an element because they deleted without reindexing. It looks like they copied the terms of service directly from another one of their products, a browser for doctors: https://www.lumosbrowser.com/terms.pdf https://www.lumosbrowser.com/terms.pdf This also explains the broken formatting: they copied from a PDF.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]

wrycoder 6y ago

I never use the Amazon app on my iPhone. I much prefer using the information dense webpage, even though I have to hold it in landscape and zoom around. I would be offended if Amazon decided to nanny me and change the experience, simply because it detected I was using a mobile screen. OTOH, the Amazon Prime Video app is great, much better than the desktop website.

coldtea 6y ago
>I never use the Amazon app on my iPhone. I much prefer using the information dense webpage, even though I have to hold it in landscape and zoom around. Yes, but that's a usability choice. What if the app was better and faster, usability wise, than the web page?

euske 6y ago

I was kinda surprised that the phrase "long tail" didn't come up in the OP. I think that the author's point can be well summed up as "the open web protects the long tail / diversity". After all, why diversity is good for the society overall is a tricky question to answer.

fireattack 6y ago
>After all, why diversity is good for the society overall is a tricky question to answer. Indeed. There are plenty of cultures seem to value "homogeneity" over diversity (at least by Western's world standard).
- Technically 6y ago
  This sounds like it's true, but I haven't seen convincing evidence that "western culture" is particularly concerned with "diversity" at all (outside of PR culture), or that other such "homogenous" cultures have significantly less tolerance for "diversity". If someone is arguing for diversity in good faith they can explain exactly what kind of diversity they're arguing for and why. Japan, for instance, appears culturally homogenous only until you compare culture across economic classes; only a very shallow definition of diversity would fail to capture this. In fact, that's true for many societies. The quirk of america is that we've internalized the diversity of the working class as uniquely american, class be damned, even if that's trivially a false characterization of the upper class. American media is not careful about how they use the word, and does not call out substance-less uses of it, so it's become an easy target for mocking lack of substance in political and cultural discussions.
Barrin92 6y ago
because diversity is an information discovery mechanism. More (or different) eyes see more. Diversity makes it so that your company figures out that the soap dispenser doesn't recognise dark skinned people in development, not when it already lands on the store shelf.
abhinavsharma 6y ago
This phrase was definitely in the back of my mind while writing this and something I use in everyday conversation. I just hesitated to use it because its one of those terms that's very common in search but has mixed usage levels outside search/ml/stats/data people, and I wanted to focus this post primarily on the UX aspect.

forgotmypw17 6y ago

If you care about the Web's openness and accessibility, register your own domain, host it yourself, and write Lynx-compatible HTML. HTTP access for older browsers is a nice touch. If your site works with Netscape and Mosaic, it shows you mean business.

aboringusername 6y ago
How do you register a domain? Can I do this without using JS and Google knowing? What's that, I need to do a Captcha and use my real information so that if I post ANYTHING someone doesn't like I can be shot in the head once they find me via WHOIS which every LEA on the planet has access to? "Open", sure.
- tannhaeuser 6y ago
  DNS and its per-TLD registration procedures/rules and mandatory protocols for transferring your domain to another registrar (depending on the respective TLD) are about as open as it gets. Which is probably why Google et al want to kill it via DNS-over-HTTP and complex amendments to the DNS protocols themselves.
bitwize 6y ago
Traffic to and from an HTTP site can be intercepted and spoofed by third parties. Use HTTPS, always and everywhere.
- forgotmypw17 6y ago
  HTTPS has its own downsides, and I disagree that you should always use it. When accessibility is paramount, HTTP is still better, because the risk of MITM is overtaken by all the things that can break with HTTPS, such as: Wrong SSL version Client date is off Client doesn't have proper certs installed Server cert is broken or misconfigured SSL takes too long to set up over slow connection No one's going to MITM my blog, while using HTTPS often impairs my own ability to use it. Also, if you think HTTPS can't be intercepted and spoofed by anyone, you're kidding yourself.

zemo 6y ago

The three listed criteria (ease of publishing, consuming, and remixing) accurately describe TikTok, so ... I'm not convinced this is a particularly useful definition of "the open web".

screamingninja 6y ago

> Download the Insight Beta for iOS I thought the whole article was about how mobile apps are taking away from the open web.

chewzerita 6y ago

Okay so I just signed up for the beta of their web browser, why not give it a shot, right? It turns out that its just a reskin of mobile Firefox, with an extremely, and I mean extremely, limited if-then "extensions" feature. Doing a great job at "showcasing the web's infinite extensibility and customizability". They also tout the (Firefox's) adblocker, even going as far as to say it will "Block every ad..." on their marketing page (technically impossible). Just because a company has an orange Y on their homepage doesn't mean their product is good. I'm not saying that it won't be good in the future, but steer clear for now. Money got us into the mess we are in[1], it is up to the real[2] community to get us out. [1] Standardized DRM, the impossibility of building a browser engine, etc [2] By "real" I don't mean corporations that symbolically showcase their "<3 of open source", while profiting off of it

abhinavsharma 6y ago
Thanks for the feedback! As the site mentions, we're still in beta, so feedback is super helpful. 1. Yes, it's forked from Firefox, this is a fairly common starting codebase and compatible license for making a browser, Brave does the same thing. Also, I used to work at Mozilla so I trust their codebase a lot as a starting point. There's a lot more that Insight can do that Firefox doesn't but that isn't apparent, then I think the onus is on us for communicating that to new users better. 2. The AdBlocking ruleset is actually a superset of Firefox, but it is still limited by Safari's 50k rule limit — https://www.zdnet.com/article/apple-neutered-ad-blockers-in-safari-but-unlike-chrome-users-didnt-say-a-thing/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/apple-neutered-ad-blockers-in-... The main thing we can do to get in addition to this is the ability to inject JS (this is a class of extension) to block anything else you see fit. 3. Apple enforces OS and API level restrictions on a browser, (e.g. must use WKWebView). There's some things you just can't do that you could if you say forked Chromium or Firefox on desktop. In general, we're trying to make a browser within the UI and technical constraints of iOS that is 1. very easy to build extensions for (usually no code) 2. has an easy to use interface without the complexity of desktop extensions In order to achieve that, we did have to simplify compared to WebExtensions. Even though the basic interface is IF-THEN (we adopted this so the easiest level of making extensions can be no-code), you should be able to do a lot with it via JS. Let me know if there's important use cases you have that you have for a mobile browser that you feel is impossible within our framework — that'd be really helpful feedback as well. Thanks for trying it out! > Money got us into the mess we are in[1], it is up to the real[2] community to get us out. I would state this as - enabling businesses to be as extractive as they currently are got us into a difficult place. People I know hold views on what can get us out on the full range from: a)the solutions having to be structurally decentralized to b) only heavy centralization can wield enough distribution power to mount a strong opposition. The position we're taking as a startup with this product is that we have to walk the walk of making the web actually more user-centric than the app alternatives because there's really no reason to adopt us unless we deliver on these promises.

fabrice_d 6y ago

The article states that one strong characteristic of the open web is: "Ease of publishing: anyone can publish to it freely or at least very cheaply, and is on the same footing with a globally accessible URL" I'm working on a web-based OS (KaiOS), and let me tell you that many app authors actually see the need to setup hosting as a hurdle. Being able to just upload a package to a store is seen as the ultimate "easy publishing". Yes they lose some control, but they don't feel they need it in the first place.

teruakohatu 6y ago
Distribution of applications is only a subset of publishing. Mobile app developers often willing live in the walled garden because it is easier and more profitable, at least initially.

eng2prog 6y ago

For starters let's stop using "Walled garden" as the phrasing. "Absolute dictatorship" is more like it. The users and developers are at the will of our FAANG dictators. As much as I hate Google for getting rid of services, I love how easy it is to distribute apks without Google. And if you play ball with Apple, you are encouraging the problem.

gfxgirl 6y ago

What evidence is there the open web is dying? At least here on HN I'd categorize 25 of the top 30 links as open web links.

tiborsaas 6y ago
Evidence is not provided since it's not dying. With the sentiment that the title suggests is really easy to attract attention compared to a happy and optimistic title which says the everything is fine.

mulmen 6y ago

There’s a lot of talk in the HN comment section recently about the death of general computing and the open web. I’m not convinced. There’s definitely closed platforms both hard and soft but the web still exists and general purpose computers are still available. When I see these complaints I see people talking about how they want other people to use the Internet and computers. That smells like authoritarianism. If you want to contribute to an open web then do it. It’s not your job to get our metaphorical racist uncles on mastodon or something. Why would you even want that? The romanticized “old web” was just a product of massive selection bias that still exists. If you want that experience it is still out there. Just stop worrying about what other people are doing.

chii 6y ago
> they want other people to use the Internet and computers.' they want other people's content to be available on the open web (not just their own content).
- fractalb 6y ago
  > they want other people's content to be available on the open web (not just their own content). It’s precisely because of that the biggest corps of the current day came into existence. Is it even possible for Google, Amazon, Facebook to become this big without the free software that was available on the web?
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - mulmen 6y ago
    Could free software exist without closed hardware and software? Was anything created in an ideologically pure vacuum?
    - anonymou2 6y ago
      Originally all software was free, it just wasn't called that because there was no closed software. It was shared like cooking recipes.

RestlessMind 6y ago

Doing interesting things on open web today is about as hard as it was in 2000.

Kirr 6y ago

The article presents a dichotomy between "web" and "app". This fails for users who consider a web browser itself to be an "app", which is indeed well suited for solving a problem of "browsing web". For as long as this problem remains well solved by a specialized app (browser), I don't need any redundant tools for e.g. reading news, interacting with communities, etc.

piyushpr134 6y ago

I wrote a blog about this in 2015. In developing economies like India, this trend is more pronounced due to rapid adoption of mobile apps http://pranjan.blogspot.com/2015/04/is-app-only-economy-going-to-kill.html http://pranjan.blogspot.com/2015/04/is-app-only-economy-goin...

paultopia 6y ago

Quibble, but... free 2 day shipping is now near universal ... uh, since when? Maybe for giant companies that can get sweetheart deals from FedEx or just build out their own last mile networks. But for all the small companies actually associated with the open web shipping still costs almost as much as the thing you're trying to buy.

Teknoman117 6y ago

I don't understand why people keep making the jump that net neutrality means that ISPs and companies can't come to a deal that makes their websites "work faster." I'm totally onboard that charging more or less for specific websites is a nasty move, but streaming systems wouldn't be nearly as workable if being able to place hardware in network POPs wasn't allowed.

Ensorceled 6y ago
> I'm totally onboard that charging more or less for specific websites is a nasty move, but streaming systems wouldn't be nearly as workable if being able to place hardware in network POPs wasn't allowed. Well, it isn't allowed. For most of us. Try it. Ask a major ISP if you can install hardware in their NOC. They'll say no. Unless you are a Netflix, YouTube or Prime and can both pay and have traffic is so large that the ISP will save money allowing it. Now try to compete as a new entrant into the space when your competition has actual hardware embedded at the ISP level.

yangvz 6y ago

It's too late to try to revive the open web and what not. Its death was already an obvious trend when Jobs introduced iPhone.

mdoms 6y ago

This is just an ad.

masa331 6y ago

Reading people complaining how open web is dying is like listening to my uncle whining about his job as a butcher and miserable life in general. Yet he goes to supermarket every day to buy a cheap meat and salami to make a "good meal" and spends the rest of his day sitting in front of TV drinking beer and vodka. Every day. Web is still the same. There are walled gardens and there are gardens without walls. And that is a manifestation of openess. Everybody can build anything and hang around anywhere he pleases. What a beautiful and truly open world. This article is mostly ad to a browser. That's another manifestation how open web is. You. can. make. own. browsers.

deleted 6y ago
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pumpkingsanew 6y ago
>You. can. make. own. browsers With the growing marketshare of chromium-only based browsers, I'm concerned that this will not be the case for long. It doesen't matter how many browsers there are if they can't implement the monopoly's proprietary standards
- masa331 6y ago
  What proprietary standards do you mean? Web technologies aren't proprietary.
  - aboringusername 6y ago
    Great. Go build me a browser capable of streaming 4k video across all major streaming providers and accessing Windvine DRM (all levels). Oh, and make it work flawlessly across every site (including the top 10,000 alexa sites) without any issues at all. And try and wade through the mountains of chroumium exclusive bullshit (Google makes the standards). Go talk to Mozilla about how easy that is (they even have to spoof UA strings to make things work properly). Good luck.
    - 6y ago

jhoechtl 6y ago

Blogs are a thing of the past. Forums dead. News-groups pale compared to what they used to be a decade ago. Instead we have twitter stories written in images, medium articles where I am asked to login and/or subscribe and Facebook groups open to those who want to participate in their ad machinery. When Googling for my hobbies, all I get are commercial web sites, no mor enews groups, fora, blogs, ... What a desaster.

throwawaygimp 6y ago

So decades of cooperation created the most incredible thing humans have created, then a bunch of kids come along and say 'Thanks! Fuck you. I'm just going to crap all over your efforts, profit from it, and there is nothing you can do about it'. Thanks Zuck. I'd love to see you sit down with some people I know who have spent their entire lives contributing to RFCs and actually building the open internet for everyone. These people aren't rich. They worked hard all their lives and lived with good values. It wasn't all wasted but you've massively devalued their work. I'd love to see you defend yourself to them, one on one. No PR people. Just techie on techie.

epicureanideal 6y ago
On the positive side, the people who are enjoying the walled gardens are probably not the people who would've participated in the open web with much positive outcome anyway. I'm actually quite happy that certain old-time online communities are available and haven't been swamped by all the people who are online merely to use the walled gardens. The open web can survive. And the 10% of people who will use it are the same 10% who would've used the open web to cooperative in a positive manner in the first place.
- onion2k 6y ago
  On the positive side, the people who are enjoying the walled gardens are probably not the people who would've participated in the open web with much positive outcome anyway. That's a false dichotomy. It's not a choice between "open and hard to participate in" versus "closed but user friendly". There's no reason why the web can't be open and cater for users who want to have easy-to-use and enjoyable experiences like Facebook and YouTube. The only thing necessary for that to happen is for companies like Facebook and Google to make it possible to connect with things outside of their sites in meaningful ways.
  - yoz-y 6y ago
    Shouldn’t the onus be on the open platform to become attractive and provide services that a closed platform can’t or won’t?

forgotmypw17 6y ago

(Copied) The Web itself remains, and so does the freedom to write compatible code. This wonderful, miraculous platform has remained stable enough over this time for me to be able to plan ahead and not be caught off-guard by something like “we’re deprecating version 2.0, please use new version 3.0 syntax” or “your platform is now obsolete, please switch to the new HTML.NET”. The W3C gang tries, and they fail, because HTML is stronger and bigger than them. The Web is stronger and bigger than all of them combined. Many have tried to contain it, to own it, to be the main one calling the shots, and HTML laughs in all their collective faces. All thanks to its basic concept of “be strict with yourself, and accepting with others.” Mosaic was the first browser for which “best viewed with” buttons were used. They failed to own the Web. Then came Netscape, “Mosaic killa”, and they managed to kill Mosaic, but they failed to tame HTML, because HTML will not be owned. Netscape was destroyed by Microsoft-IE, who also wanted to tame and own HTML, and they also failed, because HTML is not ownable. Then Firefox came and fucked up IE, and things were good for a while, Mozilla was a decent steward. Then Google came and took ownership of Mozilla, and together with Chrome they also tried to tame HTML. They will fail just like the others. HTML cannot be tamed or owned. The Web was built for freedom. If you want composable, future-proof GUI, open up your notepad.exe and write this: <html> <head> <title>Hello, World!</title> </head> <body> <h1>Hello, World!</h1> <p> This is demonstration of proper composable, future-proof, accessible GUI. </p> <form action="/"> <input type=text size=80 name=comment> <br> <input type=submit value=Go> </form> </body> </html> This GUI will work as expected and render in 25+ years worth of platform. And it could have been composed by a 10-year-old.

dingaling 6y ago
> This GUI will work as expected and render in 25+ years worth of platform It's not about syntax and language, it's about environment. Compile 10 lines of hello_world.c into an ARM executable and send it to a friend using a 'walled garden' phone. It'll be useless to them even though it's technically correct. Likewise the Web is being continually tightened and centralised. That HTML you wrote will soon require an HTTPS server, probably in a VPS because many ISPs block port 443. And the VPS provider has implemented a captcha in front to reduce botting, which links your visitor's data to another huge Internet corporation. Open web?

xweb 6y ago

Well. This article conflates three different complaints as one problem. That their browser supposedly mitigates. There are good articles about the open web vs closed for-profit ecosystems. This is not one of those articles.

bvcvbuiy 6y ago

I have two personal websites. My main problem is that it is very hard to share them. Half of the subreddits don't accept links thanks to spammers. I don't use other social media... They are not the typical Hacker News link. Generally speaking, thanks to spammer linking has become impossible outside of social media platforms.

dimitar 6y ago

Maybe I'm an optimist but my guess is that as these companies begin to try harder to please shareholders (like the recent increase of YouTube ads), the walled gardens will become less attractive. Walled gardens aren't even something new, AOL was a walled garden example from the 90s and people moved on quickly to a more open web. What we need to ensure is that the open web is still technically feasible. I guess CDNs are not that important if your site isn't bloated, but it is a worrying trend.

deleted 6y ago

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betwixthewires 6y ago

The open web isn't dying. It's just that everyone isn't using it daily. Think about this: back in the good old days that you harken back to when you say "open web", could you send your grandma a meme? No? So then what's wrong with the fact that the current open web is, although not all encompassing of internet users, many times larger than it was back then? Why do we say the real internet is dying just because the 5 most used websites aren't open? The open web is very, very open. But your mom doesn't use it to watch videos. You've got Gemini, ActivityPub, Tor, bittorrent, i2p, IPFS, OpenNIC, and hundreds of other cool things that nobody can stop or control. Many of these things are less than 10 years old. There's an open web, it is growing, it is rich with information, creativity and diversity (including diversity of thought for the monoculture members out there), and all you have to do to use it is to take an interest. If you don't like the closed web. Stop using it.

DanBC 6y ago
> back in the good old days that you harken back to when you say "open web", could you send your grandma a meme? No? Yes. You'd put it in email.
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  Hell, I remember as a kid in the 1990s, my dad would sometimes bring us memes... on paper. He worked in a bank, and back in those days, an e-mail chain full of jokes was common in an office environment. He'd occasionally print one out and show it to us.
  - raxxorrax 6y ago
    Office life was so much better back then. Now it is basically a fortress only a few chosen can flee from. I would like to give that back to the less fortunate, but there are other dynamics that make this very difficult. One think is certain though: It certainly didn't increase productivity.

shuringai 6y ago

> preach about the open web and breaking the habit of forcing publishers to pay in order to survive > "solution" is a pro-only subscription model

ngcc_hk 6y ago

It was dead long time ago. China shut it off in decades. I guess like history meant western history, philosophy meant western philosophy hence no one noticed it is mostly a way trip - chinese firm can freely roam internet (but not chinese) but western firm cannot roam there. In fact whilst not always if you start from us and uk some chinese firm now block you. It is like who, un, ... the stronger china meant a broken system as they are not really open up. Free trade if benefit then. No free information if not. After 2 decades and the west still not wake up. Good luck to humanity.

ngcc_hk 6y ago

The web is not that bad if you just look at the western side. There is no war in the western front. Just child play cf with the real war.

deleted 6y ago

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keyle 6y ago

I don't know how we can get people to write protocols over writing products. Nowadays it's the natural evolution of thing, write a product from an idea, lock it down, and try to cash in as much as possible. There is no financially viable paths for writing protocols and open source implementations of an idea. At least there is no clear path and it's far less viable. Also seriously, who can be F'ed with RFCs.

sfg 6y ago

It might exist, but I couldn't find the URI of any RSS feed for this blog, but a link to their Twitter profile was easy to find, which, all together, given their open web advocacy, is odd.

jrockway 6y ago

To me, it's clear that discoverability is the problem with the open web. People are not willing to sink time and effort into creating something unless they have some assurance that they are going to get an audience. From a raw mechanics standpoint, it's relatively straightforward to put some content up on the Internet and give it a URL. But nobody will ever see it. That is why people put everything they do on some sort of site with discoverability. Streamers stream content on Twitch, because it has that sidebar with people playing the same game and your stream could show up there, and people might click it. People upload videos to YouTube because YouTube will figure out what kind of video it is and recommend it to people interested in that type of video. People post to Facebook and Twitter because their friends can retweet it and spread it around their sphere of influence. People upload their apps to the app store because that's where people go for apps. (This is not new. People that create physical products certainly want to have their product on store shelves, so that people can randomly discover it.) I think, honestly, Google cancelling Google Reader is what killed the open web. Google Reader made it easy for anyone to become a mini Facebook. If someone liked your writing, you were pretty much assured that they would be back when you wrote your next post. Google Reader gave them an app in which to random discover your next blog post, and there was enough stuff other than you in there to get people into the habit of checking for "something" every day (and that something was occasionally you). But, it is a little unfair to say that's what killed it. What killed it was a "better way". Social media pretty much guarantees that someone will see and engage with your work, and that's what motivates people to do work. If you can bring that to the open web, you'll kill Facebook and Twitter overnight. Good luck. (There are other things that contributed. One thing that bugs me in particular is Reddit's unwritten rule of not being allowed to submit your own work. Of course, there is too much spam when people submit their own stuff -- people are too emotionally invested in their creation to notice that it's bad or off-topic -- but it basically forces someone else to be the discoverability method. You have to post it to Twitter and hope that someone picks it up and puts it on Reddit. Or you have to build your audience some other way and make your own subreddit that people opt into. That sort of thing is helping social media and hurting the traditional link aggregator. HN does a much better job, but HN has the benefit of being relatively small, focused, and having professional moderation.)

harryf 6y ago

If I was going write a response to this it would be with the title "The Open Web is dead. Long live the Open Web" People often look to Tim Berners-Lee for thought leadership on the web, as the pioneer of hypertext and now director of the W3C. But if you read, say, Roy Fielding's REST paper you'd notice things like this https://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertation/rest_arch_style.htm#sec_5_2_1_1 https://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertation/rest_arc... (and remember Roy was a co-founder of the Apache HTTP Server and contributor to https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2616.txt https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2616.txt) "Since centralized link servers are an anathema to the immense scale and multi-organizational domain requirements of the Web, REST relies instead on the author choosing a resource identifier that best fits the nature of the concept being identified. Naturally, the quality of an identifier is often proportional to the amount of money spent to retain its validity, which leads to broken links as ephemeral (or poorly supported) information moves or disappears over time." The two things I take away here were... - The guys working on the fundamentals of the web at that time couldn't imagine it would be possible to scale centralised services to serve links - Money was a key consideration to determining "system quality" - they were not building utopian systems here - they knew there would be a relationship between which information would "succeed" and how much money was behind it That in turn means the key to making a "better open web" is making it more economically viable and able to out-compete existing centralized services. That doesn't necessarily mean "distributed web" is the right answer

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nunodonato 6y ago

This is a great reminder why I should continue to work on my rss-based "social network" :)

pedro1976 6y ago
I agree. An RSS-based social network is a network that you fully own. Unfortunately the subscription experience lacks of some aspects, e.g. engagement with other users/author is much harder. We should implement some tools to overcome this. For all the sites that lack of feed support use gap fillers [0], [1] and others. [0] https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge [1] https://github.com/damoeb/rss-proxy https://github.com/damoeb/rss-proxy
- nunodonato 6y ago
  Well I'm adding extra meta data on top of feeds to add some more "social" aspects. Of course those remain centralized, but every persons' timeline is standard rss so you can read it anywhere
  - pedro1976 6y ago
    What kind of metadata do you add?
    - nunodonato 6y ago
      the social features: "likes", comments, reshares (still pondering on all this, not yet implemented)
      - pedro1976 6y ago
        Very interesting, do you already have a placeholder repo, that I can watch?
        nunodonato 6y ago

yepthatsreality 6y ago

You should care because that little trick you used to hop careers into a successful programming career isn’t because Google and Apple built really cool and powerful software and phones.

einpoklum 6y ago

That article is part of a sales pitch for the "insight browser" - a browser for iOS. People who care about the Open Web should probably want to avoid a device manufactured by/for one of the companies which makes it a point to keep its users in a closed garden. Just saying.