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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 cr

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?
    - hhas01 6y ago
      You’d think, but alas too often cries of “open web” is just nerds virtue signalling to each other, longing for those Good Old Days when they controlled the world. The vast closed Twitbook silos of today, philosophical awful as they are, are still massively more empowering to the 99% than that old primitivist WWW where you really needed a technical degree just to publish at all. This is not just me saying this: it’s the 99% saying it too. Because while they may not know how to express it in technical terms, they have already voted with their feet. So say what you like about the horrors of Twitbook, but at least they managed to unify [their] publishing with [their] consumption, making one as easy and transparent as the other. And they managed to do it even within the crippled confines of the first, botched Web. Meanwhile the geekocracy does little past sit on its ass whining about how terribly unfair it all is. As if life was a game of cricket! . If “open web” geeks really truly want to change the world, they need to start by recognizing where FANG(T) are ahead, and why they got ahead like that, and then figure how to generalize and commoditize what FANG(T) got right, and build that back into the basic building blocks of the Web—blocks which nobody owns, and which nobody can own. 30 years late, admittedly, but still better late than never. And the first step of that has to be the full and seamless unification of web-read and web-write. Because until the fundamental read and write functionality works right, there isn’t even any point in trying to fix the broken discovery (search) and the broken interop (content negotiation) and all the other brokenness that subsequently evolved on top of that. Because without simple seamless zero-effort read+write in place, no-one except the geeks will be able (or want) to use it. And Web 1.0 already did that, and look where it got us. So there are really only two things that prevent such a reboot: geeks who cannot imagine a Web that works so fundamentally unlike everything they’ve learned and grown accustomed to, and geeks who cannot imagine a Web over which they have no more control than anyone else. And nobody can fix that problem but the geeks themselves.
  - JumpCrisscross 6y ago
    > 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 Yes, there is. Decentralised systems are resilient. But their decentralisation has a coördination cost. The lack of this cost makes centralised systems more agile. They can also, on account of reduced redundancy, be more efficient. In a stable environment agility is irrelevant. The efficiency of centralisation pits evenly against the robustness of decentralisation. In reality, we get a mix, e.g. our financial system. In an unstable environment, however, the agility advantage tips scales in favour of centralisation. The past decades have seen radical computing advances in mobility, prevalence and capability. That gives a natural advantage to centralised players like Apple and Google and Alibaba. Decentralisation becomes competitive once a landscape stabilises. I thought this occurred with laptops. But Apple Silicon shuffles the deck. (It does appear true for social media.)
    - everdrive 6y ago
      And the more agile systems gave us what? Twitter and Facebook? They're cesspools of idiocy and tribalism. Please bring back the walled gardens.
  - hhas01 6y ago
    “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.” “Dear Facebook and Google, please toss away your trillion-dollar global business empires and do what we tell you. Signed, the Geekocracy.” Honestly, I’ve met doorknobs with more common sense and understanding of how the real world works. And you all still wonder why nobody listens to you? I’d shake my head, were it not already shaking so hard it’s damn near flying off.
- IanSanders 6y ago
  >certain old-time online communities are available and haven't been swamped Would you mind sharing some of the links, please?
  - foota 6y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com https://news.ycombinator.com is one example :)
    - Dahoon 6y ago
      This thread disagrees with you. HN is slowly becoming like Reddit. Down-vote all you like, it doesn't change the facts.
      - TheRealDunkirk 6y ago
        Given that Reddit is, at this point, nothing but a thin, MOSTLY-public-friendly landing page, papering over the world's largest porn portal, it's unsurprising that people who value original thought have left and found other places to discuss things of interest. And when THOSE people leave, the people who like to troll THEM have to find other places to do it, too. Slashdot has also suffered from this diaspora.
  - DoreenMichele 6y ago
    Tagfam.org might qualify, though it's a niche subject. Oldest education related forum around, afaik. Though it's a set of email lists, not boards.
  - grey_earthling 6y ago
    https://neocities.org/ https://neocities.org/ is another prominent example.
  - coward8675309 6y ago
    What, so that thousands of HN readers in search of an authentic open web experience can trample them into dust?
- nanna 6y ago
  The false premise that your argument relies on is that people aren't transformed by the technologies that they use. Regularly using Facebook transforms you from what you would have been without using Facebook; Using the open web transforms you into something different. So the problem isn't 'the open web would not have attracted the kinds of people that Facebook has'. The problem is that 'Facebook has produced the kinds of people who have no interest in the open web'. And for the reason that, the open web to hell, this benefit's Facebook's bottom line.
  - playpause 6y ago
    “The false premise that your argument relies on...” is best followed by pointing out a false premise, otherwise it’s a bit obnoxious.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - pdonis 6y ago
    > The problem is that 'Facebook has produced the kinds of people who have no interest in the open web'. I disagree. Those people have always been there and have always been the majority. America Online back in the 1990s was even more of a walled garden than Facebook is today. Most Facebook users today at least know that there is a "web" other than Facebook, if for no other reason than they see links to it in their feed. AOL users back in the day might never see anything that wasn't hosted by AOL. And there were the 10% or so of us who used the open web back then, just as there are today. For one of us to try to explain to an AOL user what "the open web" was and why it was a good idea back then was even more of a challenge than trying to explain that to a Facebook user today.
- bogomipz 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." There's a significant number of people who were introduced to the web via the earlier walled gardens of AOL, Compuserve and Prodigy who then went on to both participate and contribute to the open web. Many were even motivated as a reaction against those earlier corporate walled-garden models.
  - indymike 6y ago
    The reason that the web won vs Prodigy, Compuware and AOL is that even in its early form, the internet as a whole was just better. Also, there were no wierd extra charges and your kids couldn't run up a bill for $300 in a night (like I did to my parents).
    - treeman79 6y ago
      Ah 10 hours a month limit. Oh how I got yelled at for being online for 2 hours one night.
- peternicky 6y ago
  I find hn filled with comments like this which are apologetic in tone and completely dismiss the essence of the OP. Rather than just state “The open web can survive” please explain WHY you have that opinion. That would make for more constructive discourse.
Sander_Marechal 6y ago
I don't think Zuck has been a techie for a loooong time
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  There's a common category error I find grating in discussions about technology and tech companies, in which both engineers and business people are called "tech people", and the label "tech" is extended to cover business of companies that sell technology products and services. The consequence of that is a worryingly common rhetoric of pointing out various negative impacts of "technology" on society, which in fact are just age-old problems of businesses abusing people - just in this case, the businesses sell technology products and services. But I guess it's more refreshing to say that "technology is ruining society" and unload it on engineers, instead of talking about the real problem - the same usual failure modes of capitalism that have been identified 100+ years ago.
Erlich_Bachman 6y ago
How is this characterization helpful? Zack didn't force anyone to join their platform. They provide stuff for free to users who join by their own choice. If anything, it is the fault of the general population who don't know what's good for them. They don't care about your invisible hero's writing RFCs, not Zack.
- onion2k 6y ago
  Zack didn't force anyone to join their platform. They provide stuff for free to users who join by their own choice. Every time Facebook buys a social media company that is pretty much what he's doing. People on WhatApp, Insta, ConnectU etc did not join Facebook and yet they still ended up on Facebook.
  - Erlich_Bachman 6y ago
    Since you don't even need a facebook account to use Whatsapp, in what way are Whatsapp users forced to end up on Facebook?
    - wetpaws 6y ago
      You do need one on Oculus.
    - onion2k 6y ago
      WhatsApp shares your phone number, device information, and details of your WhatsApp usage with Facebook. A WhatsApp user isn't "on Facebook" in the sense that they have automatically get a public profile, sure, but they are on Facebook in the sense that lots of information about them end up in Facebook databases. (See "What information does WhatsApp share with the Facebook Companies?" on https://faq.whatsapp.com/general/security-and-privacy/how-we-work-with-the-facebook-companies https://faq.whatsapp.com/general/security-and-privacy/how-we...)
  - Double_a_92 6y ago
    So? What does that have to do with the free web? Those companies where not forced to acceppt Facebooks deal. Anyone is still free to start a new social network or other web service. This has nothing to do with the web, and if anything it's a general antitrust case.
throwaway936482 6y ago
Frankly if you want the kids to stop profiting from all your efforts without paying back, stop giving away your labour to open source projects that have none discrimination and free redistribution clauses that allow companies like Facebook et. al. to make massive profits from building Skinner boxes and generally increasing the grand sum of human misery. A lot of the "good people" have helped create this situation by pushing an ideology that says devs should give away their labour to increase consumer freedom without acknowledging that the people who benefit most are Zuckerberg, pg and the other hyper capitalists.
hhas01 6y ago
The “open web” withered and died the moment Berners-Lee decided he’d cut some corners for convenience and released a web browser that was read-only. Mosaic took that interpretation and ran with it, and a global information platform that should’ve been as easy for anyone to read and write as opening, editing, and saving a file in MS Word became the plaything of the technocratic elite while the ign’ant plebs looked on none the wiser of how they were robbed. Can’t blame the Jacks and the Zucks for taking the opportunity that was handed to them on a plate. That’s what happens when you create gatekeepers and single points of failure. “Just techie on techie.” Oh bless your heart, child. Once again, it was the techies who created this mess—and were perfectly happy with it too while they were the ones in charge. So until technies accept and acknowledge that they are the root of the whole problem, they’re not going to do a thing to usefully change it. ’Cos right now they’re one gang of children trying (futilely) to grab back a prized toy from another gang of children, to have all for themselves. But as long as someone controls the read and write, the conditions that enable these vast walled gardens to take root and thrive will continue to exist. The only way to change that is by restructuring the platform at a fundamental level so that everyone controls their own read and write, and no-one else can just take that from them. .. Personally I believe the first step should be reshaping Firefox into a full-blown WYSIWYG document editor, analogous to MS Word except that instead of reading and writing to a local filesystem it reads and writes them via HTTP[S] requests. And then go sort out the stagnant mess that is Apache et al so that they actually speak HTTP right, and provide that client with the “distributed filesystem” it needs to read and write to. Read-write-publish-share. Simple foundational mechanics, and there’s no reason nor excuse why it shouldn’t all work correctly. (Plus, Firefox desperately needs to differentiate itself from the Chrome/WebKit hegemony if wants to justify why it should continue to exist. Well, there’s a reason—and opportunity—right there.) If geeks can make that bit work correctly then they might have a chance at resetting the balance of powr. It’s not a complete solution: there’s still the problems of document search (currently owned by Google) and name ownership (for he who owns your name owns you, and right now all our names are owned by the quasi-libertarian shakedown artists of DNS registrars and squatters), and others. And then there’s the questions of how do you sell it (and Dog knows most geeks couldn’t sell ice cream to Arabs). But it is the first step in the right direction: putting the control into the hands of the Users. All of them, this time. -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WorldWideWeb https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WorldWideWeb https://digital-archaeology.org/the-nexus-browser/ https://digital-archaeology.org/the-nexus-browser/
socialentity 6y ago
What nonsense. Nobody is forced to use Twitter, Facebook or Instagram. Blame the people who keep using them, not the creators of those networks.
- foota 6y ago
  As others have pointed out, there are benefits to Facebook et al, both individually and collectively (though some people may ignore the latter) however there's also great harm being done through these platforms, from the creation of echo chambers to data collection (personally, I'm more worried about the former, I don't really care about privacy wrt getting ads sent to me). So I don't blame Facebook for building a platform people want to use, but I do blame them for the damage it's causing. People that care strongly about the open web (not really me, honestly, as long as it exists I'm content, imo people don't have to use it) likely feel similarly.
  - kungito 6y ago
    I mean let's be honest, there existed echo chambers in the first villages people founded. When I visit my relatives who live in villages, trust me, there is plenty of fascist echo chambers and they don't need internet to participate. The online platforms aren't a cause, they are just facilitating it. I believe it really reframes the problem
    - raxxorrax 6y ago
      I don't think fascism is a real problem on the net and I know some popular places they are around. It got some reactionary traction in the last years, but they were derided and made fun off for years before and they never made significant inroads. What really helps and has helped them is putting people und general suspicion and restricting user rights. That massively helps fascists. The increased content control is a major success fascists had achieved the last years even while not in power.
      - mercurysmessage 6y ago
fxtentacle 6y ago
My impression is that when people talk about Zuckerberg, they usually refer to his portrait as a lovable geeky nerd in the movie. But in reality, you should probably imagine someone with a psychology degree who's a master at pulling strings in the shadows and who just happens to like technology among other things. I can't find the quote now, but I believe there were several articles about how he was widely disliked at Havard for his FaceMash website. Many people didn't appreciate being part of his psychology experiment ^_^ Also, there was a lot of discussion back in the day because the first Facebook beta looked very similar to a software he was supposed to build as work for hire for a 3rd party. I'd call that a rather opportunistic move. So I wouldn't be surprised if your thought experiment would end with Zuck just saying "ooh that's sad but I don't care" and not explaining anything.
- FroshKiller 6y ago
  You found him a lovable, geeky nerd in The Social Network?
  - _emacsomancer_ 6y ago
    Perhaps fxtentacle is actually thinking of Data from ST:TNG.
  - fxtentacle 6y ago
    Yes, I thought the Zuckerberg in the movie seemed more humane and nicer than I imagine the original to be. For example, the movie presents him starting facemash to find a new girlfriend after he was rejected, which makes him appear to care about others and about relationships. But some of his actual quotes sound to me more like he sees other people as things and with some contempt. For example, consider this: ZUCK: yea so if you ever need info about anyone at harvard ZUCK: just ask ZUCK: i have over 4000 emails, pictures, addresses, sns FRIEND: what!? how’d you manage that one? ZUCK: people just submitted it ZUCK: i don’t know why ZUCK: they “trust me” ZUCK: dumb fucks
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
johbjo 6y ago
The walled gardens are using polished UIs and free hosting to win over open alternatives, and both of these costs money. From users' perspective, it's free and convenient. To break these, we need technology and infrastructure that enables distributed decentralised hosting, and that decouples UIs from servers. But UI developers still need to be rewarded, and hosting needs to be profitable, otherwise they won't be competitive. It would involve some form of micropayments system, cryptographic identities, and so on. If these things had been in place 20 years ago, IRC would be what whatsapp is today. The matrix project sounds promising, but I'm guessing it underestimates what is actually needed to replace walled gardens.
- mr_nobody 6y ago
  UI should be build in into the browser. Users should be free to choice UI they like, but for that we need a standards that everyone would agree on.
  - azangru 6y ago
    > UI should be build in into the browser. Users should be free to choice UI they like How would that work? The closest example I can think of is the web before CSS, when there was only html for semantic markup, and the browsers would display it however they wished, with content creators having very little say over what exactly their users would see on the screen. Can't see us moving back in that direction.
- CuriouslyC 6y ago
  Most people have multiple devices that can act as hosts for content, and if their friends and the people who view it also serve it, that should scale pretty cleanly.
  - samhh 6y ago
    I can't imagine that having good reliability.
    - 6y ago
raxxorrax 6y ago
I agree with your sense, but I don't think this is on Facebook at all. The commercialization is driven by rights holders and advertisers mostly, which might be customers of Facebook. That some users prefer the fancy is also not a problem because I think there is enough (virtual) space for both groups. I can use the open web as well as before, just have to know that the most viral content is probably not that great.
chrisseaton 6y ago
> I'd love to see you defend yourself to them, one on one. Why does he need to defend himself? He built what he wanted. Other people built what they wanted. Why's that got to be in conflict? Why does one party have to defend themselves to the other? There's room for both.
- drdeadringer 6y ago
  This appears to be a battle of philosophies. May "the best business" win. Our Dearest Zucky vs Freedom Fighter Stallman. The enteral struggle continues.
  - chrisseaton 6y ago
    > This appears to be a battle of philosophies. May "the best business" win. Why do you think it's a battle? Why does anyone have to be fighting? Both groups can build the web they want to build. Both can live side by side. What's the problem? Complaining that someone else is not building the thing you think they should be building is not a reasonable complaint.
    - michaelt 6y ago
      If my local bicycle shop or running club decides they don't need a website because they've got a facebook page, some would see that as a loss to the open web.
      - giobox 6y ago
        I hate this too, but to continue the example, my actual real life bike shop struggled for years with bad websites sold to them by a succession of "developers". The Facebook page appears to draw as much if not more business, and chap can run entire thing himself with no overheads. It's hardly a surprise some choose just to use Facebook really - as far as they are concerned its often "better" for them than the open web was, even if that is hard to swallow sometimes.
      - chrisseaton 6y ago
szundi 6y ago
Maybe we should create a fund for these guys.
dr-detroit 6y ago
You're mad at a face the CIA put up in front of themselves (according to abc news)
ttonkytonk 6y ago
But isn't this the name of the game? Use things to the best of your advantage?
chokeartist 6y ago
> I'd love to see you defend yourself to them, one on one. No PR people. Just techie on techie. That wouldn't end well. He would get his ass physically beat, in most likelihood.
CuriouslyC 6y ago
Don't worry, between people who want freedom on one side, and incoming government regulation on the other, walled gardens are about to get squeezed. The people who care just need to be ready with something decentralized to leverage the cracks when they appear.

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?
  - hhas01 6y ago
    You’d think, but alas too often cries of “open web” is just nerds virtue signalling to each other, longing for those Good Old Days when they controlled the world. The vast closed Twitbook silos of today, philosophical awful as they are, are still massively more empowering to the 99% than that old primitivist WWW where you really needed a technical degree just to publish at all. This is not just me saying this: it’s the 99% saying it too. Because while they may not know how to express it in technical terms, they have already voted with their feet. So say what you like about the horrors of Twitbook, but at least they managed to unify [their] publishing with [their] consumption, making one as easy and transparent as the other. And they managed to do it even within the crippled confines of the first, botched Web. Meanwhile the geekocracy does little past sit on its ass whining about how terribly unfair it all is. As if life was a game of cricket! . If “open web” geeks really truly want to change the world, they need to start by recognizing where FANG(T) are ahead, and why they got ahead like that, and then figure how to generalize and commoditize what FANG(T) got right, and build that back into the basic building blocks of the Web—blocks which nobody owns, and which nobody can own. 30 years late, admittedly, but still better late than never. And the first step of that has to be the full and seamless unification of web-read and web-write. Because until the fundamental read and write functionality works right, there isn’t even any point in trying to fix the broken discovery (search) and the broken interop (content negotiation) and all the other brokenness that subsequently evolved on top of that. Because without simple seamless zero-effort read+write in place, no-one except the geeks will be able (or want) to use it. And Web 1.0 already did that, and look where it got us. So there are really only two things that prevent such a reboot: geeks who cannot imagine a Web that works so fundamentally unlike everything they’ve learned and grown accustomed to, and geeks who cannot imagine a Web over which they have no more control than anyone else. And nobody can fix that problem but the geeks themselves.
- JumpCrisscross 6y ago
  > 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 Yes, there is. Decentralised systems are resilient. But their decentralisation has a coördination cost. The lack of this cost makes centralised systems more agile. They can also, on account of reduced redundancy, be more efficient. In a stable environment agility is irrelevant. The efficiency of centralisation pits evenly against the robustness of decentralisation. In reality, we get a mix, e.g. our financial system. In an unstable environment, however, the agility advantage tips scales in favour of centralisation. The past decades have seen radical computing advances in mobility, prevalence and capability. That gives a natural advantage to centralised players like Apple and Google and Alibaba. Decentralisation becomes competitive once a landscape stabilises. I thought this occurred with laptops. But Apple Silicon shuffles the deck. (It does appear true for social media.)
  - everdrive 6y ago
    And the more agile systems gave us what? Twitter and Facebook? They're cesspools of idiocy and tribalism. Please bring back the walled gardens.
- hhas01 6y ago
  “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.” “Dear Facebook and Google, please toss away your trillion-dollar global business empires and do what we tell you. Signed, the Geekocracy.” Honestly, I’ve met doorknobs with more common sense and understanding of how the real world works. And you all still wonder why nobody listens to you? I’d shake my head, were it not already shaking so hard it’s damn near flying off.
IanSanders 6y ago
>certain old-time online communities are available and haven't been swamped Would you mind sharing some of the links, please?
- foota 6y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com https://news.ycombinator.com is one example :)
  - Dahoon 6y ago
    This thread disagrees with you. HN is slowly becoming like Reddit. Down-vote all you like, it doesn't change the facts.
    - TheRealDunkirk 6y ago
      Given that Reddit is, at this point, nothing but a thin, MOSTLY-public-friendly landing page, papering over the world's largest porn portal, it's unsurprising that people who value original thought have left and found other places to discuss things of interest. And when THOSE people leave, the people who like to troll THEM have to find other places to do it, too. Slashdot has also suffered from this diaspora.
- DoreenMichele 6y ago
  Tagfam.org might qualify, though it's a niche subject. Oldest education related forum around, afaik. Though it's a set of email lists, not boards.
- grey_earthling 6y ago
  https://neocities.org/ https://neocities.org/ is another prominent example.
- coward8675309 6y ago
  What, so that thousands of HN readers in search of an authentic open web experience can trample them into dust?
nanna 6y ago
The false premise that your argument relies on is that people aren't transformed by the technologies that they use. Regularly using Facebook transforms you from what you would have been without using Facebook; Using the open web transforms you into something different. So the problem isn't 'the open web would not have attracted the kinds of people that Facebook has'. The problem is that 'Facebook has produced the kinds of people who have no interest in the open web'. And for the reason that, the open web to hell, this benefit's Facebook's bottom line.
- playpause 6y ago
  “The false premise that your argument relies on...” is best followed by pointing out a false premise, otherwise it’s a bit obnoxious.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- pdonis 6y ago
  > The problem is that 'Facebook has produced the kinds of people who have no interest in the open web'. I disagree. Those people have always been there and have always been the majority. America Online back in the 1990s was even more of a walled garden than Facebook is today. Most Facebook users today at least know that there is a "web" other than Facebook, if for no other reason than they see links to it in their feed. AOL users back in the day might never see anything that wasn't hosted by AOL. And there were the 10% or so of us who used the open web back then, just as there are today. For one of us to try to explain to an AOL user what "the open web" was and why it was a good idea back then was even more of a challenge than trying to explain that to a Facebook user today.
bogomipz 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." There's a significant number of people who were introduced to the web via the earlier walled gardens of AOL, Compuserve and Prodigy who then went on to both participate and contribute to the open web. Many were even motivated as a reaction against those earlier corporate walled-garden models.
- indymike 6y ago
  The reason that the web won vs Prodigy, Compuware and AOL is that even in its early form, the internet as a whole was just better. Also, there were no wierd extra charges and your kids couldn't run up a bill for $300 in a night (like I did to my parents).
  - treeman79 6y ago
    Ah 10 hours a month limit. Oh how I got yelled at for being online for 2 hours one night.
peternicky 6y ago
I find hn filled with comments like this which are apologetic in tone and completely dismiss the essence of the OP. Rather than just state “The open web can survive” please explain WHY you have that opinion. That would make for more constructive discourse.

Sander_Marechal 6y ago

I don't think Zuck has been a techie for a loooong time

TeMPOraL 6y ago
There's a common category error I find grating in discussions about technology and tech companies, in which both engineers and business people are called "tech people", and the label "tech" is extended to cover business of companies that sell technology products and services. The consequence of that is a worryingly common rhetoric of pointing out various negative impacts of "technology" on society, which in fact are just age-old problems of businesses abusing people - just in this case, the businesses sell technology products and services. But I guess it's more refreshing to say that "technology is ruining society" and unload it on engineers, instead of talking about the real problem - the same usual failure modes of capitalism that have been identified 100+ years ago.

Erlich_Bachman 6y ago

How is this characterization helpful? Zack didn't force anyone to join their platform. They provide stuff for free to users who join by their own choice. If anything, it is the fault of the general population who don't know what's good for them. They don't care about your invisible hero's writing RFCs, not Zack.

onion2k 6y ago
Zack didn't force anyone to join their platform. They provide stuff for free to users who join by their own choice. Every time Facebook buys a social media company that is pretty much what he's doing. People on WhatApp, Insta, ConnectU etc did not join Facebook and yet they still ended up on Facebook.
- Erlich_Bachman 6y ago
  Since you don't even need a facebook account to use Whatsapp, in what way are Whatsapp users forced to end up on Facebook?
  - wetpaws 6y ago
    You do need one on Oculus.
  - onion2k 6y ago
    WhatsApp shares your phone number, device information, and details of your WhatsApp usage with Facebook. A WhatsApp user isn't "on Facebook" in the sense that they have automatically get a public profile, sure, but they are on Facebook in the sense that lots of information about them end up in Facebook databases. (See "What information does WhatsApp share with the Facebook Companies?" on https://faq.whatsapp.com/general/security-and-privacy/how-we-work-with-the-facebook-companies https://faq.whatsapp.com/general/security-and-privacy/how-we...)
- Double_a_92 6y ago
  So? What does that have to do with the free web? Those companies where not forced to acceppt Facebooks deal. Anyone is still free to start a new social network or other web service. This has nothing to do with the web, and if anything it's a general antitrust case.

throwaway936482 6y ago

Frankly if you want the kids to stop profiting from all your efforts without paying back, stop giving away your labour to open source projects that have none discrimination and free redistribution clauses that allow companies like Facebook et. al. to make massive profits from building Skinner boxes and generally increasing the grand sum of human misery. A lot of the "good people" have helped create this situation by pushing an ideology that says devs should give away their labour to increase consumer freedom without acknowledging that the people who benefit most are Zuckerberg, pg and the other hyper capitalists.

hhas01 6y ago

The “open web” withered and died the moment Berners-Lee decided he’d cut some corners for convenience and released a web browser that was read-only. Mosaic took that interpretation and ran with it, and a global information platform that should’ve been as easy for anyone to read and write as opening, editing, and saving a file in MS Word became the plaything of the technocratic elite while the ign’ant plebs looked on none the wiser of how they were robbed. Can’t blame the Jacks and the Zucks for taking the opportunity that was handed to them on a plate. That’s what happens when you create gatekeepers and single points of failure. “Just techie on techie.” Oh bless your heart, child. Once again, it was the techies who created this mess—and were perfectly happy with it too while they were the ones in charge. So until technies accept and acknowledge that they are the root of the whole problem, they’re not going to do a thing to usefully change it. ’Cos right now they’re one gang of children trying (futilely) to grab back a prized toy from another gang of children, to have all for themselves. But as long as someone controls the read and write, the conditions that enable these vast walled gardens to take root and thrive will continue to exist. The only way to change that is by restructuring the platform at a fundamental level so that everyone controls their own read and write, and no-one else can just take that from them. .. Personally I believe the first step should be reshaping Firefox into a full-blown WYSIWYG document editor, analogous to MS Word except that instead of reading and writing to a local filesystem it reads and writes them via HTTP[S] requests. And then go sort out the stagnant mess that is Apache et al so that they actually speak HTTP right, and provide that client with the “distributed filesystem” it needs to read and write to. Read-write-publish-share. Simple foundational mechanics, and there’s no reason nor excuse why it shouldn’t all work correctly. (Plus, Firefox desperately needs to differentiate itself from the Chrome/WebKit hegemony if wants to justify why it should continue to exist. Well, there’s a reason—and opportunity—right there.) If geeks can make that bit work correctly then they might have a chance at resetting the balance of powr. It’s not a complete solution: there’s still the problems of document search (currently owned by Google) and name ownership (for he who owns your name owns you, and right now all our names are owned by the quasi-libertarian shakedown artists of DNS registrars and squatters), and others. And then there’s the questions of how do you sell it (and Dog knows most geeks couldn’t sell ice cream to Arabs). But it is the first step in the right direction: putting the control into the hands of the Users. All of them, this time. -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WorldWideWeb https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WorldWideWeb https://digital-archaeology.org/the-nexus-browser/ https://digital-archaeology.org/the-nexus-browser/

socialentity 6y ago

What nonsense. Nobody is forced to use Twitter, Facebook or Instagram. Blame the people who keep using them, not the creators of those networks.

foota 6y ago
As others have pointed out, there are benefits to Facebook et al, both individually and collectively (though some people may ignore the latter) however there's also great harm being done through these platforms, from the creation of echo chambers to data collection (personally, I'm more worried about the former, I don't really care about privacy wrt getting ads sent to me). So I don't blame Facebook for building a platform people want to use, but I do blame them for the damage it's causing. People that care strongly about the open web (not really me, honestly, as long as it exists I'm content, imo people don't have to use it) likely feel similarly.
- kungito 6y ago
  I mean let's be honest, there existed echo chambers in the first villages people founded. When I visit my relatives who live in villages, trust me, there is plenty of fascist echo chambers and they don't need internet to participate. The online platforms aren't a cause, they are just facilitating it. I believe it really reframes the problem
  - raxxorrax 6y ago
    I don't think fascism is a real problem on the net and I know some popular places they are around. It got some reactionary traction in the last years, but they were derided and made fun off for years before and they never made significant inroads. What really helps and has helped them is putting people und general suspicion and restricting user rights. That massively helps fascists. The increased content control is a major success fascists had achieved the last years even while not in power.
    - mercurysmessage 6y ago

fxtentacle 6y ago

My impression is that when people talk about Zuckerberg, they usually refer to his portrait as a lovable geeky nerd in the movie. But in reality, you should probably imagine someone with a psychology degree who's a master at pulling strings in the shadows and who just happens to like technology among other things. I can't find the quote now, but I believe there were several articles about how he was widely disliked at Havard for his FaceMash website. Many people didn't appreciate being part of his psychology experiment ^_^ Also, there was a lot of discussion back in the day because the first Facebook beta looked very similar to a software he was supposed to build as work for hire for a 3rd party. I'd call that a rather opportunistic move. So I wouldn't be surprised if your thought experiment would end with Zuck just saying "ooh that's sad but I don't care" and not explaining anything.

FroshKiller 6y ago
You found him a lovable, geeky nerd in The Social Network?
- _emacsomancer_ 6y ago
  Perhaps fxtentacle is actually thinking of Data from ST:TNG.
- fxtentacle 6y ago
  Yes, I thought the Zuckerberg in the movie seemed more humane and nicer than I imagine the original to be. For example, the movie presents him starting facemash to find a new girlfriend after he was rejected, which makes him appear to care about others and about relationships. But some of his actual quotes sound to me more like he sees other people as things and with some contempt. For example, consider this: ZUCK: yea so if you ever need info about anyone at harvard ZUCK: just ask ZUCK: i have over 4000 emails, pictures, addresses, sns FRIEND: what!? how’d you manage that one? ZUCK: people just submitted it ZUCK: i don’t know why ZUCK: they “trust me” ZUCK: dumb fucks
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]

johbjo 6y ago

The walled gardens are using polished UIs and free hosting to win over open alternatives, and both of these costs money. From users' perspective, it's free and convenient. To break these, we need technology and infrastructure that enables distributed decentralised hosting, and that decouples UIs from servers. But UI developers still need to be rewarded, and hosting needs to be profitable, otherwise they won't be competitive. It would involve some form of micropayments system, cryptographic identities, and so on. If these things had been in place 20 years ago, IRC would be what whatsapp is today. The matrix project sounds promising, but I'm guessing it underestimates what is actually needed to replace walled gardens.

mr_nobody 6y ago
UI should be build in into the browser. Users should be free to choice UI they like, but for that we need a standards that everyone would agree on.
- azangru 6y ago
  > UI should be build in into the browser. Users should be free to choice UI they like How would that work? The closest example I can think of is the web before CSS, when there was only html for semantic markup, and the browsers would display it however they wished, with content creators having very little say over what exactly their users would see on the screen. Can't see us moving back in that direction.
CuriouslyC 6y ago
Most people have multiple devices that can act as hosts for content, and if their friends and the people who view it also serve it, that should scale pretty cleanly.
- samhh 6y ago
  I can't imagine that having good reliability.
  - 6y ago

raxxorrax 6y ago

I agree with your sense, but I don't think this is on Facebook at all. The commercialization is driven by rights holders and advertisers mostly, which might be customers of Facebook. That some users prefer the fancy is also not a problem because I think there is enough (virtual) space for both groups. I can use the open web as well as before, just have to know that the most viral content is probably not that great.

chrisseaton 6y ago

> I'd love to see you defend yourself to them, one on one. Why does he need to defend himself? He built what he wanted. Other people built what they wanted. Why's that got to be in conflict? Why does one party have to defend themselves to the other? There's room for both.

drdeadringer 6y ago
This appears to be a battle of philosophies. May "the best business" win. Our Dearest Zucky vs Freedom Fighter Stallman. The enteral struggle continues.
- chrisseaton 6y ago
  > This appears to be a battle of philosophies. May "the best business" win. Why do you think it's a battle? Why does anyone have to be fighting? Both groups can build the web they want to build. Both can live side by side. What's the problem? Complaining that someone else is not building the thing you think they should be building is not a reasonable complaint.
  - michaelt 6y ago
    If my local bicycle shop or running club decides they don't need a website because they've got a facebook page, some would see that as a loss to the open web.
    - giobox 6y ago
      I hate this too, but to continue the example, my actual real life bike shop struggled for years with bad websites sold to them by a succession of "developers". The Facebook page appears to draw as much if not more business, and chap can run entire thing himself with no overheads. It's hardly a surprise some choose just to use Facebook really - as far as they are concerned its often "better" for them than the open web was, even if that is hard to swallow sometimes.
    - chrisseaton 6y ago

szundi 6y ago

Maybe we should create a fund for these guys.

dr-detroit 6y ago

You're mad at a face the CIA put up in front of themselves (according to abc news)

ttonkytonk 6y ago

But isn't this the name of the game? Use things to the best of your advantage?

chokeartist 6y ago

> I'd love to see you defend yourself to them, one on one. No PR people. Just techie on techie. That wouldn't end well. He would get his ass physically beat, in most likelihood.

CuriouslyC 6y ago

Don't worry, between people who want freedom on one side, and incoming government regulation on the other, walled gardens are about to get squeezed. The people who care just need to be ready with something decentralized to leverage the cracks when they appear.