4 ms·

> The web is there to provide functionality and satisfy business needs. lol Remember when the web was for people to communicate? Not just to 'satisfy business

by fao_ 6y ago

> The web is there to provide functionality and satisfy business needs. lol Remember when the web was for people to communicate? Not just to 'satisfy business needs'?

ben_w 6y ago
I don’t remember any such time, and I had a 14.4k modem.
arcturus17 6y ago
I actually don’t, my family got on the web circa 1996 and within a year or two we were buying books on Barnes & Noble and having them shipped to Spain. What are you referring to?
- edoceo 6y ago
  Pre-ecommerce Internet. (Aka: the good ol' days)
- kortilla 6y ago
  The reason for purchasing an internet connection was not to shop back then. You may have purchased some books but the majority of online activity had no apparent business purpose.
- CaptArmchair 6y ago
  The original intention of the Web - as devised by Tim Berners Lee - was to share documents in a research context. The idea of a URI or URL was to uniquely identify documents, but also to link them as hypertext. So you could jump from document to document. Then Netscape came. They were the first having a primitive idea of the potential of the Web beyond simply linking pages. The Dotcom bubble of 1999 and the first boom of e-commerce was exactly because in the few years preceding, everyone was scrambling to get dominate this Web thing. This included Microsoft, Sun and so on. Now, nothing of this is new. The entire idea of "Rich Web Applications" is as old as the Web. Silverlight, Java Web Applets, Flash,... They were all about this idea of building applications that could be loaded - and more importantly: controlled - via the Web. Over the past 15 years, Google succeeded in dominating the browser market, and building a set of API's that made it easy to build such Rich We Applications without needing extra plugins or 3rd party sandboxes. You can just do it using Javscript, HTML and CSS. And while that's not a bad thing in itself, the problem is that an entire generation of engineers has created an entire layer of abstractions on top of the browser engine in order to reinvent the exact same things which already existed back in the '90s. Only now, instead of running separate native programs and applications, everything is now corralled into a single browser environment... which tends to be entirely controlled by Google, if you use anything powered by Chromium. And this often includes how simple text documents are consumed. The text you get doesn't arrive as a HTML body in a HTTP request, it arrives as a chunk - or chunks - of JSON and needs to get parsed and assembled by layers of javascript until the assembled code can be fed to a browser engine... which will parse that once again in order to paint it on the browser canvas. None of that is truly necessary when it comes to plain text. Heck, none of that is even necessary to render a single image on the browser canvas. Plenty of major, highly visible, high traffic outlets like newspapers or media use these layers of complexity to publish text. Why? Because it gives them control over your experience and what you can do with the content e.g. paywalls, DRM, advertising, intricate metrics,... Now, plenty of the Web still offers plain HTML and CSS, just like 20 years ago. And that's awesome. But that's a long tail of websites which largely remains in the dark since the vast majority of Internet users have been corralled into a set of centralized services that tend to promote links to these highly visible outlets through their recommendation engines.
- agumonkey 6y ago
  The e-commerce felt like a side project of the web, it was nascent, potentially cool, but, at least to me, never the reason I was connecting. I wanted to read, chat, play. I really think that the business first mindset made internet rot faster than necessary. No monetization means no tracking means no cookies warnings.. so on and so forth.
dgellow 6y ago
The idea that business isn’t about people communicating is strange
- lelandbatey 6y ago
  Business, as I believe parent meant it, incorporates parts where people communicate; I suspect though that the parent would mostly say that business is about money.
- fao_ 6y ago
  The first and only rule of business is that: You are there to make money. Everything, and I mean everything is secondary. Employee wages, whatever 'solution' you're aiming to market, those are all secondary points to the fact that you are there to make money and do what works to get money. It's a harsh reality, but it's very much the case and it's the first thing you learn on any business course.
  - corobo 6y ago
    So are charities like hobbies under your definition?
    - fao_ 6y ago
      > So are charities like hobbies under your definition? A charity is not a business, it's a different type of organization. The fact/reason that most of them decide to operate like businesses is outside of the scope of what I stated.
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
  - dgellow 6y ago
    If you want, that doesn’t change the fact that business is almost entirely based on communicating between humans. Communication with coworkers, customers, investors, regulators, partners, etc. One of the main reason people interact and communicate with humans that’s aren’t their close circle is for business
vntok 6y ago
That situation you describe never actually happened, except maybe during the very first few hours, days or weeks after the Web's birth. Remember bandwidth, machines and access used to cost way more back then than they do now, so resource owners wanted to get the best bang for their buck from the get go. Note that resource owners means those who actually paid for network resources (companies, administrations, schools, labs), not people who merely benefitted from them for free because of their positions (teachers, students, lab rats etc) You seem to be the unfortunate victim of a false memory, a similar phenomenon to that experienced by the "things used to be better" crowd.
- erik_seaberg 6y ago
  My first web pages were hosted by the same ISP I was paying for a modem pool, shell account, and Usenet feed. Hardware was more expensive but not prohibitively so.
shadowgovt 6y ago
I remember when it lacked enough abstractions to satisfy business needs. That's not a proud age; it was less than what we have now.

by fao_ 6y ago

> The web is there to provide functionality and satisfy business needs. lol Remember when the web was for people to communicate? Not just to 'satisfy business needs'?

ben_w 6y ago

I don’t remember any such time, and I had a 14.4k modem.

arcturus17 6y ago

I actually don’t, my family got on the web circa 1996 and within a year or two we were buying books on Barnes & Noble and having them shipped to Spain. What are you referring to?

edoceo 6y ago
Pre-ecommerce Internet. (Aka: the good ol' days)
kortilla 6y ago
The reason for purchasing an internet connection was not to shop back then. You may have purchased some books but the majority of online activity had no apparent business purpose.
CaptArmchair 6y ago
The original intention of the Web - as devised by Tim Berners Lee - was to share documents in a research context. The idea of a URI or URL was to uniquely identify documents, but also to link them as hypertext. So you could jump from document to document. Then Netscape came. They were the first having a primitive idea of the potential of the Web beyond simply linking pages. The Dotcom bubble of 1999 and the first boom of e-commerce was exactly because in the few years preceding, everyone was scrambling to get dominate this Web thing. This included Microsoft, Sun and so on. Now, nothing of this is new. The entire idea of "Rich Web Applications" is as old as the Web. Silverlight, Java Web Applets, Flash,... They were all about this idea of building applications that could be loaded - and more importantly: controlled - via the Web. Over the past 15 years, Google succeeded in dominating the browser market, and building a set of API's that made it easy to build such Rich We Applications without needing extra plugins or 3rd party sandboxes. You can just do it using Javscript, HTML and CSS. And while that's not a bad thing in itself, the problem is that an entire generation of engineers has created an entire layer of abstractions on top of the browser engine in order to reinvent the exact same things which already existed back in the '90s. Only now, instead of running separate native programs and applications, everything is now corralled into a single browser environment... which tends to be entirely controlled by Google, if you use anything powered by Chromium. And this often includes how simple text documents are consumed. The text you get doesn't arrive as a HTML body in a HTTP request, it arrives as a chunk - or chunks - of JSON and needs to get parsed and assembled by layers of javascript until the assembled code can be fed to a browser engine... which will parse that once again in order to paint it on the browser canvas. None of that is truly necessary when it comes to plain text. Heck, none of that is even necessary to render a single image on the browser canvas. Plenty of major, highly visible, high traffic outlets like newspapers or media use these layers of complexity to publish text. Why? Because it gives them control over your experience and what you can do with the content e.g. paywalls, DRM, advertising, intricate metrics,... Now, plenty of the Web still offers plain HTML and CSS, just like 20 years ago. And that's awesome. But that's a long tail of websites which largely remains in the dark since the vast majority of Internet users have been corralled into a set of centralized services that tend to promote links to these highly visible outlets through their recommendation engines.
agumonkey 6y ago
The e-commerce felt like a side project of the web, it was nascent, potentially cool, but, at least to me, never the reason I was connecting. I wanted to read, chat, play. I really think that the business first mindset made internet rot faster than necessary. No monetization means no tracking means no cookies warnings.. so on and so forth.

dgellow 6y ago

The idea that business isn’t about people communicating is strange

lelandbatey 6y ago
Business, as I believe parent meant it, incorporates parts where people communicate; I suspect though that the parent would mostly say that business is about money.
fao_ 6y ago
The first and only rule of business is that: You are there to make money. Everything, and I mean everything is secondary. Employee wages, whatever 'solution' you're aiming to market, those are all secondary points to the fact that you are there to make money and do what works to get money. It's a harsh reality, but it's very much the case and it's the first thing you learn on any business course.
- corobo 6y ago
  So are charities like hobbies under your definition?
  - fao_ 6y ago
    > So are charities like hobbies under your definition? A charity is not a business, it's a different type of organization. The fact/reason that most of them decide to operate like businesses is outside of the scope of what I stated.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
- dgellow 6y ago
  If you want, that doesn’t change the fact that business is almost entirely based on communicating between humans. Communication with coworkers, customers, investors, regulators, partners, etc. One of the main reason people interact and communicate with humans that’s aren’t their close circle is for business

vntok 6y ago

That situation you describe never actually happened, except maybe during the very first few hours, days or weeks after the Web's birth. Remember bandwidth, machines and access used to cost way more back then than they do now, so resource owners wanted to get the best bang for their buck from the get go. Note that resource owners means those who actually paid for network resources (companies, administrations, schools, labs), not people who merely benefitted from them for free because of their positions (teachers, students, lab rats etc) You seem to be the unfortunate victim of a false memory, a similar phenomenon to that experienced by the "things used to be better" crowd.

erik_seaberg 6y ago
My first web pages were hosted by the same ISP I was paying for a modem pool, shell account, and Usenet feed. Hardware was more expensive but not prohibitively so.

shadowgovt 6y ago

I remember when it lacked enough abstractions to satisfy business needs. That's not a proud age; it was less than what we have now.