10 ms·

The Web’s Missing Interoperability

142 points by davidmckenna 6y ago

sbazerque 6y ago
I'm working on it, Ben [1]. Believe me, it is no easy thing to do. [1] https://github.com/hyperhyperspace/hyperhyperspace-core https://github.com/hyperhyperspace/hyperhyperspace-core
- BiteCode_dev 6y ago
  How do you deal with browser tiny storage limitations for each domain?
  - sbazerque 6y ago
    We use IndexedDB, and in modern browsers the limit should be at least a few hundred megabytes (see for example this answer for Chrome limits [1], the situation is similar in Firefox). So far this has been enough, but the apps we have are fairly simple (e.g. no media!). We'll see. Maybe media can be handled off browser. [1] https://web.dev/storage-for-the-web/#how-much https://web.dev/storage-for-the-web/#how-much
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- toomim 6y ago
  Hi santi! =)
  - sbazerque 6y ago
    Hey Mike! Mike is working on it as well: https://braid.news/ https://braid.news/
    - toomim 6y ago
      And now we have a new domain name: https://braid.org https://braid.org!
no_wizard 6y ago
This is true, the web is in essence[0] what we, as a collective society, make of it. Many of the points he brings up I never even thought of, and I like to consider myself a staunch privacy advocate. Namely, the points on how small businesses are affected by GDPR and anti-tracking / anti-cookie measures are fresh perspectives I've never thought of. To his point, all this is going to do is drive people to where the eye balls are, so instead of just marketing on Facebook (or Twitter, or Reddit) you want to market and convert your audience all on the same platform(s) because its increasingly difficult to do otherwise. My counter point being of course, that this may have been inevitable anyway, since this really is increasingly the way people interact, is via apps like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit etc and less and less on the open web. Of course large corporations can and should and will kicking or screaming or no, comply with the laws, but little thought has been given how much those laws don't disrupt the fundamental problem: disrupting the stranglehold these companies have on interaction. I think a good amount of the GDPR, and Apple's recent moves have good ideas and net wins, but after reading this article, I can also see how it will simply, in the long term, act as a form of regulatory capture where only the largest entrenched companies can comply and small companies, particularly non tech small businesses, will be increasingly more reliant on those platforms going forward. The solution isn't of course, to get rid of things like the GDPR, but like all laws and regulation, it needs to be re-thought and re-shaped as it affects the marketplace, and that's the crux of the problem, most regulation is set it and forget (particularly in the US) where there is little after thought given or follow up to it and augmenting it appropriately to minimize real downsides (not perceived ones that corporations complain about, but more barriers it creates to new businesses) and asking the question of is this acceptable or do we need to re-think some aspect of this? I know this won't play that well either, its not going to be a popular debate among my peers, but its important we consider all the facts, none the less. [0]: I may be reducing the article a little too much here, forgive me, I really do think everyone should read it first
- Aerroon 6y ago
  The solution, as it often is, is to create reasonable exemptions for small businesses. How do people expect a single person to start a business among all of these rules? Obviously there shouldn't be no rules, but they need to be easier to comply with. Right now it all kind of works, because there's a lack of enforcement. But we don't know how many people have given up, because they were uncertain of the regulations.
bronikowski 6y ago
> One of the reasons why GDPR is such a disaster is that it makes it all but impossible for a new social media company to ever be started in Europe Maybe we don't need more "social media companies" of the type that GDPR is "a disaster" for.
- gowld 6y ago
  Some people like to socialize with each other.
  - bryanrasmussen 6y ago
    Do these people also like to be tracked all the time and have their data sold to third parties who use that data to manipulate the people?
anderspitman 6y ago
In my opinion the way to enter the social network market is using the Slack/Discord approach. Rather than trying to make a better Facebook for the world, make a better Facebook for people to use for their specific community or company, and then make it easy to tie your account to multiple communities, and then (maybe) start connecting communities. I almost achieved escape velocity with Matrix/Riot in my gaming group a couple years ago. Ultimately it was too buggy for them at the time and we ended up on FB messenger, but if it had worked they'd all be primed to join a Matrix-based social network right now.
- ricree 6y ago
  >make a better Facebook for people to use for their specific community or company, and then make it easy to tie your account to multiple communities, and then (maybe) start connecting communities. Which, of course, was precisely how Facebook broke into the social network market in the first place. Initially not just for college students, but students at specific colleges. Then connecting students between college, then bringing in family members of those students, and so on.
  - EGreg 6y ago
    Except now it’s much more expensive and difficult to match what people want in 2021. You can’t just make a face book of ... “Profiles”. Trust me we’ve been working on https://github.com/Qbix/Platform https://github.com/Qbix/Platform and we only recently reached the point where people’s main complaint is the APPEARANCE hahaha
    - amiga-workbench 6y ago
      I can sort of see what they mean by appearance, but its not far off looking tidy. The issues are mostly around padding and UI element proportions. Some of your icons are too large for the elements they are inside of, the scaling of form elements within your filter interface is somewhat inconsistent too. If I wasn't completely slammed at work I'd be open to submitting a PR.
dmitriid 6y ago
> One of the reasons why GDPR is such a disaster is that it makes it all but impossible for a new social media company to ever be started in Europe And then goes on to > Moreover, it’s a reasonable regulation: my friend on Facebook didn’t give permission for their information to be given to Snapchat, for example. It does, though, make it that much more difficult to bootstrap a Facebook competitor: the most valuable data (from a business perspective, anyways) is the social graph So what does he propose then, huh? "Oh, forget about privacy. Since Facebook sits on a trove of personal data the never asked consent for, everyone should have the same access to the same trove of data"?
- gowld 6y ago
  Simple proposal: The data should be tightly controlled by the user, like HIPAA. Users can sell their own data for services, but they can't sell other people's data.
  - warkdarrior 6y ago
    That is the situation under GDPR right now (at least legally). But then the problem is with moving my data to another platform, especially if my data involves other people. For example, can I take my contacts from Facebook and move them to Signal? What if you are in my contacts, do I need your permission to move your info to Signal?
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
kmeisthax 6y ago
This is sort of like arguing, "if we make it illegal to push pills on people, then the Sackler family will have a monopoly on opiate addictions".
EGreg 6y ago
Yes, this describes the problems. Here is a detailed resource on what an actual solution would look like: https://qbix.com/token https://qbix.com/token (Ignore the token part and read the rest.)
rektide 6y ago
a huge part of this article is about clubhouse & social networks means for virality, about how they can expand. taking contacts & pushing to them is the kind of main model that Clubhouse is doing. > I get the argument around banning contact exports; unsurprisingly, there are calls that Apple do exactly that in the wake of Clubhouse’s rise (never mind the fact that contacts have been accessible — and thus have been accessed! — in this way for years). What people making these calls — and these laws — need to be more honest about, though, is that they killing competition. what seems awkward, missing, to me is that all these virality systems are push model. each would be social network has to bootstrap, and it does it by making new users push a bunch of invites out to their friends. where is the pull model? where can I go see my friend Cable's activity, see what networks he is most social on these days? Instagram posts to Twitter are mentioned in the article, but that's such a special purpose form, such a one off, made in part possible by the very general share-whatever nature of twitter. some standards for social network users to be able too interlink & declare their other networks would be great, as a start. second, I want some activity monitor to be standardized, so I can get a quick heads-up cross network view of where I should be looking at my associates. we lack the means to ambientlu explore each other socially, and social networking lacks a pull model of networking: we have to explicitly rendezvous on each network, owing to the lack of cross-network systems. re inter- the internet please, & let's standardize some good base level cross-social systems.
- jdminhbg 6y ago
  > what seems awkward, missing, to me is that all these virality systems are push model. each would be social network has to bootstrap, and it does it by making new users push a bunch of invites out to their friends. > where is the pull model? where can I go see my friend Cable's activity, see what networks he is most social on these days? Instagram posts to Twitter are mentioned in the article, but that's such a special purpose form, such a one off, made in part possible by the very general share-whatever nature of twitter. Clubhouse actually is both push and pull. Yes, you can send invites to friends to get them onto the app, but having your contacts also lets them connect you to those already there when you first log on. Of course this isn't the open pull model you're talking about, where I can discover new things my friend is doing, or find out where he is most active. But using the phone number as an identifier for social graphs is kind of a hack around the non-existence of such a thing.
crazypython 6y ago
See also: Semantic web. RDF, OWL, https://solidproject.org/TR/protocol https://solidproject.org/TR/protocol . It's the original intent of Tim-Berners Lee, the man who invented the web.
- sbazerque 6y ago
  In my view the lack of authentication in the original semantic web concept made it a SEO gaming vector for years and years. Knowing who to trust is as hard a problem as basic understanding / semantics.
  - IggleSniggle 6y ago
    Trust is a harder problem than basic understanding / semantics, because it requires basic understanding / semantics as a prerequisite. You might trust your banker with your money but not your personal life, and trust your friend with your personal life but not your bank account. Therefore, you there must be explicit and implicit degrees of trust that are specifically trust "for some intention" or at even just "for some specific purpose." And then, you must trust that the meaning of any promise or guarantee is equivalent between parties.
jacobobryant 6y ago
Heh, I published a post in a similar vein just today[1]. Lately I've been thinking the way to do it is have everyone publish a (paginated) Atom feed with all their public content interactions. So each item in the feed would be something like "published this blog post", "liked this tweet", "thinks this comment was written in bad faith", etc. And "follows this person" with a link to that person's atom feed. Then if you want to build a search engine/social network/recommender system, you can get started by crawling and indexing a bunch of feeds. I'd like to make a web app (probably on replit since it makes self-hosting dead easy) that has plugins for a bunch of other sites. so you connect to all your other accounts, and then this app imports your data and publishes it to a single feed for you. Obviously starting audience would be programmers, but I bet it could expand to a general audience too. [1] https://news.findka.com/p/we-need-user-centric-data https://news.findka.com/p/we-need-user-centric-data
- beardedetim 6y ago
  I’ve been noodling this idea for a few years. I think it’s a great idea and it being based on Atom/RSS is a great move. The problem, I have found, is no one wants to pay for hosting. No one wants to self host. And by no one I mean no one that is using Facebook /Twitter / Insta / etc. and for this to really work, I think you need everyone hosting their own “log”. Interested in seeing more work done in this space and am glad to see others feel the same as I do.
  - jacobobryant 6y ago
    That's a big reason why I'm excited about repl.it. You can self-host a github repo in about 2 clicks (not including account setup). I could see it increasing the reach of self-hosted apps a lot. Actually I made a little proof of concept for this a week ago: https://github.com/jacobobryant/Feedstuff https://github.com/jacobobryant/Feedstuff
    - pdonis 6y ago
      I don't think the issue is hosting the app itself, it's hosting each user's data. For the vast majority of users, hosting their own data is not even on the radar. They assume that whatever app they are using is hosting their data, and the only price they will accept for doing that is "free".
olivermarks 6y ago
Seeing Tim O'Reilly speaking at one of his web 2.0 summits around 2009 about the urgency of preventing a few companies/people monopolizing everything comes into my mind regularly when I see tech monopolist oligarchs swaggering around and being feted by a fawning media. We ignored the need to regulate to enable open innovation and interoperability and allowed walled gardens of unprecedented size to be imposed on smaller businesses, from Apple, Amazon & Alphabet and on, unfair advantage and a disaster for smaller business evolution
- jefftk 6y ago
  As the OP points out, the regulation that we are getting, so far, benefits these walled gardens by prioritizing privacy over interoperability.
  - olivermarks 6y ago
    Yes it's actually getting a lot worse! Had a long discussion the other day about Amazon and where we went wrong as a society. Short version, Amazon should have been regulated to facilitate existing small specialist businesses supply chain and delivery, not directly compete with them and force them out of business. Amazon should have been fulfilling orders on behalf of mom & pop's knitting supply, not undercutting them and cutting them out. This is incredibly damaging to the tax base as most taxes are paid by small businesses. Now we have a pandemic where the big box stores and online retailers remain open while the mom & pops are closed and going bust. It's a slow moving economic disaster IMO
    - lotsofpulp 6y ago
      >Amazon should have been fulfilling orders on behalf of mom & pop's knitting supply, not undercutting them and cutting them out. This is incredibly damaging to the tax base as most taxes are paid by small businesses. It's benefiting to me, and I think society, to not pay extra for unnecessary middlemen. If the problem is insufficient taxes, then raise taxes.
      - 6y ago
mbgerring 6y ago
Social media apps made it impossible to export your social graph many years before GDPR. The only thing that would make them do it now is if they were legally required to.
jrochkind1 6y ago
> The cause is Apple: its approach to cookies makes platform-based web storefronts increasingly difficult to monetize effectively Can anyone explain this? I'm not sure what they are referring to.
- tguedes 6y ago
  He means Shopify. Shopify merchants (and other DTC companies) heavily use Facebook/Instagram to target the specific audience they are targeting. Shopify has since announced that there will be a tighter integration with Facebook Shops
  - jrochkind1 6y ago
    What does that have to do with "apple's approach to cookies makes platform-based web storefronts increasingly difficult to monetize effectively"?
- twiss 6y ago
  Previously, cookies could be used to track users across websites (e.g. multiple websites using the Shopify platform, by making a request to shopify.com), but also to provide useful functionality (e.g. remembering their contact details). Now, this is not possible anymore, due to first-party isolation being implemented in Safari and now Firefox. Personally, I think this is not such a big deal, as the browser can remember your contact details for you anyway, and you can fill them out on any website. So I think it's a win for privacy and for users, but it's true that there are some downsides as well.
  - jrochkind1 6y ago
    It goes without saying to his audience that you can't "monetize a platform-based storefront" without tracking users across websites? Maybe I don't understand what "monetize a platform-based storefront" means exactly. He's talking about the particular store on shopify making money, not shopify itself getting customers, right?
  - thombles 6y ago
hertzrat 6y ago
He talks about about how privacy laws like those around contact lists are bad because make it harder for new social media companies to arise. Seems like a bad trade off for everyone but investors and for future users of The Crystal Network that I keep joking I will create: a network where you are rewarded with healing crystals in the mail for soothing one another on the platform, creating a veritable lattice of support
pjettter 6y ago
It's not the web, it's computing in general that has not evolved in the right direction. A grid is not a grid is not a grid. An image is not an image is not an image. Etc. So rather than fixing the web, fix computing. It will fix the web too. If not, the web is even more in trouble.
- noizejoy 6y ago
  $technology {web, computing, ...} is a mere reflection of the dynamics in our species.
- anigbrowl 6y ago
  Maybe you would be better providing examples instead of mysterious aphorisms, hard to tell if you are being serious or not.
  - pjettter 6y ago
    I suppose what I mean is that there are many idioms that we have learned and gotten used to. For example, actions like copy and paste, or click and drag (touch gestures). Formats, like a table, grid, matrix, cells. Text is also universal and with editors we have a cursor, backspace, select, cut, but also, pagination, margins, fonts, boxes, etc., when we render. Drawings are represented in various ways. We have paths, but then there are a multitude of serialization formats. None of these are really first class citizens in computing. They are all application level concepts/implementations. Some are hardware dependent (margins, when we choose a printer with settings). My point is that we would benefit if these "human needs" were met at a lower level. If a grid was a grid, an image was an image, a drawing a drawing, etc. At the application level, there could be enrichment, but the essence of a thing could be universal. Like a protocol. Once these things are protocols, everything would start functioning more alike and be able to interoperate in a better way. Including the web. Some of these things (idioms, actions) appear to work across the board, but they are fragile, unpredictable, and often fail just when you need them the most. That's because every application solves these problems for itself. (Please don't say Windows Clipboard).
MatekCopatek 6y ago
An unlikely outcome that I'd like to see is the following: 1. Legislation makes current models impossible - I'm imagining something like Section 230 being repealed, Twitter and Facebook being on the hook for anything anyone posts, which means they can't moderate and are forced to change their business model/effectively close shop. 2. People still want to blog/share/like. 3. Federated networks become a thing again because small communities are way easier to moderate. Nerds self host, regular people get accounts as part of their ISP subscription or pay a few bucks for some SaaS offering. Maybe a forward looking country gives you an e-identity on the official Mastodon instance where the ToS equals local law so we don't have to have that whole Twitter censorship discussion ever again. 4. Everyone lives happily ever after.
- EGreg 6y ago
  For 3 to happen we would need better software. Do you have any suggestions that are the best in class?
- themacguffinman 6y ago
  The repeal of Section 230 would mean more aggressive and large scale moderation, not less. Remember that the copyright liability incurred by DMCA and other copyright laws didn't kill YouTube, instead it directly led to the creation of ContentID.
  - MatekCopatek 6y ago
    I know, my assumption was it would be so much more moderation that they couldn't handle it without completely ruining the user experience.
ericflo 6y ago
> Twitter eventually cut off Instagram in-line image sharing, but by then it was too late. It actually went in the opposite direction - Instagram shut down Twitter's ability to display their images in-line.
giantrobot 6y ago
The web had interoperability but it was largely ignored and then replaced by silos and walled gardens. The Web 2.0 cognoscenti made a lot of the same mistakes as the Web 1.0 cognoscenti about how systems would be used and received by "normal" people. A lot of good ideas had terrible usability and didn't get to a real tipping point. Contrast that with social media sites (even back to MySpace) that were far more usable to the average person. As as an example, look at RSS (any version including Atom). It is a great technological solution for the Web 2.0 proponents. They were interested in long form postings and had a lot of posts on similar subjects. Their posts had titles, some categorization, and maybe even semantic elements. Making a "feed" to syndicate those posts was a pretty useful thing both for their visibility and you and I as readers. What RSS doesn't offer is a good way to express short form informal posts on mixed subject matter. Even posting a simple link to an interesting page or just an image isn't well expressed with most RSS generating software and not handled well by the format or feed readers. Even the word "subscribe" implies a bit of a formal social anti-pattern. Compare that to most social media sites, even going back to MySpace. The presented users with a single content field. The UI basically asked "What's up?". There's no implied formality of a post title or categorization. It just plops on top of a stack of your posts on your "feed". That's not to say what social media sites have done with those user feeds is necessarily good (echo chambers, engagement manipulation, etc) but they served a desire of a lot of people. I'd venture that most people don't want to sit down and make long form posts with cognitive load like titles and categories. Large social media sites have no use for interoperability because their money is made on engagement with their site/app. The Web 2.0 visionaries spent a lot of time navel gazing and being focused on their areas of interest so they missed a lot of thing social media has implemented. We're seeing interoperability start to happen again (Fediverse etc) with people taking the informal social media models and applying Web 2.0's decentralized concepts. It's not clear is the decentralized social media can hit a critical mass of users because multimedia, especially video, is a huge draw for social media users and is hideously expensive to host and distribute. There's also effectively zero monetization and a lot of people are trying to be professional social media users.
lazzlazzlazz 6y ago
The HN community will agree that there is a deep issue with interoperability and platform risk in Web 2.0, but will again have a knee-jerk response that the rapidly growing Web 3.0 community is awful, there's no point, etc. — because it's crypto. How do you create a software application that exists and runs independently of the platform (and even hardware) on which it exists? How do you create a robust, unified, incentive-aligned decentralized consensus system? Those working on crypto projects today already understand this.
- enos_feedler 6y ago
  Who decided that web 3.0 is built on crypto? I know some in the crypto community like to call it web 3.0, but I am still thinking web 3.0 is something different and built more on web 2.0
  - ehnto 6y ago
    It's all nebulous. No one even agreed on what Web 2.0 meant, it's only in retrospect that we think we know. If we were really sticking to versions being meaningful we probably should have bumped a version when frontend UI frameworks and javascript began dominating web application development, since best I could tell at the time Web 2.0 was just the addition of flat design and ajax calls.
adamc 6y ago
I hate all of these attempts to monetize communication. The government should strictly regulate them.

142 points by davidmckenna 6y ago

I'm working on it, Ben [1]. Believe me, it is no easy thing to do. [1] https://github.com/hyperhyperspace/hyperhyperspace-core https://github.com/hyperhyperspace/hyperhyperspace-core

BiteCode_dev 6y ago
How do you deal with browser tiny storage limitations for each domain?
- sbazerque 6y ago
  We use IndexedDB, and in modern browsers the limit should be at least a few hundred megabytes (see for example this answer for Chrome limits [1], the situation is similar in Firefox). So far this has been enough, but the apps we have are fairly simple (e.g. no media!). We'll see. Maybe media can be handled off browser. [1] https://web.dev/storage-for-the-web/#how-much https://web.dev/storage-for-the-web/#how-much
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
toomim 6y ago
Hi santi! =)
- sbazerque 6y ago
  Hey Mike! Mike is working on it as well: https://braid.news/ https://braid.news/
  - toomim 6y ago
    And now we have a new domain name: https://braid.org https://braid.org!

no_wizard 6y ago

This is true, the web is in essence[0] what we, as a collective society, make of it. Many of the points he brings up I never even thought of, and I like to consider myself a staunch privacy advocate. Namely, the points on how small businesses are affected by GDPR and anti-tracking / anti-cookie measures are fresh perspectives I've never thought of. To his point, all this is going to do is drive people to where the eye balls are, so instead of just marketing on Facebook (or Twitter, or Reddit) you want to market and convert your audience all on the same platform(s) because its increasingly difficult to do otherwise. My counter point being of course, that this may have been inevitable anyway, since this really is increasingly the way people interact, is via apps like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit etc and less and less on the open web. Of course large corporations can and should and will kicking or screaming or no, comply with the laws, but little thought has been given how much those laws don't disrupt the fundamental problem: disrupting the stranglehold these companies have on interaction. I think a good amount of the GDPR, and Apple's recent moves have good ideas and net wins, but after reading this article, I can also see how it will simply, in the long term, act as a form of regulatory capture where only the largest entrenched companies can comply and small companies, particularly non tech small businesses, will be increasingly more reliant on those platforms going forward. The solution isn't of course, to get rid of things like the GDPR, but like all laws and regulation, it needs to be re-thought and re-shaped as it affects the marketplace, and that's the crux of the problem, most regulation is set it and forget (particularly in the US) where there is little after thought given or follow up to it and augmenting it appropriately to minimize real downsides (not perceived ones that corporations complain about, but more barriers it creates to new businesses) and asking the question of is this acceptable or do we need to re-think some aspect of this? I know this won't play that well either, its not going to be a popular debate among my peers, but its important we consider all the facts, none the less. [0]: I may be reducing the article a little too much here, forgive me, I really do think everyone should read it first

Aerroon 6y ago
The solution, as it often is, is to create reasonable exemptions for small businesses. How do people expect a single person to start a business among all of these rules? Obviously there shouldn't be no rules, but they need to be easier to comply with. Right now it all kind of works, because there's a lack of enforcement. But we don't know how many people have given up, because they were uncertain of the regulations.

bronikowski 6y ago

> One of the reasons why GDPR is such a disaster is that it makes it all but impossible for a new social media company to ever be started in Europe Maybe we don't need more "social media companies" of the type that GDPR is "a disaster" for.

gowld 6y ago
Some people like to socialize with each other.
- bryanrasmussen 6y ago
  Do these people also like to be tracked all the time and have their data sold to third parties who use that data to manipulate the people?

anderspitman 6y ago

In my opinion the way to enter the social network market is using the Slack/Discord approach. Rather than trying to make a better Facebook for the world, make a better Facebook for people to use for their specific community or company, and then make it easy to tie your account to multiple communities, and then (maybe) start connecting communities. I almost achieved escape velocity with Matrix/Riot in my gaming group a couple years ago. Ultimately it was too buggy for them at the time and we ended up on FB messenger, but if it had worked they'd all be primed to join a Matrix-based social network right now.

ricree 6y ago
>make a better Facebook for people to use for their specific community or company, and then make it easy to tie your account to multiple communities, and then (maybe) start connecting communities. Which, of course, was precisely how Facebook broke into the social network market in the first place. Initially not just for college students, but students at specific colleges. Then connecting students between college, then bringing in family members of those students, and so on.
- EGreg 6y ago
  Except now it’s much more expensive and difficult to match what people want in 2021. You can’t just make a face book of ... “Profiles”. Trust me we’ve been working on https://github.com/Qbix/Platform https://github.com/Qbix/Platform and we only recently reached the point where people’s main complaint is the APPEARANCE hahaha
  - amiga-workbench 6y ago
    I can sort of see what they mean by appearance, but its not far off looking tidy. The issues are mostly around padding and UI element proportions. Some of your icons are too large for the elements they are inside of, the scaling of form elements within your filter interface is somewhat inconsistent too. If I wasn't completely slammed at work I'd be open to submitting a PR.

dmitriid 6y ago

> One of the reasons why GDPR is such a disaster is that it makes it all but impossible for a new social media company to ever be started in Europe And then goes on to > Moreover, it’s a reasonable regulation: my friend on Facebook didn’t give permission for their information to be given to Snapchat, for example. It does, though, make it that much more difficult to bootstrap a Facebook competitor: the most valuable data (from a business perspective, anyways) is the social graph So what does he propose then, huh? "Oh, forget about privacy. Since Facebook sits on a trove of personal data the never asked consent for, everyone should have the same access to the same trove of data"?

gowld 6y ago
Simple proposal: The data should be tightly controlled by the user, like HIPAA. Users can sell their own data for services, but they can't sell other people's data.
- warkdarrior 6y ago
  That is the situation under GDPR right now (at least legally). But then the problem is with moving my data to another platform, especially if my data involves other people. For example, can I take my contacts from Facebook and move them to Signal? What if you are in my contacts, do I need your permission to move your info to Signal?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

kmeisthax 6y ago

This is sort of like arguing, "if we make it illegal to push pills on people, then the Sackler family will have a monopoly on opiate addictions".

EGreg 6y ago

Yes, this describes the problems. Here is a detailed resource on what an actual solution would look like: https://qbix.com/token https://qbix.com/token (Ignore the token part and read the rest.)

rektide 6y ago

a huge part of this article is about clubhouse & social networks means for virality, about how they can expand. taking contacts & pushing to them is the kind of main model that Clubhouse is doing. > I get the argument around banning contact exports; unsurprisingly, there are calls that Apple do exactly that in the wake of Clubhouse’s rise (never mind the fact that contacts have been accessible — and thus have been accessed! — in this way for years). What people making these calls — and these laws — need to be more honest about, though, is that they killing competition. what seems awkward, missing, to me is that all these virality systems are push model. each would be social network has to bootstrap, and it does it by making new users push a bunch of invites out to their friends. where is the pull model? where can I go see my friend Cable's activity, see what networks he is most social on these days? Instagram posts to Twitter are mentioned in the article, but that's such a special purpose form, such a one off, made in part possible by the very general share-whatever nature of twitter. some standards for social network users to be able too interlink & declare their other networks would be great, as a start. second, I want some activity monitor to be standardized, so I can get a quick heads-up cross network view of where I should be looking at my associates. we lack the means to ambientlu explore each other socially, and social networking lacks a pull model of networking: we have to explicitly rendezvous on each network, owing to the lack of cross-network systems. re inter- the internet please, & let's standardize some good base level cross-social systems.

jdminhbg 6y ago
> what seems awkward, missing, to me is that all these virality systems are push model. each would be social network has to bootstrap, and it does it by making new users push a bunch of invites out to their friends. > where is the pull model? where can I go see my friend Cable's activity, see what networks he is most social on these days? Instagram posts to Twitter are mentioned in the article, but that's such a special purpose form, such a one off, made in part possible by the very general share-whatever nature of twitter. Clubhouse actually is both push and pull. Yes, you can send invites to friends to get them onto the app, but having your contacts also lets them connect you to those already there when you first log on. Of course this isn't the open pull model you're talking about, where I can discover new things my friend is doing, or find out where he is most active. But using the phone number as an identifier for social graphs is kind of a hack around the non-existence of such a thing.

crazypython 6y ago

See also: Semantic web. RDF, OWL, https://solidproject.org/TR/protocol https://solidproject.org/TR/protocol . It's the original intent of Tim-Berners Lee, the man who invented the web.

sbazerque 6y ago
In my view the lack of authentication in the original semantic web concept made it a SEO gaming vector for years and years. Knowing who to trust is as hard a problem as basic understanding / semantics.
- IggleSniggle 6y ago
  Trust is a harder problem than basic understanding / semantics, because it requires basic understanding / semantics as a prerequisite. You might trust your banker with your money but not your personal life, and trust your friend with your personal life but not your bank account. Therefore, you there must be explicit and implicit degrees of trust that are specifically trust "for some intention" or at even just "for some specific purpose." And then, you must trust that the meaning of any promise or guarantee is equivalent between parties.

jacobobryant 6y ago

Heh, I published a post in a similar vein just today[1]. Lately I've been thinking the way to do it is have everyone publish a (paginated) Atom feed with all their public content interactions. So each item in the feed would be something like "published this blog post", "liked this tweet", "thinks this comment was written in bad faith", etc. And "follows this person" with a link to that person's atom feed. Then if you want to build a search engine/social network/recommender system, you can get started by crawling and indexing a bunch of feeds. I'd like to make a web app (probably on replit since it makes self-hosting dead easy) that has plugins for a bunch of other sites. so you connect to all your other accounts, and then this app imports your data and publishes it to a single feed for you. Obviously starting audience would be programmers, but I bet it could expand to a general audience too. [1] https://news.findka.com/p/we-need-user-centric-data https://news.findka.com/p/we-need-user-centric-data

beardedetim 6y ago
I’ve been noodling this idea for a few years. I think it’s a great idea and it being based on Atom/RSS is a great move. The problem, I have found, is no one wants to pay for hosting. No one wants to self host. And by no one I mean no one that is using Facebook /Twitter / Insta / etc. and for this to really work, I think you need everyone hosting their own “log”. Interested in seeing more work done in this space and am glad to see others feel the same as I do.
- jacobobryant 6y ago
  That's a big reason why I'm excited about repl.it. You can self-host a github repo in about 2 clicks (not including account setup). I could see it increasing the reach of self-hosted apps a lot. Actually I made a little proof of concept for this a week ago: https://github.com/jacobobryant/Feedstuff https://github.com/jacobobryant/Feedstuff
  - pdonis 6y ago
    I don't think the issue is hosting the app itself, it's hosting each user's data. For the vast majority of users, hosting their own data is not even on the radar. They assume that whatever app they are using is hosting their data, and the only price they will accept for doing that is "free".

olivermarks 6y ago

Seeing Tim O'Reilly speaking at one of his web 2.0 summits around 2009 about the urgency of preventing a few companies/people monopolizing everything comes into my mind regularly when I see tech monopolist oligarchs swaggering around and being feted by a fawning media. We ignored the need to regulate to enable open innovation and interoperability and allowed walled gardens of unprecedented size to be imposed on smaller businesses, from Apple, Amazon & Alphabet and on, unfair advantage and a disaster for smaller business evolution

jefftk 6y ago
As the OP points out, the regulation that we are getting, so far, benefits these walled gardens by prioritizing privacy over interoperability.
- olivermarks 6y ago
  Yes it's actually getting a lot worse! Had a long discussion the other day about Amazon and where we went wrong as a society. Short version, Amazon should have been regulated to facilitate existing small specialist businesses supply chain and delivery, not directly compete with them and force them out of business. Amazon should have been fulfilling orders on behalf of mom & pop's knitting supply, not undercutting them and cutting them out. This is incredibly damaging to the tax base as most taxes are paid by small businesses. Now we have a pandemic where the big box stores and online retailers remain open while the mom & pops are closed and going bust. It's a slow moving economic disaster IMO
  - lotsofpulp 6y ago
    >Amazon should have been fulfilling orders on behalf of mom & pop's knitting supply, not undercutting them and cutting them out. This is incredibly damaging to the tax base as most taxes are paid by small businesses. It's benefiting to me, and I think society, to not pay extra for unnecessary middlemen. If the problem is insufficient taxes, then raise taxes.
    - 6y ago

mbgerring 6y ago

Social media apps made it impossible to export your social graph many years before GDPR. The only thing that would make them do it now is if they were legally required to.

jrochkind1 6y ago

> The cause is Apple: its approach to cookies makes platform-based web storefronts increasingly difficult to monetize effectively Can anyone explain this? I'm not sure what they are referring to.

tguedes 6y ago
He means Shopify. Shopify merchants (and other DTC companies) heavily use Facebook/Instagram to target the specific audience they are targeting. Shopify has since announced that there will be a tighter integration with Facebook Shops
- jrochkind1 6y ago
  What does that have to do with "apple's approach to cookies makes platform-based web storefronts increasingly difficult to monetize effectively"?
twiss 6y ago
Previously, cookies could be used to track users across websites (e.g. multiple websites using the Shopify platform, by making a request to shopify.com), but also to provide useful functionality (e.g. remembering their contact details). Now, this is not possible anymore, due to first-party isolation being implemented in Safari and now Firefox. Personally, I think this is not such a big deal, as the browser can remember your contact details for you anyway, and you can fill them out on any website. So I think it's a win for privacy and for users, but it's true that there are some downsides as well.
- jrochkind1 6y ago
  It goes without saying to his audience that you can't "monetize a platform-based storefront" without tracking users across websites? Maybe I don't understand what "monetize a platform-based storefront" means exactly. He's talking about the particular store on shopify making money, not shopify itself getting customers, right?
- thombles 6y ago

hertzrat 6y ago

He talks about about how privacy laws like those around contact lists are bad because make it harder for new social media companies to arise. Seems like a bad trade off for everyone but investors and for future users of The Crystal Network that I keep joking I will create: a network where you are rewarded with healing crystals in the mail for soothing one another on the platform, creating a veritable lattice of support

pjettter 6y ago

It's not the web, it's computing in general that has not evolved in the right direction. A grid is not a grid is not a grid. An image is not an image is not an image. Etc. So rather than fixing the web, fix computing. It will fix the web too. If not, the web is even more in trouble.

noizejoy 6y ago
$technology {web, computing, ...} is a mere reflection of the dynamics in our species.
anigbrowl 6y ago
Maybe you would be better providing examples instead of mysterious aphorisms, hard to tell if you are being serious or not.
- pjettter 6y ago
  I suppose what I mean is that there are many idioms that we have learned and gotten used to. For example, actions like copy and paste, or click and drag (touch gestures). Formats, like a table, grid, matrix, cells. Text is also universal and with editors we have a cursor, backspace, select, cut, but also, pagination, margins, fonts, boxes, etc., when we render. Drawings are represented in various ways. We have paths, but then there are a multitude of serialization formats. None of these are really first class citizens in computing. They are all application level concepts/implementations. Some are hardware dependent (margins, when we choose a printer with settings). My point is that we would benefit if these "human needs" were met at a lower level. If a grid was a grid, an image was an image, a drawing a drawing, etc. At the application level, there could be enrichment, but the essence of a thing could be universal. Like a protocol. Once these things are protocols, everything would start functioning more alike and be able to interoperate in a better way. Including the web. Some of these things (idioms, actions) appear to work across the board, but they are fragile, unpredictable, and often fail just when you need them the most. That's because every application solves these problems for itself. (Please don't say Windows Clipboard).

MatekCopatek 6y ago

An unlikely outcome that I'd like to see is the following: 1. Legislation makes current models impossible - I'm imagining something like Section 230 being repealed, Twitter and Facebook being on the hook for anything anyone posts, which means they can't moderate and are forced to change their business model/effectively close shop. 2. People still want to blog/share/like. 3. Federated networks become a thing again because small communities are way easier to moderate. Nerds self host, regular people get accounts as part of their ISP subscription or pay a few bucks for some SaaS offering. Maybe a forward looking country gives you an e-identity on the official Mastodon instance where the ToS equals local law so we don't have to have that whole Twitter censorship discussion ever again. 4. Everyone lives happily ever after.

EGreg 6y ago
For 3 to happen we would need better software. Do you have any suggestions that are the best in class?
themacguffinman 6y ago
The repeal of Section 230 would mean more aggressive and large scale moderation, not less. Remember that the copyright liability incurred by DMCA and other copyright laws didn't kill YouTube, instead it directly led to the creation of ContentID.
- MatekCopatek 6y ago
  I know, my assumption was it would be so much more moderation that they couldn't handle it without completely ruining the user experience.

ericflo 6y ago

> Twitter eventually cut off Instagram in-line image sharing, but by then it was too late. It actually went in the opposite direction - Instagram shut down Twitter's ability to display their images in-line.

giantrobot 6y ago

The web had interoperability but it was largely ignored and then replaced by silos and walled gardens. The Web 2.0 cognoscenti made a lot of the same mistakes as the Web 1.0 cognoscenti about how systems would be used and received by "normal" people. A lot of good ideas had terrible usability and didn't get to a real tipping point. Contrast that with social media sites (even back to MySpace) that were far more usable to the average person. As as an example, look at RSS (any version including Atom). It is a great technological solution for the Web 2.0 proponents. They were interested in long form postings and had a lot of posts on similar subjects. Their posts had titles, some categorization, and maybe even semantic elements. Making a "feed" to syndicate those posts was a pretty useful thing both for their visibility and you and I as readers. What RSS doesn't offer is a good way to express short form informal posts on mixed subject matter. Even posting a simple link to an interesting page or just an image isn't well expressed with most RSS generating software and not handled well by the format or feed readers. Even the word "subscribe" implies a bit of a formal social anti-pattern. Compare that to most social media sites, even going back to MySpace. The presented users with a single content field. The UI basically asked "What's up?". There's no implied formality of a post title or categorization. It just plops on top of a stack of your posts on your "feed". That's not to say what social media sites have done with those user feeds is necessarily good (echo chambers, engagement manipulation, etc) but they served a desire of a lot of people. I'd venture that most people don't want to sit down and make long form posts with cognitive load like titles and categories. Large social media sites have no use for interoperability because their money is made on engagement with their site/app. The Web 2.0 visionaries spent a lot of time navel gazing and being focused on their areas of interest so they missed a lot of thing social media has implemented. We're seeing interoperability start to happen again (Fediverse etc) with people taking the informal social media models and applying Web 2.0's decentralized concepts. It's not clear is the decentralized social media can hit a critical mass of users because multimedia, especially video, is a huge draw for social media users and is hideously expensive to host and distribute. There's also effectively zero monetization and a lot of people are trying to be professional social media users.

lazzlazzlazz 6y ago

The HN community will agree that there is a deep issue with interoperability and platform risk in Web 2.0, but will again have a knee-jerk response that the rapidly growing Web 3.0 community is awful, there's no point, etc. — because it's crypto. How do you create a software application that exists and runs independently of the platform (and even hardware) on which it exists? How do you create a robust, unified, incentive-aligned decentralized consensus system? Those working on crypto projects today already understand this.

enos_feedler 6y ago
Who decided that web 3.0 is built on crypto? I know some in the crypto community like to call it web 3.0, but I am still thinking web 3.0 is something different and built more on web 2.0
- ehnto 6y ago
  It's all nebulous. No one even agreed on what Web 2.0 meant, it's only in retrospect that we think we know. If we were really sticking to versions being meaningful we probably should have bumped a version when frontend UI frameworks and javascript began dominating web application development, since best I could tell at the time Web 2.0 was just the addition of flat design and ajax calls.

adamc 6y ago

I hate all of these attempts to monetize communication. The government should strictly regulate them.