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> Right now, while a sort of stubborn counter-culture exists in the fringes of the internet, it's just a shadow of what the internet could be. I'm not sure it

> Right now, while a sort of stubborn counter-culture exists in the fringes of the internet, it's just a shadow of what the internet could be. I'm not sure it could ever be more than a counter-culture on the fringes of the internet, nor am I sure it should be. The popularisation of the web is a genie that cannot be put back in the bottle. And most people don't want what you're selling. I don't say that to be disparaging at all, as I personally love projects like this and Gemini, etc. But I think it's okay that the small web should remain small. Related to this is the pervasive theory - you could call it a conspiracy theory - that the current state of the web has been thrust upon the masses against their will. On the contrary, it has been driven primarily by consumer demand. Behind every corporation peddling a toxic product is a million or more (often much more) consumers who want it. Popularising the small web would fundamentally change and most likely ruin it even if you somehow managed to keep perverse corporate incentives out (or maybe keeping the corporate incentives out means it can never really get popular). I guess my point is that it is not a shadow of what it could be. I don't think it could be much more than what it is, which is fine.

marginalia_nu 4y ago
> I'm not sure it could ever be more than a counter-culture on the fringes of the internet, nor am I sure it should be. The popularisation of the web is a genie that cannot be put back in the bottle. And most people don't want what you're selling. I don't say that to be disparaging at all, as I personally love projects like this and Gemini, etc. But I think it's okay that the small web should remain small. I'm not really envisioning making the small websites big, but rather making the internet seem less small. Judging by the results you find on Google and so on, you might think there was only a few hundred websites, because that's all you ever see. There are millions. > On the contrary, it has been driven primarily by consumer demand Who, besides the advertisement industry, wants the state of the internet as it is today? Even my hairdresser complains about how bad it's gotten, how pointlessly vapid the listicles are, how hard it is to find a reliable review. Show me, where is the demand for bait-and-switch click funnels, for email spam, for websites that take 45 seconds to load on an android phone only to have ads pop in between every sentence? Who is the person that wants to scroll through dozens of blog posts trying to find an answer to a problem, only to slowly realize it's just AI-generated word salad? The internet, as it looks today, fails rather spectacularly to meet consumer demand. It is incredibly hostile not only to consumers, but to content producers as well. The only real winners are the middle men, the platform operators that have inserted themselves in the middle of this whole mess.
andrepd 4y ago
The narrative that "if it sells it means people want it" has been used for a long time (e.g. cigarettes). Of course, that simplistic take ignores the (1) role that advertising plays in manufacturing those desires in the first place, and (2) the fact that consumers often don't have a choice. Relating to (2): everyone I know complains about the state of modern Web (from my tech friends to my mum) one way or the other. They simply have no choice because, as mentioned several times in these comments, even tech people have an incredibly hard time extricating themselves from dark patterns and SEO-hell search results and surveillance and AI-generated listicles... let alone regular people!

marginalia_nu 4y ago

> I'm not sure it could ever be more than a counter-culture on the fringes of the internet, nor am I sure it should be. The popularisation of the web is a genie that cannot be put back in the bottle. And most people don't want what you're selling. I don't say that to be disparaging at all, as I personally love projects like this and Gemini, etc. But I think it's okay that the small web should remain small. I'm not really envisioning making the small websites big, but rather making the internet seem less small. Judging by the results you find on Google and so on, you might think there was only a few hundred websites, because that's all you ever see. There are millions. > On the contrary, it has been driven primarily by consumer demand Who, besides the advertisement industry, wants the state of the internet as it is today? Even my hairdresser complains about how bad it's gotten, how pointlessly vapid the listicles are, how hard it is to find a reliable review. Show me, where is the demand for bait-and-switch click funnels, for email spam, for websites that take 45 seconds to load on an android phone only to have ads pop in between every sentence? Who is the person that wants to scroll through dozens of blog posts trying to find an answer to a problem, only to slowly realize it's just AI-generated word salad? The internet, as it looks today, fails rather spectacularly to meet consumer demand. It is incredibly hostile not only to consumers, but to content producers as well. The only real winners are the middle men, the platform operators that have inserted themselves in the middle of this whole mess.

andrepd 4y ago

The narrative that "if it sells it means people want it" has been used for a long time (e.g. cigarettes). Of course, that simplistic take ignores the (1) role that advertising plays in manufacturing those desires in the first place, and (2) the fact that consumers often don't have a choice. Relating to (2): everyone I know complains about the state of modern Web (from my tech friends to my mum) one way or the other. They simply have no choice because, as mentioned several times in these comments, even tech people have an incredibly hard time extricating themselves from dark patterns and SEO-hell search results and surveillance and AI-generated listicles... let alone regular people!