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> Users are only able to interact with each other through opaque centrally controlled services, where the middlemen choose how and what the services support and
by notJim 15y ago
> Users are only able to interact with each other through opaque centrally controlled services, where the middlemen choose how and what the services support and approve
Previously, normal users were unable to interact with each other at all. Do you really think grandma/your uncle/etc would have learned to write HTML, found a place to get hosting, and put it online, if only Facebook hadn't come along?
Oh, and by the way, it turns out you have even more options for putting your HTML content online now [Heroku, AWS, Linode, Wordpress, Jekyll, etc], thanks in large part to the financial and social capital influx that came to the Web during the "Web 2.0" boom.
- mindslight 15y ago"Normal users" certainly used email clients, installed web browsers, and used local page-creation tools. That certain technologies have made these tasks easier does not mean that those specific technologies were the only way forward, or that those technologies are without drawbacks. Publishing Turing-complete blobs clearly gives the creator the most freedom and power, but at the expense of limiting the consumers' options to "experience content as intended" or "don't". My whole point is that this philosophy of server-knows-best is causing the 'web' to revert to the standard creator -> middleman -> passive consumer chain. Of course many different "ways" of publishing are flourishing - those are the middlemen!