4 ms·

One solution to the profitability problem might be to remove all the non-profitable users. When I browse the home page all I see is anti-work, anti-capitalism,

by b1n 3y ago

One solution to the profitability problem might be to remove all the non-profitable users. When I browse the home page all I see is anti-work, anti-capitalism, nuance-less politics, etc. As people have mentioned, the free money decade is over - users are going to have to start becoming Customers if they want their voices to be listened to.

imiric 3y ago
> users are going to have to start becoming Customers if they want their voices to be listened to. That would be an improvement to the current "free" platforms that users pay for with their data, or attention to psychologically manipulative content. The web should definitely adopt the business-customer model, and cut out the leechy middlemen. Going a step further, the business should happen not with a centralized platform, but with web hosters, infrastructure companies, and ultimately ISPs. The technology for anyone to publish and manage their data already exists, but is not user friendly enough to be accessible to anyone but the technically proficient. The internet is inherently peer-to-peer. Service silos only exist because user-friendly tools are made for consumers rather than publishers, and the easiest way for users to publish content is via a 3rd party. We have user-friendly web _browsers_, but web servers are still reserved for the technically proficient. There's a lot of work needed in this area, but all the building blocks already exist.
- nologic01 3y ago
  Yep. Its incredible that for decades we havent developed a decentralized internet of "apps" that is more aligned with how the economy works. In some cases the current platform design is totally absurd: like linkedin (or github or azure) thus microsoft having insider knowledge about anything that happens in the digital space. This is basically down to society being largely tech illiterate and various people taking enormous advantage of that.
  - imiric 3y ago
    I think this was a failure of the early web. You can see in the original proposal[1] that the building blocks were a "browser" and a "server". So the web client gets to have a user-friendly application for consuming content, but the web server is just... a server. There's no user-friendly counterpart for publishing content. This would be equivalent to the modern web browsers not existing, and users having to "navigate" using cURL. I love cURL, but it's intended for a technical audience, and the web would've never taken off had it been the default client interface. You can also see in the proposal that phase 2 considered a "universal authorship" goal, and has a rough draft of what a user-friendly publishing interface could be, but it was far too vague, and to my knowledge this phase never came to pass. As a result of this, companies like GeoCities and Angelfire popped up to fill the void of what the web lacked, and later on social media platforms served the same purpose. Advertisers noticed early on a very lucrative opportunity, and tech giants were built to support them. ISPs noticed that the demand was only for downloading content, so they never bothered to build the infrastructure needed to also serve content, and most internet connections were asymmetrical. And, so, here we are. To be fair, there have been some attempts to make publishing easier. I think the best attempt was Opera's Unite in 2009. But by then, it was too little, too late, and Opera being Opera, it never gained traction. BitTorrent is a big one, but it's only a protocol, so it should be a building block of whatever the solution is. Now we have all these distributed projects, web3, etc., but they're still unusable by the average internet user. A part of the problem is education, sure, but I reckon that the average internet user has been conditioned to believe that all these mainstream platforms _are_ the internet. So even if friendly publishing tools existed, and users had the knowledge to use them, they would still choose to use the centralized platforms. Partly because, unfortunately, most people don't care about their data, privacy, etc., and just want to consume content. So I don't think any of this will change. Technical users will keep using niche tools, and the mainstream web will keep being centralized and run by advertisers. [1]: https://www.w3.org/Proposal.html https://www.w3.org/Proposal.html
    - nologic01 3y ago
      > but they're still unusable by the average internet user yep that asymmetry is deep-seated. but decentralized serving does not need to be extreme. I can imagine e.g. geographically local (e.g. city-level) infrastructure hosting - supported maybe by local taxes like a utility - and people using wordpress enhanced with activitypub. Between each user doing self-publishing and all users being captive in one gigantic data-mining and humiliatingly abusive platform there are literally billions of options. > most people don't care about their data, privacy, etc., and just want to consume content This is something that is repeated a lot (also here on HN) and of course at some very basic level it is true. If the negative impact of current designs was obvious we would not have the nightmare we drifted into. But it is a rather simplistic take on how things work with technology adoption, regulation of business behavior, markets etc. E.g. people didn't not care about ozone layer depletion, they were probably completely unaware of it. That's why we have experts and regulators and institutions to advise the general population about what is safe and in their interest. In the case of the ozone layer, laws were passed. Substances were banned. Substitutes invented. The planet and our skin was saved. We moved on to the next existential risk. The same playbook has repeated countless times. People generally assume that the system works to protect them and that is not a totally wrong assumption. If everybody moved fast and broke things modern society would quickly collapse. Yet notice that nobody of authority ever warned users not to use these platforms. In fact the opposite. In what is unthinkable and unprecedented collusion, most public sector entities actively advertise them, by being in these platforms, providing links to them etc. What has happened in this space is that a major social contract has been violated. Politicians, in a combination of ineptitude ("We run ads, senator") and capture have acquiesced to this drift. This has played out for so long that people who are aware of what is happening are exhausted and defeatist. We should not give up though. This is important stuff.

by b1n 3y ago

imiric 3y ago

> users are going to have to start becoming Customers if they want their voices to be listened to. That would be an improvement to the current "free" platforms that users pay for with their data, or attention to psychologically manipulative content. The web should definitely adopt the business-customer model, and cut out the leechy middlemen. Going a step further, the business should happen not with a centralized platform, but with web hosters, infrastructure companies, and ultimately ISPs. The technology for anyone to publish and manage their data already exists, but is not user friendly enough to be accessible to anyone but the technically proficient. The internet is inherently peer-to-peer. Service silos only exist because user-friendly tools are made for consumers rather than publishers, and the easiest way for users to publish content is via a 3rd party. We have user-friendly web _browsers_, but web servers are still reserved for the technically proficient. There's a lot of work needed in this area, but all the building blocks already exist.

nologic01 3y ago
Yep. Its incredible that for decades we havent developed a decentralized internet of "apps" that is more aligned with how the economy works. In some cases the current platform design is totally absurd: like linkedin (or github or azure) thus microsoft having insider knowledge about anything that happens in the digital space. This is basically down to society being largely tech illiterate and various people taking enormous advantage of that.
- imiric 3y ago
  I think this was a failure of the early web. You can see in the original proposal[1] that the building blocks were a "browser" and a "server". So the web client gets to have a user-friendly application for consuming content, but the web server is just... a server. There's no user-friendly counterpart for publishing content. This would be equivalent to the modern web browsers not existing, and users having to "navigate" using cURL. I love cURL, but it's intended for a technical audience, and the web would've never taken off had it been the default client interface. You can also see in the proposal that phase 2 considered a "universal authorship" goal, and has a rough draft of what a user-friendly publishing interface could be, but it was far too vague, and to my knowledge this phase never came to pass. As a result of this, companies like GeoCities and Angelfire popped up to fill the void of what the web lacked, and later on social media platforms served the same purpose. Advertisers noticed early on a very lucrative opportunity, and tech giants were built to support them. ISPs noticed that the demand was only for downloading content, so they never bothered to build the infrastructure needed to also serve content, and most internet connections were asymmetrical. And, so, here we are. To be fair, there have been some attempts to make publishing easier. I think the best attempt was Opera's Unite in 2009. But by then, it was too little, too late, and Opera being Opera, it never gained traction. BitTorrent is a big one, but it's only a protocol, so it should be a building block of whatever the solution is. Now we have all these distributed projects, web3, etc., but they're still unusable by the average internet user. A part of the problem is education, sure, but I reckon that the average internet user has been conditioned to believe that all these mainstream platforms _are_ the internet. So even if friendly publishing tools existed, and users had the knowledge to use them, they would still choose to use the centralized platforms. Partly because, unfortunately, most people don't care about their data, privacy, etc., and just want to consume content. So I don't think any of this will change. Technical users will keep using niche tools, and the mainstream web will keep being centralized and run by advertisers. [1]: https://www.w3.org/Proposal.html https://www.w3.org/Proposal.html
  - nologic01 3y ago
    > but they're still unusable by the average internet user yep that asymmetry is deep-seated. but decentralized serving does not need to be extreme. I can imagine e.g. geographically local (e.g. city-level) infrastructure hosting - supported maybe by local taxes like a utility - and people using wordpress enhanced with activitypub. Between each user doing self-publishing and all users being captive in one gigantic data-mining and humiliatingly abusive platform there are literally billions of options. > most people don't care about their data, privacy, etc., and just want to consume content This is something that is repeated a lot (also here on HN) and of course at some very basic level it is true. If the negative impact of current designs was obvious we would not have the nightmare we drifted into. But it is a rather simplistic take on how things work with technology adoption, regulation of business behavior, markets etc. E.g. people didn't not care about ozone layer depletion, they were probably completely unaware of it. That's why we have experts and regulators and institutions to advise the general population about what is safe and in their interest. In the case of the ozone layer, laws were passed. Substances were banned. Substitutes invented. The planet and our skin was saved. We moved on to the next existential risk. The same playbook has repeated countless times. People generally assume that the system works to protect them and that is not a totally wrong assumption. If everybody moved fast and broke things modern society would quickly collapse. Yet notice that nobody of authority ever warned users not to use these platforms. In fact the opposite. In what is unthinkable and unprecedented collusion, most public sector entities actively advertise them, by being in these platforms, providing links to them etc. What has happened in this space is that a major social contract has been violated. Politicians, in a combination of ineptitude ("We run ads, senator") and capture have acquiesced to this drift. This has played out for so long that people who are aware of what is happening are exhausted and defeatist. We should not give up though. This is important stuff.