9 ms·

On the State of the Web

107 points by headalgorithm 3y ago

skilled 3y ago
It's tough life out here for developers who're so plugged into the matrix of the actual Web that you can't overlook how condensed and bland it has become. But stating the obvious doesn't really help or do anything. I think if people genuinely feel this way then what is needed are solutions. There's actually quite a lot of psychology involved in this whole debate/situation, but my gut tells me that people don't even want to listen to that. It's just a weird phase for everyone - there is an overflow of garbage on the web that is designed to manipulate you and talk to you as if we are two different species. Look what StackOverflow is doing now also - it's literally ruining a great Internet community (intense as it is) because their hand has been forced by people who pay the bills. And because nobody could foresee the future, perhaps things didn't seem like they would end up this bad. But they have.
- noitpmeder 3y ago
  What's stack overflow doing?
  - skilled 3y ago
    > Moderation Strike: Stack Overflow, Inc. cannot consistently ignore, mistreat, and malign its volunteers https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/425000/moderation-strike-stack-overflow-inc-cannot-consistently-ignore-mistreat-an https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/425000/moderation-s... > Starting the Prompt Design Site: A New Home in our Stack Exchange Neighborhood https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/390463/starting-the-prompt-design-site-a-new-home-in-our-stack-exchange-neighborhood https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/390463/starting-the...
  - tacker2000 3y ago
    Seems like its also slowly loosing its way.
- manuelmoreale 3y ago
  > I think if people genuinely feel this way then what is needed are solutions. I personally think the solutions, from a technical stand point, are already there. What we need are intentions and solid motivations. The reason why more people are not running personal sites, blogs, digital gardens or any other sort of truly personal web space is not for lack of technical solutions. But it’s hard to make non dev people to realize what’s possible out there on the web.
kreutz 3y ago
Reddit is a glorified bulletin board that does not need ~2000 employees to operate and iterate. The community is their product. They are were never going to be a unicorn and they will die trying. Software eats the world but Silicon Valley manages to find a way to kill off its own creation.
- omnimus 3y ago
  This is the case with most of these. Having big, popular, very profitable website is not enough. They are going to break them all. Good maybe if the VCs get annyoed it will finally allow for healthy ecosystem to emerge.
  - riwsky 3y ago
    *not at all profitable
- mkl95 3y ago
  > They are were never going to be a unicorn and they will die trying. Reddit are valued at ~5bn, which makes them a full-blown unicorn. But in 2023 the gap between a unicorn and an IPO-ready company can be huge.
  - nighthawk454 3y ago
    "valued at" may be the metric, but I think the bigger point here is they're unprofitable and have not much path to either fix that or continue 'growing'. So by monopoly money rules yes they're a valuable unicorn, but realistically it's more like time to pay the piper.
    - JohnFen 3y ago
      Yes. Whenever I hear that a company (or a person) is "valued at" something, I know that number that follows is not likely to bear any relationship with reality.
      - 3y ago
fferen 3y ago
I've been using Cloudhiker lately to replace the good old stumbleupon days and it does capture some of the magic of the old web. (not affiliated)
- manuelmoreale 3y ago
  This is neat, I didn’t know about it. I maintain a site that’s similar in spirit: https://theforest.link/ https://theforest.link/ A lot of weird and quirky websites in there.
- tru1ock 3y ago
  That takes me back! I completely forgot about stumbleupon and will check out cloudhiker, thanks!
seydor 3y ago
If you want the web make it easy to monetize and do accounting for small websites. Else you get megasilos
- manuelmoreale 3y ago
  Agree. But also, some things don’t need to be monetized. We can have small forums and small communities online just because we like them. We’re happy to pay for our other hobbies and running a forum with a few hundreds users doesn’t cost all that much.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - seydor 3y ago
    Then you end up resenting it after some times has passed and you re no longer interested but you re pressured by users to keep the website up. That's unsustainable and ugly
    - manuelmoreale 3y ago
      Well in that case you figure out if someone else wants to pick up the torch. And if no one wants to do it then you let things go. And that’s also ok.
dynamorando 3y ago
Would it make sense if NPR ran a Mastodon instance? EDIT: or if public universities ran their own instances? All content submitted by users would be CC licensed. EDIT EDIT: To keep costs down, just rate limit the number of posts that could be made per user.
- xnx 3y ago
  I often think about what a "public access" web would look like (similar to "public access" TV that exists in some US cable markets).
  - dynamorando 3y ago
    This seems to make sense; we have public parks, why can’t we have public spaces online?
- flyinghamster 3y ago
  I think this makes a great deal of sense, for any organization that wants a feed-type social media presence. The fly in the ointment is DDOS protection. That might not be a problem in some cases, but once you attract enough attention you become a peachy target.
  - riwsky 3y ago
    cries in RSS
    - lolinder 3y ago
      You can follow any Mastodon account with RSS: https://mstdn.social/@feditips/108357998963885456 https://mstdn.social/@feditips/108357998963885456
  - dynamorando 3y ago
    NPR Mastadon instance: sponsored by Cloudflare
- 3y ago
samcgraw 3y ago
> You can still set up your tiny quiet corner on the web, do your own things, and connect slowly with other people This is exactly what I've been after with my side projects. Thanks for the encouragement to continue even when things are slow-going, makes me remember it's a feature not a bug.
- zerojames 3y ago
  The IndieWeb is a nice corner of the web where you can find people with whom to chat about tech, the web, and many other things! https://indieweb.org/discuss https://indieweb.org/discuss
  - kokanee 3y ago
    huh I clicked around for a while and I like the vibe but I can't find any directory or feed of pages/projects to explore; it looks like it's all documentation and chat rooms for developers. Is there a way to browse the indie web as a consumer rather than a developer?
    - manuelmoreale 3y ago
      Unfortunately, the indie web is very, very dev oriented. That’s because people who care about having personal websites are more often than not developers and they like to talk about development. And as a result of that you get a ton of web related content. But there’s also something else. As mentioned in another post I maintain a list of weird links you can browse at random if you want to do some browsing https://theforest.link/ https://theforest.link/ I try to include sites that are “different” and I also try to avoid having too much dev oriented content. But I warn you that you might stumble on some weird content.
      - 16bitvoid 3y ago
        > As mentioned in another post I maintain a list of weird links you can browse at random if you want to do some browsing https://theforest.link/ https://theforest.link/ Out of 6 random tries, all were dev oriented and none were what I would consider weird. 3 out of the 6 were websitehowto.com and the other 3 were developer blogs. Perhaps it was just poor luck, but I don't see how websitehowto.com, a "5-page guide to start a Wordpress website", really fits.
z3t4 3y ago
We need to get better at connecting with each others. The press revolutionized organizations as it made it possible for few people to organize a large group of people. We now have the Internet where anyone can communicate with anyone else. We no longer need a hierarchical structure with generals and captains telling people what to do. We can solve any problem more effectively by just communicating among each other.
carlosjobim 3y ago
Complaining about the state of the web is like complaining that the radio only plays crap songs, that TV only has reality soaps, or that McDonald's food is not nutritious or tasty. At some point you have to realize that this is how it is always going to be in the mainstream, and seek out quality content outside the mainstream. Instead of being mad that the quality content isn't in the mainstream. There's more high quality content online than ever before, if you're willing to lift your pinky finger a millionth of an inch and make some effort to find it - or God forbid pay a little for it.
- namaria 3y ago
  Two or three generations of a pattern don't make it universal. Manorial servitude dominated European economy for nearly five centuries.
rcarmo 3y ago
I feel mostly the same about the web (and have kept blogging regardless of audience, discoverability, hype, etc.). I’m not an idealist to the point where I believe we will wind back the clock to before Google Reader was shut down and social networking became a rampant grab for eyeballs, but I like to find places where things are still original, even if few and far between.
nektro 3y ago
I think this is the post that put me over the edge https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7076790208431566848/ https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7076790... > Anjali SudAnjali Sud, CEO of Vimeo > [...] Yes our new tools leverage AI (because duh, we’re in 2023).
- tacker2000 3y ago
  Well to be fair he has to do it and has to say that. Otherwise he will be seeming to have missed the boat… but yes this AI stuff getting a bit out of hand now.
  - TeMPOraL 3y ago
    I was going to correct you to say she, but I figured I'll double-check, since these days you can't exactly infer someone's pronouns from a profile photo thumbnail - so I clicked the CEO's name, and instead their profile page, I got... ...the most hostile implementation of CAPTCHA I've ever seen, outside of jokes (like "solve this integral to post the comment"). Some kind of manual "do math with some ugly low-resolution icons, and use arrow buttons to find matching image with the ${math result} number of ${ugly low-resolution icon}". And you have to do it 5 times. I gave up after the first, no way I'm wasting couple minutes on going through bullshit like this. Sorry for this bit of negativity, but I think it's on point in the overall context of this submission.
    - nektro 3y ago
      https://media.licdn.com/dms/image/C4E03AQGThVFQzx3XVw/profile-displayphoto-shrink_800_800/0/1650757720680?e=1694044800&v=beta&t=nhgBo9r24dLRucwZ-j-ONfTpS6dz95VujIegieoTI-U https://media.licdn.com/dms/image/C4E03AQGThVFQzx3XVw/profil...
masswerk 3y ago
> we can't just have an entire world of sites and services all available for free with just a few ads slapped on top of them Arguably, advertising on the Web is too cheap and too ubiquitous. This may be even the key problem. As a reminder, before this, a select, smaller number of media like newspapers, magazines, even TV, was able to sustain itself by advertising with consumer prices only contributing to a minor part of the overall costs of production and distribution. (The peak in revenues from this actually isn't that long ago: 2008/2009.) The current model of ubiquitous, but also infinitesimal small prices & revenues, plays only to the brokers, while sustaining nothing.
musicale 3y ago
> And so now we're seeing services turning to aggressive monetization because it turns out that we can't just have an entire world of sites and services all available for free with just a few ads slapped on top of them It probably doesn't take a huge amount of money to run a basic Reddit-like forum site if you're not trying to become some imagined billion-dollar business. > You can still set up your tiny quiet corner on the web, do your own things, and connect slowly with other people. It would be a nice silver lining if the obvious missteps that we're seeing in the commercial web helped to inspire and invigorate the non-commercial web.
friend_and_foe 3y ago
How does that make the web special? Humans can por time and love into anything they want.
samsquire 3y ago
I have positive nostalgia for the early web and web forums. It takes a key person to keep something good alive, they invest time, effort, themselves into something good and share it. Please go create a blog and tell me about it. I use GitHub as my blog host and just update a README.md to post.
_madmax_ 3y ago
A very succint and accurate report, in my opinion. Finally someone named it on an ad-free website. N.B. Also reading the other comments, Can HN not become a place where frustrated reddit user come to vent, this is a nice place here...don't ruin it.

107 points by headalgorithm 3y ago

It's tough life out here for developers who're so plugged into the matrix of the actual Web that you can't overlook how condensed and bland it has become. But stating the obvious doesn't really help or do anything. I think if people genuinely feel this way then what is needed are solutions. There's actually quite a lot of psychology involved in this whole debate/situation, but my gut tells me that people don't even want to listen to that. It's just a weird phase for everyone - there is an overflow of garbage on the web that is designed to manipulate you and talk to you as if we are two different species. Look what StackOverflow is doing now also - it's literally ruining a great Internet community (intense as it is) because their hand has been forced by people who pay the bills. And because nobody could foresee the future, perhaps things didn't seem like they would end up this bad. But they have.

noitpmeder 3y ago
What's stack overflow doing?
- skilled 3y ago
  > Moderation Strike: Stack Overflow, Inc. cannot consistently ignore, mistreat, and malign its volunteers https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/425000/moderation-strike-stack-overflow-inc-cannot-consistently-ignore-mistreat-an https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/425000/moderation-s... > Starting the Prompt Design Site: A New Home in our Stack Exchange Neighborhood https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/390463/starting-the-prompt-design-site-a-new-home-in-our-stack-exchange-neighborhood https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/390463/starting-the...
- tacker2000 3y ago
  Seems like its also slowly loosing its way.
manuelmoreale 3y ago
> I think if people genuinely feel this way then what is needed are solutions. I personally think the solutions, from a technical stand point, are already there. What we need are intentions and solid motivations. The reason why more people are not running personal sites, blogs, digital gardens or any other sort of truly personal web space is not for lack of technical solutions. But it’s hard to make non dev people to realize what’s possible out there on the web.

kreutz 3y ago

Reddit is a glorified bulletin board that does not need ~2000 employees to operate and iterate. The community is their product. They are were never going to be a unicorn and they will die trying. Software eats the world but Silicon Valley manages to find a way to kill off its own creation.

omnimus 3y ago
This is the case with most of these. Having big, popular, very profitable website is not enough. They are going to break them all. Good maybe if the VCs get annyoed it will finally allow for healthy ecosystem to emerge.
- riwsky 3y ago
  *not at all profitable
mkl95 3y ago
> They are were never going to be a unicorn and they will die trying. Reddit are valued at ~5bn, which makes them a full-blown unicorn. But in 2023 the gap between a unicorn and an IPO-ready company can be huge.
- nighthawk454 3y ago
  "valued at" may be the metric, but I think the bigger point here is they're unprofitable and have not much path to either fix that or continue 'growing'. So by monopoly money rules yes they're a valuable unicorn, but realistically it's more like time to pay the piper.
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    Yes. Whenever I hear that a company (or a person) is "valued at" something, I know that number that follows is not likely to bear any relationship with reality.
    - 3y ago

fferen 3y ago

I've been using Cloudhiker lately to replace the good old stumbleupon days and it does capture some of the magic of the old web. (not affiliated)

manuelmoreale 3y ago
This is neat, I didn’t know about it. I maintain a site that’s similar in spirit: https://theforest.link/ https://theforest.link/ A lot of weird and quirky websites in there.
tru1ock 3y ago
That takes me back! I completely forgot about stumbleupon and will check out cloudhiker, thanks!

seydor 3y ago

If you want the web make it easy to monetize and do accounting for small websites. Else you get megasilos

manuelmoreale 3y ago
Agree. But also, some things don’t need to be monetized. We can have small forums and small communities online just because we like them. We’re happy to pay for our other hobbies and running a forum with a few hundreds users doesn’t cost all that much.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- seydor 3y ago
  Then you end up resenting it after some times has passed and you re no longer interested but you re pressured by users to keep the website up. That's unsustainable and ugly
  - manuelmoreale 3y ago
    Well in that case you figure out if someone else wants to pick up the torch. And if no one wants to do it then you let things go. And that’s also ok.

dynamorando 3y ago

Would it make sense if NPR ran a Mastodon instance? EDIT: or if public universities ran their own instances? All content submitted by users would be CC licensed. EDIT EDIT: To keep costs down, just rate limit the number of posts that could be made per user.

xnx 3y ago
I often think about what a "public access" web would look like (similar to "public access" TV that exists in some US cable markets).
- dynamorando 3y ago
  This seems to make sense; we have public parks, why can’t we have public spaces online?
flyinghamster 3y ago
I think this makes a great deal of sense, for any organization that wants a feed-type social media presence. The fly in the ointment is DDOS protection. That might not be a problem in some cases, but once you attract enough attention you become a peachy target.
- riwsky 3y ago
  cries in RSS
  - lolinder 3y ago
    You can follow any Mastodon account with RSS: https://mstdn.social/@feditips/108357998963885456 https://mstdn.social/@feditips/108357998963885456
- dynamorando 3y ago
  NPR Mastadon instance: sponsored by Cloudflare
3y ago

samcgraw 3y ago

> You can still set up your tiny quiet corner on the web, do your own things, and connect slowly with other people This is exactly what I've been after with my side projects. Thanks for the encouragement to continue even when things are slow-going, makes me remember it's a feature not a bug.

zerojames 3y ago
The IndieWeb is a nice corner of the web where you can find people with whom to chat about tech, the web, and many other things! https://indieweb.org/discuss https://indieweb.org/discuss
- kokanee 3y ago
  huh I clicked around for a while and I like the vibe but I can't find any directory or feed of pages/projects to explore; it looks like it's all documentation and chat rooms for developers. Is there a way to browse the indie web as a consumer rather than a developer?
  - manuelmoreale 3y ago
    Unfortunately, the indie web is very, very dev oriented. That’s because people who care about having personal websites are more often than not developers and they like to talk about development. And as a result of that you get a ton of web related content. But there’s also something else. As mentioned in another post I maintain a list of weird links you can browse at random if you want to do some browsing https://theforest.link/ https://theforest.link/ I try to include sites that are “different” and I also try to avoid having too much dev oriented content. But I warn you that you might stumble on some weird content.
    - 16bitvoid 3y ago
      > As mentioned in another post I maintain a list of weird links you can browse at random if you want to do some browsing https://theforest.link/ https://theforest.link/ Out of 6 random tries, all were dev oriented and none were what I would consider weird. 3 out of the 6 were websitehowto.com and the other 3 were developer blogs. Perhaps it was just poor luck, but I don't see how websitehowto.com, a "5-page guide to start a Wordpress website", really fits.

z3t4 3y ago

We need to get better at connecting with each others. The press revolutionized organizations as it made it possible for few people to organize a large group of people. We now have the Internet where anyone can communicate with anyone else. We no longer need a hierarchical structure with generals and captains telling people what to do. We can solve any problem more effectively by just communicating among each other.

carlosjobim 3y ago

Complaining about the state of the web is like complaining that the radio only plays crap songs, that TV only has reality soaps, or that McDonald's food is not nutritious or tasty. At some point you have to realize that this is how it is always going to be in the mainstream, and seek out quality content outside the mainstream. Instead of being mad that the quality content isn't in the mainstream. There's more high quality content online than ever before, if you're willing to lift your pinky finger a millionth of an inch and make some effort to find it - or God forbid pay a little for it.

namaria 3y ago
Two or three generations of a pattern don't make it universal. Manorial servitude dominated European economy for nearly five centuries.

rcarmo 3y ago

I feel mostly the same about the web (and have kept blogging regardless of audience, discoverability, hype, etc.). I’m not an idealist to the point where I believe we will wind back the clock to before Google Reader was shut down and social networking became a rampant grab for eyeballs, but I like to find places where things are still original, even if few and far between.

nektro 3y ago

I think this is the post that put me over the edge https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7076790208431566848/ https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7076790... > Anjali SudAnjali Sud, CEO of Vimeo > [...] Yes our new tools leverage AI (because duh, we’re in 2023).

tacker2000 3y ago
Well to be fair he has to do it and has to say that. Otherwise he will be seeming to have missed the boat… but yes this AI stuff getting a bit out of hand now.
- TeMPOraL 3y ago
  I was going to correct you to say she, but I figured I'll double-check, since these days you can't exactly infer someone's pronouns from a profile photo thumbnail - so I clicked the CEO's name, and instead their profile page, I got... ...the most hostile implementation of CAPTCHA I've ever seen, outside of jokes (like "solve this integral to post the comment"). Some kind of manual "do math with some ugly low-resolution icons, and use arrow buttons to find matching image with the ${math result} number of ${ugly low-resolution icon}". And you have to do it 5 times. I gave up after the first, no way I'm wasting couple minutes on going through bullshit like this. Sorry for this bit of negativity, but I think it's on point in the overall context of this submission.
  - nektro 3y ago
    https://media.licdn.com/dms/image/C4E03AQGThVFQzx3XVw/profile-displayphoto-shrink_800_800/0/1650757720680?e=1694044800&v=beta&t=nhgBo9r24dLRucwZ-j-ONfTpS6dz95VujIegieoTI-U https://media.licdn.com/dms/image/C4E03AQGThVFQzx3XVw/profil...

masswerk 3y ago

> we can't just have an entire world of sites and services all available for free with just a few ads slapped on top of them Arguably, advertising on the Web is too cheap and too ubiquitous. This may be even the key problem. As a reminder, before this, a select, smaller number of media like newspapers, magazines, even TV, was able to sustain itself by advertising with consumer prices only contributing to a minor part of the overall costs of production and distribution. (The peak in revenues from this actually isn't that long ago: 2008/2009.) The current model of ubiquitous, but also infinitesimal small prices & revenues, plays only to the brokers, while sustaining nothing.

musicale 3y ago

> And so now we're seeing services turning to aggressive monetization because it turns out that we can't just have an entire world of sites and services all available for free with just a few ads slapped on top of them It probably doesn't take a huge amount of money to run a basic Reddit-like forum site if you're not trying to become some imagined billion-dollar business. > You can still set up your tiny quiet corner on the web, do your own things, and connect slowly with other people. It would be a nice silver lining if the obvious missteps that we're seeing in the commercial web helped to inspire and invigorate the non-commercial web.

friend_and_foe 3y ago

How does that make the web special? Humans can por time and love into anything they want.

samsquire 3y ago

I have positive nostalgia for the early web and web forums. It takes a key person to keep something good alive, they invest time, effort, themselves into something good and share it. Please go create a blog and tell me about it. I use GitHub as my blog host and just update a README.md to post.

_madmax_ 3y ago

A very succint and accurate report, in my opinion. Finally someone named it on an ad-free website. N.B. Also reading the other comments, Can HN not become a place where frustrated reddit user come to vent, this is a nice place here...don't ruin it.