You could imagine an alternate history where user feedback had been built into the infrastructure of the web, where being able to write a comment, similar to bu

You could imagine an alternate history where user feedback had been built into the infrastructure of the web, where being able to write a comment, similar to bulletin board systems, or suggest a change, would have been built into browsers and http servers. Where admins would have to take active steps in the server configuration to turn off that feature. Implementing it naively would mean that spam would have been an early initial problem. You would handle it with moderation initially, where some sort of verification would be used. IP black lists would have been a heavy handed early solution. I like to think that if the social aspect of the web was in the hands of infrastructure engineers, that we would have seen clever solutions, like proof of work needed to post content. That may have triggered the rise in ideas like cryptocurrency in the late ‘90s. The rise of comment spam would have taken pressure off of email providers to manage spam. The focus on them would have been lower. You wouldn’t have seen legislation like the CanSPAM act, which legitimized unsolicited commercial email content. By integrating social aspects into the web early on, it would have degraded the value proposition of social media sites. You likely would have seen sites like MySpace and Facebook get started, but they would have leveraged built in web technologies to implement the social aspects. A user feed with comments could just have been implemented with RSS and the built in comment feature. Link aggregation sites like Digg or Reddit never would have been created. The value proposition would have exclusively been finding and connecting with friends. With cryptocurrency taking off in the early 2000s, we may have seen payments get integrated into the web browser at this stage since there already would have been infrastructure for proof of work built into the web browser. This would give content publishers a way to make money off their content besides advertising. Today there are 1/5 as many journalists as there were 20 years ago. The news industry has been decimated by the web. Had payments been integrated early on, the news industry would not have had to resort to advertising to as high degree as it had, local news would have found more robust funding sources in the digital era, and we would have a more robust media environment today. With two way communication being the norm, and social media having less prominence, there would have been more healthy discourse on issues. Rise in disinformation campaigns would have been blunted by people with expertise seeing content and being able to say, “that’s bs because … “. That content would not have been in walled gardens, kept away from most of the public to see. We would not have seen a rise in disinformation campaigns. The vaccine movement would have not taken off. This would have changed the course of elections. I don’t think we would be able to predict political outcomes in 2008 and beyond in this future.