6 ms·

We can have a different web

36 points by Intralexical 2y ago

wheezeramos 2y ago
Algorithm, schmalgorithm Andrew Stephens rang a bell. “Save the Web by Being Nice” My rant: read it or don’t. The way to have the new web is to be the new web. The web is here to talk to folks. I am one of the ones. So are you. Write it like you mean it. Start a blog, join a forum, add talk. It takes time. Do it. Say nice things on other blogs. Post good reviews. And learn to write well. Check Hemingway’s 5 hints. Write short sentences. Write short first paragraphs. Use vigorous language. Be positive, not negative. Never have just five rules. (As for the fifth, Omar said, “It is my firm belief that it is a mistake to hold firm beliefs.”) The point being, forget algorithms. Create! Make the new web. Try small words: let large words earn their keep. Be nice to those for whom you write and make the new web. For grins, I wrote my blog for 16 years; I sent 14 to archive. It’s your turn.
esperent 2y ago
I find a commonality between many articles I read online: 1. An interesting headline that draws me in. 2. A long setup/history which I start reading, then skimming, then just scrolling past 3. And finally, the meat of the article. But by 3. I've decided that the article doesn't contain any interesting info - otherwise, why would I be scrolling past the first 2/3s of it? I'm aware this is a subconscious decision, a bad heuristic. But in a world filled with info, I rarely fight against it. I didn't read this article, for instance. My coffee break is over, it's time to get back to work. Maybe it's time for blogs to start doing something similar to what the better recipe sites do, and provide a link at the top to skip the setup and get to the real article.
- TheCleric 2y ago
  I don’t mean this rudely, but the common factor there is you. Could it just be you don’t enjoy this style of writing?
  - hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
    As someone who agrees with the parent commenter, I don't think (at least for me) it's individual style, but it's what my goal is and what the content is. I think the main problem is blog posts, which basically contain a single main thesis, that are written like short stories. I think that if, as an author, your goal is to get a primary point across, and you're publishing on the web, for the love of God, get to the point. There is a near infinite amount of content online vying for our attention, and if I'm reading for information, I don't want to spend a ton of time just figuring out if your point is worth my time. On the other hand, if you're telling a story, I'm fine getting drawn in with elaborate prose. But at least for me, most of the time I'm looking for this style of writing in a book, or at least something like a magazine article that is positioned as a short story. I don't often look for this type of content on the web, and I almost never look for it in blog posts.
    - Dalewyn 2y ago
      >I think that if, as an author, your goal is to get a primary point across, and you're publishing on the web, for the love of God, get to the point This. There is a reason TL;DR became a proper word.[1] [1]: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/TL%3BDR https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/TL%3BDR
  - 8n4vidtmkvmk 2y ago
    I thought the same. I thought the title was hinting at a path to bring back the old web, not building up to "we can do it if we want".
  - esperent 2y ago
    No offense taken, of course the common factor is me! That was the entire point of my comment. I don't enjoy articles like this. I was wondering if other people have the same feeling. It seems like many do, to the point that there's an actual rule of journalism (inverted pyramid) stating that you should avoid crafting articles this way.
- ranger_danger 2y ago
  or HN could have an AI-bot to summarize the article at the top of the comments.
  - djbusby 2y ago
    https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kb5_hIuEk8g https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kb5_hIuEk8g
  - aworks 2y ago
    I use HackSnack to generate an RSS feed for this. https://www.kadoa.com/hacksnack https://www.kadoa.com/hacksnack
    - ranger_danger 2y ago
      Whoa this is cool. If only it were open source... I'd like to do this for other sites as well.
- idle_zealot 2y ago
  The point of this post is the feel, the narrative, in service of strengthening the central metaphor of internet as untilled land dominanted by fortresses (social media). The tl;dr is: don't use Facebook, make websites. Maybe make a decentralized search/discovery protocol (or something?).
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- Turing_Machine 2y ago
  What you describe almost the opposite of the classic "inverted pyramid" style of writing journalism. I agree it's a bad style if you want to have busy people reading your site. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_pyramid_(journalism) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_pyramid_(journalism) Cut to the chase, and put the interesting-to-some-but-not-all stuff at the bottom, or better still, behind a link. We have hypertext, guys. That's what it's for. > I'm aware this is a subconscious decision, a bad heuristic. I don't think it's a bad heuristic at all. There are far more web pages than anyone could possibly read in their limited lifespan. It makes sense to optimize for sites that get to the point right away. Note that I'm speaking here of purely informational sites, not "literary" sites where the beauty of the prose is intended to be part (or even all) of the purpose. Different rules apply there.
cxr 2y ago
Let's stop with the abuse of the word "algorithm". Enough already. Even in a world where it wasn't the wrong word to reach for (i.e. a world that isn't the one we're in), even if it were proper, it is still by this point embarrassingly hackneyed. It's shameless, unrepentant pablum. And that's still ignoring that it's the wrong word to use in >90% of the instances where it seems to show up these days. I have a pretty simple flowchart for lay people and tech journalists alike. It goes like this: Are you about to use the word "algorithm" in an article or comment about social media? No? -> GOOD. Yes? -> Don't. (And to go one further, since you were already angling that way, maybe you should reconsider whether or not to scrap the whole piece entirely; do you actually have anything new and interesting to say on the topic?)
- idle_zealot 2y ago
  What is the proper term for the mechanism that decides how to populate a social media feed other than a "recommendation algorithm"?
  - cxr 2y ago
    That phrase doesn't appear in the linked article, but to answer your question: "Recommender system", e.g. <https://www.trulia.com/blog/tech/recommender-engine/ https://www.trulia.com/blog/tech/recommender-engine/>, <https://github.com/microsoft/RecAI https://github.com/microsoft/RecAI>, etc. Even if there were no consensus for an alternative, that wouldn't make "recommendation algorithm" acceptable, because it fails to meet the criteria to be an algorithm. The word means something. cf "Imagine you're a mathematician, and fellow mathematicians start calling derivatives integrals instead[...] it's being used to describe systems that are almost the exact opposite" <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23672561 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23672561>
- Dalewyn 2y ago
  "Algorithm" is a more accurate, more descriptive, better word than what succeeded it: "AI".
  - deleted 2y ago
bruce511 2y ago
>> And those who cultivate those plots outside of these walls face pressures to conform to the whims of the businesses in hopes that the pathways remain open. Otherwise, they might toil away in silence, rarely seeing visitors like they one day used to. I feel like this paragraph sums up the root of the issue. IF your main concern is "I want lots of people to like my work, and by extension like me, and by extension validate my existence" then naturally we gravitate (literally a force of gravity) towards single common places. Since most people most definitely fall into this camp, common platforms win. If no-ones gonna read my post on Google+, why on earth would I share my profound ideas there? If the worth of my product is based on the number of followers and likes then it's logical to go to the place where those metrics are amplified. The nostalgia for the "good old days" is ultimately rooted in golden memories (sometimes, admittedly, delusional) of when we felt noticed, and valued, and cared for. For many of us that is "before adulthood" for some definition of "adult". Put another way, there are a LOT more high-school football stars than NFL stars. Of course the web of our youth -hasn't gone away- . You are as free as ever to build a blog, write your thoughts, as you ever were. In fact it's easier than it ever was. But how will people like it? Friend you? Follow you?
- 8n4vidtmkvmk 2y ago
  Not literally. Gravity is not pulling me towards Facebook and Twitter. Maybe it's similar if you consider big social networks as having lots of mass, but it's still not literally a force of gravity.
autoexec 2y ago
Counter point: We can't have a different Web Search engines ruined by their SEO spam designed "to pull in money via ads and affiliate links", Social networks and their "constant push to satisfy...an algorithm tuned to keeping eyeballs on the platform", newspapers and their "aggressive paywalls and expensive subscription models", the ads, the trackers, the popups, and the chatbots - the enshittification of the internet in all of its forms can be traced back to single source. The root of all evil. Greed is the problem and we're no better equipped to deal with it online than we are offline. It seems like everywhere people act selfishly and try to take as much as they can from everyone else while giving back as little as possible things only get worse for everyone, but you can't stop people from falling into that trap. It's like some kind of mental disorder. A person suffering from greed will knowingly poison themselves and their families. It's caused people to pollute the air they need to breathe and the water they need to drink. We'll never convince someone afflicted with Greed to stay away from our websites. Any new internet protocol we create, any new platform we develop, any new community we build will be slowly corrupted the moment it gets popular enough to be useful. It will probably start even before then. Speculators will try to get an early foothold to gain an edge over their soon-to-be competitors. The playbook has been written, and now it's just a matter of following the steps. Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish. We have many advantages compared to the people who created the internet. We have better tech. We have better access to that tech. We have the examples they left us to build from. We also have things they never had to deal with. The technology they used was designed to work for them. All of our technology is designed to be used against us by other people. They were creating the infrastructure to communicate freely. All of our infrastructure is already captured and monitored. It's designed to get in our way if we aren't using it the way others want us to. Simply hosting a website likely violates your ISPs TOS. Using Tor or a VPN means some webpages never load and those that do harass you to solve riddles to improve the AI they'll use against you. The creators of the internet never had to deal with AI bots pretending to be normal users spreading astroturf and shilling for their masters. Real content takes time and effort but ads can be spammed by bots which never sleep until those ads drown out everything else. The only way to get back something like the internet before it was infested with greed is to keep most people off of it. Small communities can be controlled and moderated. In a small community the identities of users can be verified to keep bots away. It doesn't solve the problem of carefully planted shills or paid off members, but it keeps the problem a little more contained and manageable. The problem is that what we'd be left with in that case wouldn't really be the internet. Just another walled garden, one to keep the money away. At best we might be able to pull off going back to the time when you could find a really cool BBS, but the old internet was a once in a lifetime thing.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

36 points by Intralexical 2y ago

Algorithm, schmalgorithm Andrew Stephens rang a bell. “Save the Web by Being Nice” My rant: read it or don’t. The way to have the new web is to be the new web. The web is here to talk to folks. I am one of the ones. So are you. Write it like you mean it. Start a blog, join a forum, add talk. It takes time. Do it. Say nice things on other blogs. Post good reviews. And learn to write well. Check Hemingway’s 5 hints. Write short sentences. Write short first paragraphs. Use vigorous language. Be positive, not negative. Never have just five rules. (As for the fifth, Omar said, “It is my firm belief that it is a mistake to hold firm beliefs.”) The point being, forget algorithms. Create! Make the new web. Try small words: let large words earn their keep. Be nice to those for whom you write and make the new web. For grins, I wrote my blog for 16 years; I sent 14 to archive. It’s your turn.

esperent 2y ago

I find a commonality between many articles I read online: 1. An interesting headline that draws me in. 2. A long setup/history which I start reading, then skimming, then just scrolling past 3. And finally, the meat of the article. But by 3. I've decided that the article doesn't contain any interesting info - otherwise, why would I be scrolling past the first 2/3s of it? I'm aware this is a subconscious decision, a bad heuristic. But in a world filled with info, I rarely fight against it. I didn't read this article, for instance. My coffee break is over, it's time to get back to work. Maybe it's time for blogs to start doing something similar to what the better recipe sites do, and provide a link at the top to skip the setup and get to the real article.

TheCleric 2y ago
I don’t mean this rudely, but the common factor there is you. Could it just be you don’t enjoy this style of writing?
- hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
  As someone who agrees with the parent commenter, I don't think (at least for me) it's individual style, but it's what my goal is and what the content is. I think the main problem is blog posts, which basically contain a single main thesis, that are written like short stories. I think that if, as an author, your goal is to get a primary point across, and you're publishing on the web, for the love of God, get to the point. There is a near infinite amount of content online vying for our attention, and if I'm reading for information, I don't want to spend a ton of time just figuring out if your point is worth my time. On the other hand, if you're telling a story, I'm fine getting drawn in with elaborate prose. But at least for me, most of the time I'm looking for this style of writing in a book, or at least something like a magazine article that is positioned as a short story. I don't often look for this type of content on the web, and I almost never look for it in blog posts.
  - Dalewyn 2y ago
    >I think that if, as an author, your goal is to get a primary point across, and you're publishing on the web, for the love of God, get to the point This. There is a reason TL;DR became a proper word.[1] [1]: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/TL%3BDR https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/TL%3BDR
- 8n4vidtmkvmk 2y ago
  I thought the same. I thought the title was hinting at a path to bring back the old web, not building up to "we can do it if we want".
- esperent 2y ago
  No offense taken, of course the common factor is me! That was the entire point of my comment. I don't enjoy articles like this. I was wondering if other people have the same feeling. It seems like many do, to the point that there's an actual rule of journalism (inverted pyramid) stating that you should avoid crafting articles this way.
ranger_danger 2y ago
or HN could have an AI-bot to summarize the article at the top of the comments.
- djbusby 2y ago
  https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kb5_hIuEk8g https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kb5_hIuEk8g
- aworks 2y ago
  I use HackSnack to generate an RSS feed for this. https://www.kadoa.com/hacksnack https://www.kadoa.com/hacksnack
  - ranger_danger 2y ago
    Whoa this is cool. If only it were open source... I'd like to do this for other sites as well.
idle_zealot 2y ago
The point of this post is the feel, the narrative, in service of strengthening the central metaphor of internet as untilled land dominanted by fortresses (social media). The tl;dr is: don't use Facebook, make websites. Maybe make a decentralized search/discovery protocol (or something?).
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
Turing_Machine 2y ago
What you describe almost the opposite of the classic "inverted pyramid" style of writing journalism. I agree it's a bad style if you want to have busy people reading your site. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_pyramid_(journalism) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_pyramid_(journalism) Cut to the chase, and put the interesting-to-some-but-not-all stuff at the bottom, or better still, behind a link. We have hypertext, guys. That's what it's for. > I'm aware this is a subconscious decision, a bad heuristic. I don't think it's a bad heuristic at all. There are far more web pages than anyone could possibly read in their limited lifespan. It makes sense to optimize for sites that get to the point right away. Note that I'm speaking here of purely informational sites, not "literary" sites where the beauty of the prose is intended to be part (or even all) of the purpose. Different rules apply there.

cxr 2y ago

Let's stop with the abuse of the word "algorithm". Enough already. Even in a world where it wasn't the wrong word to reach for (i.e. a world that isn't the one we're in), even if it were proper, it is still by this point embarrassingly hackneyed. It's shameless, unrepentant pablum. And that's still ignoring that it's the wrong word to use in >90% of the instances where it seems to show up these days. I have a pretty simple flowchart for lay people and tech journalists alike. It goes like this: Are you about to use the word "algorithm" in an article or comment about social media? No? -> GOOD. Yes? -> Don't. (And to go one further, since you were already angling that way, maybe you should reconsider whether or not to scrap the whole piece entirely; do you actually have anything new and interesting to say on the topic?)

idle_zealot 2y ago
What is the proper term for the mechanism that decides how to populate a social media feed other than a "recommendation algorithm"?
- cxr 2y ago
  That phrase doesn't appear in the linked article, but to answer your question: "Recommender system", e.g. <https://www.trulia.com/blog/tech/recommender-engine/ https://www.trulia.com/blog/tech/recommender-engine/>, <https://github.com/microsoft/RecAI https://github.com/microsoft/RecAI>, etc. Even if there were no consensus for an alternative, that wouldn't make "recommendation algorithm" acceptable, because it fails to meet the criteria to be an algorithm. The word means something. cf "Imagine you're a mathematician, and fellow mathematicians start calling derivatives integrals instead[...] it's being used to describe systems that are almost the exact opposite" <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23672561 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23672561>
Dalewyn 2y ago
"Algorithm" is a more accurate, more descriptive, better word than what succeeded it: "AI".
- deleted 2y ago

bruce511 2y ago

>> And those who cultivate those plots outside of these walls face pressures to conform to the whims of the businesses in hopes that the pathways remain open. Otherwise, they might toil away in silence, rarely seeing visitors like they one day used to. I feel like this paragraph sums up the root of the issue. IF your main concern is "I want lots of people to like my work, and by extension like me, and by extension validate my existence" then naturally we gravitate (literally a force of gravity) towards single common places. Since most people most definitely fall into this camp, common platforms win. If no-ones gonna read my post on Google+, why on earth would I share my profound ideas there? If the worth of my product is based on the number of followers and likes then it's logical to go to the place where those metrics are amplified. The nostalgia for the "good old days" is ultimately rooted in golden memories (sometimes, admittedly, delusional) of when we felt noticed, and valued, and cared for. For many of us that is "before adulthood" for some definition of "adult". Put another way, there are a LOT more high-school football stars than NFL stars. Of course the web of our youth -hasn't gone away- . You are as free as ever to build a blog, write your thoughts, as you ever were. In fact it's easier than it ever was. But how will people like it? Friend you? Follow you?

8n4vidtmkvmk 2y ago
Not literally. Gravity is not pulling me towards Facebook and Twitter. Maybe it's similar if you consider big social networks as having lots of mass, but it's still not literally a force of gravity.

autoexec 2y ago

Counter point: We can't have a different Web Search engines ruined by their SEO spam designed "to pull in money via ads and affiliate links", Social networks and their "constant push to satisfy...an algorithm tuned to keeping eyeballs on the platform", newspapers and their "aggressive paywalls and expensive subscription models", the ads, the trackers, the popups, and the chatbots - the enshittification of the internet in all of its forms can be traced back to single source. The root of all evil. Greed is the problem and we're no better equipped to deal with it online than we are offline. It seems like everywhere people act selfishly and try to take as much as they can from everyone else while giving back as little as possible things only get worse for everyone, but you can't stop people from falling into that trap. It's like some kind of mental disorder. A person suffering from greed will knowingly poison themselves and their families. It's caused people to pollute the air they need to breathe and the water they need to drink. We'll never convince someone afflicted with Greed to stay away from our websites. Any new internet protocol we create, any new platform we develop, any new community we build will be slowly corrupted the moment it gets popular enough to be useful. It will probably start even before then. Speculators will try to get an early foothold to gain an edge over their soon-to-be competitors. The playbook has been written, and now it's just a matter of following the steps. Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish. We have many advantages compared to the people who created the internet. We have better tech. We have better access to that tech. We have the examples they left us to build from. We also have things they never had to deal with. The technology they used was designed to work for them. All of our technology is designed to be used against us by other people. They were creating the infrastructure to communicate freely. All of our infrastructure is already captured and monitored. It's designed to get in our way if we aren't using it the way others want us to. Simply hosting a website likely violates your ISPs TOS. Using Tor or a VPN means some webpages never load and those that do harass you to solve riddles to improve the AI they'll use against you. The creators of the internet never had to deal with AI bots pretending to be normal users spreading astroturf and shilling for their masters. Real content takes time and effort but ads can be spammed by bots which never sleep until those ads drown out everything else. The only way to get back something like the internet before it was infested with greed is to keep most people off of it. Small communities can be controlled and moderated. In a small community the identities of users can be verified to keep bots away. It doesn't solve the problem of carefully planted shills or paid off members, but it keeps the problem a little more contained and manageable. The problem is that what we'd be left with in that case wouldn't really be the internet. Just another walled garden, one to keep the money away. At best we might be able to pull off going back to the time when you could find a really cool BBS, but the old internet was a once in a lifetime thing.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]