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I generally agree, our web is increasingly made of huge corporations, silos and less and less made of small indie websites which would guarantee that no one is
by julien 14y ago
I generally agree, our web is increasingly made of huge corporations, silos and less and less made of small indie websites which would guarantee that no one is ever powerful enough to decide for everybody else.
Yet, I'm not as pessimistic as you seem to be. We can make things better: we just have to do it.
- seiji 14y agoWe should definitely try, but centralization does give some dangerous benefits. It would be difficult to have trending topics in a completely decentralized twitter (everybody would have to report to some central "trending topic collector" service, right?). You could still notify someone of @ mentions, but then @foo turns into an email address (or something with lookupable routing information). Not very pretty. With tumblr, half the benefit of the service is seeing who posted the same thing somewhere else. Unless you are Google, we can't quite cross reference the entire web in real time to see who posts the same thing or who forked it from whom. Centralization gives us many nice features we can't get from distributed systems, but it also gives us single points of failure, arbitrary internet dictatorships, and fad driven startup cargo cult fetishism.
- julien 14y agoI'd argue that all the "benefits" of centralized web are probably just easier to implement when everything is centralized, but can also be implemented in a decentralized fashion. Trending topics can be done by agregating local trending topics, for example.
- misuba 14y agoTrending topics are this decade's flagpole sitting. Replace it with something just as dumb-joinable-fun that's only possible with a decentralized web, and people will forget about the old thing after a while. Easier said than done, of course, but not an inherent advantage to centralization. And Google used to be impossible too. There's always a chance that someone reading this site will do to Google exactly what Google did to AltaVista, and for the exact reasons you cite here.
- untog 14y agoTrending topics are this decade's flagpole sitting I don't think that's true. Identifying trending topics can be hugely important. I forget where I saw it, but someone did an analysis of tweets about "earthquake", when one occurred on the east coast of the US some months ago. It followed the path of the quake almost exactly. When people are posting about events before the news does, it's great to be able to detect it.
- icebraining 14y agoIt would be difficult to have trending topics in a completely decentralized twitter (everybody would have to report to some central "trending topic collector" service, right?). A decentralized Twitter would probably be like StatusNet: Server-to-server, not client-to-client. It wouldn't be that hard to subscribe (using PSHB) to each server's trending API and get callbacks from all of them. So yes, there would be trending topic collecting services, but multiple, not a central one. You could still notify someone of @ mentions, but then @foo turns into an email address (or something with lookupable routing information). You can hide the routing information from the user, as message metadata. With tumblr, half the benefit of the service is seeing who posted the same thing somewhere else. It's not really that hard: when you re-publish a post from another server, yours can just subscribe to get new events about that post (like new reposts).
- cdcarter 14y ago> It's not really that hard: when you re-publish a post from another server, yours can just subscribe to get new events about that post (like new reposts). Because trackback/pingbacks worked so well.
- state 14y agoConflict is good for creativity. I agree: we do just have to do it. We have to use these conditions to our advantage in paving the way forward. The world doesn't have a single necessary outcome. We ought to view our constraints as provocations.