6 ms·

Dark Social: We Have the Whole History of the Web Wrong

142 points by vectorbunny 14y ago

gordonguthrie 14y ago
I was just saying to someone that we had IM on IBM mainframes (the chat facility) or the (confusingly named) Ethernet on DEC VAXes back in the mid 80s. What we used them for was 'are you going for tea?' and other social chit-chat between the various terminal rooms up the Uni...
- dhimes 14y ago
  yep- just installed ytalk on my Debian dev box for this. Works great!
- zaptheimpaler 14y ago
  I just discovered the 'kibitz' command on linux, which is basically remote desktop assistance for linux (well, remote terminal). Apparently, this is used for chatting quite often too (i.e open up a text editor). EDIT: screen can do this too! screen -x can attach to a non-detached screen session.
  - KC8ZKF 14y ago
    Can't you just use talk(1)?
- dredmorbius 14y ago
  In a quaint bit of online archaeology, Douglas Hofstadters' Metamagical Themas describes his experiences using some of the early Unix communications tools, particularly talk (predecessor to IRC) and the dynamics it triggered. They're very, very similar to what emerged later as IM and SMS became prevalent. Modulo the rather smaller share of users in possession of PhDs in mathematics, computer science, or other technical disciplines.
aw3c2 14y ago
By their logic the "dark social" is ANY inbound link not coming from "Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, YComb, Digg, Stumble" or do I get that wrong? If so, well, that is called the "Internet". It uses hyperlinks to send people between pages on it.
- Semaphor 14y ago
  No, any link with no set referrer. That exactly not stuff from other pages.
- papsosouid 14y ago
  No, it is any inbound link to a page unlikely to be typed manually "blah.com/articles/random/crap/article-title-goes-here/35487623", that has no referrer header at all. Traffic coming from other websites will still have referrer headers, just traffic from email, IM, etc don't.
  - kzahel 14y ago
    I believe any referral traffic from an https:// https:// site will NOT send the referrer header. It does not seem like the article is taking that into account.
    - papsosouid 14y ago
      He did mention that, but of course there's no way to figure out how much of that traffic is from https referrals. Of course, I wouldn't be shocked if 90%+ of https referrals are from gmail, which would put it right back to what he is assuming: email, IM, etc.
      - Tipzntrix 14y ago
        You make a pretty good point, but not just gmail. Pretty much all -mail providers use https when users access their web interface.
- roc 14y ago
zhoutong 14y ago
It's called "social web" for a reason. Instant messenger and chat rooms and ICQ and USENET forums and email are not web. At most the OP is talking about the history of the Internet. {The World Wide Web (abbreviated as WWW or W3,[2] commonly known as the Web), is a system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the Internet. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Wide_Web http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Wide_Web}
- papsosouid 14y ago
  He may have focused too much on icq and email, but the point is still valid. Forums existed in the 90s. They were websites.
  - binxbolling 14y ago
    Forums did more than exist-- they were massively popular. Sure, I don't remember a forum with 1 billion members, but I'm still boggled at the colossal output of some of them. I remember pretty niche topics still with large, competing boards and real-life meetups... all before Zuckerberg even hit puberty. I think the author's point is that the web didn't just magically come alive in 2004, and this is more than true.
- jeremyjh 14y ago
  He acknowledges this upfront. I'm not sure why he persists in using this terminology since he does know better. I think that he is correct so far as there is equivalent functionality in the older internet social tools and protocols.
- pedrocr 14y ago
  That was my first impression too but I think his point is that the web was already social because people were already using (and still do) out of band mechanisms to socially share web links. The new social web is just using the web itself to stream those previously OOB messages. This is in contrast to saying that before the social web people used the web individually, looking up information by themselves but not interacting socially about the web.
netcan 14y ago
This is one of those topics where you have to be careful not to slip into meaningless semantics where you're just arguing about how we should use some word and what things should be named.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
jonmc12 14y ago
+1 for tldr inserts on The Atlantic articles. Always have found their articles meaningful but verbose.
- btrautsc 14y ago
  +1 for immediately thinking the same thing
lukasb 14y ago
This is why app developers need really well-thought out sharing features - preferably based on URIs.
humdumb 14y ago
The title could be better. What he's describing with the term "dark social" is not the "Web", it's the internet. That's a distinction that is important to understand. There is much you can do over the internet that is difficult to do over the "web". Moreover, the "web" is still quite centralized in the sense that there are a disproportionate number of servers to clients. It has been called the "calf-cow" model. Some are calling for an end to that.
chris123 14y ago
Oops, someone (the author) forgot about AOL, which was founded in 1985 and began mailing floppy disks to people in 1993 (http://techcrunch.com/2010/12/28/aol-floppy-disk/ http://techcrunch.com/2010/12/28/aol-floppy-disk/). That is when and where I had my first social web experience (it was in an AOL chat room, specifically). The company and the "social web" boomed from there, so much so, in fact, that eventually AOL bought Time Warner. It was the largest merger ever, at the time (http://money.cnn.com/2000/01/10/deals/aol_warner/ http://money.cnn.com/2000/01/10/deals/aol_warner/). And it flopped, but that beside the point :)
barce 14y ago
This piece reads so much like the Salon.com piece in 2004: http://www.salon.com/2004/03/09/deep_web/ http://www.salon.com/2004/03/09/deep_web/
- humdumb 14y ago
  I'd say this is a flaw of the "web" and relying on hyperlinking and "HTML forms" as a means to access all content. That's what web crawlers do. Better would be putting databases on certain known ports, with no "hostname" requirements and let search engines scan IP ranges for openings on those ports. You send a ping to the port and if a "Welcome" response comes back, then you have a public database to explore. The response might even describe the contents of the database. (Yikes, I'm having flashbacks to gopher.) What's funny is that "port scanning" is like the term "hacker" it has a negative connotation even though there's nothing inherently devious about it. Pinging a port to detect if there's a public database open on it is actually a more efficient less resource intensive means of service discovery than crawling hyperlinks in HTML generated by some web developer (maybe even one employed by a governemnt agency with a tight budget) hoping to stumble upon every possible data resource.
Keyframe 14y ago
I vividly remember working on SunOS (later Solaris) and SGI machines and using ytalk, irc and gopher all the time before WWW. WWW made us all want to occupy graphics workstations more instead of vt320s, ha! Even though most of us were in graphics programming at the time, we were working on vt320s, imagine that.
EGreg 14y ago
I think he's confusing the web and the internet. AIM, email, USENET etc. are not really web. Unless you have web clients.
- 3rd3 14y ago
  I think, most people confuse the internet with the web, so maybe the essence of the article should have been that the internet is "social" even without Facebook, Twitter etc. wich would be still a very similar statement.
teeja 14y ago
I use few "social" web links, maybe 1%. He fails to mention bookmarking. Most of the traffic I generate comes from bookmarked or search engine URLs. (I may or may not be unusual in that I surf with referrer turned off.)

142 points by vectorbunny 14y ago

I was just saying to someone that we had IM on IBM mainframes (the chat facility) or the (confusingly named) Ethernet on DEC VAXes back in the mid 80s. What we used them for was 'are you going for tea?' and other social chit-chat between the various terminal rooms up the Uni...

dhimes 14y ago
yep- just installed ytalk on my Debian dev box for this. Works great!
zaptheimpaler 14y ago
I just discovered the 'kibitz' command on linux, which is basically remote desktop assistance for linux (well, remote terminal). Apparently, this is used for chatting quite often too (i.e open up a text editor). EDIT: screen can do this too! screen -x can attach to a non-detached screen session.
- KC8ZKF 14y ago
  Can't you just use talk(1)?
dredmorbius 14y ago
In a quaint bit of online archaeology, Douglas Hofstadters' Metamagical Themas describes his experiences using some of the early Unix communications tools, particularly talk (predecessor to IRC) and the dynamics it triggered. They're very, very similar to what emerged later as IM and SMS became prevalent. Modulo the rather smaller share of users in possession of PhDs in mathematics, computer science, or other technical disciplines.

aw3c2 14y ago

By their logic the "dark social" is ANY inbound link not coming from "Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, YComb, Digg, Stumble" or do I get that wrong? If so, well, that is called the "Internet". It uses hyperlinks to send people between pages on it.

Semaphor 14y ago
No, any link with no set referrer. That exactly not stuff from other pages.
papsosouid 14y ago
No, it is any inbound link to a page unlikely to be typed manually "blah.com/articles/random/crap/article-title-goes-here/35487623", that has no referrer header at all. Traffic coming from other websites will still have referrer headers, just traffic from email, IM, etc don't.
- kzahel 14y ago
  I believe any referral traffic from an https:// https:// site will NOT send the referrer header. It does not seem like the article is taking that into account.
  - papsosouid 14y ago
    He did mention that, but of course there's no way to figure out how much of that traffic is from https referrals. Of course, I wouldn't be shocked if 90%+ of https referrals are from gmail, which would put it right back to what he is assuming: email, IM, etc.
    - Tipzntrix 14y ago
      You make a pretty good point, but not just gmail. Pretty much all -mail providers use https when users access their web interface.
roc 14y ago

zhoutong 14y ago

It's called "social web" for a reason. Instant messenger and chat rooms and ICQ and USENET forums and email are not web. At most the OP is talking about the history of the Internet. {The World Wide Web (abbreviated as WWW or W3,[2] commonly known as the Web), is a system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the Internet. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Wide_Web http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Wide_Web}

papsosouid 14y ago
He may have focused too much on icq and email, but the point is still valid. Forums existed in the 90s. They were websites.
- binxbolling 14y ago
  Forums did more than exist-- they were massively popular. Sure, I don't remember a forum with 1 billion members, but I'm still boggled at the colossal output of some of them. I remember pretty niche topics still with large, competing boards and real-life meetups... all before Zuckerberg even hit puberty. I think the author's point is that the web didn't just magically come alive in 2004, and this is more than true.
jeremyjh 14y ago
He acknowledges this upfront. I'm not sure why he persists in using this terminology since he does know better. I think that he is correct so far as there is equivalent functionality in the older internet social tools and protocols.
pedrocr 14y ago
That was my first impression too but I think his point is that the web was already social because people were already using (and still do) out of band mechanisms to socially share web links. The new social web is just using the web itself to stream those previously OOB messages. This is in contrast to saying that before the social web people used the web individually, looking up information by themselves but not interacting socially about the web.

netcan 14y ago

This is one of those topics where you have to be careful not to slip into meaningless semantics where you're just arguing about how we should use some word and what things should be named.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

jonmc12 14y ago

+1 for tldr inserts on The Atlantic articles. Always have found their articles meaningful but verbose.

btrautsc 14y ago
+1 for immediately thinking the same thing

lukasb 14y ago

This is why app developers need really well-thought out sharing features - preferably based on URIs.

humdumb 14y ago

The title could be better. What he's describing with the term "dark social" is not the "Web", it's the internet. That's a distinction that is important to understand. There is much you can do over the internet that is difficult to do over the "web". Moreover, the "web" is still quite centralized in the sense that there are a disproportionate number of servers to clients. It has been called the "calf-cow" model. Some are calling for an end to that.

chris123 14y ago

Oops, someone (the author) forgot about AOL, which was founded in 1985 and began mailing floppy disks to people in 1993 (http://techcrunch.com/2010/12/28/aol-floppy-disk/ http://techcrunch.com/2010/12/28/aol-floppy-disk/). That is when and where I had my first social web experience (it was in an AOL chat room, specifically). The company and the "social web" boomed from there, so much so, in fact, that eventually AOL bought Time Warner. It was the largest merger ever, at the time (http://money.cnn.com/2000/01/10/deals/aol_warner/ http://money.cnn.com/2000/01/10/deals/aol_warner/). And it flopped, but that beside the point :)

barce 14y ago

This piece reads so much like the Salon.com piece in 2004: http://www.salon.com/2004/03/09/deep_web/ http://www.salon.com/2004/03/09/deep_web/

humdumb 14y ago
I'd say this is a flaw of the "web" and relying on hyperlinking and "HTML forms" as a means to access all content. That's what web crawlers do. Better would be putting databases on certain known ports, with no "hostname" requirements and let search engines scan IP ranges for openings on those ports. You send a ping to the port and if a "Welcome" response comes back, then you have a public database to explore. The response might even describe the contents of the database. (Yikes, I'm having flashbacks to gopher.) What's funny is that "port scanning" is like the term "hacker" it has a negative connotation even though there's nothing inherently devious about it. Pinging a port to detect if there's a public database open on it is actually a more efficient less resource intensive means of service discovery than crawling hyperlinks in HTML generated by some web developer (maybe even one employed by a governemnt agency with a tight budget) hoping to stumble upon every possible data resource.

Keyframe 14y ago

I vividly remember working on SunOS (later Solaris) and SGI machines and using ytalk, irc and gopher all the time before WWW. WWW made us all want to occupy graphics workstations more instead of vt320s, ha! Even though most of us were in graphics programming at the time, we were working on vt320s, imagine that.

EGreg 14y ago

I think he's confusing the web and the internet. AIM, email, USENET etc. are not really web. Unless you have web clients.

3rd3 14y ago
I think, most people confuse the internet with the web, so maybe the essence of the article should have been that the internet is "social" even without Facebook, Twitter etc. wich would be still a very similar statement.

teeja 14y ago

I use few "social" web links, maybe 1%. He fails to mention bookmarking. Most of the traffic I generate comes from bookmarked or search engine URLs. (I may or may not be unusual in that I surf with referrer turned off.)