4 ms·

The open web isn't dying, we're killing it

84 points by benwerd 6mo ago

boca_honey 6mo ago
So it is dying.
yalogin 6mo ago
Why use the present continuous tense? We can safely use the past tense as llms definitely killed it. The web of course isn’t going to vanish but there is no motivation for anyone to create a new site now.
- PaulDavisThe1st 6mo ago
  What one earth are you talking about? What ever was the motivation for creating a new site? How has it changed?
  - chromacity 6mo ago
    Not everything is about money. People were doing it, so they clearly had a motivation of some sort. I'm sure that some folks did it for themselves - just like writing a diary - but many others wanted to make new friends, earn praise, teach others, and so on. If nothing else, LLMs have an indisputably negative impact on the second part. Fewer people will make it to your website if there's an AI digest on top of search results (or if they can skip search altogether by asking ChatGPT).
- jacquesm 6mo ago
  I am happy to ignore the scrapers (I block them wholesale) and will probably move to something even more drastic in the near future.
  - deleted 6mo ago
- nine_k 6mo ago
  What is the point of playing guitar any more? You're not going to be another Elvis. You're not going to be another Robert Plant or Paco de Lucia, even if you play equally good. The world is choke-full of excellent guitar music recordings. People still play guitar nevertheless. They do it for the enjoyment of the few friends sitting next to them, and, most of all, for the fun they personally have in the process. If your motivation is seriously different, especially it it involves fame, influence, or money, you are holding it wrong.
  - add-sub-mul-div 6mo ago
    Your metaphor doesn't apply. It's not pointless to create a new site because better ones exist. It's pointless because it will get scraped and summarized/remixed for someone else's profit, if the few sites people use for discovery even deign to index it. And the people who do consume it will be too lazy to read it in its original unsummarized form. You can still journal for the love of writing, but why put the effort into publishing for so little return?
    - nine_k 6mo ago
      > get scraped and summarized/remixed for someone else's profit Well, yes, so what? Are you creating it for your own enjoyment, or are you holding yourself back to stick it to the greedy capitalist? It would be hard to find your site using Google, unless you know a perfect long fragment, but it was equally hard, or harder, to find it using AltaVista in 1995! People who care link to each other and participate in webrings, much like they did 30 years ago. Everything is dust in the wind, everything we create is most likely going to perish, make peace with that. Then you notice that there is a gap between the moment you create something, and the time it perishes, and it's plenty long enough to bring joy to you and those you care about, and maybe even random passers-by.
  - blast 6mo ago
    Well said and I agree completely...but did Robert Plant play guitar?
    - 6mo ago
idle_zealot 6mo ago
Am I missing something or is the thesis of this piece, or at least its main action item, a demand that everyone all of a sudden "grow up" and accept personal cost and inconvenience, and that will somehow save the open web? It acknowledges systemic problems, and then totally ignores them in favor of prescribing a pie-in-the-sky solution. It's like saying we could solve homelessness if only enough people would give to charity and take someone in off the street. Technically true, and I'd love to meet the alien species to whom it is relevant, because they sound swell. I find it particularly disappointing as a conclusion because its a strange curveball on what otherwise seemed to be the obvious conclusion it was building to: if we want the open web to survive then it has to be convenient to use. We need to grow up from our RTFM tendencies and build technology that people can intuit how to use without a manual. Approximately nobody wants to spend their time reading a manual to learn to operate a chat application or publish a blog. We even have an opportunity afforded to us by enshitification and declining software quality. The bar is lowering on being the easiest option!
- pdonis 6mo ago
  The problem is that building technology that people can intuit how to use without a manual takes more time and effort than a person can afford to spend on a hobby project. It has to be a business. Which means it's not just a matter of doing the tech right; it's a matter of finding a business model that supports the open web. And that means displacing the current business models that don't, but which have a lock on the market.
- smitty1e 6mo ago
  > We need to grow up from our RTFM tendencies and build technology that people can intuit how to use without a manual. Concur to a point here. But these technologies don't drive the bell curve of the population. This conversation could be repackaged as: "Why doesn't the distribution drift toward the technologically savvy tail?" Sorry. People don't scale. As popularity grows, all drifts toward the mean. You can have smartphones, but you will inevitably ooze toward a small number of providers making commodities out of the users. Sites like HN will be the outlier. Technological gravity, boss.
chromacity 6mo ago
Yes, but here's the realization I had some time ago: no one cares. The billions of people online don't care. The internet is overwhelmingly accessed from mobile devices and used chiefly for shopping, scrolling through TikTok, watching Netflix, swiping on Tinder, and so on. More importantly, we don't care, not really. We pay lip service to it, but what have we done to foster the open / small web today? Many of us work at companies that aren't moving the needle in the right direction, and in our free time, we seem to be content debating AI-generated think pieces and press releases from AI vendors. As I write this, in the top ten HN stories, I see press releases from Deepmind, Cursor, Tailscale, and Qwen. Even when commercial interests don't dominate and someone's passion project makes it to the top, how often do we offer meaningful encouragement or support? The "old web" is something we like as an abstract idea, but in reality, we don't lift a finger to preserve it. I'm guilty too. When I'm done writing this comment, I'll probably go back to doomscrolling on walled-garden social media for a while.
- bruce511 6mo ago
  To be honest, I'm not sure I even understand what the term "Open web" is supposed to mean? Does it mean that each individual and company is hosting their stuff on their own physical hardware? Is it OK to use say AWS? Does it mean that Facebook is the Open Web as long as you work at Facebook? But it's not if you don't? Is any site with a login "not the open web"? So if I'm hosting on my own metal, paid for by paying subscribers, then I'm not Open Web? To your point, I think no one cares because the term is so meaningless that it's irrelevant. Actual real people aren't interested in some technical distinction which is completely unrelated to their goals for being on the web in the first place. It seems to me that the whole concept of "Open web" is so poorly defined, and the reasons for caring so obscure, that it pretty much never comes up anyway. Joe Public doesn't care because there's no reason to care, and he doesn't even know it's "a thing".
  - echelon 6mo ago
    A world where hyperscalers don't dictate the technology choices of 99.99% of people and totally control distribution. A world where platform taxes and gatekeeping don't stifle innovation or put a ceiling on startups. A world where the balance of power is more evenly distributed. A world where single giant point of failures can't dictate the security posture and privacy of the entire civilization. The brief period of time between 1993 and 2008.
musicale 6mo ago
> We embedded the follow buttons, added the share widgets, installed the trackers, and told our friends, readers, coworkers, and communities that the right place to find us was Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, Instagram, Substack, or whichever silo was ascendant that year. So you're the ones who did it! But youtube is actually pretty great with the appropriate extensions and scripts.
- jacquesm 6mo ago
  Youtube is a complete accident. If early browsers had simply properly embedded video and there would have been a reasonable device independent standard then we wouldn't have needed youtube at all. Any website would have been able to host its own videos.
raincole 6mo ago
The idea of open web only works when only a small portion of the population access the internet. Feel prophetic in regards to the fate of democracy.
- nine_k 6mo ago
  No, the analogy does not hold. All free male citizens of Athens participated in Athenean democracy of ancient times, which achieved serious successes. All citizens of Switzerland participate in the direct democracy, and Switzerland is in a pretty good shape. The "small web" is a different phenomenon. When accessing the Web was cumbersome and unglamorous, that served as a filter for motivated and skillful people. Those who care, those who are inclined to create so strongly that they would overcome all these hurdles for it. Similar dynamics exist among open source software contributors. Once the internet became a zero-effort communication channel, it started to attract people who just want some quick dopamine fix, but who have a lot of other, more important things to mind. That is, the majority, the regular people. These are not bad people! They just don't focus on the internet, or art, or whimsical texts and projects. This is just literally normal, in the statistical sense. There's an old saying about not blaming a mirror for the image it shows.
  - jacquesm 6mo ago
    This is precisely the mechanism behind the 'eternal September'. And as such outlets dry up HN is attracting more and more of the overflow and will eventually go that way as well.
  - Terr_ 6mo ago
    > These are not bad people! They just don't focus on the internet, or art, or whimsical texts and projects. Recycling from a prior discussion [0] a Terry Pratchett quote, involving two characters that are inventing print journalism as they go along, with a focus on "the public interest" and short-term audience desires versus civic priorities... > "Are you saying people aren't interested in the truth?" > "Listen, what's true to a lot of people is that they need the money for the rent by the end of the week." [holding up document as example] "This is a report of the annual meeting of the Ankh-Morpork Caged Birds Society [...] They've got no say in who runs the city but they can damn well see to it that cockatoos aren't lumped in with parrots. It's not their fault. It's just how things are." > [...] "It's important! Someone has to care about the... the big truth. [...] if they don't care about anything much beyond things that go squawk in cages then one day there'll be someone in charge of this place who'll make them choke on their own budgies. You want that to happen?" [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45188182 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45188182
kunai 6mo ago
I do find it quite ironic that this piece reeks of LLM-writing while also simultaneously decrying the death of everything that is in antithesis to things like that. Is there a single shred of originality or shame left in the SV-adjacent writing sphere?
- 152334H 6mo ago
  Best to treat it with some emotional distance. It's not like the optimization process feels it. Whether be it human dullards, scripted botfarms, or even maleficence -- none of them experience shame. If they do see it at all, it would be as one of many factors to boost engagement.
  - blast 6mo ago
    Fuck boosting engagement.
    - kunai 6mo ago
      There is an ever-dwindling minority of people who think "fuck boosting engagement" is a valid strategy in this era. Online, engagement is everything. We have all, through social media and feed algorithms, been reduced to acting out the most insipid style of court-jester antics to try and garner attention; the SNR is just too high for good content to thrive.
- blast 6mo ago
  "The lesson is not just to resist. It is to grow up." Barf.
- sph 6mo ago
  AI slop that complains about how AI is ruining the Internet is a trending genre on Hacker News.
- JKCalhoun 6mo ago
  "this piece reeks of LLM-writing…" How so? It's getting to feel like some weird kind of AI McCarthyism where everything is suspected of being manufactured. Since I have no idea whether something is LLM-generated or not, I've instead decided to argue things on their merits alone.
PaulDavisThe1st 6mo ago
When @home first started figuring out how to IP-over-cable in the mid-90s, one of its early employees was incredibly excited that the promise was to offer symmetric up/down bandwidth, with the implicit goal that people could run servers at home. The entire industry, from IP providers to software developers, dropped this as a goal very early on. Bandwidth wasn't available, server installation and management was too complex for almost everyone, security issues turned into a swamp of nightmarish proportions. Had we been clear in, say, 1995, that goal of IP-at-home was "run your own server (appliance), it will be as easy as using the iPhone that you haven't seen yet", the state of the web would be very, very, very different. But that turned out not to be the goal, certainly not a goal that was even remotely close to achieved, and we're stuck with what we now have, for now at least.
- jacquesm 6mo ago
  I see no reason why we could not bend it back that way. I have some friends that run a mid sized ISP that somehow managed to stay independent, they run fiber to the home and have a large enough customer base that it might be interesting to see if they're open to removing any blocks on symmetrical links for qualified users. I suspect the first time one of the home IP servers is hit with a large enough denial of service attack the whole thing will be reverted but it is a neat idea, and maybe with some tweaks it could be made to work.
- LoganDark 6mo ago
  I've been fighting my ISP for years trying to get an upload speed that is not over TWENTY FIVE TIMES slower than my download speed. It took an FCC complaint for them to even get back to me.
- Merethbar 6mo ago
  The whole discussion reminds me of talks at the dinner table with my father. He was born in 1939 studied what is "IT" nowadays in Vienna, Austria, and Chicago, Illinois. He was working as the head of IT at the University in Innsbruck when the first e-mail ever was sent at the CERN. The idea of a free and decentralised Internet to connect Universities and scientists on the whole planet was the ideal that started his workoholism. First networks were up, when suddenly the marked was flooded with products from the US based on a network fitting the needs of the US military. My father complained bitterly about the hesitation of the european experts. Cooperation was still slowed down by national "pride". "Gifts" to decision takers and the (false) impression that the US tech was ripe, safe and ready to use stalled the european ideas of an internet of free access to the knowledge of human kind, an internet of enlightenment, so to say. The european idea was that of an indestructable public infrastructure, like a public watergrid, but to fulfil the rights on education and access to knowledge rather than water. Financed by public funding "from everyone for everyone". With open source building blocks. Like a rail network that can be enlarged and maintained from anyone anywhere. It would have been something new, something revolutionary. He stated that the US solution would inherit the according values: militaristic, competitive, commercialised and capitalistic. When the first shops opened online and scientific publications started to be barred behind paywalls he stated: "That is the end of what the internet could have been." Was he right? Somehow. Would the european solution have taken a different route? Maybe not. What remained from that time? The ideas and nostalgia visible in this thread. And an active open source community including the Linux ecosystem. It is not dead. It diversified. It mirrors our societies. If my father would have survived the pandemic I am sure he would push for the creation of a new internet from scratch. With hardware that hardwires data safety, prohibits invasion of private spaces and functions as a public infrastructure. Would there be reckless drivers? Sure. But they wouldn't dictate the rules of the road including fares and up- and download rates. Free as in liberty, not free as in freedom. Dear ingenieurs: It's your turn. P.S.: This comment reflects the opinion of my father as I remember it. It is not based on journalistic research.
mitchbob 6mo ago
Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47562214 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47562214
lwansbrough 6mo ago
I won’t be taking responsibility for the scrapers that are molesting the free and open web and destroying its economic viability. Somebody else is doing that.
LoganDark 6mo ago
I don't understand the point of the distinction. We say the open web is dying because a vocal minority does do all they can to preserve it and reject the influences of the worse platforms. But the rest of the world doesn't care and so the open web is dying. Its proponents aren't killing it; it's dying despite their best attempts to keep it alive.
deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
Gagarin1917 6mo ago
It’s not “dying” but it’s being “killed”? Come on…
banziha104 6mo ago
[dead]
sam_lowry_ 6mo ago
The article starts with a picturesque "Sam Altman holding a knife to Tim Berners-Lee's throat", I woyld wish there be an LLM to generate that, are there any?
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
fatata123 6mo ago
[dead]
morgengold 6mo ago
The closed web is dopamine optimized. You cannot win against that.
JKCalhoun 6mo ago
"We embedded the follow buttons, added the share widgets, installed the trackers, and told our friends, readers, coworkers, and communities that the right place to find us was Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, Instagram…." Yeah, so glad to have shoved off that shit. My own site is bare bones, hand-rolled HTML. Would that the rest of the web were like that. I suppose it takes time.

84 points by benwerd 6mo ago

So it is dying.

Why use the present continuous tense? We can safely use the past tense as llms definitely killed it. The web of course isn’t going to vanish but there is no motivation for anyone to create a new site now.

PaulDavisThe1st 6mo ago
What one earth are you talking about? What ever was the motivation for creating a new site? How has it changed?
- chromacity 6mo ago
  Not everything is about money. People were doing it, so they clearly had a motivation of some sort. I'm sure that some folks did it for themselves - just like writing a diary - but many others wanted to make new friends, earn praise, teach others, and so on. If nothing else, LLMs have an indisputably negative impact on the second part. Fewer people will make it to your website if there's an AI digest on top of search results (or if they can skip search altogether by asking ChatGPT).
jacquesm 6mo ago
I am happy to ignore the scrapers (I block them wholesale) and will probably move to something even more drastic in the near future.
- deleted 6mo ago
nine_k 6mo ago
What is the point of playing guitar any more? You're not going to be another Elvis. You're not going to be another Robert Plant or Paco de Lucia, even if you play equally good. The world is choke-full of excellent guitar music recordings. People still play guitar nevertheless. They do it for the enjoyment of the few friends sitting next to them, and, most of all, for the fun they personally have in the process. If your motivation is seriously different, especially it it involves fame, influence, or money, you are holding it wrong.
- add-sub-mul-div 6mo ago
  Your metaphor doesn't apply. It's not pointless to create a new site because better ones exist. It's pointless because it will get scraped and summarized/remixed for someone else's profit, if the few sites people use for discovery even deign to index it. And the people who do consume it will be too lazy to read it in its original unsummarized form. You can still journal for the love of writing, but why put the effort into publishing for so little return?
  - nine_k 6mo ago
    > get scraped and summarized/remixed for someone else's profit Well, yes, so what? Are you creating it for your own enjoyment, or are you holding yourself back to stick it to the greedy capitalist? It would be hard to find your site using Google, unless you know a perfect long fragment, but it was equally hard, or harder, to find it using AltaVista in 1995! People who care link to each other and participate in webrings, much like they did 30 years ago. Everything is dust in the wind, everything we create is most likely going to perish, make peace with that. Then you notice that there is a gap between the moment you create something, and the time it perishes, and it's plenty long enough to bring joy to you and those you care about, and maybe even random passers-by.
- blast 6mo ago
  Well said and I agree completely...but did Robert Plant play guitar?
  - 6mo ago

idle_zealot 6mo ago

Am I missing something or is the thesis of this piece, or at least its main action item, a demand that everyone all of a sudden "grow up" and accept personal cost and inconvenience, and that will somehow save the open web? It acknowledges systemic problems, and then totally ignores them in favor of prescribing a pie-in-the-sky solution. It's like saying we could solve homelessness if only enough people would give to charity and take someone in off the street. Technically true, and I'd love to meet the alien species to whom it is relevant, because they sound swell. I find it particularly disappointing as a conclusion because its a strange curveball on what otherwise seemed to be the obvious conclusion it was building to: if we want the open web to survive then it has to be convenient to use. We need to grow up from our RTFM tendencies and build technology that people can intuit how to use without a manual. Approximately nobody wants to spend their time reading a manual to learn to operate a chat application or publish a blog. We even have an opportunity afforded to us by enshitification and declining software quality. The bar is lowering on being the easiest option!

pdonis 6mo ago
The problem is that building technology that people can intuit how to use without a manual takes more time and effort than a person can afford to spend on a hobby project. It has to be a business. Which means it's not just a matter of doing the tech right; it's a matter of finding a business model that supports the open web. And that means displacing the current business models that don't, but which have a lock on the market.
smitty1e 6mo ago
> We need to grow up from our RTFM tendencies and build technology that people can intuit how to use without a manual. Concur to a point here. But these technologies don't drive the bell curve of the population. This conversation could be repackaged as: "Why doesn't the distribution drift toward the technologically savvy tail?" Sorry. People don't scale. As popularity grows, all drifts toward the mean. You can have smartphones, but you will inevitably ooze toward a small number of providers making commodities out of the users. Sites like HN will be the outlier. Technological gravity, boss.

chromacity 6mo ago

Yes, but here's the realization I had some time ago: no one cares. The billions of people online don't care. The internet is overwhelmingly accessed from mobile devices and used chiefly for shopping, scrolling through TikTok, watching Netflix, swiping on Tinder, and so on. More importantly, we don't care, not really. We pay lip service to it, but what have we done to foster the open / small web today? Many of us work at companies that aren't moving the needle in the right direction, and in our free time, we seem to be content debating AI-generated think pieces and press releases from AI vendors. As I write this, in the top ten HN stories, I see press releases from Deepmind, Cursor, Tailscale, and Qwen. Even when commercial interests don't dominate and someone's passion project makes it to the top, how often do we offer meaningful encouragement or support? The "old web" is something we like as an abstract idea, but in reality, we don't lift a finger to preserve it. I'm guilty too. When I'm done writing this comment, I'll probably go back to doomscrolling on walled-garden social media for a while.

bruce511 6mo ago
To be honest, I'm not sure I even understand what the term "Open web" is supposed to mean? Does it mean that each individual and company is hosting their stuff on their own physical hardware? Is it OK to use say AWS? Does it mean that Facebook is the Open Web as long as you work at Facebook? But it's not if you don't? Is any site with a login "not the open web"? So if I'm hosting on my own metal, paid for by paying subscribers, then I'm not Open Web? To your point, I think no one cares because the term is so meaningless that it's irrelevant. Actual real people aren't interested in some technical distinction which is completely unrelated to their goals for being on the web in the first place. It seems to me that the whole concept of "Open web" is so poorly defined, and the reasons for caring so obscure, that it pretty much never comes up anyway. Joe Public doesn't care because there's no reason to care, and he doesn't even know it's "a thing".
- echelon 6mo ago
  A world where hyperscalers don't dictate the technology choices of 99.99% of people and totally control distribution. A world where platform taxes and gatekeeping don't stifle innovation or put a ceiling on startups. A world where the balance of power is more evenly distributed. A world where single giant point of failures can't dictate the security posture and privacy of the entire civilization. The brief period of time between 1993 and 2008.

musicale 6mo ago

> We embedded the follow buttons, added the share widgets, installed the trackers, and told our friends, readers, coworkers, and communities that the right place to find us was Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, Instagram, Substack, or whichever silo was ascendant that year. So you're the ones who did it! But youtube is actually pretty great with the appropriate extensions and scripts.

jacquesm 6mo ago
Youtube is a complete accident. If early browsers had simply properly embedded video and there would have been a reasonable device independent standard then we wouldn't have needed youtube at all. Any website would have been able to host its own videos.

raincole 6mo ago

The idea of open web only works when only a small portion of the population access the internet. Feel prophetic in regards to the fate of democracy.

nine_k 6mo ago
No, the analogy does not hold. All free male citizens of Athens participated in Athenean democracy of ancient times, which achieved serious successes. All citizens of Switzerland participate in the direct democracy, and Switzerland is in a pretty good shape. The "small web" is a different phenomenon. When accessing the Web was cumbersome and unglamorous, that served as a filter for motivated and skillful people. Those who care, those who are inclined to create so strongly that they would overcome all these hurdles for it. Similar dynamics exist among open source software contributors. Once the internet became a zero-effort communication channel, it started to attract people who just want some quick dopamine fix, but who have a lot of other, more important things to mind. That is, the majority, the regular people. These are not bad people! They just don't focus on the internet, or art, or whimsical texts and projects. This is just literally normal, in the statistical sense. There's an old saying about not blaming a mirror for the image it shows.
- jacquesm 6mo ago
  This is precisely the mechanism behind the 'eternal September'. And as such outlets dry up HN is attracting more and more of the overflow and will eventually go that way as well.
- Terr_ 6mo ago
  > These are not bad people! They just don't focus on the internet, or art, or whimsical texts and projects. Recycling from a prior discussion [0] a Terry Pratchett quote, involving two characters that are inventing print journalism as they go along, with a focus on "the public interest" and short-term audience desires versus civic priorities... > "Are you saying people aren't interested in the truth?" > "Listen, what's true to a lot of people is that they need the money for the rent by the end of the week." [holding up document as example] "This is a report of the annual meeting of the Ankh-Morpork Caged Birds Society [...] They've got no say in who runs the city but they can damn well see to it that cockatoos aren't lumped in with parrots. It's not their fault. It's just how things are." > [...] "It's important! Someone has to care about the... the big truth. [...] if they don't care about anything much beyond things that go squawk in cages then one day there'll be someone in charge of this place who'll make them choke on their own budgies. You want that to happen?" [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45188182 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45188182

kunai 6mo ago

I do find it quite ironic that this piece reeks of LLM-writing while also simultaneously decrying the death of everything that is in antithesis to things like that. Is there a single shred of originality or shame left in the SV-adjacent writing sphere?

152334H 6mo ago
Best to treat it with some emotional distance. It's not like the optimization process feels it. Whether be it human dullards, scripted botfarms, or even maleficence -- none of them experience shame. If they do see it at all, it would be as one of many factors to boost engagement.
- blast 6mo ago
  Fuck boosting engagement.
  - kunai 6mo ago
    There is an ever-dwindling minority of people who think "fuck boosting engagement" is a valid strategy in this era. Online, engagement is everything. We have all, through social media and feed algorithms, been reduced to acting out the most insipid style of court-jester antics to try and garner attention; the SNR is just too high for good content to thrive.
blast 6mo ago
"The lesson is not just to resist. It is to grow up." Barf.
sph 6mo ago
AI slop that complains about how AI is ruining the Internet is a trending genre on Hacker News.
JKCalhoun 6mo ago
"this piece reeks of LLM-writing…" How so? It's getting to feel like some weird kind of AI McCarthyism where everything is suspected of being manufactured. Since I have no idea whether something is LLM-generated or not, I've instead decided to argue things on their merits alone.

PaulDavisThe1st 6mo ago

When @home first started figuring out how to IP-over-cable in the mid-90s, one of its early employees was incredibly excited that the promise was to offer symmetric up/down bandwidth, with the implicit goal that people could run servers at home. The entire industry, from IP providers to software developers, dropped this as a goal very early on. Bandwidth wasn't available, server installation and management was too complex for almost everyone, security issues turned into a swamp of nightmarish proportions. Had we been clear in, say, 1995, that goal of IP-at-home was "run your own server (appliance), it will be as easy as using the iPhone that you haven't seen yet", the state of the web would be very, very, very different. But that turned out not to be the goal, certainly not a goal that was even remotely close to achieved, and we're stuck with what we now have, for now at least.

jacquesm 6mo ago
I see no reason why we could not bend it back that way. I have some friends that run a mid sized ISP that somehow managed to stay independent, they run fiber to the home and have a large enough customer base that it might be interesting to see if they're open to removing any blocks on symmetrical links for qualified users. I suspect the first time one of the home IP servers is hit with a large enough denial of service attack the whole thing will be reverted but it is a neat idea, and maybe with some tweaks it could be made to work.
LoganDark 6mo ago
I've been fighting my ISP for years trying to get an upload speed that is not over TWENTY FIVE TIMES slower than my download speed. It took an FCC complaint for them to even get back to me.
Merethbar 6mo ago
The whole discussion reminds me of talks at the dinner table with my father. He was born in 1939 studied what is "IT" nowadays in Vienna, Austria, and Chicago, Illinois. He was working as the head of IT at the University in Innsbruck when the first e-mail ever was sent at the CERN. The idea of a free and decentralised Internet to connect Universities and scientists on the whole planet was the ideal that started his workoholism. First networks were up, when suddenly the marked was flooded with products from the US based on a network fitting the needs of the US military. My father complained bitterly about the hesitation of the european experts. Cooperation was still slowed down by national "pride". "Gifts" to decision takers and the (false) impression that the US tech was ripe, safe and ready to use stalled the european ideas of an internet of free access to the knowledge of human kind, an internet of enlightenment, so to say. The european idea was that of an indestructable public infrastructure, like a public watergrid, but to fulfil the rights on education and access to knowledge rather than water. Financed by public funding "from everyone for everyone". With open source building blocks. Like a rail network that can be enlarged and maintained from anyone anywhere. It would have been something new, something revolutionary. He stated that the US solution would inherit the according values: militaristic, competitive, commercialised and capitalistic. When the first shops opened online and scientific publications started to be barred behind paywalls he stated: "That is the end of what the internet could have been." Was he right? Somehow. Would the european solution have taken a different route? Maybe not. What remained from that time? The ideas and nostalgia visible in this thread. And an active open source community including the Linux ecosystem. It is not dead. It diversified. It mirrors our societies. If my father would have survived the pandemic I am sure he would push for the creation of a new internet from scratch. With hardware that hardwires data safety, prohibits invasion of private spaces and functions as a public infrastructure. Would there be reckless drivers? Sure. But they wouldn't dictate the rules of the road including fares and up- and download rates. Free as in liberty, not free as in freedom. Dear ingenieurs: It's your turn. P.S.: This comment reflects the opinion of my father as I remember it. It is not based on journalistic research.

mitchbob 6mo ago

Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47562214 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47562214

lwansbrough 6mo ago

I won’t be taking responsibility for the scrapers that are molesting the free and open web and destroying its economic viability. Somebody else is doing that.

LoganDark 6mo ago

I don't understand the point of the distinction. We say the open web is dying because a vocal minority does do all they can to preserve it and reject the influences of the worse platforms. But the rest of the world doesn't care and so the open web is dying. Its proponents aren't killing it; it's dying despite their best attempts to keep it alive.

deleted 6mo ago

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Gagarin1917 6mo ago

It’s not “dying” but it’s being “killed”? Come on…

banziha104 6mo ago

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sam_lowry_ 6mo ago

The article starts with a picturesque "Sam Altman holding a knife to Tim Berners-Lee's throat", I woyld wish there be an LLM to generate that, are there any?

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fatata123 6mo ago

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morgengold 6mo ago

The closed web is dopamine optimized. You cannot win against that.

JKCalhoun 6mo ago

"We embedded the follow buttons, added the share widgets, installed the trackers, and told our friends, readers, coworkers, and communities that the right place to find us was Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, Instagram…." Yeah, so glad to have shoved off that shit. My own site is bare bones, hand-rolled HTML. Would that the rest of the web were like that. I suppose it takes time.