4 ms·

I don't think it's really an "AI problem", we just got to the "worse" part of the "Worse is better". Back in the day one of competitors of the World Wide Web w

I don't think it's really an "AI problem", we just got to the "worse" part of the "Worse is better". Back in the day one of competitors of the World Wide Web was Project Xanadu. Project Xanadu was supposed to address the concerns like content persistence and version management within the core design. As such it was much more complex, opinionated and centralized. WWW on the other hand comes with no guarantees - you might get a document in response to a HTTP request, and that's it. But WWW service can be rolled out in a completely permissionless way, and is quite simple - effectively, the contents of the file system can be shared with the world, so e.g. a document can be published just by putting its file into a particular directory within the file system. Thus Web could get to a "good enough" state much faster and quickly spread all over the world. But its permissionlessness and simplicity lead to downsides: impersistence and chaos of broken links, web search provided by mega-corporations, etc. WWW evolution was, unfortunately, not "incentive compatible" with features like advanced persistence and identification clarity: there was much more focus on entertainment content and ads

bichiliad 2mo ago
Who would have owned the centralization? I always thought that one of the lovely parts of the WWW was that anyone could have a part of it in theory, even if it was easier to let someone else host your website for you.
- killerstorm 2mo ago
  I'm not saying "web" would be better if it was more centralized. WWW is optimal in the sense that it sits directly on top internet protocols, i.e. it just defines how to use TCP/IP to retrieve a document. I think in the "ideal world" we could get higher-level protocols on top of WWW, perhaps offering document persistence and global search. E.g. they could function in a federated way. We had a lot of interesting experiments -- Freenet, bittorrent, IPFS, "Semantic Web", ActivityPub -- but we haven't seen anything which directly competes with centralized services. Of course, it is hard to compete with well-capitalized companies. But also there might be over-reliance on "startups". As Peter Thiel explained, "startups" generally want to build monopolies, as you can't really make money by offering a commodity. So it's not really surprising that Google dropped support for XMPP, for example - they'd rather keep users within the ecosystem.

bichiliad 2mo ago

Who would have owned the centralization? I always thought that one of the lovely parts of the WWW was that anyone could have a part of it in theory, even if it was easier to let someone else host your website for you.

killerstorm 2mo ago
I'm not saying "web" would be better if it was more centralized. WWW is optimal in the sense that it sits directly on top internet protocols, i.e. it just defines how to use TCP/IP to retrieve a document. I think in the "ideal world" we could get higher-level protocols on top of WWW, perhaps offering document persistence and global search. E.g. they could function in a federated way. We had a lot of interesting experiments -- Freenet, bittorrent, IPFS, "Semantic Web", ActivityPub -- but we haven't seen anything which directly competes with centralized services. Of course, it is hard to compete with well-capitalized companies. But also there might be over-reliance on "startups". As Peter Thiel explained, "startups" generally want to build monopolies, as you can't really make money by offering a commodity. So it's not really surprising that Google dropped support for XMPP, for example - they'd rather keep users within the ecosystem.