3 ms·

The real problem with little distributed websites is attention. The same problem websites had since the 90's. How to get indexed by search engines. How to be go

by Detrus 13y ago

The real problem with little distributed websites is attention. The same problem websites had since the 90's. How to get indexed by search engines. How to be go to places. Poogle Glus, F*book, Shitter are tools for managing attention. Who is paying attention to you? Random visitors or people from your address/contact book? How easy is it to get? On Facebook everyone can get a few likes. On old websites you dig through analytics to figure out if someone liked it. It seems hopeless to spread new tools for publishing and uncensored networks when there's little commercial advantage to them. They'll be used by furry porn enthusiasts and freedom fighters. But you still have to fix the problems of discoverability and attention for regular users to adopt them en masse. A distributed web that would be used by enough people still has to have all the features people came to love in FB/Poogle+/Twitter/Google Search Bubble. Many freedom fighters ignore this reality and seem nostalgic for the bare bones sites of the 90's but easier to publish. Today's centralized networks are hacks that exist because the fundamental design of the web was ill conceived in the 90's.

nine_k 13y ago
Who exactly needs attention, and from whom? * Businesses. Well, when I want to contact a business, I type its-name-dot-com and get there, usually without fail. Such sites get indexed pretty well, too, so googling for a relevant thing shows them. * "Top bloggers". They usually maintain their own websites anyway. If not, services like blogger.com and medium.com are OK for them, unless what they post is highly controversial. I suppose they don't get most of their traffic from search engines, but rather from links posted by other people. * Small-time bloggers aspiring to become top bloggers. I think the reasoning above holds for them. * People wanting to socialize. Well, yes, they'd like some attention, but probably not from random people who found them on 5th page of search results by a keyword. Here "friend of a friend" contacts usually shine; a P2P network can easily provide them, as social sites try to do (but only friendfeed.com and nightweb.net seem to do enough of that). Otherwise you usually just give a link to your feed to friends and/or relatives. Commercial advantage is not the only possible engine of creation. E.g. Linux had little commercial advantage in its early years. Eventually, of course, an open technology might be embraced and used for commercial advantage, which is good (lower prices, more openness). But many people will and do use it for their own advantage and enjoyment of non-commercial nature. Talking with friends (securely and without fear of censorship) may be one of such things.
- Detrus 13y ago
  Businesses don't get the attention they want and have little idea if the attention they get from spamvertising are curious page views, capable buyers or people that think their business is crazy. Quite a common theme on HN. Also having to know the name of a business to search for them biases everything towards big players. Good luck remembering these http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_kwkfi5tqEi1qzqh0wo1_500.png http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_kwkfi5tqEi1qzqh0wo1_500.pn... when you need them. Impossible to remember app/startup names are one of the failures of the web's design. And the design of computers in general. When I need contacts or video chat I shouldn't have to memorize brands like Facetwitter or Skype, only contacts and video chat. New players that improve on those services can live under those tags. Top bloggers and news services are adopting content farm tactics because that's the model that fits the web. So journalism/news that the web was supposed to liberate from censorship and centralization are declining in quality and usefulness because of the current web's design pays them through ad impressions. Commercial advantage of a new model for the web has to be significant and decentralization could be a feature but I don't think THE feature. For Linux customization, price reduction and feature parity were THE feature. In the early days it didn't have feature parity. A new model getting feature parity with the current web seems like a harder task.
jalfresi 13y ago
Today's centralized networks do not exist because of a lack of discoverability. For crying out loud dude, Google solved the problem of discoverability by crawling the "decentralised" web.

by Detrus 13y ago

nine_k 13y ago

Who exactly needs attention, and from whom? * Businesses. Well, when I want to contact a business, I type its-name-dot-com and get there, usually without fail. Such sites get indexed pretty well, too, so googling for a relevant thing shows them. * "Top bloggers". They usually maintain their own websites anyway. If not, services like blogger.com and medium.com are OK for them, unless what they post is highly controversial. I suppose they don't get most of their traffic from search engines, but rather from links posted by other people. * Small-time bloggers aspiring to become top bloggers. I think the reasoning above holds for them. * People wanting to socialize. Well, yes, they'd like some attention, but probably not from random people who found them on 5th page of search results by a keyword. Here "friend of a friend" contacts usually shine; a P2P network can easily provide them, as social sites try to do (but only friendfeed.com and nightweb.net seem to do enough of that). Otherwise you usually just give a link to your feed to friends and/or relatives. Commercial advantage is not the only possible engine of creation. E.g. Linux had little commercial advantage in its early years. Eventually, of course, an open technology might be embraced and used for commercial advantage, which is good (lower prices, more openness). But many people will and do use it for their own advantage and enjoyment of non-commercial nature. Talking with friends (securely and without fear of censorship) may be one of such things.

Detrus 13y ago
Businesses don't get the attention they want and have little idea if the attention they get from spamvertising are curious page views, capable buyers or people that think their business is crazy. Quite a common theme on HN. Also having to know the name of a business to search for them biases everything towards big players. Good luck remembering these http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_kwkfi5tqEi1qzqh0wo1_500.png http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_kwkfi5tqEi1qzqh0wo1_500.pn... when you need them. Impossible to remember app/startup names are one of the failures of the web's design. And the design of computers in general. When I need contacts or video chat I shouldn't have to memorize brands like Facetwitter or Skype, only contacts and video chat. New players that improve on those services can live under those tags. Top bloggers and news services are adopting content farm tactics because that's the model that fits the web. So journalism/news that the web was supposed to liberate from censorship and centralization are declining in quality and usefulness because of the current web's design pays them through ad impressions. Commercial advantage of a new model for the web has to be significant and decentralization could be a feature but I don't think THE feature. For Linux customization, price reduction and feature parity were THE feature. In the early days it didn't have feature parity. A new model getting feature parity with the current web seems like a harder task.

jalfresi 13y ago

Today's centralized networks do not exist because of a lack of discoverability. For crying out loud dude, Google solved the problem of discoverability by crawling the "decentralised" web.